Shut Your Beak…

Shakespeare wrote that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”. What he failed to mention is that some whine, bitch, cry and generally act like children until someone finally gives them a little greatness of their own to play with in the hope that it will shut them the fuck up for ten seconds.

Gordon Ramsay seems to revel in being one of the latter.

For those of you fortunate enough not to know this prize prick, he’s a chef. A good one – his Michelin stars prove that he can cook. But he’s more than just a chef, just some lucky kid born with the ability to turn rocket into something edible. He’s an utter wanker.

See, Ramsay couldn’t stick with being a chef. Like many who are born to greatness in one discipline, he felt the need to usurp it in another; so he became a TV chef.

TV chefs are renowned for their egos, and indeed an ego can be fun to watch as it grows, is punctured, and grows again, as happens on so many reality TV shows.

Ramsay obviously didn’t get the memo on puncturing. His ego, inflated beyond all that is good and decent already, swells with every show.

His principle articulation of this ego is to scream obscenities at those who work for him, deriding their efforts and working himself into a fit at their inability to cook at his level. This does not make for good television, though I suppose millions would disagree with me. It’s Ensign Goiter syndrome – you know that when Spock, Kirk, Scotty, Bones and, errr, Goiter, beam down to the surface, Goiter ain’t comin’ back. Similarly with Ramsay, you know that the new pastry chef is going to last five minutes – it’s just how many times he can call her a fucking useless piece of shit that causes any slight sense of tension.

Personally I don’t like to watch people who are good at what they do being insulted and humiliated for my delectation. I find it unseemly, below me. In an economy in which the financial equivalents of Ramsay have taken their billions and scoffed at the rest of us while our pensions become worthless, I feel his arrogance and spite is ill-placed.

So there you have it, our first Beak of the Week. Gordon Ramsay, crown prince of acting like a spoilt… well, crown prince.

You, sir, should Shut Your Beak.

I like badgers. I like that they’re both a verb and a noun. I like that they snuffle. And I like that they are one of the few interesting species that we’ve got in England, which seems to get a pretty effing raw deal on David Attenborough’s new show. (So far we’ve encountered Jungles, Deserts, Ice Caps and Caves. Not a bloody word about England’s interesting polar region, nor our 10,000 square-mile rain-free zone.)

Badgers were recently in the news. According to urban legend, and as reported by a few reasonably sound news sources, man-eating badgers had been released in Iraq, presumably to ferret out some insurgents or some such. That such a thing might be taken seriously amuses me greatly, and makes me want to repeat the word ‘badger’, because it feels delicious on my lips.

It’s also rather fun to know that my parents’ first names – John and Clare – form the name of the man who wrote a famous poem about badgers. (This I learned from Wikpedia; I don’t read poetry because it confuses me.) The poem is named – perhaps a little simplistically – ‘Badger’.

Why am I writing about badgers, exactly? Because yesterday Jen brought one home.

Ok, so it was actually a garbage disposal unit for the sink, but it still said badger on the outside.

According to the product literature, our new badger insinkerator (nicely done there) is both stylish and functional. For a device that lives under the sink and grinds potato peelings into dust, I felt that the stylish part of this description was somewhat redundant. Mind you, if they release one in Brilliant Red, like my BlackBerry, I’ll be first on the list for a new one.

So, we have our badger. Excellent. Now to install it. Except that it turns out that the old one wasn’t actually broken – Jen poked at it a bit with a screwdriver and fixed it. So now, the brand new stylish badger has to go back to the store.

In order to facilitate this process, I placed the badger on top of the washing machine in the laundry room, which abuts the garage, which contains the cars, which will transport the device back to Lowes.

So – in actual fact, the sentence makes sense. At least, a lot more sense than my friend Pierce’s polite request to his wife whilst on the phone to me: “Honey, please don’t use the speargun to close the curtains”.

Nope, no idea.

Since I became a ‘contractor’ at my previous employer, my life has been replete with the time to do stuff. Fun stuff. In fact, basically, I’ve been skiving off for about three months now.

Most of that time has been spent worrying about trivialities such as money, food, children and Family Guy. But, as someone once said, fuck that. So I went to do something else.

Something, ideally, dangerous.

Not that I have a death-wish. I just wanted to do a few things now that I probably won’t be able to do if Jen and I ever get married, or we move to bloody Florida, or I drop dead tomorrow.

So, in the last week alone, I won decent money in Las Vegas playing high stakes no-limit. Nerve wracking stuff.

I ran – and half killed myself – climbing 960 feet in the first one and a half miles in Death Valley, before continuing too long and having to ask French people for cold water on the way home. How embarrassing.

I jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane at 12,000 feet above Moab, and it turned out that skydiving brought out the foul-mouthed Scotsman in me.

I caught up with some friends in Aspen, and went a little off the deep-end on beer, wine, vodka, Red Bull, Jagermeister, Scotch, and milk. Not sure how dangerous that really was, because I can’t remember if the squealing brakes were for me or for a prairie dog.

And in a couple of days I zip off to Mexico to, errr, talk to a friend about timeshare.

Any way you look at it, this is two weeks of excellent adventure.

Best of all, my unavailability at my ‘job’ might cause them to disengage from our relationship. If so, the old time/money equation does begin to figure, but the former has suddenly manifested itself as the more enjoyable of the two.

Wake up… time to die.

Nah. I just thought that would be a cool pay-off, but even though the sentiment is right, y’know, because I’m doing dangerous things that could hurt me and so on, because I have time off, there wasn’t another Blade Runner reference in the entire story, so it wasn’t actually that clever.

Sorry.

Until recently, I kept a list of the three things that kept me sane. Each of them provided a foundation for normality in my life, a platform just a few inches above the water that ensured I didn’t have to go off the deep end.

Of course, this is a lie. I did no such thing. But if I had, then the three rock-solid truths in my life might have been:

1. Any Will Ferrell movie can be condensed into a two minute trailer which will explain the plot, feature all of the jokes, and provide all the confused shouting you really need.

2. Only enormously fat, ghoulish people who, as I have mentioned elsewhere, are on a sinister quest for discount Cheese-Wiz, shop/roam the aisles at Wal-Mart.

3. Dead squirrels do not extricate themselves from my pond and wander off into the wild blue yonder.

Yet my faith has been shaken by the crumbling edifice that was point three.

Before I went on vacation… dead squirrel in big hole in the yard where badly-constructed pond used to be.

On returning from vacation… no evidence whatsoever of said deceased rodent.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine what happened. Assuming that it didn’t clamber out of its own volition, I am left with the conclusion that someone – or something – removed it.

A local cat? Desperate to feast on rotting tree-hugger? Or a lazy and not particularly picky fox?

No, I think the answer is more devilish. I think the other squirrels hoisted the victim out of the hole and took him to a secret location where they buried him. I think the bushy-tailed little fuckers are a lot smarter than they appear, and gather and intern their dead compatriots so that they don’t fall into the hands of scientific researchers, who might discover their apocalyptic plan and foil it.

Just look at the squirrels in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory – evil little beasts intent on murdering children. Or that squirrel on YouTube that has injected its malicious subliminal message into millions of viewers.

Think I’m the first to notice? Think again. Go to this site to see the corroborating evidence against these murderous tree-dwelling denizens.

We must unite against them, take down this lunatic fringe of the rodent world, dash their plans for… why am I writing this?