Fairweather friends

It might surprise my new readers and followers to discover that I was not the most popular child in the playground.

I know, it’s quite staggering really. I wish they could see me now! An international jet-setting, eco-warrior, Citizen Journalist, blogospheric sensation.

I remember the day Steve joined our school. His family had moved up from London and his dad was a policeman. To say that he was not instantly popular with the other kids would be an understatement. He was bullied readers, bullied remorselessly. Steve Pigson the Cockney Copper Cock they called him.

For a while, much to my eternal shame, I relished the fact that the spotlight of juvenile torment had swivelled away from yours truly. However, even at that early age, I was a boy of compassion and high moral standing. I knew that I could not leave Steve to the face the taunts and tribulations alone. I stepped in and offered the hand of friendship, eventually.

For a time we were close. We even formed a special Crime Investigation Club. We had a Code of Practice, secret handshakes and special rules that we did not tell non-members. No one else wanted to join, in fact if the truth be told, the bullies used to take the piss out of our club. But it didn’t matter to us. We had each other and we had the club. We stuck together through thick and thin that term. It didn’t really stop the bullying. In fact I think if anything it might well have helped redouble the efforts of our tormentors.

Still, we made it to the summer holidays and hung out every day until Steve and his family came went to Ibiza to visit Steve’s dad’s sister and her Balearic husband. It was a long fortnight. When it was over, Steve came around to see me and he had the stupidest look on his face. He was practically bursting with excitement it seems. I thought that maybe he'd managed to get lucky with a girl or something.

Steve waited until Mum had left the house to go to her book club and then he went rummaging in his bag and pulled out a video tape. Steve had stolen the tape from his uncle’s den. He didn't say what it was, he just drew the curtains and popped it in the player. A grainy image appeared and so Steve twiddled with the tracking. Then in full focus was a large backside moving jerkily back and forth. The sound was low, but it sounded like someone was in trouble. Lots of shouting and grunting. Then I realised what it was!

It was hardcore German porn readers! I had never seen anything quite like it. Massive they were. Really, really massive cocks. I'd never seen a circumsized penis. I didn't think they were real! Sure, like any young boy I had seen a few interesting magazines in my time, but nothing like this. This was high grade filth. The kind of high grade smut that people would pay good money to see. And when I say ‘people’ what I really mean is ‘school boys’.

The Crime Investigation Club quickly morphed into The Jazz Film Club. A plan was hatched. We knew that Jeremy Clarke’s mum and dad had two video recorders because he’d recently tried to hawk pirated copies of Porkies from the Patel’s corner shop video hire. We knew this because he’d been under the close surveillance of the Crime Investigation Club! We knew this because we’d tried to buy a copy and he said that we “weren’t the right type of clientele”. Clarke was using his pirated Porkies to win friends and influence people, just not us... We decided to use the porn video to befriend Clarke, with the aim of using his copying facilities, meanwhile Steve and I would market and sell the German porn at a premium rate.

The plan ran surprisingly smoothly at first. Both Steve and I had wracked up a significant number of prospects in the new business pipeline and we soon become quite amazingly popular. All of a sudden the taunts had turned to jovial banter – our playground streetcred had gone through the roof. As each day passed by our stock rose.

Clarke’s recording services, however, were proving a sticking point. He insisted that he needed to borrow the movie and could only record the film over night while his parents were asleep. Steve and I might well have been stupid, but we weren’t idiots! We insisted that we needed to be present for all the recordings in case Clarke decided to cut us out of the loop and make his own sub-master tape. We hit an impasse. A seemingly impassable impasse, or so it seemed, until I came up with the brainwave of jumping on a bus to Nottingham to pick up some copying cables and blank cassettes. I would travel down at the weekend. Mum was due to be away visiting friends at the weekend, so Steve would sneak his parents’ video recorder around to my house and we’d stay up all night making copies of the porn.

Early on Saturday morning I jumped on the bus to Nottingham. In those days a trip to Nottingham from Lincoln was a major bloody deal for me. I’d been there before to see Notts Forest of course, but that was on specially organised coach trips. This time I was travelling solo to the big city. I’ll cut to the chase. After a day of hunting around the Broadmarsh and Victoria Centres, I finally found a specialist video outlet hidden away in the Lace Market that had the cables I needed.

