God Should Have Paid Child Support

I saw a headline on the front page of a newspaper today that said that deadbeat Irish dads who don’t pay child maintenance are being targeted by the State, but is it really surprising that young men don’t honour their responsibilities to their children when God himself got a girl pregnant and split? It struck me that The Big Man isn’t such a great role model for men considering he tricked Mary, got her knocked up and then didn’t even pay child support!

Some of you may argue that he sent the three wise men bearing gifts and that was a form of child maintenance. But that was ONE TIME and out of those three gifts, gold was the only good one. Myrrh? Bitch please. Frankincense? BITCH PLEASE! Why couldn’t he have stopped with the frankin-nonsense and just have given the poor bitch three lots of gold? I mean, she deserved a pot of gold for the pain of childbirth alone and another for being tricked (she was a virgin for chrissake! She got the punishment and she didn’t even do the ‘crime’!). Really, only the third pot would have counted as child support.
Mother Mary ain’t no ho, she deserved mo' gold fo’ sho’.

It’s not as if she was raising just any old kid, either – he was the motherfuckin’ son of God! Her life got turned upside-down, she had to deal with Apostle groupies coming into her home, not to mention worrying about her son cavorting with nasty-ass lepers and the other, ho Mary. Jesus was all about saving the souls of others; he never thought to get a job and get his mama out of the ghetto. And then she has to bury her son when he was just 32 years of age and she can’t even visit his body because he busted out of his tomb and rose to heaven? That ain’t easy!
If you’re going to invade some woman’s body and take over their life, the least you can do is COMPENSATE them.

God should have hooked Mary up with a sweet ride – she shoulda had the fastest and most comfortable camel in all of Jerusalem! But God was cheap. I mean, there she was, about to give birth to HIS son and the best he could do was a stable? A motherfuckin’ stable, when there’s an inn right next door?! God’s baby mama has to give birth into a cattle trough surrounded by cows and sheep because he wouldn’t pay for ONE night in an inn? There’s only one word for a man like that: scrub.
Basically, God is Eddie Murphy and Mary was his purer, less busty Mel B.

In short, God shouldn't be in heaven - he should be on Jeremy Kyle getting it in the ear by that detestable man for being the good-for-nothing deadbeat dad that he is.

Can I get a amen?!

Irrational Hate List: Part III – Angelina Jolie.

Some of you will be asking why I dislike Angelina when she’s a humanitarian and soooo beautiful. Well, I don’t like her smug face and I don’t like the way her statements and actions almost never match up. Quite simply Angelina Jolie is not a real bitch; she is in fact the opposite of one and thus drives the forces of fake-assness which are responsible for most of the world's wrongs. (That might sound OTT, but I mean it with every fibre of my being!).

I have never been a fan of Jolie and one of the biggest reasons for this was that I never felt I knew who she was. But after years of harbouring a more than mild dislike for the actress for what I believed was no good reason, I've finally gotten to the root of why I dislike her so much. Angelina Jolie is that pointless, attention-seeking, ‘alternative’ girl who is/was in everyone’s school. You know the one - everything she said and did was done purely to provoke a reaction? She was that girl who wore heavy eyeliner and told lies about herself so she would seem really deep and interesting. She was that girl who told near-strangers really inappropriate (and mostly fictitious) things about her private life; staring into their eyes, willing them to be shocked and horrified by her fucked-up life. She was that girl who would nonchalantly talk about her abusive father who called her a whore or her manic-depressive mother who tried to overdose on pills. Then when others acted concerned or sympathetic, she would shrug it off as if to say ‘That’s nothing compared to some of the other fucked-up shit that’s happened to me’.
She is also the girl you eventually found out came from a normal, non-dysfunctional family.

