Acceptance Speech
Hello there, reader. As you may or may not be aware, this website you're currently goggling at was once a website. In its previous incarnation it was shortlisted for the Manchester Blog Awards. Exciting. I didn't win, obviously. Still, in the event of there being some kind of administrative error which resulted in my being declared the winner, I wrote an acceptance speech which I then read in my gibbering voice to room full of strangers at the swanky award ceremony. Here it is, in a slightly lengthier form.
Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. I don’t know what to say. It gives me great pleasure to accept this award for having the best blog on the internet. Of all the people on the shortlist, I was definitely the one who I wanted to win the most. However, I feel I should take this opportunity to give some of the other nominated blogs - the ones which didn’t win - the kind of recognition they deserve.
One of my favourite blogs is Jane Rumbelow’s ‘Trick Or Tito’. In an online world awash with blogs written by new or expectant mothers documenting their child’s every gurgle, coo and successful bowel motion, ‘Trick Or Tito’ stands out: the mother in question firmly believes her child isn’t merely a baby with rudimentary motor skills and an as-yet undeveloped grasp of the concept of language as a means of communication, but, in fact, the reincarnation of Josip Tito, Yugoslavia’s post-war communist head of state. Her blog-posts lay out her reasons for suspecting this, giving numerous real-life examples as proof. Is the author’s young child really possessed by the spirit of a figure of middling importance in the history of communism? Or is the author merely suffering from a series of linked hallucinations brought on by chronic exhaustion? Who knows. Here are some of my favourite excerpts:
March 10th
‘Last night Charles cried throughout the night, like he has every other night for the past three weeks. Again I tried to ignore him. He’s old enough now, I thought, to learn that I can’t be constantly at his beck and call. By 2am I was crying, my head ploughed beneath my pillow, my mad fingernails clawing away at my mad face in a rage of madness. By 3am, I felt I’d reached a pitch of madness. I could get no madder. I listened to Toby crying. Was I beginning to pick out a pattern in his endless, mind-bending squeals: a few repeated sounds and here and there, like a language? Was this the Yugoslavian language? Do Yugoslavians communicate by means of screaming their language at one another? I don’t know - I’ve never been to Yugoslavia and cannot speak Yugoslavian. By 4am, I’d started to notice that there were subtle yet undeniable modulations in the tone and pitch of his screams as if to allude to some subtle additional meaning to what he was saying. Piece by piece, I felt I was beginning to get the gist of what he was shrieking about. By 5:30 I was proficiently fluent enough in Yugoslavian to follow what he was saying and sat, oddly calm, listening to him list his recommendations for an aggressive economic growth policy within the military. He softened his stance after I’d got up, bathed him and fed him.’
August 11th
‘Another sleepless night. I sat on the living room rug with Toby playing with some building blocks - the sort with coloured letters on them - and showed him how to spell ‘mum’. He tried to do as I showed him but, somehow, managed to instead spell out “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” despite there being neither enough floor-space to legibly replicate such a quotation, and there only being five letter-blocks.’
September 26th
‘Another sleepless night. In the afternoon I left Toby in the living room playing with his toys whilst I made a sandwich in the kitchen. When I returned he had set up what looked like a recreation of the Organ Zaštite Naroda trial of various former members of the collaborationist Ustasa administration, with Skunky the Skunk as Yugslav Catholic figurehead Aloysius Stepinac and Alf the duck as collaborationist statesman Draza Mihailovic. In a break from the accepted historical account they were each handed a crayon and sentenced to fight one another to the death .’
A brief mention must go to 'The Guarded Bard', a blog maintained by millionaire property tycoon Daniel Mayer who was taken prisoner by local gangsters earlier this year. As he waits for his wife to pay the ransom money, Mayer uses an iPhone he’s managed to keep hidden on his person not to alert the authorities to his location, but instead to post brief, evocative poems documenting his hostage experiences onto his blog. Poems such as ‘Death Awaits?’:
I’m handcuffed to a radiator,
So I’ll see you later.
Or will I?
