Be Excellent To Each Other

Once they figure out "Cancer" isn't the capital of Venezuela anyway,

I remember that now!

Isn't it odd that Jo O'Meara disappeared, but the two worst in all that are still in the spotlight.

9.6 guiltily suppressed snorts / 10

Because Jo was just a bit stupid, not actively evil or shameless enough to pull everything the other two have.

A guy who was an inspiration to many died of cancer a couple of years back.

He had one of the wierdest and most brilliant funerals ever. He specifically asked for comedians to do something at the funeral, so we had jokes, stories and one guy walking up to the lectern and yelling "Helllooooo Salford!" before launching into a bunch of hack material.

I was lucky enough to be asked to read a poem of his. We then gave him the most amazing standing ovation as the coffin disappeared behind the curtains.

I still miss the bastard. He'd drunkenly tell me "yeah, one-liners, all well and good, but why don't you tell 'em what you really think? Its a fucking pub in Eccles not Radio fucking Four."

I should stop skim-reading.

Man, that poems wonderful. The guy sounds excellent.

That is indeed an excellent poem. Also a wonderful eulogy.


In extra depressing cancer news, Christina Applegate has had a double mastectomy.

gutted

I imagine she feels slightly worse.

I believe she had no career aspirations other than getting the Big Brother cash. Think she breeds dogs or something now so she didn't manage to ruin her career.

That's one of the few times I've genuinely laughed at a forum post.

She went off to have a kid, she's actually releasing an album later this year.

Doubt that will be bothering the chart compilers on her past form. I thought by the time of BB she was washed up and had accepted it.

Oddly enough, for the first part I'm entirely " " but for 9/11 I cried my fucking eyes out. Odd.

I was completely indifferent during the 9/11 attacks, when Maddie was kidnapped, when Diana was killed, during the 7/7 attacks, and pretty much every disaster ever - natural or man-made.

When I went to New York City last year though, and went to visit the 9/11 memorial... it was weird, I had this sudden wave of emotion hit me like a bucket of water to the face and I bawled my fucking eyes out.

Surprised me to no end, it did. I think it was seeing all the "Missing" posters and realising that all of these were real people with real lives and real families, cut off just because they were unlucky enough to not call in sick that morning.

A good excuse to link to a brilliant article from Cracked:

< http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_wh ... phere.html >

With a face like hers I wouldn't be surprised if she gives birth to them herself.

Is the lesson there to always skive as much as possible?

I'd probably feel some connection if I visited the site, like you, but sitting here thousands of miles away with no real link to the event, I'm incredibly indifferent.

The one thing that upsets me about 9/11 is how so many fucking stupid things have been done in the name of fighting trrrists since then despite being more likely to die from having a coconut drop on your head*.


*may not be true

I'm not usually one of those for mass hysteria, but I have to confess to being really upset by proxy that day. We couldn't get hold of my Dad all morning (he was just in meetings all day and hadn't thought to call us to let us know he was OK), living so close to London in a big commuter town and knowing some of the affected areas pretty well PLUS the radio being on at work all day with constant news reports... I was utterly exhausted and emotionally shattered by the end of the day.

9/11 did rattle me a bit. I've always been a bit emotional when things like that happen, and I get very upset when other people around me are upset. Since the company I worked for at the time had the floors that the second plane hit, and 300 of our employees died, I was surrounded by rather a lot of glum people. Between that and seeing the people jump from the windows, etc. I had a fair bit of cry.

Which, strangely, contrasts with the 7/7 attacks, which were literally just down the road from my office, and yet I felt like that was a big adventure, despite the chance of injury/death to me or someone I care about being far higher.

Odd things, people.

Which is fair enough. You had something to worry about.

My first exposure to the 9/11 event was a text message from my friend as I stumbled sleepily into college, saying "Someone's flown a plane into some building in America".

I haven't been to NY, before or after 9/11. I hadn't been to London before 7/7, or to Manchester before the Arndale Centre blew up. I just can't get upset to something I can't attach myself to in any way. Oh well — I'm certainly not judging anyone for getting upset at anything ever.

Yeah, my Mum shouted up the stairs to me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The first thing that went through my head, as I sat there playing computer games, was "What's the World Trade Center?"

I can't explain why I didn't know what it was, I'm normally pretty switched-on about that sort of thing - landmarks etc. but I'd literally never heard of it before in my entire life.

I remember watching 9/11 happen with a wholly inappropriate, shocked sort of grin on my face. I think the sheer ludicrousness of the situation; the fact that it looked like something out of a film, made it very hard for my poor brain to accept, which might account for the village-idiot like expression.

My mother's car was unfairly clamped that lunchtime. I returned to work looking forward to having a large rant when I was told what happened. A sense of perspective is a wonderful thing.

(I worked in a record shop at the time. Whilst that afternoon we had the radio on, for some reason just before we closed we played a certain REM track)

Shiny Happy People?

I remember distinctly that I was packing, as I was off to uni a couple of days later. The video of a building on fire and then collapsing was very interesting while I packed. My most prominent thought was 'this doesn't happen to America very often, hmm'.

Here's a good question, I'm aware that both towers fell, but I was reading something the other day about another building falling, called The Third Tower. I've never heard of this before and despite reading the wikipedia article I don't quite get it. A third building fell? I don't remember that.

People forget the Pentagon was hit, too.

It was near the other two.

The conspiracy theorists believe it was rigged with explosives and demolished as part of an insurance scam.