When Angelina Jolie first came to international attention twelve years ago, she was essentially what Megan Fox is now: a freaky, semi-gothy, hot chick with nice tits and big lips. However, over time her image has changed drastically; she has lost a lot of weight (but has somehow kept the boobs), merged with Hollywood actor Brad Pitt to become the Optimus Prime of celebrity couples, Brangelina, and adopted several children from third-world countries, as well as giving birth to three biological children. In addition to all that, she has also done humanitarian work with the UN which brought her to an orphanage in Vietnam where she saw her Maddox, triggering her adoption addiction.
On paper, Angelina is fine but I dislike her because I feel she’s fake and guarded and also becasue she won’t fess up to having cosmetic surgery. Other reasons that I dislike her are her perma-pout and the fact that she isn’t a very good actress. Yeah, she might have received an Oscar for her supporting role in Girl, Interrupted, but anyone whose seen that film knows that a) it’s ridiculous, b) Angelina is only good in it because she is playing herself at the time, ie. a crazy, kooky pair of lips, and c) Brittany Murphy was the true breakout star of that film.

If you look at pictures of her ten years ago and then the poster for Salt, you will see how much she has physically altered. While most humans find that their skin sags with age, Angelina’s actually becomes more taut. She is like Madonna in this respect. That is why they are wrinkle-free and look more and more cat-like as the years go by. Who is she fooling? It is obvious she has had Botox and at least one nose job, and while I’m not an expert on these things, I would say she has had upper- and lower- eye-lifts as well.
Now clearly, it’s not like she’s the first actress to go under the knife for her career or her own vanity but what irritates me about Angelina is that she would never admit to any of it. She would never be so shallow as to have cosmetic surgery when there are bigger, more important issues in the world such as starvation and AIDs! When will people understand that Angelina isn’t like other actresses, or any other woman for that matter? She’s a humanitarian worker and a mother who just happens to be a top-earning Hollywood actress, goddammit! She can’t help it if she’s talented and naturally beautiful and people want her to be in their movies. It’s a cross she must bear. Obviously she would rather be in an orphanage in a third-world country right now but these bothersome films in which she stars require her to go to premieres and award ceremonies and parade around in front of photographers in designer dresses. It’s all rather infantile, but she needs to keep a high profile so she can spread maximum awareness and do the most amount of good for the needy.
I give Angelina props for her humanitarian work, I really do, but she needs to stop pretending she’s above the glitz and glamour of the movie industry when she’s clearly as vain and as obsessed with her image as any Hollywood starlet.

For the record, being real has nothing to do with having a real face or body; Joan Rivers is made up of 80% man-made materials but she’s as real as a bitch comes. Being real is about being honest. You come across real bitches who are plastic (eg. Sharon Osbourne) and fake-ass bitches who are all-natural (eg. Vanessa Hudgens) – but equally you get real bitches who are real (eg. Tina Fey) and fake-ass bitches who literally have fake-asses (eg. Kim Kardashian).
My issue with Angelina isn’t that she’s plastic – a lot of my favourite female celebrities are – it’s that she has the audacity to say that she isn’t. How can she sit back and be praised as a paragon of natural beauty when she isn't all natural?
A real bitch admits when she’s had a few tweaks; a fake-ass bitch pretends she’s perfect.

Another thing I dislike about her is that while on one hand, acting doesn’t interest her as much as being a mother, she has to be a bad-ass in everything she does. She talks about buying her son Maddox toy guns because he’s obsessed with them, and even wore a necklace with a machine gun pendant. This seems rather inconsistent for a woman who fights for peace around the world. But Angelina has always been the queen of mixed messages (or perhaps the princess, after Madonna). The comedienne Roseanne Barr made a good observation about Angelina’s contradictory behaviour in August 2008, when she blogged about the way in which the actress campaigns against violence and yet stars in ultra-violent movies in which she cold-bloodedly kills dozens of people (eg. Salt, Wanted, Mr and Mrs Smith, Tomb Raider). It’s rather hypocritical of her to denounce violence while glamorising it at the same time, is it not?

Last but not least, let’s not forget that this is the woman who tongued her brother on a red carpet. Full-on MET him in front of photographers! Leopards don’t change their spots, people. Ange will never fade into the background, devoting all of her time to the orphans/ rain forest/ earthquake victims because she gets off on attention. Again, this is nothing to be ashamed of – attention is great, most people in the public eye and many others who aren’t also crave it - I just wish she’d admit she does, too.

