“I think it makes good sense for Kanye West to keep his date the same as 50 Cent.  First I was like, “What is he doing?” like, “It’s gonna kill him.”  …  He already knows that he doesn’t mind being number two because he knows he’s going to be number two” 50 Cent, referring to himself in the third person

Curtis, Curtis, Curtis.  Have you learnt nothing from your namesake, Curtis Stigers, who so famously predicted himself off of the billboard chart with his overexagerated boasts?  (Stigers, in an interview with a surprisingly lucid Cher, told fans ”there’s no need for you, listening to me now, to even buy the single - I’m number one and no shit can change that”; record sales amounted to three copies, at least two of which were bought erroneously according to anecdotal reports)

Now before you accuse me of siding with the boy West, let me point out that I sent Kanye a rather lovely ham hock last Winter and am yet to receive even the most cursory of handwritten “thank you” notes, so he and I have something of a pig-headed beef going on.  No, this is about Fiddy (who is resolutely heterosexual) and his obvious lack of self-confidence, manifesting in an over-inflated ego rant that Neo-Freudians would suggest comes from having no significant male role model in his early years (Curtis has been painfully honest about his father: “Daddy ain’t around, probably out committing felonies”)  At one point it looked as though he had found a suitable replacement in the shape of The Game, but their relationship broke down after 50 accused The Game of stealing a prized pencil eraser in the shape of Jessica Rabbit.

As a trained therapist with a chair of my own, I’d like to extend the turgid branch of help to Curtis and offer to assist him in working through his angst.  Seriously, it can’t be good for his digestive system.  In fact, if there are any rappers, RnB artistes or similar reading this and in need of emotional support, do get in touch (saying that, though: Ludacris, please, stop calling me - and no, reversing the charges is not a good way to win back my respect).  I promise confidentiality and to not release my album on the same day as yours.

“It’s got to the point where he’s in my office at least twice a day, rubbing his hands together and saying “Right, when are we hitting the campaign trail?”  It’s beginning to get right on my tits.  We’ve seriously considered sedating him” Anonymous White House Source

Heap big powerful medicine men called in to discretely monitor the President’s gradual decline into rambling pleasantries are reportedly “concerned” that Bush is setting himself up for jarring cognitive dissonance once the truth of his lapsing power sinks in.

“Normally people take this sort of thing in their stride - Eisenhower had a highly successful turn on the conference circuit making anti-Hitler jokes - but we’re worried at how blind to his situation Georgie is.  One day he’ll wake up and just be a man in a poorly fitting suit jacket and his underpants, rather than that same man with his finger on the nuclear button” Barbara Pith, Pittsburgh

However critics of the President are dubious as to the authenticity of these claims, and instead believe it to be a ploy by the Republican party to extend their oft-criticised tenure in the face of rising critique.

“It’s all a pack of shitty lies, we’ve seen this before with Nixon - they say he’s forgotten about a term, and use that as an excuse to give him another one” Comment left in an Internet Newsgroup

While members of the Bush family were unavailable for comment, a fax machine repairman in New Jersey gave us the following unofficial statement:

“George W. is a big boy and he knows what he’s doing.  All this liberal “out of office” horse crap is just another greasy slur campaign by the Democrats, and neither he nor his buddies will let it get to him.  The President looks forward to another fourteen years during which he’ll do a load of great stuff, you’re just jealous”

“We thought it was a mistake at first … until the test results came back in.  Even sterile swaps bought with middle-class money end up a bit dirty.  You may as well piss it up the wall; we’ve been buying photocopier paper and beer bongs, it’s bloody useless” Anonymous Researcher, CTSU Oxford University

In a conference call on Wednesday, slack-jawed members of the liberal press responded with a mixture of horror and disbelief.  Guardian columnist Vivienne Nathanson had to be escorted from the room, a trickle of vomit comprising mostly organic broccoli trailing from her chin, while Polly Toynbee stripped to the waist and tore at her breasts with an unnamed item of hand-made ceramic.

“For years we’ve been relying on a traditionally self-hating, hypochondriac demographic to fuel the search for incomprehensible medical discoveries … this research comes as a swift and distressing kick to the balls” Petra Griffiths, Director CRU, London

The study, due to be published in The Lancet this coming Monday, makes some broad suggestions as how to target the newly valuable working classes, but its authors remain realistically grim.

“For most people floundering in the shit-pits of society, cancer isn’t much of a worry - they’re more concerned with where the finance for their next sofa will come from.  We totally expect to see cancer research in the UK and elsewhere dribble to a halt as the middle-classes take their money elsewhere” Geoffrey Golding, UCL

In connected news, auction house Christies has already noticed a rise in demand for vintage antimacassars and crap “ethnic” sculpture, as the aimless 35 - 50 age group attempt to find new directions to channel their wealth.

