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[patrick boo]

The official worst time of year is coming up. Not only have the clocks changed so it gets dark at 11 O'Clock in the morning - great especially in places where there are no street lights - we have that two-headed shitefest of Halloween and Bonfire night.

Now before this goes any further, I'm not some mardy old killjoy who just wants to stop people having fun - I just object to a lot of the non-occasions when we are TOLD to have fun. If you want to have a good time, go and have one on October 17th, bad films and Absinthe day, or November 9th, Bridget Bardot's birthday and an excuse to gorge on Knickerbockerglories until you vomit through your eyeballs. I'd rather that than dress up like a fucking witch (when everyone knows witches look like perky sixties housewives, I'd endorse that celebration) and going around begging for a mixture of sugar, additives, crushed bovine spines and eyelids at complete strangers' houses, or celebrating our primal urges by going out and making a big fire and burning a poor effigy of some unknown terrorist fighting for some unknown cause at some unknown point in history...

Maybe it was just my family/neighbourhood, I dunno, but nobody really seemed to celebrate Halloween when I was a kid, it was something the Americans did. Certainly we never had trick or treating. Then when I got to my teenage years everyone wanted to rent out 'scary' videos to watch. Scary videos bored me shitless than and do now. They definitely don't scare me any more, especially since we spent a month disecting the genre on my film course.

...But it's November 5th that really fucks me off. I tell you what, 'The Wicker Man' is a great film, not because it's scary, it's just a cool film - more of a thriller than a horror - I'd say the same for 'The Shining'. Anyhoo, Guy Fawkes night is just like thousands of mini 'Wicker Man's all over the country. Does anyone really know why we're celebrating? Who Guy Fawkes was? He was just a bloke from York who got caught up in a complex religious civil war. He was a guy who got burnt alive. Yeah, celebrate that!

Why celebrate fire? Fire is shit. Fire is the reason why we felt the need to invent central heating. We've not got central heating here, our only heating comes from an open fire and a Rayburn stove. Coal, ash, soot, sparks. You ever seen someone being burnt alive? I have. I've seen a man turn into a human fireball. I've smelt it. I tell you what, if you've ever smelt a man being burnt alive you'd never celebrate fire again.

So if you want to have a good time this year, be a bit more original and think up a decent reason for it.

Rant over.

[drunken claire]

lighten up
jst get drunk

[betamax]

i feel exactly the same revulsion to ''being told to celebrate'' at new year/hogmany/whatever

all it really means is that we are all another year closer to our respective deaths whenever those might be

why celebrate time running out?

i also prefer random celebration for any reason i can think of and oppose all forms of organised state owned celebration

as for fucking christmas

dont get me started......season of corporatre greed and exploitation....and that fucking coke advert

[patrick boo]

That was part of my plan...

Drunkenness is fine, if tempered with a large amount of bile and an awareness of the disturbing slightly antiseptic Aryan undercurrent of Abba's music. The drum pattern for 'Dancing Queen' is a Daily Mail editorial in Swedish morse code

[betamax]

ABBA disturb me too more than any music that is deliberately disturbing by design ....but that is the fascination and the addiction to it.......its that tickly pop purity mixed with the darkest undercurrent of gorgeous swedish suicide-by-slow-overdose melancholy

even their happy songs are deeply sad

sadder than the smiths

whose sad songs are deeply happy

at christmas im building a bonfire to burn an effigy of father xmas..... and on xmas eve, will piss cheap champagne through the letter box of a nearby religious institution where the hypocrites inside will be celebrating midnight mass

purely symbolic

santa is an anagram of satan btw.....

Im off to celebrate day-after-the-clocks-go-back-day

[Lester Burnham]

I'm in on this too,

I was planning to spend my halloween running around the streets of my peaceful hamlet dressed like the guy from Clockwork Orange and screaming at 4 year olds... but I cant be bothered, so I'll watch the TV instead.

Bonfire night is usually bollocks, you invest masses of money for what are usually shitty fireworks that kinda fizz for a few seconds then die... and thats after you've spend two hours in the freezing cold with some snotty 5 year old wiping cheap tomatoe sauce on the bottom of your coat.

Christmas, well thats the day I wonder about muttering insults, everyone tends to get angry with me, then I get drunk, realise how much money it's cost me, and get more drunk.

New Year, I got paid to stay in last year... the year before I was a bacardi vomit machine... and I have no idea what I'm doing this year.

Bollocks to it all.

Ba-humbug indeed, I'm with ye Paddy.

[patrick boo]

I have decided that I would like a Bacardi vomit machine for Christmas. A ceramic one mind, not one of those cheap chipboard versions with the dissolving lardons.

Now that theres an opening for the position of Santa, maybe the new one could have a suit, shirt and tie and a sleigh plastered with the logo's of manufacturers of crackers and tacky xmas tree decorations, and a radio which plays supermarket christmas songs - pulled by a herd of toy store owners. or something.

[delboy]

ah christmas, shaky on the radio, snow falling steadily outside as the local church choir sing 'ding dong merrily on high' on your doorstep, and the bbc are harping on about which big films (that anyone who'se interested in film will have seen at the cinema or rented out) from three years ago they are showing over the festive period.

yeah its all a load of bollocks as the specials once said.

why not start an annual national boo day?

[soundian]

Why don't you Boo-ify the skylab for Chrissers.