Mr Malark

I'm not sure whether this is an urban myth but did you know that it's apparently impossible for a son to be shorter than his mother? Apart from when he's, like, six... that's acceptable.

But you'd almost expect that principle, even from a mathematical perspective, to see a population's average height shooting through the roof. However, it doesn't have the same effect on women, so, it's all offset...

I'm not sure whether I believe this.

That said, I work with a freakishly tall woman and, boy, let me tell you, she ain't having no children, tall or otherwise. Poor thing's way too big. Built like a big man. Bless her. A big, strong man. Strapping. Powerful.

Does anyone else get an inexplicable buzz from ignoring Limos?

I booked my first dental appointment in five years earlier after waking up with not one but two toothaches.

Five years, man. I hope she can find the teeth under the dust.

But I think the length of time that has elapsed between visits is largely attributable to my last experience.

I was booked in for an extraction and a clean and I was pretty tense tense about the former. However, I needn't have been because the tooth was whipped out with the minimum of fuss and no small degree of efficiency.

Somewhat relieved, I moved from the hard world of needles and drills into the softer world of fuzzy brushes and smiles.

The hygienist was a pleasant-looking woman of middle years, not unattractive, with a sunny disposition. I immediately felt at ease and, with the edginess of the previous session dissipating away, I settled down into the chair and began making happy small talk. She set to work and, as the brushes tickled my gums, I reached up in content satisfaction and grasped the back of the headrest. The hygienist smiled down on me and I, with a mouthful of benign instruments, smiled up at her. All was well.

At least it was until, some fifteen minutes later, I lazily pulled my hands from the headrest and felt it collapse away beneath me. It only took me a nanosecond to realise I hadn't been holding the headrest at all. I had been holding her thighs.

I had to lie there for another five minutes, flushed bright red with a harsh, inescapable light in my face, as she finished off. I've never missed a drill and a pair of pliers so much in my life. Who knew all that poise and decorum had been condensed into that one wisdom tooth?

Did anyone see that photo during the week of the estranged wife of a tycoon as she seeks to contest his claim that he is now actually £27m in debt? Trying to turn on the puppy eyes in the newspapers? So she can pick up a hefty settlement and continue living in her £10k a month Regency house?

Ha, someone needs to tell her puppy eyes only work when they're on a puppy. Not an old dog.

I went to the Prizefighter boxing event at the Excel Centre last night and watched eight fighters battle it out to win the knock-out tournament.

However, the more interesting players were outside the ring. The place was a haven for old-school gangsters. Everywhere you looked, there were these middle-aged stereotypes who you just knew would drive away in a Jaguar to a chintzy home with Roman pillars either side of the front door.

But the women, and there were many, cut an even nuttier picture. Because they were all uber-feminine and had turned up in slinky evening wear looking absolutely stunning.

It made for a strangely antiquated microcosm. Men were men and women were most definitely women. There was no blurring of the lines here, and there's clearly something about the sport that evokes a reversion to a more primal time.

But I think I can exploit that. At the next event I've decided to set up a food stall selling various meats. Only, without the meats. Just spears.

'You... go... hunt.'

'Oh no he didn't!'

That expression is fine if you've got a thick Brooklyn accent but could it even sound any more stupid when conveyed in a British tone? It sounds so absurdly incongruous.

'Poor guy. When the doctor gave him the results, he burst into tears.'
'Oh no he didn't!'
'............I'm so sorry! I was sure you were English when we started this conversation?'

I was going to do a bit of Blogging while I was down here in the Cornish hinterland but I've only got my touchscreen iPhone and it's not easy trying to type something on a pane of glass. Because it lacks a certain tactual quality. Recoil.

It's strange how you miss it. But it's like trying to trampoline on a wooden floor. Or attempting to make love to a poster.

I miss the Third Dimension.

I'm currently on a week's holiday in a remote cottage down in Cornwall and this is about the first time a telecommunications satellite has even passed overhead. It's a Murderer's Paradise. You wouldn't even need to cut the phoneline, because there isn't one.

My posts are therefore going to be limited to desperate pleas for help, and snot.

I was having a chat with a colleague earlier about the Belbin Team Inventory.