Another genre of blog which is popular these days is the so-called ‘bad science’ variety. These are blogs which are dedicated to unmasking alternative medicine gurus, fraudulent medical quacks, anti-science holistic therapists and the like. One of the best examples of this type is a blog titled ‘Smash The Crystals! Smash Them! Go On! Do It!’ For this blog, maverick doctor and sceptical rationalist Professor Winston Sykes has assembled a team of junior medical researchers, dressed and made them up to look exactly like a horde of zombies and led them in an all-out horror-movie style assault on the home of Dr Angela Ford, a crystal healer, alternative nutritionalist and Professor Sykes’s unwitting arch-nemesis . Here are some samples of the progress report posts from his blog:
March 10th
‘Today we commenced the attack on Dr Ford’s house and, simultaneously, the attack on the unreason, irrationality and quackery which has encroached into the world of professional medical science. Whilst I crept round the back of her house and cut her phone and electricity cables, my team kicked her door down, waggling their painted-green arms about and noisily groaning the word ‘brains’. At the time she was busy cooking in the kitchen. She grabbed a large knife and immediately started slashing away wildly at the army of the undead. The fool! So immediately did she believe that a zombie apocalypse - a possibility so utterly implausible it literally makes me laugh: ha! - was underway, that I felt victory in the air. Sadly, Edgar, one of my students, got stabbed in the arm, severing a major artery. At the time of writing it remains unclear whether or not he’ll be able to use the arm ever again. However, this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of this experiment when I say it’s the most important experiment anyone’s ever done. Humanity hangs in the balance.’
March 16th
‘Success! My team of zombie-doctors have seen Dr Ford after nearly a full week of only hearing the sounds of her pitiful weeping and pleas for mercy from behind her barricaded-shut kitchen door. She emerged early this morning, again in tears, holding a handful of crystals in one of her shaky hands, a dreamweaver in the other and chanting ‘I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. Return to your earthy, soily graves’. Obviously, this mumbo-jumbo had no effect on my “zombies” and she fled up the stairs, locked herself in the bedroom and dragged all her furniture against the door. But not before kicking Kathy, another one of my assistants, down the stairs. She’s sustained spinal injuries preventing her both from continuing with my research and from communicating verbally ever again, but if she could I’m sure she’d say ‘You’re doing sterling work, Professor Sykes. I love you.’’
April 27th
‘Last night Dr Ford destroyed her staircase, filled her bath with tap water and is no doubt awaiting death. Despite this I still sometimes hear her reciting incantations, smell incense being burned, and listen to her thump about above me as she performs yoga poses. All my assistants have now either been hospitalised for indefinite periods or have abandoned me. Susan, the last remaining assistant, left yesterday. She called me ‘a drunken misogynist’. And so it falls to I alone to take this experiment to its conclusion. Hunched at the bottom of a staircase decimated by a woman whose mind I’m tinkering with, moaning occasionally, and touching up my child’s Halloween face-paint, I will prove she is mad.’
Another worth mentioning is local activism blog, ‘Stop The Drabblington-on-Sea Flyover’. Although this blog, maintained by amateur journalist David Jessop, used to be a shining example of an everyday citizens using online media for direct action in local politics - in this case to oppose the projected construction of a new flyover championed by local Councillor Gordon Crumb - recently it has dissolved from a series of posts outlaying complex and passionate arguments against the construction of the flyover to a seemingly unending string of bizarre and briefly worded outright lies about Councillor Crumb himself. Recent lies have included:
October 15th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small hole be built into one of the supporting pillars of the flyover so he can have sex with the brickwork whenever he likes.
October 16th: Gordon Crumb worships a bag of wool he once found which he calls ‘Satan’.
October 17th: Gordon Crumb runs a casino where kidnapped children are accepted as betting currency.
October 18th: Gordon Crumb has a small black patch tattooed onto his penis which spells out ‘Kill All Chinese People’ when he gets an erection.
October 19th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small underground room be built beneath the flyover in which he plans to keep a tramp as his unwilling pet locked in a box full of sick.
October 20th: Gordon Crumb spends his Saturdays collecting the turds of strangers in a small, rusty pot.
October 21st:Gordon Crumb spends his Sundays crouched in a ditch, poking strangers’ turds up his bottom.
A few brief mentions should also go to the following:
'Liver Lover’s Blog' - the online diary recording one man’s quest to eat the liver of every living creature on the earth, which was described by the Guardian’s media supplement as being ‘truly monstrous’.
'Diary of a Call Goat'
'Bites For Whites' - A racist cookery blog
And a final mention must go to the blog on the shortlist which I like the least.