Choice, then, is crippling us.  Once upon a time there were only two choices facing us: plague or no-plague, and only the masochistic or confused went for the former.  Now, if you wander into your local plague emporium, you’re faced with bubonic, Ebola-based or any number of genetically-modified derivatives for 100% of the fresh plague taste you love but with only half the calories.  A telemarketer tried to sell me a pox very low on the glycemic index last week, and wouldn’t get off the phone until I’d listened to his entire spiel about how own-brand supermarket diseases have been shown to be bulked with inverted sugar syrup.

In fact it seems that the big chain foodstores can do no right at the moment.  Only this past Friday did the British media frot themselves into a frenzy of gnashed cellophane at the news that some ready-made sandwiches contain as much salt as eight bags of crisps (that’s chips for my American friends, and кексы for any Russians reading).  Jim Winship, director of the British Sandwich Association, balefully retorted that “meat is salty” while saving his tears to pour over a prawn-mayo baguette he was making for some small children. 

Frankly, it’s another opportunity for the general public (about whom I generalise) to divorce themselves from all major areas of responsibility.  “These sandwiches have lots of salt in them, you brutes!” they cry, their cowed spines quaking at the thought of having to manage their own diet, “why are the government doing nothing to protect me - and my children, for the love of all that’s holy! - from this sandwich menace?!”

Ironically sandwichgate comes as researchers find us crippled with choice, the profligacy of options driving us deep into depression and making us feel inadequate.  Professor Mark Lepper of Stanford University performed studies with jam of all things and found that consumers offered a mere six fruity choices ended up buying more and feeling happier than those offered 24.  “I feel as though I’ve been punched in the face after I’ve been round somewhere like [British supermarket] Morrisons” wailed Joy Miller, 39, leaving us to ponder how the poor woman might feel if she were actually punched in the face (as though she’d been asked to choose between a selection of terrestrial television channels for a Saturday night viewing binge, perhaps).

Where does that leave the vomiting, goose-pimpled man or female-impersonator in the street, then?  In a world where anything from homemade horseradish sauce to scrotoplasty is on the menu, we run the risk of leaving our streets strewn with people become jellied lumps of indecisive gristle caked with salt.  There’s no easy answer (I mean, just look at the Nazis), but there certainly is a knee-jerk one: starting this week, look out for the Dante’s Handcart “You Ought” feature, telling you exactly what you need to buy, bake or bone.  With rational thought as fashionable as nosegays, I’ve no doubt “You Ought” will be our biggest success yet.

So let me introduce my latest gadget review, only this isn’t so much of a gadget and it’s not going to be much of a review; the SmartCafé cafetiere mug.  A double-walled plastic mug with built-in French-press-style plunger mechanism, it promises an individual cup of steaming coffee without me having to wastefully pour away the rest of the jug.

It’s a cup.  So it holds liquid and stops you from having to drink directly from the kettle.  You don’t care how much it weighs, because you’ve held a cup before, haven’t you.  Needless to say it’s not as heavy as a brick (or a ceramic mug for that matter) but it’s heavier than a shrew.  Since you can’t drink coffee out of a shrew (unless you’re a sick bastard with very little thirst) that’s not exactly an issue. 

Operation is simple.  Put in ground coffee.  Pour on water just off the boil (boiling water burns the oils in the coffee and gives it an unpleasantly bitter taste) up to the ‘max’ line, which is around a centimetre beneath the rim.  Stir, leave for 3-4 minutes, then slide the plunger into groove and gently press down.  Add milk, cream, sugar, syrup, bran-flakes, eye of newt and whatever else people slosh into perfectly innocent coffee these days.  Drink.

Of course, if you want to be a paranoid idiot you’ll follow the supplied instructions to the letter, including “place hot cafetiere mug on a flat, heat-proof, non-slip surface.”  That means you probably shouldn’t attempt to use the mug on the hind-quarters of a cat.

Does it work?  Well yes, thanks for asking, it does.  Initially I wondered if coffee grounds would escape around the sides of the filter, but aside from a couple of extra grains at the very bottom there aren’t any more in my cup than there are from a traditional cafetiere, and the mesh is fine enough to do its job properly.  The outer walls of the mug are warm to the touch but not hot, while the coffee inside seems to be maintaining its warmth.  Obviously it’s not going to be as efficient as a proper vacuum-walled flask, and much of the heat escapes from the top rather than radiating out of the sides, but every little helps.

Is it worth the £4.95 ($9.92) I paid for it?  Personally, yes.  If you’re a thirsty traveller than you might like their cafetiere travel cup, which is a little under twice the price but probably holds twice as much, as well as having a non-spill cap.  I, however, am able to conduct myself with some degree of stability and am rarely prone to spilling drinks all over myself.

