Doner donors

Ah, Autumn - season of misseds and mellowed fruitiness.
As the gymnosperms embark upon their annual autophagous process of shedding their leaves before snorting up the mulchy goodness in the spring, the thoughts of Trousers turn to wondering why homophagia is so frowned upon by our society.

For many years now, our society has condoned cannibalism, of a sort, through the donor card system. I don’t know what else you would call it. If you had an old car whose parts you could use to mend another vehicle, we would describe such recycling as cannibalism. All very effective and efficient and a process that has happened in humans, with hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, blood, bone marrow, corneas etc. etc. being re-used to patch up those folks who have failed their MOT.

Why then is still a continued resistance to using the other, more appetising bits of the body as food ? Why are we not carrying cards that tell people what to do with our buttocks (chateaubriand), ribs (presumably spare) and lips, eyelids and aresholes (saveloys). Maybe rangy old great aunt Hermione would only be enough for a few sandwiches, but uncle Bertrand would see us proud for Sunday lunch and provide enough cold cuts for supper for the rest of the week.

What of the fat: we are constantly bombarded with the message that ever more people are dieing of obesity-related conditions but ne’er a fig is mooted about rendering down these tallow-laden tubbies into a form of biodiesel. This would not only be effective recycling but also a form of poetic justice as they payback for all the extra fuel that they would have consumed during the course of theri lives on escalators and in lifts, aircraft, hearses etc.

It is a shame that, given the British reticence to engage in the consumption of odd things such as horse, snails, frogs, garlic and wine (we’ll leave that to the Old Enemy, thank you very much), I don’t see us adopting this practice anytime soon, unless Europe were to ban it, in which case we might take it up just to spite them.

LargetrouserS: May contain nuts

ID my id

Over in his sandblasted obelisk, The Moai has recently raised the thorny issue of ID cards.

Now I have to admit, I'm rather in favour of these little gadgets. At present, whenever I get mugged by a needy immigrant I have to report my passport lost to the passport office, my driver's licence to the DVLA, my credit cards to the bank, my birth certificate to Somerset House, my mobile to Vodafone and my wife to the registry office - the list is endless. With the new card, once I have staunched my bloody nose and made myself presentable, I shall only have to present myself once at the local police station, where, with a mug of strong, sweet milky tea and a chocolate hobnob in hand, I can relate my tale of woe to a solitary, caring constable and be back on my way in just a few short minutes.

What is rum, however, is the cost of these little doohickies. I am hoping that the success of the ID card system will be monitored and that if tide of feckless and unwashed will not yield then Tony Blair will all give us a rebate like the King Cnut he is.

Musing further, I wondered if there could be a market for a more interesting card - the id card.
In Freudian theory, the id is the division of the psyche that is totally unconscious and serves as the source of instinctual impulses and demands for immediate satisfaction of primitive needs (thanks reference.com). Rather than the boring stuff about nationality, height, arse size etc., the id card would actually record what has made you you. For example, favourite sweets, first kiss, best ever gig, fear of cheese, those "funny" games with uncle Raoul, close encounters with Pam Ayres, etc. Carrying a PDA or mobile phone that could read other people's id cards would enable you to prepare a devastatingly pithy gambit to slap the saddoes down before they trap you in a corner at a party and the ensuing ennui makes immolation unavoidable.

LargetrouserS: Object in my trousers may be larger than they appear

Fowl cocks

I spotted a young oaf on the bus the other day wearing a T-shirt with this slogan. At first it occurred to me that unless he worked on a battery farm, it was exceedingly unlikely that the person stood on his left would be a chicken owner.

Then I considered how on earth he could make the supposition that this random person might be in possession of a smaller than average bird ? Surely any serious breeder of poultry would have more than one animal and, assuming a gaussian distribution within that population, there would obviously be bound to be certain individuals that were smaller than their brethren.

I decided to approach the buffoon in question and remonstrate that his slogan should read "If the person next to me is a chicken breeder, it is possible that at least one of his cocks will be statistically smaller than the average of that population".

Unfortunately he had already left the bus.

LargetrouserS: Sometimes size is important

Celebrities: supply and demand

Time was when being a celebrity meant that you either had to be good at something that nobody else could do (like excelling at lacrosse), do something that nobody could be bothered to do (like going to the moon), repeatedly play yourself in a number of movies (like Cary Grant), or be a record breaking mutant (like John Merrick). In those golden days, celebrity was something rare and unusual, a goal that could only be attained through sweat, blood and tears or a genetic abnormality.
The intrusion of political correctness has now meant that even the most extraordinarily ordinary person thinks that it is their right to a degree of celebrity, even if they have done nothing more heroic that sit in a house for ten weeks with no television and a group of like-minded retards.
Tonight, ITV will be screening a special shark night (catching up with Discovery after all these years), the highlight of which will involve lowering "celebrities" into the water in a shark cage so that they can be at risk of being eaten. I'm not sure if this will be an interactive programme, where a press of the red button will open a flap and condemn another "actress" to becoming selachimorphic dental floss but we can only hope.

