Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Dead Badger Removal: The Facts

Published by Dead Badger on 27th April, 2009.

Dead Badger

It has come to my attention that an increasing number of people arrive here looking for guidance on how to legally remove a dead badger, only to leave disappointed. Never let it be said that I don’t respond to popular demand; here is what you need to know.

Enacted in 1916 as an emergency war measure, the Meles Meles (Deceased) Act was rushed through the Commons with only twelve MPs in attendance, sandwiched between a debate on the restriction of access to string for the under-fives and a motion on the proper labelling of ham. Both proposals were rejected, leaving only the badgery filling to be scraped off the legislative highway.

But I digress.

As with any roadkill, the very first item of business is to shave the badger. Starting with the off-side foreleg, shave against the lie of the fur with firm, even strokes, working your way anti-clockwise around the badger until you reach the snout. If the badger is lying prone*, you can now shave straight down the dorsal stripe. This will be of great help with stage five, in which we attach the aqualung.

For the moment, however, stand back and admire your work – there can be few sights more majestic than a freshly shaven badger. You may notice passers-by stopping to stare; this is well-deserved recognition for performing your civic duty.

You are now ready to distress the badger. Many people feel this stage to be gratuitous, arguing that a badger that has breathed its last is beyond the words of mortal man. This is a grave error; an undistressed dead badger will turn rancid, and may bolt. By this stage you should have formed a good working relationship with your badger, but you must put these feelings to one side and draw from your innermost core of rage. This will not be easy for either of you.

Equipped with an edging hoe and approaching from upwind, circle the badger (this time clockwise), scattering beef suet evenly around the perimeter. Fix the badger with a stern gaze (do not worry if it appears oblivious), and insult its mother, who surely was the sluttiest badger in the sett. Did its sister not openly cavort with the vole, yea, and the ferret too? Go for the jugular, both literal and metaphorical: using the hoe with short stabbing motions, question the badger’s rhetoric. Its prose is forced, and of stilted meter; its grasp of fiscal policy is shallow and facile; it abuses the fallacy of composition.

Tears may be flowing freely at this point: yours or the badger’s, it matters not. While giving off (among other things) an air of apparent stoicism, no badger is unmoved by criticism of its debating skills. Upon reaching your client, genuflect to the north and rub lightly first with unsalted butter, then with winter-grade motor oil, ensuring of course that the ears are well tended.

A badger prepared in this way can last for up to 9 months in the refrigerator, or approximately two weeks in a well ventilated cupboard. Of course, the above steps are all optional, and indeed not mentioned in the legislation at all: you can, if you wish, skip straight to the final stage:

Place badger in bin.

Badger in bin

*Ever since a badger killing spree in the 70s in which a lawyer used a Renault to run over and collect innumerable supine badgers, they have lain in something of a legal Laguna. Members of the public encountering a badger that has expired in a supine position are advised to turn it over and treat as if prone.

Tags: , , . 2 Comments

Stupid posters (again)

Published by Dead Badger on 22nd April, 2009.

It seems plenty of other people are finding the freaky Met poster campaign disturbing. Firstly, there’s another one I hadn’t seen, if anything even dafter than the first:

Met bin poster

Hurray, everybody! Let’s start poking through our neighbours’ rubbish and reporting things we don’t understand! It’ll be a blast (boom boom (boom boom)).

The internet being the internet, however, people are having great fun changing the message, and a man called James Holden has set up a utility to do it for you, so even people who don’t have Photoshop can get in on the fun. Below is my best effort:

CCTV aliens poster

Only the elderly man was spared

It seems a bit pointless, however, as the unpronounceable qwghlm on Flickr has already made the best one possible.

Tags: , , . 0 Comments

Inept Ontology, or, The Modern-day Pinocchio

Published by Dead Badger on 14th April, 2009.

