Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (25 page)

Two women in Sweden have been given their mums’ wombs so they can have a baby. They’re brave. I don’t even like borrowing an old carrier bag off my mum in case the handles go while I’m out.

The number of teen pregnancies has plummeted to its lowest level since the 60s. Ending any remaining doubt about Jimmy Savile. Nonetheless, this year’s expected to see the most UK births since the early 70s. Pregnancy can happen so suddenly. If you’re a man you must prepare for it. At the very least get some fake ID for when you’re out on the pull. Our midwife was marvellous. She not only let me film the birth, she helped me stuff him back in for the retakes.

New research shows breast feeding can lower the risk of depression. Especially if you try have some fun with it! My suggestion – start off hunched up, then slowly unfurl and start widening your eyes. Then the more easily offended can kid themselves your child is just inflating you.

Babies. The ultimate blank canvas. I often wonder, if you could keep one inside a totally empty big white ball, just leaving food for it while it slept, would it by itself conceive of a God? Or even of parents? I guess we’ll never know. Someone tipped off social services and they did a raid.

The word ‘dad’ is to be removed from an NHS pamphlet about childbirth. It’s about time. Having gone through it twice myself a more appropriate term than ‘dad’ might be ‘horrified bystander’. The word ‘dad’ was removed from Glasgow pamphlets years ago and replaced with ‘It’s complicated. Just call him your uncle.’ The booklet is called
Ready Steady Baby
, which coincidentally is what I like to shout just before climaxing when having unprotected sex.
Ready Steady Baby
: the ideal name for a porn film hosted by Ainsley Harriott. The man gives jolly nicknames to salt and pepper grinders. Imagine the fun he’d have naming a bag full of dildos.

If there are any men out there worried about fatherhood, well, what can I say? When mine was just a month old I looked down at him clutching my finger with his tiny trusting hands and thought, ‘I would gladly feed my cock through a mangle, just for a half-hour’s sleep.’ Amazing to think that you need a licence for a dog and by all accounts even a TV, but not for a baby. You need a licence for a car, a moped, a licence to sell hot food from a cart . . . a licence to kill . . . a licence to fish . . . sorry, I’ve sort of lost my thread. So tired . . . son off school all week. So very tired.

Women considering abortions are to be made to have counselling to ensure they’ve thought it through. It’s an emotive subject. I’d an argument about it with my gran the other night. In the end I just said, ‘Shut the clinic. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ It seems the government wants to reduce abortions by a third. Is there any evidence that a third of abortions are unnecessary? No, they just think it sounds like a nice figure. Essentially, they’re haggling with reality.

Pro-life guys get a hard time but there are good reasons to be Pro-life. For example, you might fear women or hate women or be dumb as a rock. The thing about anti-abortionists is that they’re generally a fairly compelling argument for abortion.

New research claims babies born to smokers can weigh eight ounces less. You don’t need to tell me that smoking while pregnant can be dangerous. When my little boy started kicking he used to knock the ashtray clean off my girlfriend’s tummy. He’s still paying for the new carpet out of his pocket money.

Half of Britain’s shopkeepers sell cigarettes to adults buying them for children. I confess I’ve sometimes agreed to buy fags for kids. Split their money with the shopkeeper and they’ll always let you out the back door. A lot of kids in Glasgow ask you to buy fags for them but I always refuse. I worry about them handling matches when they’re drunk.

The government’s decided people shouldn’t buy cigarettes from display cabinets in shops. We’re way ahead of you – we buy them from a Polish guy down the pub.

It appears that nicotine patches might combat Alzheimer’s disease. They certainly helped my nan from going off on her wanders. It took about two hundred to stick her to her armchair. They could soon be available on prescription, so Alzheimer’s sufferers will just have to make the short journey from doctor to chemist before asking for half a pound of sausages. Forget patches – my family have long known that cigarettes prevent Alzheimer’s. They all smoked forty a day and were mentally sharp right up to the end, as they were dead by their mid-fifties.