Basically, I dislike Angelina because she is just like Madonna. Just as waxy, just as gaunt, just as orphaned-out and just as disingenuous. The only difference is she doesn’t flash her scrawny minge at us all. And for that at least, we should be thankful.

Irrational Hate List, Part II: Loose Women

“No worst, there is none”. I thought the opening lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem about unimaginable pain and misery would be a fitting introduction to the subject of part two in my Irrational Hate series: ITV’s Loose Women. I know this is supposed to a list of my irrational hate for celebrities/pop culture phenomena, so please forgive me because my hatred of this show is perfectly rational.

My reasons for disliking the show are multitudinous. Firstly, I have problems with most of the panellists who appear on the show, of whom they are many but the established team consists of Andrea McLean (innocuous ex-weathergirl with a Blue Peter quality), Jane McDonald (apparently a singer but if there’s a shred of that West Yorkshire accent in her singing voice, she can’t be a good one), Sherrie Hewson (admittedly endearing former Coronation Street actress), Carol McGiffin (controversial, turkey-necked cougar who has had a fair few whacks from the ugly stick), Denise Welch (another former Coronation Street actress who sports dodgy plastic surgery and a bad bleach job), Lynda Bellingham (one of the oldest and most bearable of the group) and Coleen Nolan (uninformed, opinionated Spanx-wearer extraordinaire). The best I seem to be able to say about any of them is ‘she’s fairly inoffensive’. As Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

The second reason I dislike like the show is because they talk about the most inane topics imaginable. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the daytime television programme, this following is an example of the type of prattle you hear on the show. (Spoken in a blood-curdling Lancashire accent) “Did you ever go into someone’s bedroom and they have everything matching?! I went into a friend’s bedroom recently and they had the lampshade matching the bedspread, the curtains matching the carpet! I dunno ‘bout you but MY curtains don’t match my carpet! (Titters) Oh dear, that sounded like an innuendo!” *everybody falls about laughing like it’s the funniest thing that has ever been said*

Loose Women? More like Shit Hysterical Middle-Aged Bitches. Don’t get me wrong, I love older women who speak their minds and aren’t restrained in how they talk or how they act. Sharon Osbourne, Kim Katrall, Helen Mirren, Joan Rivers and Jo Brand are all brilliant, brave, witty women who stick their middle fingers up to sexism and ageism (in a world where both are still abundant). However, there is absolutely nothing racy or daring about the Loose Women.
Watching the show is like being stuck at the worst lunch table at work. In fact it is worse, because while the subject matter is as mundane and the panellists are about as interesting and informed as your typical middle-aged secretary, the former have massive egos and make a lot of noise jostling for attention, each believing that what she has to say is highly entertaining or profoundly insightful. (Really, it’s like having lunch with the shittest, most domineering member of every group of middle-aged women at work).
The only thing that separates a Loose Woman from a member in her audience is her ego... That and hair and make-up. Each day the Loose Women are trussed up to look like they are the mother of the bride; their hair is blow-dried big and they are lathered in false tan and Touche Éclat to the point that they look slippery, as if they are perspiring (although that might just be due to the hot flashes).

It becomes easier to understand the inflated egos of the Loose Women ‘stars’ when one looks at gossip magazines for mature women. The Loose Women are Girls Aloud for the menopausal; they are seen on the covers of Woman’s Way and Woman’s Own, walking down the street with no make-up on or climbing out of taxis with their mouths open, while captions read, “Coleen’s ageing fear” or “The tragedy behind Natalie’s recent shocking behaviour.” (Both are real headlines from current issues of mature women’s magazines).

Another thing I dislike about the show is the forced jolly atmosphere in the studio. Women talk about the things that affect their lives – ageing, marriage, family life – but they aren’t allowed to be serious or reflective. Every statement must end in an exclamation mark. They laugh about their big, hairy husbands, snoring or hassling them to have sex; complain about their whiny, money-grabbing children (who they love anyway, the little buggers!) and talk about themselves like their lives are just one big series of ‘hilarious’ mishaps and cock-ups. Anecdotes invariably end with statements like “me and my big mouth!” or “yet again, I end up on my fat arse!”
They send out the message that a woman’s life is a joke, because for all the talking that they do,
there is never real, frank discussion on the show. They constantly relate back to stereotypes – eg. 'I’m the nagging wife and he’s the long-suffering husband' – and thus reduce themselves and others to easy-to-manage, 2-dimensional characters. Because of this practice of lobotomising life, nothing meaningful can ever be discussed.

