OMFG. As if MBTs and Sketchers weren't bad enough...

Once upon a time I thought that Sketchers were the worst shoes I've ever seen in the world, and just couldnt understand why girls and European men insisted upon wearing them. Then I realised that people like Christina Aguilera are paid millions of pounds to feature in expensive ad campaigns for them.

So I thought 'oh, ok, i suppose advertising can be persuasive and people can get caught up in a moment or whatever, so I can accept that it's ok for people to fall for it all and end up buying a pair of these shitty things'.

But then I saw MBTs.

I laughed so much when I saw them in a shop window near Carnaby Street that when I started to walk into the shop to see how much they were, the Security Guard moved in front of me to block my access. I've still no idea how much they cost but I presume it can't be any more than £20 or something like that. I mean, people look so ridiculous when they wear them. Who would pay money to look like that.



However, Maybe it's because there are 3 Friday 13th's this year, or maybe because the planets were in a certain alignment at some stage, but incredibly, we have now ended up with certifiably, THE worst pair of shoes ever. Sketchers have decided to make their own version of the MBTs. That's right, Sketchers saw a pair of orthopedic shoes and thought - 'What a great idea, they look fantastic! Let's jump on this bandwagon...'

So, if you think you have a shred of dignity about you and wish to surrender it, these are the perfect shoes for you...

Seriously

Eric Cantona advertised Renault these days?? WTF?

John Lennon's Jukebox

These are some of the songs that were in John Lennon's portable Jukebox back in the 60s. He talks a bit about them in these videos too.

NEW FAVOURITE WEBSITE

HERE (the answers people leave are stupid but the pictures are brilliant)

Papal Breaking

This is like explaining to your great uncle what funky house is.

YouTube Break

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Whereas most Youtube videos get stale pretty quickly. These guys' sincerity make this whole thing watchable.


Similar vain, and also very good. Thank you Bruno and Danielle.

Asher Roth

This song makes me sooooo glad i didn't go to 'College' in America. If this and Crazy Town are what's popular over there, I'd rather have the Baywatch themetune any day of the week.

Balkan Diary, Part 4: Sarajevo

Heading to Sarajevo was a little difficult, as the Serbs and Bosnians still have a little bit of bad blood between one another. The most frustrating aspect of this is that no one has seen fit to erect road signs or any sort of aides to direct you around Bosnia since the war ended, so we drove fairly blindly around mountains and rubbish dumps until we eventually got near Sarajevo where a few signs started popping up.


After just 10 minutes of driving through the city centre and seeing that every building was either a Mosque or a Church we knew we weren’t in for a storming night. Everyone seemed quite serious and we didn’t garner any smiles as we sat and drank in the park.

Anyone we’d spoken to recommended we go to ‘Cheers’, a theme bar based on the TV series. It was awful so decided to disregard the advice of anyone who could speak English from here on in. Thinking that students knew how to party we went to the student club, Sloga. It was literally heaving, with what looked like every young person in Sarajevo there. But I don’t think people in Sarajevo are very used to having fun so understandably had a pretty low threshold of what was enjoyable. They’d all turned out to see what must be one of the worst bands in the whole Balkan region.

They had 3 guitarists and played bangers like ‘Always look on the Brightside of Life,’ and ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. People were losing their shit to these awful renditions of what are rubbish songs to begin with. The people were quite friendly, but were also trying to sell us crack cocaine, which I think even if I had have taken, I would still not have enjoyed myself.

The next day we went for a walk about. It seems JME has set up a travel agents over there.


People will worship anything in Sarajevo. This was the Holy Temple of the Regular Bloke (thanks Gabe).


We realized that we were getting some disagreeable looks from people in Serbia and Bosnia because our car had Croatian plates, so we drew a smiley face on the bonnet to let them know we were friendly guys.


There was nothing to buy in the whole city – all the clothes and DVDs were bad fakes and the selection of food was dire, we had a donner kebab for breakfast (which was actually gorgeous) or this dish

of bread, raw onions, and little dog poo shaped pieces of meat that tasted like Birds Eye frozen beefburgers and looked so much like dog poo we took them out in the street to put them back in their natural environment.


They might all be devoutly religious here, but at least they still enjoy a bit of bawdy humour.

Waiting in an airport for 5 hours is never easy, and after 14 whole days in the company of just one other person, we’d exhausted most traditional avenues of conversation. We decided to spice things up by having a drawing competition. Things started off tame with simple drawings of pandas but soon escalated into drawings of each other raping dogs.