This latest laudable venture follows on a number of attempts to redress the celebrity supply:demand ratio. Following a number of programmes which attempted to bump them off one by one (Lenny Henry in a jungle, Joanna Lumley on a desert island), we heaved a sigh of relief when they started carting them off in groups to an Australian jungle-based concentration camp where they were not only subjected to the prattling of Ant&Dec&Ant but were to be ritually humiliated before the final execution. Somewhat disappointingly, I don't believe that any celebrities have actually suffered in the making of the programme to date but surely its only a matter of time. The Channel 4 programme "The Games" had a more subtle approach: train unfit "celebrities" to take part in sports where they would inevitably damage themselves.

Seizing on the latter format and realising its limitations for celebrity culling, ITV came up with Celebrity Wrestling, where the Z-listers were "trained" by pro-"wrestlers" in advanced physical techniques such as gurning, pointing at your opponent in a particularly hard way, and posing in spandex. Of course all of this was useless in the face of the ludicrous games they were forced to endure, all of which were seemingly designed by torture experts to break little bits of their bodies without actually killing them. This programme wass such a success that in a few short weeks all the original participants had been maimed and all the substitutes had either run-out or run away. With the satisfaction of a job well-done, ITV was able to pull the series well before its planned finale, which I am led to believe may have involved a bear.

Their success in this public service obviously guided ITV to run a second series of the X-Factor. This is effectively a prophylactic device, designed to cut ridiculous dreams of celebrity short beore they can take root in the person's mind and fester like a brain cancer. Week after week it is a delight to watch the stultifyingly untalented cut down to size and told to go back to the jam factory from whence they came. The need for this programme is emphasised in every episode when tone deaf lunatics with an unbelievable self-belief - "...I knows I as the X-Factor, I'm pretty with a good voice and a great personality...", "...that's right, I'm her mum and she sings like an angel..." - are basically told that they are unattractive tone-deaf rubbish. You really start to beleive that these people live in a house where all the mirrors are broken and all their friends and family are deaf.

So we have seen that the media are trying to clear up their own mess and clear up the celebrity supply:demand imbalance they have created. The latest venture, which I overheard on the Christian O'Connell show this week, will be to recreate the trek that the survivors of the Andean plane crash made (the ones that weren't eaten, obviously), as depicted in teh movie "Survival". I can see that this could be the start of great things in the recreation of famous disaster movies (not necessarily depicting real events).
My favourite concept at this time would be a recreation of the Towering Inferno, possibly at Trump Tower. Funding would come via telephone and text votes from the public who could vote on such things as "Who gets to go in the bosun's chair ?" and "Who gets to face the exploding water tank ?". There could also be a weekly challenge of running through a burning, exploding room protected solely by a damp flannel in order to win a family size tube of Savlon. It can't fail.

LargetrouserS: Never knowingly underbold

Attack iguanas

Before anybody accuses me of being iguanist, I should begin by assuaging anybody's fears that I am advocating indiscriminate drubbings of these gentle reptiles.

The train of thought began one perry-fueled lunchtime following a brief discussion around the difficulites of speying an iguana. The creatures can hold their breath, apparently, giving the impression that they are anaesthetised, only to "wake up" some minutes later and attempt to crawl off the operating table, leaving their innards behind, somewhat disappointingly.

We mused on the possibility of using the animals' ability to hold their breath, along with the Galapagos iguanas' well-developed swimming capability and sharp claws, to produce a strain that could be trained to swim out to enemy warships with a mine and cling to their hulls.
Talk rapidly turned to the possibility of training the beasts to fly fighter jets; now I'm no herpetologist, but I'm damn sure that the lack of opposable thumbs would prevent an iguana from grasping a joystick. Bobbo suggested that the application of Velcro to front feet and the joystick might be a form of workaround but Cripplit rapidly pointed out that this would prevent the iguana from pulling the eject handle and thus constitute a safety hazard.

The debate concluded that iguanas would be a most ineffectual ally in a combat situation and we resolved that we should all watch our backs if we were ever unfortunate enough to be drafted into a mixed human/reptile fighting force, especially if the iguanas were flying the planes.

LargetrouserS: For your glistening pleasure