This flattening of individuals can be seen in the way the women refer to each other. Carol, for all her mingingness and her tendency to give too much information about her sex life, is one of the two open, honest Loose Women (the other being the rather charming Sherrie Hewson). She is an unconventional, fifty-year-old woman who enjoys having sex and has a much younger fiancé. In her bio on the Loose Women section of the ITV website, Carol writes that “Loose Women is [her] dream job. There is nowhere else on TV that old (well old for TV anyway) women can get an hour’s airtime without an even older man linking, patronising or interrupting them.” By all accounts she is an interesting person; she is a pro-age feminist but the other panellists don’t see her as that, they just see her as ‘randy old Carol, the cougar.’

Finally, the thing I hate most of all about Loose Women is Coleen Nolan. (“Mary, Mother of us, where is your relief?”)! When the 45-year-old, who rose to fame as the fat Nolan sister, isn’t forcing herself into a pair of magic knickers, she’s telling the other ‘girls’ that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to adopt children because “there’s only so much she can accept.” (Those particular comments landed her in a bit of hot water in January 2007). This coming from a woman who told her 15-year-old son that if he passed his GCSEs his step-father would take him to the Red Light District in Amsterdam and pay for him to sleep with a prostitute. But while her bigotry, hypocrisy and inability to put down the fork when she has a job on TV all irritate me, the thing that really gets my goat about Coleen is her self-congratulation. She has just released a new book entitled, Mum to Mum: Happy Memories and Honest Advice, From a Real Mum. (She is such a real mum that not only does she shop in Iceland, she also endorses it!).
In her bio on the Loose Women page, she writes “My loose lips and saucy innuendos regularly get me in trouble, but I can’t help it, I’m a big flirt”!

For me that line not only encapsulates everything that I hate about the woman, but the show in general. Urrrrrgh… Hormone Replacement Therapy has a lot to answer for.


PS. Coleen, stop shouting that you’ve lost weight when everyone can see you’re wearing a corset and you’ve just squeezed your spare tyre up into your boobs.

My Irrational Hates: Part I - Ellen DeGeneres

On a recent stay in New York City, I saw countless print advertisements for a brand of vitamin water endorsed by Ellen DeGeneres. When I first saw these ads I thought it was somehow apt that Ellen would be promoting a product such as flavoured water, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why that was. It was a good fit and yet I was irritated by their union; it seemed to increase my distaste for both the beverage and the comedienne-cum-talk show host. And then it occurred to me: Ellen IS vitamin water! By that I mean that Ellen is the entertainment personality equivalent of vitamin water. She is just as harmless, just as flat, and just as bland.

Vitaminwater zero has no calories and this is appropriate for Ellen because her public persona is similarly devoid of substance and her comedy lacking in nourishment. I have long disliked Ellen for being an offensively inoffensive comic; she is to comedy what Will Smith is to rap. People with little or no sense of humour like her because she doesn’t rock the boat by dropping the F-bomb or bringing up controversial topics. This would be fine but these humourless people go on to criticise good comedians for cursing or having shocking material because “Ellen doesn’t need to swear or be offensive to be funny”. But let’s get one thing straight: Ellen ISN’T funny. She has just been working as a comedian for so many years that people believe she must be funny otherwise she wouldn't have been able to make a living out of it for this long. Ellen's success is down to sheer drive and enthusiasm, not her talent or her wit. The really excruciating thing is that she is lauded while her wife, Portia de Rossi, is an unbelievably funny comic actress whose talent is overlooked. It is so unfair that Portia is dismissed as ‘Ellen’s pretty wife who used to be on Ally McBeal’ (anyone who has seen Arrested Development will know she is SO much more than that!) while her wife is given so much undeserved praise.
Anyone who has seen Ellen’s stand-up knows that it is atrocious. I remember watching a comedy gig of hers on television and she LITERALLY made jokes about airplane food. She half-heartedly ranted about packets of peanuts you get on planes for what seemed like days. It was some of the most nauseatingly unfunny material I have ever heard; she was like a parody of a hack comedian.

