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.

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.

One of these assertions is a fact.

Given that everyone in America except Jen and me is a God-fearing Christian, we can assume that the former statement is erroneous.

Ergo, praying is bullshit.

I know this because I prayed once, just once in my life. I was nine or ten. I’d been an atheist since the age of seven, and I wanted to check to see if it worked.

My grandmother on my mother’s side had promised me an Atari when I came to Scotland to visit. An Atari!! Rob Smith had one, Jay Tucker had one, and despite not having one myself I was actually the school champion on Asteroids.

I wanted one so desperately I could shit.

I lay awake at night for weeks, praying desperately for the Atari to be an Atari 2600, so that I could practice saving Earth from various invaders from space, or from the dragon realm, or simply from France.

The day we got to Scotland, my grandmother made a big song-and-dance, and presented me with a Binatone machine that played Pong. And only Pong.

I was out of my mind with anger, grief, and sheer confusion that despite making a pact with God for the first time in my life, that I would pray and he would ensure the delivery of an Atari, he had backed out of the deal.

I don’t think I ever wanted anything that much again, with the possible exception of Rebecca Priestley.

But there’s another reason for my statement.

I know praying is bullshit because Christian kids get mangled in car wrecks. They get abused by perverted alcoholics. They – gasp! – become homosexuals.

Didn’t their parents pray for these things not to happen? Didn’t they sit at the dinner table and politely ask God not to let their kid contract bone disease? Didn’t they sit in church and pray for more white people in the NBA? Or were they just praying for Cheerios for breakfast?

You, dear reader, have my permission to pray whenever you want, assuming you have the time to waste. I’m sure that it assuages your guilt, or calms your mind, or whatever.

But rest assured, whether you’re praying for Arsenal to get beaten at home, or for your wife and two children not to get killed in front of your eyes by a drunk driver, as happened to an acquaintance of my fiancée, nothing in the world can prevent shit happening.

One.

I mean, what the bloody odds? What are the odds that three times out of ten I end up sitting by some fat guy who thinks that the armrest between is is the Maginot Line, and he’s Herman Goering? And what are the odds that a further three times out of ten, I’ll be plonked down right by someone who wants to engage you in detailed discussions about their sales job, their recent discovery of Rogaine for alopecia, or – even worse – their children?

Then you’ve got babies. Oh, have you ever got babies. Usually the infants are either directly in front of me, or directly behind me. I think that the look I give to mothers who want to be seated next to me whilst tending to a baby puts them off the seat for good. But believe me, if there’s are three people left to board the plane, and one is a stunning redhead who looks like she might enjoy a conversation about poker, and an exhausted mother trying to control her hideous offspring is the other, I know where my chips are falling.

But that one time…

I was sitting next to a simply gorgeous girl on a flight from Boston to Denver. Her name was Pamela J. Cici**ati. The slightly off-kilter spelling of her surname was memorable. And the middle initial was just classy.

Pamela was first to go. She asked an innocuous question of some sort, and on hearing my English accent she essentially melted into my arms. Gushing with unrequited longing for me, or at least any bloke with said accent, she engaged me in a conversation that meandered from jobs, to homes, to likes, to loves, to what the hell you’d do if you could do anything, right here, right now.

Then she told me that she had always wanted to join the Mile High Club.

Not being used to the directness of a successful American girl on a mission, I think I remember stuttering, covering my lap discreetly and basically trying to pass the comment off as something that girls said to me all the time.

“Oh really? I hear it’s a little cramped in there,” I volunteered idiotically.

Pamela looked at me curiously, obviously expecting a different response. In fact, I suppose, any response at all that wasn’t that.

“Haven’t you wanted to?” she replied.

At this point my memory becomes fuzzy, mainly because I have blocked the incident from my mind after this. All I remember is that whatever I said wasn’t “Yeah baby, let’s get it on, this is very much my bag”, but something like “I’m pretty sure they can arrest us for that kind of thing”.

