Where I'm from, shops actually board up their windows against the violence of this day

Pancake day looms, folks. Some say it came about during the run-up to the fasting of Lent, when somebody invented a flat cake in a pan to use up all the delicacies like eggs and flour and sugar. Then they gorged themselves like a fat bastard until their pancreas started to hurt from all the insulin it had to produce, and afterwards they said ''this shall be known as panc-ache day. Also I now have type II diabetes.'' The Lent tradition of spending time actually being disciplined and sensible about what you eat has long since faded into memory, of course, but Pancake day remains as a fun afternoon for the whole family, where parents can amaze their children with dexterous displays of pancake flipping, and children can gaze in wonder as sheets of sizzling hot batter spin through the air onto their upturned awestruck faces.

Anyway, in celebration of this day I'm here to share with you my favourite recipe for pancakes. But it wouldn't be worth sharing if it was just some ordinary run-of-the-mill method of pancake-making, of course. So: are you the sort of person not merely satisfied with the banal humdrum of the mere ordinary pancake? Are you willing to buy fresh, expensive ingredients and use only the highest-grade cookery equipment? Will you watch your pan like a hawk for that perfect temperature and timing? Are you, in short, the kind of person willing to pour as much love into your cooking as you would into raising your own children?

Yes?

Then fuck off. This recipe's for lazy cunts. HAHA WHAT AN UNPREDICTABLE JOKE

You will need:

Egg powder

Milk powder

Flour

A two-pint bottle of milk

1) Open the bottle of milk.

2) Use it all up in some way. I dunno, lots of tea, or something. We only actually need the bottle. Or any kind of large container like that would do, really - lemonade bottle, urinal bottle, anything. Go crazy. Invent. Live your life.

3) Put flour in the bottle.

4) Put egg powder in the bottle.

5) Put milk powder in the bottle.

6) Put water in the bottle.

7) What, you want measurements? Put enough of the stuff in to make pancakes. Jesus.

8) Screw the lid on tight and shake the bottle up and down vigorously for around sixty seconds - the same general motion as if you're watching porn, but for six times longer.

9) Pour the resulting batter into the pan and fry to perfection.

10) Plate up the fruits of your labour and realize that being able to follow this recipe means you have no friends, family or significant other to shame with your appallingly low standards. Garnish with the bitter tears you weep at your lonely, lonely life.

Interesting fact: I DO pour as much love into my cooking as I would into raising my own children.

Fucked if I know. Any suggestions?

You know that phrase, "Lefty Loosey Righty Tighty"? If you don't, there's this phrase, right, and it goes "Lefty Loosey Righty Tighty", and it's supposed to help you remember how to deal with things like screws and bottle tops if you haven't got what is technically known as a memory. Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was how that phrase really pisses me off.

Now you might expect my beef to be with the phrase's inherent smug tweeness, but I'm not actually here to complain about that. Although admittedly, that's mostly because the phrase's inherent smug tweeness really speaks for itself. It's one of those things that tossers say when they want to look clever. You know, you'll be there trying to open a bottle, and maybe the top's been screwed shut too tight or maybe you just strained your hand last night with all that porn, and for whatever reason you can't open it. And then some tosser walks into the room and sees you struggling, and even though they could easily just look to see which way you're trying to turn it, they'll go "Oh, are you turning it the right way?" as if the only explanation for your difficulties is that you're just too thick to know how to undo a bottle. And then they'll pause for a moment, and then they put a smug little chirp in their voice and go "Remember, it's 'Lefty Loosey Righty Tighty!'" and then smile and turn away and pretend to do something else while they congratulate themselves on how they just looked clever. No, you looked like a tosser, you tosser.

Anyway, no, what pisses me off about that phrase isn't the wording, it's the fact that I understand what it means. And so do you, don't you. You don't even need me to explain it means that when you want to loosen something like a screw or a bottle top, you rotate it like this:

Pictures of bottle tops are dull, so I will illustrate with tits.

And when you want to tighten something like a screw or a bottle top, you turn it like this:

Damn you, Google Image.

As soon as I heard that phrase, I knew that that's what it meant. As soon as you heard that phrase, you knew what it meant too. Everyone who hears this phrase knows what it means.

Now: why the hell do we know what it means? Because the screw isn't going 'left' or going 'right', is it? It's turning. So every part of it is going in a different direction - if you turn it to the right, then the bottom part is going to the left, the left part is going up and the right part is going down.

No, Google, still not doing it right.

So why do we arbitrarily just know that that phrase refers to only the top?

It's really annoying.

Well that was a shit ending, so here's a stupid video to make up for it.

It's because we turn it how we imagine turning ourselves, jeez

The Dog's Bollocks

So my workplace, a little pub-restaurant out in the Derbyshire countryside, has been selling children's books to try to beat off the insidious claws of the recession [Not any more they aren't! They stopped over six months ago! Christ.], and a few [hundred] nights ago I found myself flicking through one. Well, if 'flicking’ is what you can do to a book with cardboard pages thicker than a sandwich, but anyway.

Now, I'd expected that this wouldn't be the most entertaining use of my time. I'd expected it would be silly and vapid and saccharine. What I hadn't expected, ladies and gentlemen, was to find SYSTEMATIC BRAINWASHING. What I hadn't expected was to find one of the many reasons why the human race is made up of more pricks than a porcupine orgy in a rosebush. [/pretentious analogy]  

I will explain.