'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Bitingly Satirical Spoof Blog' - the “comedy blog” which, rather than making any kind of attempt at wit or insight within its content, relies instead on meaningless surrealism, pseudo-intellectual references and needless scatological descriptions. Worse still, this is the sort of blog which attempts to excuse itself from its own overwhelming brain-numbing idiocy by repeatedly making references to itself in a pathetic bid to suggest a self-aware gloss of irony which is altogether lacking from the content itself. It also strives, wherever possible, to reference the fact that it references itself, as if this somehow elevates it above what is ultimately infantile repetition. If the author of such a blog were here, in front of you all, reading this, I’m sure he’d attempt to make a further reference - to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he had just referenced himself. And then, no doubt, there’d have to be yet another reference - this time to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced himself. You see? It’s passive aggressive, shit and childish. I’m glad it didn’t win.
Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. Thank you.
- - - - - - -
ADDENDUM
Since that speech was made, it has been drawn to my attention that Mr Jessop has signed up for an account on the microblogging site Twitter, which he plans to use as, in his own words: 'a platform to tell the world THE TRUTH about George Crumb, the pen-pushing pederast.'
Here are some of those 'TRUTHS':
George Crumb rounds up orphans, crucifies them in his back garden and then pelts them with crisps and pick ‘n’ mix.
George Crumb has a series of ties he wears on a rotational basis to show what objects he’s concealing in his anus for his erotic amusement: yellow means he carries a carrot; red means a small, silenced mobile phone he occasionally sends obscene, nonsensical text messages to; and blue means a beloved, rusting pizza cutter from his childhood.
George Crumb has built himself a hollowed-out snowman near St Arnold’s Primary School. This is so he can watch the children playing and tinker with himself whilst safely concealed within.
George Crumb’s garden also contains a large military cannon and a series of large mousetraps. He uses the traps to capture woodland creatures which he then loads into the cannon and fires point blank into a wall of his house.
At Christmas, instead of giving gifts George Crumb goes on a spree of stealing presents, food and clothing from local children.
At Christmas, instead of decorating a tree, George Crumb decorates a giant steel phallus.
At Christmas, instead of singing festive carols George Crumb wanks to dog-snuff.
A close viewing of a video clip for George Crumb’s local election campaign on YouTube shows him laughing as he vomits into a baby’s mouth.
George Crumb sleeps in a large, mattress-less bed alongside the stolen remains of Buster Merryfield.
George Crumb recently held a Council tea-party to raise funds for Barnardos at which he was photographed there offering round a selection of biscuits on a plate to those gathered. Look closely at the picture however, and it becomes clear he was, in fact, secretly dipping his cock into their scorching-hot tea.
Also, whilst relaxing at home, George Crumb wears a turd-monocle. Yes! A turd-monocle!
Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. I don’t know what to say. It gives me great pleasure to accept this award for having the best blog on the internet. Of all the people on the shortlist, I was definitely the one who I wanted to win the most. However, I feel I should take this opportunity to give some of the other nominated blogs - the ones which didn’t win - the kind of recognition they deserve.
One of my favourite blogs is Jane Rumbelow’s ‘Trick Or Tito’. In an online world awash with blogs written by new or expectant mothers documenting their child’s every gurgle, coo and successful bowel motion, ‘Trick Or Tito’ stands out: the mother in question firmly believes her child isn’t merely a baby with rudimentary motor skills and an as-yet undeveloped grasp of the concept of language as a means of communication, but, in fact, the reincarnation of Josip Tito, Yugoslavia’s post-war communist head of state. Her blog-posts lay out her reasons for suspecting this, giving numerous real-life examples as proof. Is the author’s young child really possessed by the spirit of a figure of middling importance in the history of communism? Or is the author merely suffering from a series of linked hallucinations brought on by chronic exhaustion? Who knows. Here are some of my favourite excerpts:
March 10th
‘Last night Charles cried throughout the night, like he has every other night for the past three weeks. Again I tried to ignore him. He’s old enough now, I thought, to learn that I can’t be constantly at his beck and call. By 2am I was crying, my head ploughed beneath my pillow, my mad fingernails clawing away at my mad face in a rage of madness. By 3am, I felt I’d reached a pitch of madness. I could get no madder. I listened to Toby crying. Was I beginning to pick out a pattern in his endless, mind-bending squeals: a few repeated sounds and here and there, like a language? Was this the Yugoslavian language? Do Yugoslavians communicate by means of screaming their language at one another? I don’t know - I’ve never been to Yugoslavia and cannot speak Yugoslavian. By 4am, I’d started to notice that there were subtle yet undeniable modulations in the tone and pitch of his screams as if to allude to some subtle additional meaning to what he was saying. Piece by piece, I felt I was beginning to get the gist of what he was shrieking about. By 5:30 I was proficiently fluent enough in Yugoslavian to follow what he was saying and sat, oddly calm, listening to him list his recommendations for an aggressive economic growth policy within the military. He softened his stance after I’d got up, bathed him and fed him.’