Pamela spent much of the rest of the trip looking out of the window, and the rest of it ignoring me even more obviously. I guess she was the kind of girl that guys just don’t turn down.

I spent sleepless nights for a while after this. It’s the kind of thing that men fantasize about, and not only was it on the cards for me, but with a seriously sexy, smart, and confident woman in her mid-twenties.

Go on, say it. I’m a fucking idiot.

She misses her bus, Al Gore is elected, and Obama returns to the present, less nerdy and probably a nice, electable shade of white.

Pretty cool, huh? There’s a movie there somewhere.

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.

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?

It involves placing motivational quotes in a small frame mounted at eye-level above the urinal in the men’s bathroom.

Today’s quote read as follows: “If you want to stay young, keep going at whatever it is that keeps you going. For me, that’s hard work, and lots of it.”

Apparently Ingrid Bergman, whose hard work consisted mainly of lounging around in bars listening to pianos, came up with this pearl of wisdom.

I did not find that being told to do more work was particularly motivational.

To begin with, as a real estate agent might confirm, it’s all about location, location, location.

When I’m micturating, I am concentrating on only one thing: making sure that the direction of the stream is conducive to walking away with confidence, even in light khaki trousers.

Since this necessitates peering conscientiously into the bowl, I do not need to be distracted by facile attempts to make me work harder. And the sad thing is that I was so mystified by the fact that someone had thought that this was appropriate, I couldn’t stop my eyes returning to it. It was like watching a seventeen car pile-up on the freeway, except with more dangling.

Location aside, I’ve never been one for deriving great and important insights from those posters that feature such words as ‘DETERMINATION’ and then have a picture of some grinning guy planting a flag on top of a mountain. I find them puerile and an insult to my intelligence. I mean, it really takes determination to climb Kilamanjaro. Lots of it, I’m sure. But I don’t think that the same determination is really required when putting together a spreadsheet detailing how often the printer needs ink.

Whatever… it’s not nearly as bad as a quote that blatantly and unapologetically says ‘Get back to work, minion, a simple urination shouldn’t take you this long”.

When I was a young kid at school, the wall between the girls’ stalls and our rudimentary pissoir was about six feet tall. With real effort and a seriously overful bladder, it was possible to pee over the wall and onto the head of some unsuspecting nine year old. Richard Shepherd, in particular, was an expert.

Any bets on how long before I put the same trick to use on our latest motivational quote?

Frankly I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention.

See, I used to like movies that critics described as ‘thought-provoking’, but these days I’m realizing that I’m far happier with movies that are ‘thought-repressing’.

Take ‘Kung-Fu Panda’, for example. Best movie I’ve seen in ages. A fat panda becomes the dragon warrior and uses his fat belly to repel the evil dude!!! And I went to see it twice!!! Of my own volition!!! I even learned the secret Eastern power of Exclamation Mark!

How does it stack up against Apocalypse Now? One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Well – none of them has a fulsome indigenous Chinese relative of the bear in them, for a start. But more importantly, none of them make me want to watch them again.

See, that’s the thing with really good movies. They usually take you from A to B. They take their time, build it up, and eventually reveal to you some truth or other that you might not have figured out by yourself.

At the end of the movie, you feel sated. There’s a medium – the film. There’s a message – war is bad. Or mental patients might not be mental. Or computers have irritating voices. But having experienced it once… is there any real need to see it again?

With Kung-Fu Panda, it’s just… hey, that monkey is Jackie Chan! And the Squirrel, or Possum, or whatever he is, he’s just like Yoda! Except more hairy.

It’s thinking at the top level. Recreation through Recognition via Repetition. It’s what we already know, with the words in a different order.

I don’t really have a problem with it.

Sorry.

By the way, there was supposed to be some clever deal here using Jack Black, the voice of the panda, who starred in the truly abysmal movie Shallow Hal, and one of my illustrated examples of a great movie (2001), in which H.A.L. the computer was a protagonist. And I’m showing you how I have no depth. Right? Geddit? Geddit?

Ah fuck it, I’m way too lazy to explain it to the likes of you.