I finally made it back home for early evening and called Steve. Steve didn’t answer the phone. I gave it a while, then called again. Again no answer. I sat in the front room surrounded by empty video cassettes and cables. I’d even got in a bottle of cider from a shop in Nottingham where they didn’t need ID. I called Steve again, although now it was getting late. There was no answer. By now, I’d had ¾ of a bottle of Olde English and I was feeling a little bit miffed, our plans were looking shaky. I got on my bike and I went around to Steve’s place to see where he was and what was happening.

The curtains were drawn as I approached, but I could see the flickering light from the television set. I knock on the door, I knocked again. I knock a third time with all my might and eventually a flustered Jeremy Clarke came to the door. I barged past him and into Steve’s front room, and there he was surrounded by video tapes with a guilty look on his face.

Unbeknownst to me Steve had done a deal with Jeremy. Jeremy had the video recording facilities, but more than that, thanks to his trade in Porkies videos, he could offer Steve new business channels into the local Scouts and the school just up the road. And with it, not just financial wealth but also the adulation that Steve craved so much. I had been cut out of the loop by greed.

And that readers, is pretty much how I felt when Nick Clegg sided with David fucking Cameron.

It was almost as sickening as watching Blackpool beat Notts Forest at the City Ground.

Still, Steve and Jeremy’s video empire came crashing down almost as soon as it started. Somehow Steve’s father found out about the taping business. Someone told him. I have no idea who it was. ;-)

Steve’s fair-weather fanclub slipped away faster than it had grown since Steve had taken some payments in advance for the video in order to buy the blank cassettes and the bullies wanted their money back plus interest!

Eventually, I offered the hand of friendship back to Steve. Even though he had the cheek to call me a snitch! I suspect Nick Clegg’s wounded liberals might one day forgive him. But not before the whole sorry mess comes crashing down.

Yours in politics

Newsdesk

Erotic Fiction

I’d like to make a welcome to my new friends.

But in particular, I’d like to say hello to Ellie.

Hello, Ellie.

I don’t know if the rest of you have been to Ellie’s blog, but it’s quite, um, candid. She appears to be a woman of considerable appetites and, while I’m not one to judge, I do feel a little sorry for her husband. Presumably he doesn’t know what she’s getting up to behind his back with a string of men, women and portable equipment.

I was uplifted by the frankness of her writing. Indeed, I hadn’t been reading Ellie’s blog for more than a couple of minutes before I felt a post coming on.

So here we go: I was reminded, as I so often am by these sorts of things, of the few years that Dave the Roofer spent supplementing his income by writing erotic fiction for a publishing house called Fantasy Towers. Sadly FT has gone bust now (they even sold their web domain to the Financial Times in a bid to stay afloat) and that was, in part, Dave’s fault.

To be fair to Dave, he’s always striven for new territory and, after a while, he began to find the constraints of the FT style guide a little tight. He wanted to really stretch the genre as wide as it would go and so he managed to persuade FT’s owner and chief editor to take a gamble on what turned out to be his final book, Nun Buggers.

Sadly it proved too extreme for FT’s readership and the firm effectively choked to death, not unlike Sister Gloria, the auto-erotic asphyxiation-inclined Mother Superior in the book, who was found hanging by her rosary from the door handle of her office in the Convent, with a tennis ball in her mouth and an extra large love egg up her whotsit.In a poignant twist, the love egg was still jiggling. It was, Dave wrote, the only life left in her.

But it was the chief editor’s call to publish the book, ultimately, so he’s to blame. Dave told me that when he first went to see the chief editor, he was staggered by the amount of books in the office, with many classic British novels among the bongo. He asked the editor if he’d read them all, and the editor said he had, indeed.

“Oh yes,” he said, “all of them, and more than once. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Sense and Sensibility, Brideshead Revisited, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, Pamela, they’re all terribly dog-eared, I’m afraid. But none is so well thumbed as Howard’s End.”

“That’s good, is it?” said Dave.

“It’s wonderful,” said the editor, smiling wistfully. “Time after time I lose myself in it for hours.”

It was three months before Dave realised that Howard was the office junior.

For a couple of years Dave was their biggest selling author. Of course he didn’t publish under his real name, Dave the Roofer. He had a nom de plume, which he actually took from a distant ancestor: The Contessa Alexia von Lichtenstein (the Roofer – lol!!).