The Dante’s Handcart Duck awards this product 12 out of 15 Quacks

Mike Peake in today’s Sunday Times recalls an interviewwith the Gorester, who’s undergoing something of a publicity flurry right now with his Live Earth concert malarkey and trying desperately to make environmental issues sexy.  Al could take a leaf out of other growth industries such as rhinoplasty, terrorism and auto-erotic asphyxiation; the attacks in the UK this week have been automatically attributed to fundamentalist Islamic extremists, myopically ignoring the controversial public smoking ban that came into force today.

My theory is that, with the anti-smoking lobby receiving a much-needed fellate-in-the-bushes with the new clean-air legislation, irate tobacco-hounds have staged a number of aggressive protests aimed at significant locations in smoking lore: Glasgow Airport, home of duty-free bulk-buy fags, and a popular nightclub in London, such establishments being a common place for smokers to “light up”. 

As the UK government, newly under the baleful eye of Gordon “Marrowbone” Brown reacts with the inevitable nicotine ID patches and mandatory registration with the police for convicted cigarette-users, we can expect to see howls of protest unfurled across newspapers and pamphlets, keeping the topic firmly in the public eye.  And what do the the eco-mutterers give us?  A Toyota Prius and a glass of organic orange juice.  For shame!

“Eventually affluent people in the developed world will start to forget what it was like to be lost - just as we are all beginning to forget what research was like before Google”

Lest I tread on the toes of any sat-nav companies or inadvertently bugger an NDA agreement other, more in-touch bloggers have been observing, I firmly believe that we’ll see a range of GPS devices with in-built randomiser chips.  This high-tech “get lost” function will, according to a user-set ratio of likelihood, randomly choose a journey to scupper with poor directions and general topographical ignorance.

Obviously, with the number of people who blindly obey their sat-nav and find themselves half submerged in the nearest flooded road, manufacturers will have to work hard to out-stupid the general public.  I can only assume that they’ll take ‘Celebrity Voice Directions’ to their logical conclusion and instill the intelligence of celebrity dullards into their dashboard map-manglers.  Let’s hope the day that we can all invest in a little George W. Bush to drive us round the bend comes soon enough to satisfy Michael.

Otherly, why have car manufacturers not caught on and put 12v cigarette lighter/charging sockets on the top part of the dashboard?  When I want to plug in my Garmin Nuvi I’m forced to have the cable trail down, round the instrument binnacle and to the socket near the gear-lever.  A second socket up on top of the dash would avoid all that.  Sort it out, guys!

“Without any stretch of the imagination, the X60 could easily be a favourite of many large IT departments and tablet PC enthusiasts” I4U Review

No surprise, then, that I’ve already been on to Lenovo’s PR people and am on the waiting list for a review unit. 

The other piece of tabletty-goodness is that my good bud Ewdi (who got married yesterday - congratulations Mr Ewdi and Mrs Ewdi!) sent me over a Samsung Q1 UMPC to use while my tc1100 continues to suffer.  It’s the first time I’ve had my hands on one, and while passive touchscreens take some getting used to when you’re more familiar with active ones it’s nonetheless an awesome little gadget.  Having read Steve’s ultra-handy guide to setting up a streaming multi-room audio system I’ve now got another thing on my to-do list.  Perhaps I’ll couple that up with trying out Windows Home Server, since I got accepted onto the beta test for it.

Of course, no blog entry would be complete without my traditional hat-tip to Mike Cane, who I’m coming to consider as my spiritual creepy-cousin.  He’s been playing with a Q1 too, and I’m glad to hear that he’s suitably impressed.  Given Mike’s general attitude toward, well, life, that’s high praise indeed.

Poor Ann, everyone has jumped on the “club the homophobic, inappropriate bitch to death with her own Adam’s apple” bandwagon and missed her point entirely: is it possible that Americans are about to vote an offal-based meatball into office?

Coulter has obviously spent some time in the UK (possibly in the company of Bernard Manning), and thus understands that a faggot is:

“traditionally made from pig heart, liver and fatty belly meat or bacon minced together, with herbs added for flavouring and sometimes breadcrumbs. The mixture is shaped in the hand into balls, wrapped round with “caul” (a membrane from the pig’s abdomen), and baked” Thanks Wikipedia!

To be fair, if I was about to be governed by a chunk of pelvis-clad abattoir floor-scrapings then I’d want to know.  I’m not sure what the possible implications on foreign policy might be, but I can’t see American-Islam relations being done much good by having a Commander in Chief made from pork by-product.

Ladies, gentlemen, (and that curious middle ground occupied by Ann) we should be thanking Coulter not lambasting her.  Yes, the odorous sack of effluence is an embarrassment to taste, sanity and human-kind, but at least she knows her meat.