This is a theoretical assessment that seeks to characterise members of a team by any one of nine roles, and, although I haven't taken it in over a decade, I've historically fallen into the Plant category. Plants are characterised by their ability to come up with innovative solutions but suffer from an inability to implement any of them.

However, I felt in recent years this same Plant had blossomed into something quite different and, indeed, was now, if anything, closer to the Completer-Finisher role on the other side of the spectrum.

But that's bullshit. Cos you could pick me up and set me down 2,000 years ago and I still wouldn't do anything with all the answers.

'Hey Pontius, you ever considered screws instead of nails for those, you know, crucifixions?'
'Screws, you say? Hmmn. Tell me more...'
'................nah, forget I mentioned it.'

My dad has a lot of vinyl tucked away in the attic so I recently decided to buy him a USB turntable that'd allow him to convert all his favourites to digital before they degrade away to nothing.

But as he's not the most IT savvy of guys, I said I'd do it for him and put them all on discs so he could play them around the house and out and about in the car.

However, I hadn't factored in the size of the collection...

I was expecting five or six LPs. Not a bin liner. And that's just the Hank Williams' albums, which, I can only presume by the sheer volume, must have been recorded in real time over the entire length of his life. 'Hank Williams Asleep. Vol 876.'

It's nuts. And because half of them are scratched, I've had to sit there and listen to each and every track just in case I need to jog it on. I've sat through 270 tracks so far and I'm still barely a quarter of the way along. And it's the likes of, 'James Galway Plays Japanese Folk Classics On His Flute...' Why would someone even make that? Who decided that would be a seller?

Anyway, I am stumbling across the odd gem. Slim Whitman, and his inability to keep it below falsetto, is a real find. And Hank Williams, despite the endless repetition and slight variations on the same tracks, is a fine songwriter.

But if time is money, this is proving to be the most expensive present in the world. Next time, I think I'm just going to give him the money.

I haven't been to the gym in about six weeks because I can't much be bothered. At least that's what my conscious mind tells me. My subconscious probably has a slightly different take on it... My subconscious' just glad no one can see it. My subconscious thinks it's attached to an idiot.

Because the last time I went to the gym, I had a bit of a tiff with a treadmill.

The place was fairly empty and I didn't really want to be there either. However, I girded my loins, plugged my iPod in, and, falling into my well-worn routine, set off for the running machines.

And as I got the machine up to top speed, I found my mind wandering. I was bored. I wanted to stop. I needed a pep to keep me going so I decided to switch the music to a bit of Bill Conti. However, as I was attempting to invoke the Spirito di Rocky, cycling through the menus, I began to veer off-course. I was losing my balance.

Before I knew it, I had hit the hard verge and, incredibly, was only saved from going over by my uncanny and hitherto unexploited ability to carry on running at top speed on one leg.

It was crazy. It was like I was suddenly on the fastest skateboard in the world.

After ten seconds of this madness, my survival instincts kicked in and I jumped to the verges that run either side of the belt, which was still going like the clappers beneath me.

I deactivated it on the console and turned to see whether anyone had seen my, ahem, predicament... There was only one guy on a cross-trainer and he, discreetly, was keeping his eyes down. I was going to go across and poke my face under his and give him the two-fingered 'Yeah, you see me, I see you...' treatment, just in case he thought about repeating it anywhere else, but thought better of it. Instead I went and stood behind a post for a few minutes. Then I left.

If you play an instrument and you spot one at a party, it's funny how irrisistable it is to have a go. But the problem is, you're then forced to play the best thing you know, in an effort to look far better than you are.

But what do you do when even that's shit?

Play something worse?

It's funny, I went out for a drink tonight after work and got chatting to a new guy who's about ten years younger than me. And it's odd because he reminded me of my best friend about a decade ago. A bit nervous, a little bit geeky, but clearly a good guy with interests in a lot of slightly offbeat things. Only, yet to find the confidence and conviction that he's going to find over the next few years.

It was great to speak to him. He reminded me of me.

We shook hands at the end of the night and went our separate ways but I know that I can trust that guy if I was ever in a tight spot. If I ever went overboard in a crowd, I know I'd have his hand.

It's weird how you sometimes have that connection.

Anyway, er... football, birds, big jugs...