I shit you not.

OR WAS IT?

I was working at train station with Radio 4 on.

I remember that, but I'm with the conspiracy theorists on that one. The CCTV looked to me to show a plane that was not a giant passenger bird. There are some nifty shots somewhere of 'Damage where plane was supposed to have hit', and 'size of plane that was supposed to have hit', with a massive difference between the two.

Building Seven was it, I think? It wasn't hit by anything, but collapsed over many hours after slowly burning. I don't think anyone was killed; the building was evacuated.

I've always explained this as simply "If you've never stood outside the Pentagon then you have no idea just how big it really is."

A passenger airliner wouldn't look that big next to it, IMO.

There was a 'conspiracies' type programme on it the other week. Basically, it fell down due to fire.

I had a friend on a flight from Boston on Sept 11th* so waiting to hear she was OK was a bit nerve-wracking. OTOH my wife had a bad feeling about one of her old college classmates from Buffalo that turned out to be true, sounds daft to say it but at least he died before the tower came down. (He was on the phone, directing people to the roof - the line stayed open but noone responded after a while.)

I'd just started doing standup and did 10 minutes of really angry, yet funny, stuff about the sheer bloody stupidity of it all. Coping mechanism I suppose.

The Maddie and Diana things just passed me by. I'm not alone in feeling like someone standing on the outside of a mob, wondering what all the fuss is about.

The "third building" was WTC 7 I think, demolished for safety reasons. The conspiracy theorists have had a field day with that one, but they are open to any idea except the one that some people hate America so much that they will hijack some planes and fly them into landmark buildings.



*Not 9/11.

To me, the two pieces that resonate about 9/11 where the people jumping from the towers, choosing that over being burnt to death, and the passengers of United 93 giving up their lives to stop the terrorists flying it into Washington. This is a common reaction, and ties in the (excellent) cracked.com article on Dunbar's Number: it puts a more human face on the statistics, by making about just a few individuals.

There is a quite, quite brilliant documentary about one of the fire stations involved. Two French journalists where doing a standard "follow the rookie firemen" type documentary and they got pulled into the WTC drama. They had footage taken inside the buildings before they collapsed and they filmed the captain giving orders in the foyer, accompanied every so often by a huge "BANG!" above them.

The narrator then explained that each noise was a body hitting the roof. I'll never forget that bit.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!

I am now consumed with rage that makes your own look miniscule in size!

The hole in the size of the Pentagon and the core frame of the plane are the exact same size! Plus there is video of it hitting. And absolutely tons of plane wreckage. And eyewitnesses. And a missing plane.

The options are:

1) The plane hit the Pentagon as advertised

2) The original plane took off, was hijacked by government agents and landed somewhere hidden. All on board were then executed. The government then flew a drone plane that looked like the plane in question into the Pentagon. They then scattered a ton of wreckage from the original plane around the crash site, doctored videos to show that it was the original plane, paid people to say it was a plane, and also widened the hole to fit exactly the right kind of plane, with exactly the crash scene one would expect from the happening.

I know which scenario seems more likely.

Aye, I saw that. It was good.

I enjoyed the interview with the ex-government guy, who basically said "You really believe the government has the competence to keep something secret after all these years? No leaks what so ever? Really?"

Presumably everyone's seen the South Park where the conspiracy is that the government is behind the conspiracy theories in order to make themselves look competent enough to carry out that large a conspiracy?

No.

That brought a smile to my face. A few days later, when it was sunny, i was sat outside ChavPub with MattTheBuilder and a barmaid. The barmaid was banging on about aliens and whatnot, and I mentioned that point, although she struggled to grasp the concept. Then MattTheBuilder and i had a game of Aunt Sally.

I got a bit upset over Sept. 11th as it was all happening. I distinctly remember my girlfriend texting me to tell me that a plane had crashed into the WTC and me tuning into the news just in time to see the second plane hit live. I remember the news reader originally assuming that someone had dug up footage of the first plane hitting and were showing that, until it was pointed out that the ither tower was already on fire and had a massive hole in it. And suddenly it dawned that this was a second plane and could no longer be a bizarre accident. Of course, for me, the reason that Sept. 11th strikes such a chord is not the number of deaths, although that was truly awful, but the sheer audaciousness of Al Qaeda's plan. It's awful to say it, but has there ever been so callous and co-ordinated a terrorist attack as that? Way to make the world stand up and take notice.

I was doing a temp job at the local Royal Mail sorting office when Diana died, so I was just pissed off at having to deal with the massively increased amount of post as people were sending letters to the Prince's. God, what a fucking disgrace all that nonsense was! I can remember my Mum teling me about how she'd signed a book of commiserations at St. Albans Abbey when she went shopping there one day that week, and immediately regretting it in the knowledge that the only reason she'd done it at all was because everyone else was. She personally couldn't have given a crap about this one woman she'd never met. I agree with her.

But they didn't, not one bit.
I bet 99% of Americans couldn't tell you why it was done.

Coz Saddam stol their oil, and they hate freedom, y'all.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7573973.stm

A response you could almost predict. Perhaps somebody *did* predict it? hohoho.

Apparently her father died of a heroin overdose in the toilets of the Lansdown Road KFC in Bournemouth.

Someone on Popbitch commented that he was given employee of the month 3 months running before they finally noticed.

*worm. FTFT.

Big Boss? Is that what they call it over there? What next? Solid Snake?