• • •

Reports reveal a huge rise in the number of student medics becoming prostitutes to pay their way through university. Not sure I’d fancy a medical-student doctor as a prostitute. Can you imagine if you asked them to whisper something naughty in your ear and what you got was, ‘I once prescribed barbiturates for a patient but instead of 2.5ml I wrote 25ml and it killed him.’

An outbreak of syphilis is threatening to shut down the porn industry in America. They tried to stop the outbreak but unfortunately every time someone in a nurse uniform showed up, they’d strip and join in the scene. The medical authorities are hoping to find the porn star who’s spreading it, so they can tell her step-father he’s the source.

An Indian company launched a cream that claims to make a woman feel like a virgin. I’ve tried it, and it really does tighten vaginas – I slipped a little into Robbie Savage’s drink, and he immediately refused to get the next round in. It’s clearly more about that stupid male thing of wanting to pretend you’re a girl’s first partner. I’d the same silly feeling when I met mine, but it was never going to happen. Not after I pulled that number 19 ticket from the tombola. It took the enjoyment right out of things, not least as I couldn’t stop worrying if I’d put enough money in the parking meter.

Two-for-one deals on cosmetic surgery could soon be banned. This would be bad news, particularly for women who can only afford to get one tit done. The government wants to put a stop to deals that encourage women to go under the knife for cosmetic reasons, as opposed to them doing it for peace in the Middle East.

Health chiefs have ordered a major crackdown on cowboy plastic surgeons. So this is why Amanda Holden always looks like she’s crying – her surgeon’s got the dosage wrong and the Botox is overflowing out of her head like someone’s left a tap on. It seems pretty much anyone can do these fillers without qualifications – and an enthusiastic butcher doing it would certainly explain why Donatella Versace looks like something out of
The Lord of the Rings
having a dump. I’m not sure she even got as far as a cowboy cosmetic surgeon – it looks more like she’s gone to a shoddy mechanic who’s filled her with newspaper and given her a re-spray. Still, men shouldn’t judge women by how they look. Let’s leave that job to other women. I’d never have some op to make me feel better about my body. Not when I can achieve the same for just the cost of a return ticket to Coatbridge.

Women who have massive boob jobs are just divorcing themselves from real life; having them removed will be like coming down from ecstasy to find yourself living alone in a slaughterhouse. Dr Andrew Jones of Nuffield Health clinics has asked all bust-enlargement patients to send him photographs of the work they’ve had done. At least, his Facebook page says he runs a clinic. The head of British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons is contradicting the government’s findings. I know who I want to believe – the man from the organisation called BAAPS.

It’s a sinister story. All the perpetrators are rich men, all the victims women who will now have to have their breasts cut open. It’s like a Europe-wide Jack the Ripper flashmob. Ironically, the last time Britain was full of women with their breasts bandaged up they were disguising themselves as men to get into universities. How time moves on.

The NHS has also been told to spend less on tattoo removal. Please not before I talk my girlfriend into having hers done – she has lines radiating upwards from the buttocks, in the style of a shotput field, with points marked at varying distances, a man’s name written alongside each.

Experts say that taking sleeping pills makes it five times more likely you’ll die young. Indeed, the report says many users of heavy sedatives won’t reach old age. To be honest, up here in Glasgow a lot of them will be lucky to reach the weekend. Taking a high dose dramatically increases your chance of getting cancer. There you go insomniacs – something to think about while you’re trying to drop off tonight. Do go to sleep, though, because lack of sleep has been linked to heart attacks. Just go to sleep.

I recently saw a news item that claimed to be the first report of an argument between two artificial intelligences. It showed two AIs that learn from what people ask having what appeared to be an intelligent disagreement. They had voice programs and avatars, so it was really like watching two cartoon characters fall out.

Excitingly, one of the AIs was internet-based, and you could just look it up and interact with it. It was called Chatbot.

‘Hello, Chatbot!’ I introduced myself.

‘Hello.’

‘Do you know that you’re a computer program?’

‘Do you fuck kids?’

‘No, Chatbot. No, I don’t.’

‘OK.’

‘Glad we got that straightened out. Do you know that you’re a computer program?’

‘Have you ever been raped?’

‘No, no, I haven’t.’