August 11th
‘Another sleepless night. I sat on the living room rug with Toby playing with some building blocks - the sort with coloured letters on them - and showed him how to spell ‘mum’. He tried to do as I showed him but, somehow, managed to instead spell out “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” despite there being neither enough floor-space to legibly replicate such a quotation, and there only being five letter-blocks.’
September 26th
‘Another sleepless night. In the afternoon I left Toby in the living room playing with his toys whilst I made a sandwich in the kitchen. When I returned he had set up what looked like a recreation of the Organ Zaštite Naroda trial of various former members of the collaborationist Ustasa administration, with Skunky the Skunk as Yugslav Catholic figurehead Aloysius Stepinac and Alf the duck as collaborationist statesman Draza Mihailovic. In a break from the accepted historical account they were each handed a crayon and sentenced to fight one another to the death .’
A brief mention must go to 'The Guarded Bard', a blog maintained by millionaire property tycoon Daniel Mayer who was taken prisoner by local gangsters earlier this year. As he waits for his wife to pay the ransom money, Mayer uses an iPhone he’s managed to keep hidden on his person not to alert the authorities to his location, but instead to post brief, evocative poems documenting his hostage experiences onto his blog. Poems such as ‘Death Awaits?’:
I’m handcuffed to a radiator,
So I’ll see you later.
Or will I?
Another genre of blog which is popular these days is the so-called ‘bad science’ variety. These are blogs which are dedicated to unmasking alternative medicine gurus, fraudulent medical quacks, anti-science holistic therapists and the like. One of the best examples of this type is a blog titled ‘Smash The Crystals! Smash Them! Go On! Do It!’ For this blog, maverick doctor and sceptical rationalist Professor Winston Sykes has assembled a team of junior medical researchers, dressed and made them up to look exactly like a horde of zombies and led them in an all-out horror-movie style assault on the home of Dr Angela Ford, a crystal healer, alternative nutritionalist and Professor Sykes’s unwitting arch-nemesis . Here are some samples of the progress report posts from his blog:
March 10th
‘Today we commenced the attack on Dr Ford’s house and, simultaneously, the attack on the unreason, irrationality and quackery which has encroached into the world of professional medical science. Whilst I crept round the back of her house and cut her phone and electricity cables, my team kicked her door down, waggling their painted-green arms about and noisily groaning the word ‘brains’. At the time she was busy cooking in the kitchen. She grabbed a large knife and immediately started slashing away wildly at the army of the undead. The fool! So immediately did she believe that a zombie apocalypse - a possibility so utterly implausible it literally makes me laugh: ha! - was underway, that I felt victory in the air. Sadly, Edgar, one of my students, got stabbed in the arm, severing a major artery. At the time of writing it remains unclear whether or not he’ll be able to use the arm ever again. However, this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of this experiment when I say it’s the most important experiment anyone’s ever done. Humanity hangs in the balance.’
March 16th
‘Success! My team of zombie-doctors have seen Dr Ford after nearly a full week of only hearing the sounds of her pitiful weeping and pleas for mercy from behind her barricaded-shut kitchen door. She emerged early this morning, again in tears, holding a handful of crystals in one of her shaky hands, a dreamweaver in the other and chanting ‘I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. I bid you go, zombies. Return to your earthy, soily graves’. Obviously, this mumbo-jumbo had no effect on my “zombies” and she fled up the stairs, locked herself in the bedroom and dragged all her furniture against the door. But not before kicking Kathy, another one of my assistants, down the stairs. She’s sustained spinal injuries preventing her both from continuing with my research and from communicating verbally ever again, but if she could I’m sure she’d say ‘You’re doing sterling work, Professor Sykes. I love you.’’
April 27th
‘Last night Dr Ford destroyed her staircase, filled her bath with tap water and is no doubt awaiting death. Despite this I still sometimes hear her reciting incantations, smell incense being burned, and listen to her thump about above me as she performs yoga poses. All my assistants have now either been hospitalised for indefinite periods or have abandoned me. Susan, the last remaining assistant, left yesterday. She called me ‘a drunken misogynist’. And so it falls to I alone to take this experiment to its conclusion. Hunched at the bottom of a staircase decimated by a woman whose mind I’m tinkering with, moaning occasionally, and touching up my child’s Halloween face-paint, I will prove she is mad.’