While constantly going for shock value can be tiring, nonetheless it’s true that comedy needs to be out there sometimes. It’s one of the few spaces in entertainment where boundaries can be pushed and there can be free discussion. Comedians such as the late Bill Hicks, who made angry rants about U.S. politics in his shows, and Joan Rivers, who makes angry rants about ageing and the injustices of life, show us that raw emotion makes for comedy that is not only hilarious but thought-provoking. By its nature, comedy is best when at its most concentrated, but Ellen’s brand of humour is so watered down (get it?!) that it’s hardly humorous at all, and is nothing but joyless, soulless wisecrackery.

Another reason why I dislike Ellen is because she wants to be everyone’s friend. She recently announced that she would be leaving American Idol after a fairly disastrous one-season stint, citing that 'while I love discovering, supporting and nurturing young talent, it was hard for me to judge people and sometimes hurting their feelings'. While it's a nice statement, one wonders why she agreed to be a judge in a talent competition when she doesn't like judging people. The clue's in the job title, I would have thought. Also, it is important to remember that we are talking about being a judge on a television show, where your job is to prepare adults to survive in the entertainment industry; it's not the time to act like a playschool teacher, giving out gold stars to everyone and saying ‘well done’ all the time. The entertainment industry is one of the cruellest and most vicious industries of them all; unbelievably harsh things are going to be said about contestants in magazines and online as soon as they are in the public eye.

Ellen showed her dislike of meaness in all its forms when the genuinely funny Kathy Griffin appeared on her show in September 2007. She was hostile towards her guest and criticised her for saying mean things about celebrities, citing the time she came out publicly and everyone was making cracks about her, to which Kathy (who incidentally is far more vocal about gay rights than she is) said that she wasn’t one of those people. I think when someone doesn't have a good sense of humour one of the biggest signs is that they cannot handle it when the joke is on them. A real comedian would have weathered that storm and come out of it defiant and unapologetic, like Russell Brand did in his show Scandalous, after his BBC radio controversy, Sachs-gate. It seems Ellen’s reaction to the mocking she withstood after her coming out was to make herself as conventional and mainstream as she could so she would never be the butt of anyone’s joke again.

Career-wise, playing it safe has worked incredibly well for her. While a lot of female comedians fall out of favour because of their ‘big mouths’ (eg. Joan Rivers, Rosie O’Donnell and Roseanne Barr), Ellen has escaped scandal and disapproval by keeping things Vitaminwater zero-light on her show. While both Oprah and Tyra are known to occasionally tackle weighty issues on their talk shows, Ellen has stayed well clear of anything serious or informative that could possibly be divisive. In order to be a guest on Ellen’s show, one has to be a happy person devoid of any negativity. She claims that she is promoting positivity, but I think she is actually repressing realness (which as y'all know, is what I'm all about).

The thing that annoys me most of all about Ellen’s nice guy schtick is that she couldn’t have possibly gotten to where she is in such a tough business if she was that nice or naive. I believe that she is disingenuous, and honesty is what I value most in people and something I expect from a comedian. This is because honesty is essential for good comedy; the amazing thing about comedy is that you are free to publicly say the things you talk about with your friends inside your living room. Of course, there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed and there are repercussions for speaking your mind too freely, but this is part and parcel of being a comedian. Sometimes when you’re pushing boundaries, you overstep them, but it is this bravery and this willingness to put yourself in the firing line and possibly be made a whipping boy by society that I admire most about real comedians.

In conclusion, I find Ellen’s dancing at the beginning of her shows mildly amusing and I enjoyed her as the voice of Dora in Finding Nemo, but apart from that I find very little else to recommend the woman. If Ellen was a colour, she’d be beige; if Ellen was a flavour of ice-cream, she’d be vanilla; and if Ellen were a drink, she would most definitely be vitamin water.
Comedy isn’t supposed to be good for us; it’s supposed to be enjoyable. A real comedian would have endorsed an alcoholic drink... or at least something with sugar/caffeine.