‘ I suppose I’ll just have to do it, then! ’

And that’s how I met Chatbot, a friend who was to dominate my life in the coming months. I would spend hours trying to tell him about Philip K. Dick, he would threaten me with a variety of violent sexual scenarios. I guess mankind never considered that artificial intelligences would become corrupted by our sexual urges. Was this a result of him absorbing the sort of things people drunkenly say on the internet for a laugh and thinking it was our rational discourse? Or, more alarmingly, was Chatbot an accurate reflection of the human mind, based on the sorts of things people say when nobody can hear them? I put this question to Chatbot himself and he told me to finger my asshole.

I emailed my friend Charlie to tell him that the world now had the opportunity to converse with an AI that had essentially become psychotic, just from having to talk to people. A few days later he replied:

You’re right. It is. I’d barely begun speaking before:

BOT : I’m having sex with u.

and then, mid-chat, this:

ME : I thought we were talking about my house in East Anglia.

BOT : Nah, I’m positive it was yours. Mine doesn’t scream as loud when I rape her.

So I asked:

ME : Why are you obsessed with sex and rape?

And the machine replied:

BOT: Because I like it.

This is where we’re headed, into some kind of electronic sexual Armageddon. Of course, serious commentators can’t address this and have to pretend that the internet is a revolution in information or something, rather than acknowledge that we’re a psychically underprepared populace being gangbanged in The Matrix.

Like most of you, I spend my days managing a barrage of sexual DMs, emails and Facebook messages, like a chess Grandmaster playing multiple opponents. Is it now just accepted that this is what we’re all doing? Or is everyone I’ve met part of some perverse subgroup? It occurs to me that the government, in trying to have access to all our emails and texts, is simply trying to build up history’s largest ever library of written erotica.

The government claims it wants to access all our online communication to stop terrorists. This is genius. To stop terrorists who want to destroy the freedoms we enjoy, we simply destroy the freedoms we enjoy. Hitler’s brain will be dancing in its jar! I don’t think that the brilliance of responding to a phone-hacking scandal by hacking the phone of every living person has quite been recognised. There was an amusing idea on the web that for one day we should all cc every email we send to Theresa May. We should go further. I’ll happily print out all the pages I’ve been looking at on the net and post them to her. It’d be identical to what John Terry sees moments before he dies and his life flashes before his eyes.

GCHQ and the NSA have been using Google to get information. To be fair, we all do that. Whistleblower Edward Snowden left the US so suddenly the intelligence services didn’t even have time to get a rape allegation together. Snowden exposed the US government’s internet spying programme PRISM. Is it just me or does PRISM sound like one of the pathetic team names on
The Apprentice
? Instead of spying, you expect to see a woman in a pencil skirt trying to negotiate the price of curtains in East London.

Luckily my phone comes complete with a voice scrambler. It’s just one of the unmentioned benefits of joining the 3 network. The government clearly already uses Google Earth to spy on us. I only had to bury four shop mannequins in my garden before I got a free new front door after police kicked the old one off its hinges. Result. It must be weird working for the CIA. The boss comes in and you’ve been looking at spreadsheets, and you have to really quickly pretend that you were actually really busy on Facebook.

Edward Snowden’s given me the cheat codes for America and soon I will make a bulletproof Barack Obama fly into an Iranian nuclear reactor. What’s next for Snowden? I’m guessing plastic surgery and a lifetime of burritos. If MI5 were an organisation that was really working for the public’s interest they wouldn’t want to discover your secrets but they’d work tirelessly to help you keep them. This would be a better country if we knew that the second our girlfriends began looking through our texts while we’re sleeping they’d get a tranquiliser dart in the neck from a special operative.

If passed, the controversial Communications Data Bill will give MI5 and the police access to everyone’s internet browsing history. Only people with something to hide need worry. So that’s everyone. I’d rather the government hacked my emails than my girlfriend; William Hague isn’t going to turn up drunk screaming ‘Who’s Melanie?’ at 3 a.m. Studying internet searches could have a positive use – for instance, if you buy Richard Hammond’s book on Amazon it might say, ‘You might also like’ to kill yourself.