Dave started out writing erotic twists on established stories or genres. The saucy horror short story The Camel’s Paw gave him his first big break, and he followed this up with Charles Dickings’ Great Expectorations, a skit in which pathological liar Pip feeds Estella an absolute whopper and she finds it hard to swallow. Then there was the Life and Times of Miss Hand-Shandy, a story about a girl who works in an eighteenth century massage parlour, which had a very happy ending. Of all of Dave’s books from this early period, I liked the semi-autobiographical Wankenstein the least; it was too self indulgent. Dave did admit to me once that, by this stage in his historic erotica writing, he had begun to run a little dry.

The fixation with illicit rumpo within the confines of religious buildings that was eventually to prove his downfall was evident in the only gay erotic novel he wrote, charting the nightly trysts between two extremely flexible and open minded residents of a Silent Trappist Monastery.

Called The Love That Dare Not Speak It’s Name, it’s pretty much like Brokeback Mountain, but with monks, and less dialogue (it’s all about body language, the book’s jacket says). Dave hasn’t spoken to Annie Proulx since her short story came out. He’s tetchy about the details, but he thinks she ripped him off. It’s a shame, they were really good friends, and he did her roof for mates’ rates.

Probably his most challenging period was when he got into hyper-realism. Fantasy Towers tried to dissuade him from following this route, knowing, I suppose, that what their readers really wanted was fantasy. But Dave is an obstinate man and, when the creative urge is upon him, cannot be knocked off his path. So I thought I might give you a sample of writing from this, his most difficult erotic book: The Married Sex Life of Robert and Claire.

To set the scene, Robert and Claire, have just got home after a meal out for their fifteenth wedding anniversary.

“Well the food was nice, at least,” said Claire with a sigh, stepping out of her high heels and massaging her feet. She made a mental note to buy a new pumice stone.

“One hundred and twenty fucking quid,” said Robert, hiccupping. “And that dessert was only a chocolate fucking pudding. It was a piece of piss; even you could have made it. Just because that twat’s on the telly. He wasn’t even doing the cooking, the fuckwit.”

Robert walked to the downstairs toilet, knocking their wedding photo askew as he bumped into the wall. With a sigh he began to empty his bladder.

“Christ, I’ve been dying for this since we got in that cab,” he shouted. “Hey, pretty lucky to find an unlicensed one, eh love? Saved us a tenner at least.”

“Do you think you could please shut the door when you’re using the toilet,” said Claire. “And don’t go all over the seat,” she shouted, adding “for fuck’s sake” under her breath.

“I never go over the seat,” Robert replied, wiping the seat with some toilet roll.

Robert flushed the cistern and swayed out of the toilet and back into the hallway. Claire sighed to herself. He was drunk again. The meal wouldn’t even have been so expensive if he hadn’t ordered that second bottle, not to mention the dessert wine. Still, at least the kids didn’t have to see him like this. She’d packed them off to her mum’s.

“Bloody hell, fifteen years,” said Robert putting his hands on Claire’s tits. “Where’s it all gone, eh?”

“I don’t know,” said Claire wondering whether Robert thought she was enjoying his attentions.

“Right, then,” he said, “I suppose we should, you know, nip upstairs, given the kids are away. Make like it’s fifteen years ago, eh love?”

Claire couldn’t remember if she’d even enjoyed it fifteen years ago. Nonetheless, she took the stairs ahead of him.

In the bedroom Robert struggled out of his trousers and stood before her, in his shirt, underpants and socks. She let her dress slide to the floor, took off her tights and bra, and slipped between the sheets. Robert pulled the bedclothes back, naked now, and clambered on to the bed as she parted her legs in tired resignation, shut her eyes and waited.

Nothing happened.

“Oh,” said Robert.

Claire opened her eyes. Robert was looking ruefully down at his cock, which was flaccid.

“I don’t know…” he started to make an excuse…

“Just forget it, don’t worry,” said Claire.

“I’m so tired and stuff, and work’s really stressful,” Robert said.

“You’re drunk,” said Claire, flatly.

“I could, er, I could use my mouth, I mean I could go…”

“Please, Robert, shut up,” said Claire, “you’re embarrassing me.”