I'd like to think I won.

Balkan Diary, Part 3: Belgrade

Our Lonely Planet’s description began, ‘Belgrade is not a beautiful City’, and they really weren’t joking.



Not since Crunk-czar has there been a genre with such an amazing name as Turbo-Folk. But despite the promise of weekly shootings, gang violence and slutty girls, we found Turbo-Folk to actually be surprisingly like a night out in a posh nightclub in Essex. Getting in was the normal story of velvet ropes, guest lists and guys in suits taking your coat. The bar was table service only, and the clientele was strictly middle-aged men and ropey looking women pretending to be in their teens. The music was far from anything as exciting as I had imagined. It seems when they prefixed ‘Folk’ with ‘Turbo’, they didn’t mean ‘wrecklessly fast gabba techno beat’s like I had imagined, but what they really meant was ‘cheesy European pop music’. After half an hour a band came on stage so we thought it might pick up. Instead the lead singer was wearing a suit with a skinny tie and started singing Robbie Williams’ “I just wanna feel real love”. We left.


The next club we went to, Stefan Braun, was at the top of a skyscraper and had metal detectors on the door so looked a bit more serious. In actuality, it was home to exactly the kind of club you imagine Russian hookers go to on their night off; almost everyone was wearing white trousers.. When the bar girls weren’t selling bottles of beer for £4, they would get on the bar and dance while guys took photos of them and compared cameras.

A massive guy got on the bar too and sprayed 5-feet canisters of gas all over the room. I have no idea what it was, but it felt like we were in the gay steel mill from The Simpsons, except it full of lecherous straight men. In fact, the last Gay Pride march in Belgrade had to be abandoned because so many people turned up to beat up those on the march, so I don’t think the people of Belgrade would be keen on that comparison.

The Military Museums are where things really picked up. They had some very gnarly stuff on show from the 1999 conflict with NATO including a machete with (rather a lot of) traces of human blood,

a razor wire string to torture people with,

the uniform of a captured US soldier,

the rear wing tip of a shot down fighter jet, and the full cockpit of the Stealth bomber that was shot down.


The next day was the Belgrade derby which despite the threatening swastikas sprayed all over the toilets and heavy duty riot police was home to some of the best choreographed football hooligans I’ve ever seen.

From sneaking around the pitch to steal each other’s banners, having a man on scaffolding directing the crowd over loudspeakers throughout the whole game and setting off dozens of flares at exactly the same time,

the almost camp guys in Oakleys and tight stonewashed denim really put on a good show. The best bit was once they'd finished singing a song, all the (real) fans took their shirts off and threw them in the air. Shirts Off Crew Belgrade!!

Balkan Diary, Part 2: Zagreb

Zagreb didn’t have much in the way of nightlife that we could see and anyone we spoke to only recommended shit bars full of Australians so when we heard that all the local youngsters were off to ‘Turbo-Folk’ parties we thought that might spice things up a bit. When anyone we asked about the scene told us how dangerous these night were and pleaded with us not to go we got even more excited and decided to cut our loses in Zagreb and go to a night in the home of Turbo-Folk, Belgrade.

As we would find out on the way to Belgrade, and for the rest of our travels, the most obvious difference between the ethnic groups that we could see is that Bosnians and Serbs love to set fire to plastic by the side of roads.

Croats on the other hand prefer to set fire to cars.

Balkan Diary, Part 1: Ljubljana

Having recently become unemployed, I’ve found myself watching a lot of TV recently, in particular Top Gear, so I quite fancied the idea of going on a driving holiday, maybe to California. However, having recently become unemployed it seemed more realistic to go driving around Eastern Europe instead; in particular, the Balkans. I took a camera with me so you can feel as if you came too. Hold on to your seats and let’s go!!

First stop, Ljubjlana
First thing to learn is that Eastern Europeans are total whores for brands. As if Audi wasn’t enough of a global brand, this guy customized his £30,000 car to make it look like a fake Reebok X Burton collaboration from Chinese eBay. I hope he doesn’t regret it.


Any thoughts we had that Eastern Europe was going to be cheap were quickly dashed when we saw the window display at Cyberdog.