Has anyone seen that disconcerting new road safety advert about the tell-tale signs of people driving under the influence of drugs? Four kids in a car with eyes like saucers? And the warning, 'The penalties for drug driving are the same as for drink driving.'

The same as drink driving? Nothing about, well, drugs are illegal? So I'm alright to drive on two spliffs then? Maybe a little bit of acid? Driving along in a big pumpkin?

What with the effects of gravity and those great, big gaping holes at the bottom, what keeps bogeys from simply falling out of your nose? You'd think there'd be an almost constant rockfall of bogies rolling down your chin.

I dunno, just a thought. Been a quiet day.

With Derren Brown publicly picking out the winning Lottery numbers ahead of the draw this evening, it reminds me of the time we went to see him at the theatre.

And it was all very entertaining, until he decided to hold a seance and asked the entire audience to join hands. Which was all well and good until I turned to my right and realised I was sitting next to a tough-looking black youth sitting on his own in a baseball cap at the end of the row...

Seances are really uncomfortable.

I'm finally reaching a stage at which I can no longer keep the optician at bay. One eye is so conspicuously stronger than the other, it's like half my head's watching the world in High Definition, whereas the other half takes it all in on some old, busted piece of junk, broadcasting from the bottom of a pond.

In fact, I now realise I was a bit hasty upgrading all my tv gear to HD. Cos there was a cheaper solution: I could've bought an eye patch.

After watching a couple of morons sing it on The X Factor, I haven't been able to get Starship's 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now' out of my head.

But not the original. The morons' version.

It's killing me. If I knew which part of my brain was regurgitating it, I'd dig it out with a spoon.

Notorious is a biopic of the short life of rapper Christopher Wallace, a man better known by his monikers Biggie Smalls and Notorious B.I.G.

It charts his life growing up in Brooklyn as, well, a big, fat guy slinging drugs on corners and rapping in his spare time. However, his verbal dexterity brings him to the attention of Sean 'Puff Daddy' Combs and the maverick record producer, in impressive fashion, proceeds to build a brand new record label around him.

And all is well. They're pulling in big bucks, drawing increasingly big crowds, and even rubbing along nicely with rappers from the West Coast. However, that all changes when West Coast big-mouth Tupac Shakur pops round to Biggie's New York studio and gets attacked, robbed and shot in the foyer. Shakur accuses Biggie of being in on the robbery and, suddenly, a huge rift, fuelled by the media, develops between the East and West coast scenes.

It only ends when the two lead protagonists are dead.

It's an odd movie because I knew next to nothing about Biggie Smalls going into this and, knowing how good the West Coast stuff was during the same period, with the likes of Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube all turning out excellent material, I was prepared to be blown away by a man that appeared to be holding up the East Coast on his own.

However, based on this showing, Biggie Smalls wasn't actually that good. I can only presume he benefitted from a really weak New York scene because he just sounds like a fat guy rapping, a little bit breathless from the weight. And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, even if that one eye is sitting atop a body stuffed with pies.

Notorious: 5/10.

Bruno is the latest Sacha Baron Cohen creation to hit the big screen and, if you've been living under one of the few rocks that doesn't feature an advert of a camp man in skimpy lederhosen, it's the tale of an Austrian fashionista's laboured attempts to make it big in America.

A lot of people have compared it unfavourably to Borat but it's almost exactly the same film. There's really very little difference between the two and you could easiy slap a moustache on the lead character and call it a sequel.

And it's still, in parts, very, very funny. Don't get me wrong, it's immensely cringey and you'll probably have to watch large chunks of it through cupped fingers but Cohen is brilliantly shameless and, in his excesses, is unrivalled at drawing out concealed prejudices. His characters are almost a form of Political Correctness Entrapment.

Stand out scenes include Bruno's graphic attempts through a medium to re-live a tender moment with his deceased Milli Vanilli lover, and another in which he manages to get a partisan chatshow audience onside then sets about completely destroying all his good work. It's a staple of Cohen's work.

It's not a perfect comedy and you wonder how much of it is staged but it's still miles funnier than anything else out there. Cos you could put a hundred Will Ferrells in a room with a hundred typewriters and at the end of a hundred years, all you're going to have is a hundred skeletons and a pile of unfunny shit.

Bruno: 7.5/10.