“Or maybe you could, y’know, kiss it. That might wake it up a bit…”

“Get off!” said Claire.

Robert rolled to the side of Claire, and she turned her back to him.

“I don’t know why, for once, we couldn’t just have a romantic night together,” She began. “Dan takes Juliette away for a weekend once a month. I’m not asking for that, I’m just asking, for once, that we have dinner out and some kind of attempt at romance. But no, not even on our fucking anniversary. Don’t you care, Robert? Don’t you care? Robert…”

But Robert was asleep.

In the early hours of the morning he awoke with an erection so powerful it almost hurt. His head was full of hot, scattered images, fragments of dreams he’d been having. He was horny as hell, that was all he could think about. He rolled over and whispered to his wife:

“Claire, are you awake love?” he gave her shoulder a shake. “Claire, are you awake? I’m really bloody horny. Can we have sex now?”

Claire was awake, but she pretended to be asleep. There was no way, there was just no way. When another shake got no response, Robert sighed and turned over. Suddenly he remembered one of the dreams he’d been having, about the young girl who worked in his office. God she was so gorgeous. So young, so... so unspoiled. Without him willing it, his hand found its way down to his cock.

It didn’t take long. He let out an almost inaudible moan. Breathing in it felt as if he inhaled no oxygen; only despair.

Claire shuddered.

Well, there you go, readers, I told you it was challenging. I for one struggled to see the titillation in it. But Dave was convinced that he’d started a new movement in erotic fiction and was not to be dissuaded. Then, as soon as it had come, it was gone, and he was back to more familiar output, with some utter filth based on the Swiss Family Robinson.

The thing that always used to make me smile about Dave’s books, the ones that had the actual fantasy stuff in them, was that they were all read by people who thought they were written by an aristocratic woman. In fact, of course, they were written by a 16 stone roofer from West London. Dave told me that this was more or less the norm, and that most female writers of erotic fiction are, in fact, men.

Now I’m not suggesting Ellie is a sixteen stone man, I don’t doubt her femininity for a moment. No, no. But it does get you thinking, doesn’t it.

Anyways, once again, welcome to all my friends and Ellie: Keep it up!

Peace

ND

18+ Porn Star

Looks like my blooger outreach programme has paid dividends readers. Barry's Theory of Followization has rattled up the Newsdesk follower number to 18.

It was Just 17 yesterday, I was going to post about it, but then I was overcome by a tsunami of news. Tide and time, and news tsunamis, wait for no man. It's almost a pity that I've got 18 followers, I was going to post the headline Just 17 - which almost certainly would have brought in a few extra readers thanks to something called Search Engine Optimization.

The Internet is crawled by huge virtual spiders, apparently. When someone types something into Google a huge spider crawls the Web (geddit?!) and finds Web pages featuring the searched term. I wrote about this when I mentioned that loads of people have been coming to the site becasue of Mess's warning about Wu Travel.

Anyway, by posting a headline Just 17. I was almost certainly guaranteed to pick up what Web afficianados called 'traffic'. That's hit to you and me!

Another way of driving traffic is to include links to other sites and hope that your site gets mentioned as much as possible on other sites. So, if you're reading this, how about doing Barry a small favour and posting about it on your site?

When I had 17 followers, I was going to pontificate about the Beatles song, I Saw Her Standing There. Which opens with the immortal lines "well she was just 17, you know what I mean?" which if Garry Glitter covered it (the song) he'd probably get locked up. Again.

So, on reflection, maybe I would have gotten some undesirable types stopping by, rather than fans of the Fab Four. I guess it's just just as well that Bambi joined the Newsdesk fold pushing me up to the far more innocuous number 18.

Bambi is not a cartoon deer or a porn star*, but with a name like that, you could be confused for thinking she is. She's not though. She's a perfectly respectable American mum, whose blog A Day in the Life is coidcidentally a Beatles song!!

What are the chances of two Beatles songs appearing on the blog?

*porn star is a perfect example of the right type of phrase to use if you want your blog to be picked up by perverts Googling about.

At the time of blogging, Bambi has 39 followers, one of whom is called 18+.

Again, what are the chances?!

It's like that telly programme Lost isn't it. Where the plane crashes in mid-air and disappears. Not unlike that plane that recently crashed in mid-air and disappeared.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?