Hewn before the knowing of Time from some antipodean proto-tree, the Australian Cricket Captain is a beast not of flesh, nor of myth. Born without language or love, he knows but one desire: to execute his skills. And yet, and yet; the latest of this kind feels an alien hunger stirring within his gnarled breast.

The lamentations of the English still fulfil him, yes, but unexercised mental muscles twinge when someone hands him a baby to sign. This baby could be launched into the second tier with but a flick of his combat-attuned arms, of this he has no doubt. He could crush it utterly without even using the second PowerPlay, and yet, and yet; somehow this baby is exuding more than an all-encompassing slime. It oozes not just baby food, but confidence; the confidence born not only of the knowledge that all of this will be wiped up by someone else, but of knowing its place in the world. Society embraces this baby with a familiarity the Australian Cricket Captain has never known, no matter how sticky he has been. Without even developing an outswinger, the baby has penetrated the Captain’s forward defensive, and scattered the prehistoric stumps of his soul.

The Australian Cricket Captain hands the baby back to its mother, and trudges back to the pavilion, a broken man.

All of which is to say, if Ricky Ponting is paying websites to put up this bizarre bit of taxonomy on barely cricket-related pages, it smacks of overcompensating (click image for full size):

Ricky Ponting, human being

I want to be a real boy!

Tags: , , . 0 Comments

Quis custodiet (ipsos custodes)2? Oh, it’s me. Right.

Published by Dead Badger on 3rd April, 2009.

I’ve just arrived home, having spent a pleasant evening in the company of Messrs Canon L. Printer and Henry The Depressed Fern. Printers, as any fule kno, were put on this Earth to test us, and to separate the merely persistent from those prepared to spend three solid hours making the requisite sacrifices of dead trees, bent paperclips, blood, sweat and (alarmingly) hair in order to ensure the passage of the last print job. But this is a whinge for another day.

Bearing this in mind, however, I wasn’t in the best of moods on the Tube home, so I’m not sure whether my reaction to this poster is entirely fair. I present it to you without prejudice:

Statistically aberrant cluster of babies

Statistically aberrant cluster of babies

Now, having scrupulously allowed the reader to make up his or her own mind, allow me to supply my own views:

Fuck that for a game of soldiers.

I suppose I can manage a bit more than that, so here goes: has it really come to this? That we are publishing some bizarre form of propagandic haiku, exhorting people to spy on the people who are spying on the machines that spy on us? Even for the most fervent surveillance state wet-dreamer, this paranoia in triplicate is surely spiralling into self-parody. Not only are we expected to be content with being watched 24/7, we’re expected to be complicit in ensuring that everyone else is similarly chuffed. Don’t look at the cameras! Don’t photograph the Police! And smile while you don’t, dammit.

Clearly, the lesson we are take from this poster is that we must somehow cleanse the populace of all information that might somehow be useful to terrorists. I’m afraid that just for starters this is going to require the elimination of all particle physicists, either by deportatation, elimination or lobotomy. We can continue by rounding up the aeronautical engineers, sequestering them somewhere they can do no serious harm – Hull, perhaps – and distracting them from their plight with plenty of questions about aircraft on treadmills. We can then continue through the professions as necessary, until our population consists entirely of telephone sanitisers, management consultants and marketing executives (neatly closing the cycle of human existence). We will subsist on the remnants of the canned food made by our better-informed but terminally imperilled ancestors, retaining only important knowledge such as “don’t run with scissors.” It’ll be a better life for us all.

As I took the photo, incidentally, I drew odd looks from several nearby people, causing me to wonder whether my overt surveillance of propaganda encouraging people to practice surveillance of people practising surveillance of surveillance gear was itself suspicious. However, this fifth order spying clearly confused my fellow travellers, unused as they are to multiple levels of recursion. Having not only observed me observing the propaganda about observing those who observe those who observe me, they observed each other observing me, and experienced a moment of fleeting self-doubt sufficient that they briefly considered turning themselves in to the Police.

This allowed me to slip on to the next Tube, ironically unobserved.

Tags: , , . 4 Comments