The book I happened to pluck from the shelf that day was Usborne's "That's not my Puppy", a 'touchy-feely' book full of bits of carpet and sandpaper and other such stuff for kids to slap at and drool over. As you probably inferred from the title, the plot concerns the narrator and his hunt for his missing puppy. Each page he encounters a dog with a textured bit on some part of its body – a furry coat, say, or a squashy nose - and each time, the narrator exclaims "That's not my puppy!" and follows with an explanation of how he knows this - an explanation which is always (and this is the important bit) that his puppy’s coat / paw / tail / nose is of a different texture to the one he’s currently appraising.

Now, a quick skip to the back of the book reveals the narrator’s dog to be a spaniel. You know, one of these.

 The first dog he encounters is a pink show-groomed poodle. One of these.

"That's not my puppy!" our unseen narrator exclaims. And how does he know this? How can he tell that this bastard offspring of a rat and a candy-floss machine is not his dear English Springer? Why, because “Its tail is too fluffy!”

So I want you to imagine that you’re a wee sprat of a child in your mother’s arms, and she’s reading this thing to you in that fucking annoying voice that everyone uses when they’re talking to children – you know, that high-pitched one so full of condescension that it practically crystallizes onto the walls. I want you to imagine that she just read the first bit to you, that bit about its tail. What would your first thought be?

I don't pretend I was anything more than a perfectly average baby WHO WAS AWESOME, but I like to think my first thought would have been “Are you blind, woman? Of course it’s not my puppy, it’s bright fucking pink. I don’t need to feel its tail because I’ve got eyes.”

But of course the only communication you can make at this point in your life is to blat at the pages with your pudgy proto-hands and go “blurba lurba poooo!” so your mother doesn’t pick up on your utter contempt for her and whatever smacktard put this book together and carries on reading it to you. The next dog is a golden retriever, and apparently this one isn’t the right one either, because “Its paws are too bumpy.” It’s also four times the size of my dog and the same colour as the Sugar Puffs monster, but no, you’re right, I’m not sure, let’s have a feel of its paws first.

Now the problem I have is this. A wee sprat’s mind is a busy little thing and it learns how to act by picking up cues from the people around it. So as you get past the third dog (A Dalmatian that obviously isn’t yours since “Its collar is too shiny,” shininess apparently being a tactile sensation these days) your baby will notice how you consistently ignore the apparently obvious evidence in favour of a bunch of obscure arbitrary proofs that don't even make sense (anyone think they can identify their own pets just from the feel of their paws? Anyone at all?).

And the conclusion they're going to come to is "I don't understand at all why you'd have to feel at the dog when you could just look at it, but mummy thinks that's what you should do and mummy is the cleverest person in the world, so I guess I'm just not very clever and I should wait for other people to tell me what's true instead." (although in less erudite terms, of course, such as "WAAAAAAAAAAH [pantsload of shit]".)

And then you fast forward forty years and you end up with this:

Seriously, you can't do something like this without it occurring to you at some point that it's maybe not a good idea. I am convinced, therefore, that it did; that some little voice inside his head tapped him on his shoulder and said "Look, the door's giving way. You're going to kill yourself if you don't stop," ... and then another voice said "No, it can't be the right conclusion if you thought of it, because you haven't got the brains for these things, remember? So it must be alright! If it was really dangerous then they wouldn't have made it possible to smash through it in the first place, would they?"

And do you know something? This book isn't even the worst of them; it's got sequels. You think brainwashing your kid into meekly accepting any bullshit shoveled its way is bad enough, you should check out the next one involving the search for a missing baby that they identify by feeling its fucking clothes. Yes, now you get to convince your kid that not only are the sole protectors of his frail and helpless personage not even capable of keeping track of where he is, but that the only thing that differentiates one human being from another is what kind of clothes they wear. The pièce de résistance though is, perhaps, the ending, in which the baby you're looking for turns out to be yes, you, my dear! and the publishers facilitate this by having a mirror stuck to the final page. Except that the only kind of mirror you can really put into a book is one of those silvery-cardboard ones you get in birthday cards, and I have never seen a birthday-card mirror that doesn't make you look like you just tried to block a sledgehammer with your face. So having gone through the trauma of learning that their parents could lose them at any time and that they're just a worthless drone with no identity past their bib and shawl, they reach the final page and go "Oh, so this is what I look like JESUS JACK CHRIST I'VE GOT A MOUTH FOR A FOREHEAD." Well done there, mum. From bright happy child to abandonment-paranoid oh-god-I'm-hideous fashion-obsessive in less than ten pages.

Now, I'm the first to admit that there is no stronger proof of a cruel and unforgiving god than the existence of children, but even I'm forced to step up in their defense here. Parents, you need to stop reading these things to your kids; you're shortening their odds of succeeding in life, and frankly they're short enough as it is. Children are already whining, spoiled, self-entitled, demanding, thankless little bundles of tosspot that eat your food and spend your money and scrawl crayon all over the walls and generally waste the best years of your life, and even if they don't join the massed ranks of Retardia they'll probably turn out to be sullen ungrateful disappointments who end up wasting the rest of their own lives too. With drink, maybe, or drugs, or writing really pointless articles for a really pointless website.

Yes okay these books could also teach you not to accept an answer just because it looks obvious BUT SHUT UP