Whilst Cyberdog may now just be the preserve of Hard house losers and ‘nutters’ in Britain, in Slovenia it’s big news with people (presumably) willing to piss away €420 on natty disco ball / shorts combos like this one. Hopefully they won’t regret it…

Eschewing the numerous restaurants designed for middle-aged couples we decided to go to a party that was described to us as ‘underground’. The helpful girl even circled it’s location on our map - a car park. Amped at the idea of going to a rave so quickly into our trip we were pretty worried when we couldn’t hear any music when we got to the car park.


Realising she must have meant underground as in underground car park, we explored its lower levels for quite a while, but to no avail, eventually giving up and heading home only to find the real party was just around the corner.

Confirming a passion for snappy dressing, when this guy came into the party it was like the Fonz had just walked in.

Literally every single girl was totally on his jock and started dancing with him. The DJs played nu jazz all night, so the girls must have really liked him to be dancing to it.


Ljubljana’s residents obviously enjoy a good joke as much as Londond’s Real Gold Crew, these pictures of Fritzl as a ‘Family Man’ were sprayed all over the city.

Due to the high number of young men who died fighting in the Balkans, the women started to forget what penises looked like, so decided to erect metallic penises all over the region and use them as doorstops.


Eastern Europeans have completely gotten over hating the whole ‘commercial hip hop thing and embraced it for what it is. It’s so commercial out in Slovenia that Hip Hop even operates its own petrol stations.

I couldn’t see Russell Simmons in there, but I imagine he’s a right areshole and won’t let anyone have cashback.

This is James posing in front of some real ‘old skool’ graffiti. Really sticking it to those commercial-ass fools in Hip Hop who sold out.


And me eating a horse burger. Which was so disgusting it ruined the rest of the day.

The Double Bluff

If any sex offenders out there feel a little bit bored with pretending to the whole world that they're not in fact a molesterer / rapist / flasher you could probably do worse than dip your toe in to the water of psychology by trying the old 'Double Bluff'.

By wearing this t-shirt and pretending to have your dick poking out your jeans, people will be so put at ease with your obvious humour that the fact you actually want to fiddle / bugger / scare them will be the last thing on their mind. Voila, easy access.

BIRTHDAY VIBES

Friday is my birthday and will be partying at the Globe for GetMe!

Saturday is my brother's birthday so will be partying with him (everyone invited) at the White Swan in Euston.

Come!

420 Day!!! Light that Shit up..

Of course, there'll be no need to tell all you weedheads (or maybe you'll be too stoned, rofl!) but today is 420 day, or the 20th April.

I'm not sure why no one knows what it is in Britain, but it seems to be a huge deal in America. I guess maybe because in Britain any person over the age of 18 who talks about smoking weed is automatically ignored by everyone within earshot.

To sum it up for you, 420 seems to be a 'catchphrase' in the US that basically means 'i like to smoke weed'. I think the idea was that it was initially a cool underground little phrase that would only be understood by other weedheads (a bit like early Catholics etching fishes above catacombs in Rome), but now they have big parades to promote why cannabis should be legalized (a bit like Mass at Christmas or Easter). This guy thought the phrase itself was funny enough to warrant him blowing the opportunity of winning a ton of duff prizes on The Price is Right.


If you want to read more about it go here. In fact, the most shocking thing I noticed in this article is that it mentions the Editor of High Times magazine in 1998.

Only last week one of my friends sent round a front cover of that very magazine from 1992 with Cypress Hill on the cover, where we all laughed about how impossible it would be to find decent content for such a poorly conceived magazine. Matt even drew up a conversation from the offices of High Times, it went like this:

Editor: “So weed – still illegal?”

Writer: “Yep”

Editor: “Anyone rolled any interesting joint recently?”

Writer: “I made a windmill”

Editor: “You always do. Any feature ideas?”

Writer: “How about ‘Green vs. Hash – the Final Debate’?”

Editor: “I quit”

I feel proud that we can now give that man his real name. Stephen Hager. If anything I think 420 day should be renamed Stephen Hager Day in tribute to how he has managed to find enough cannabis related news to fill an entire magazine every month since at least 1992 until the present day. He must be a surprisingly stressed individual.

Sexy eBay

This woman is clearly clueless. I mean, who supports West Ham and Man United?? Only a fairweather fan. Oh, and she doesn't even have any trousers on.

Come on Lady, get it together.

The Look Of A Man Who Knows

That He Is Having The Piss Taken Out Of Him.

(click it to see his eyes more clearly)