Another worth mentioning is local activism blog, ‘Stop The Drabblington-on-Sea Flyover’. Although this blog, maintained by amateur journalist David Jessop, used to be a shining example of an everyday citizens using online media for direct action in local politics - in this case to oppose the projected construction of a new flyover championed by local Councillor Gordon Crumb - recently it has dissolved from a series of posts outlaying complex and passionate arguments against the construction of the flyover to a seemingly unending string of bizarre and briefly worded outright lies about Councillor Crumb himself. Recent lies have included:
October 15th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small hole be built into one of the supporting pillars of the flyover so he can have sex with the brickwork whenever he likes.
October 16th: Gordon Crumb worships a bag of wool he once found which he calls ‘Satan’.
October 17th: Gordon Crumb runs a casino where kidnapped children are accepted as betting currency.
October 18th: Gordon Crumb has a small black patch tattooed onto his penis which spells out ‘Kill All Chinese People’ when he gets an erection.
October 19th: Gordon Crumb has insisted a small underground room be built beneath the flyover in which he plans to keep a tramp as his unwilling pet locked in a box full of sick.
October 20th: Gordon Crumb spends his Saturdays collecting the turds of strangers in a small, rusty pot.
October 21st:Gordon Crumb spends his Sundays crouched in a ditch, poking strangers’ turds up his bottom.
A few brief mentions should also go to the following:
'Liver Lover’s Blog' - the online diary recording one man’s quest to eat the liver of every living creature on the earth, which was described by the Guardian’s media supplement as being ‘truly monstrous’.
'Diary of a Call Goat'
'Bites For Whites' - A racist cookery blog
And a final mention must go to the blog on the shortlist which I like the least.
'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Bitingly Satirical Spoof Blog' - the “comedy blog” which, rather than making any kind of attempt at wit or insight within its content, relies instead on meaningless surrealism, pseudo-intellectual references and needless scatological descriptions. Worse still, this is the sort of blog which attempts to excuse itself from its own overwhelming brain-numbing idiocy by repeatedly making references to itself in a pathetic bid to suggest a self-aware gloss of irony which is altogether lacking from the content itself. It also strives, wherever possible, to reference the fact that it references itself, as if this somehow elevates it above what is ultimately infantile repetition. If the author of such a blog were here, in front of you all, reading this, I’m sure he’d attempt to make a further reference - to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he had just referenced himself. And then, no doubt, there’d have to be yet another reference - this time to the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced the fact that he has just referenced himself. You see? It’s passive aggressive, shit and childish. I’m glad it didn’t win.
Thank you. Thank you. You’re too kind. Thank you.
- - - - - - -
ADDENDUM
Since that speech was made, it has been drawn to my attention that Mr Jessop has signed up for an account on the microblogging site Twitter, which he plans to use as, in his own words: 'a platform to tell the world THE TRUTH about George Crumb, the pen-pushing pederast.'
Here are some of those 'TRUTHS':
George Crumb rounds up orphans, crucifies them in his back garden and then pelts them with crisps and pick ‘n’ mix.
George Crumb has a series of ties he wears on a rotational basis to show what objects he’s concealing in his anus for his erotic amusement: yellow means he carries a carrot; red means a small, silenced mobile phone he occasionally sends obscene, nonsensical text messages to; and blue means a beloved, rusting pizza cutter from his childhood.
George Crumb has built himself a hollowed-out snowman near St Arnold’s Primary School. This is so he can watch the children playing and tinker with himself whilst safely concealed within.
George Crumb’s garden also contains a large military cannon and a series of large mousetraps. He uses the traps to capture woodland creatures which he then loads into the cannon and fires point blank into a wall of his house.
At Christmas, instead of giving gifts George Crumb goes on a spree of stealing presents, food and clothing from local children.
At Christmas, instead of decorating a tree, George Crumb decorates a giant steel phallus.
At Christmas, instead of singing festive carols George Crumb wanks to dog-snuff.
A close viewing of a video clip for George Crumb’s local election campaign on YouTube shows him laughing as he vomits into a baby’s mouth.
George Crumb sleeps in a large, mattress-less bed alongside the stolen remains of Buster Merryfield.
George Crumb recently held a Council tea-party to raise funds for Barnardos at which he was photographed there offering round a selection of biscuits on a plate to those gathered. Look closely at the picture however, and it becomes clear he was, in fact, secretly dipping his cock into their scorching-hot tea.
Also, whilst relaxing at home, George Crumb wears a turd-monocle. Yes! A turd-monocle!