Well, famously it's more likely that you'll be kicked to death by a donkey than die in a plane crash. Which will be little comfort to the families of 228 people who sadly perished on flight Air France 447. That's news, readers, right there.

Getting in just before Bambi (as it were) was Apple4Tammy whose blog Tammy's Tale: A weight loss journey chronicles her battle with the bulge. I don't know whether her blogger name is a reference to her profession (teacher) or her possible dietary regime. What I do know is that like Pamela Anderson, Tammy is from Canada.

Listen to me Tammy, YOU LOOK GREAT and you know that if Pammy didn't have her curves she wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as she is. So I'm pleading with you here on the Internet, don't do anything stupid and lose too much weight.

Men like a bit of meat on the bone. It's a fact - you've only got to read the excellent blog of another one of my recent followers and commenter Mr London Street. He's a prolific blogger and has 55 followers (at the time of writing) even though he's from Reading. He's keen on smut apparently, so would probably be the sort of person driven to blogs that included regular mentions of PORN STAR.

(You see readers, by writing porn star over and over again, I'm bound to ramp up traffic. Although, not the blind. I wonder what the blind do for porn? Do they have porn braille?...I might well have hit upon an amazing invention there - I might see if Dragon's Den are interested.)

As well as Mr London Street (whose best friend is also called Dave....this posting is bit like the Twilight Zone), I'm now also being followed by Da Kat's Blog. She's only got two followers (including me), news which I'm sure will brighten the day of young Mess! (Her other follower is called Aniram Selwonk - which sounds like one of Mr Coleman's anagrams!)

Last, but my no means least, is Mo Snakeskin, his most recent post is titled I Could be a Porn Star. Which is clearly nothing more than a cunning ruse to drive traffic to his site. Still, at the time of writing he has 100 followers. So he must know a thing or two about Search Engine Optimization.

Porn star.

Right, think the old Fray Bentos should be done, I found one of Dave the roofer's Ron Jeremy videos earlier, think I'll pop it on.

Business models, new in town

A few weeks ago, on the tenth birthday of London's premier free newspaper - the Metro - I came up with a new paradigm in business publishing. The Oyster - the world's first adult entertainment commuter freesheet.

I've been working on a presentation that I plan to take to prospective advertisers. What to take a sneak preview?

Of course you do:

THE OYSTER

Good morning/afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Barry Newsdesk. For ten years I worked in media sales. I single hendedly witnessed the downfall of print media. But during that time, one publication bucked the trend, one publication grew where others whithered on the vine.

I'm talking about the Metro, of course.

WAIT!! I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm here to simply peddle out yet another freesheet wannabe immitator - like the London Paper or the London Lite.

But I'm not. It's true I've been inspired by the unlikely success of the Metro, but I'm going to bring you a whole new concept. And it's not just a concept, it's backed up with cold hard facts.

A few weeks ago, on the tenth birthday of London's premier free newspaper - the Metro - I came up with a new paradigm in business publishing. The Oyster - the world's first adult entertainment commuter freesheet.

Based on the Metro's groundbreaking business model of repurposing material and placing advertisements against it, the Metro revolutionised how the commuters of the world consume news.

Now I'm proposing to revolutionise how the commuters of the world consume bongo.

That's right, you heard me, I said bongo.

Grumble. Smut. Porn. Jazz mags!!

Forget the Internet, with all its fancy widgets and functionality, the Metro almost single-hendedly changed the landscape of the world beyond recognition. And besides, you can't get a signal on the underground, so mobile phones and laptops don't work, which is almost certainly probably half the reason no one reads adult literature while traveling to and from work.

Think about it.

Just for a second.

Sex sells, that much is obvious, you've only got step into your nearest newsagent to buy a four pack of Cobra and some Monster Munch the shelves are stacked with the stuff, or take a walk around Soho and you'll see it literally for sale all over the place. Or just nip into a phone box to make a call becasue the battery on your mobile is dead, you'll be greeted by genuine photos of busty blondes new in town who love their jobs.

Now, imagine a FREE newspaper packed to the rafters with smut. You wouldn't even need to hire people in luminous jackets to hand out the papers at stations, commuters would be literally clamouring for it.

But don't take my word for it. I carried out extensive research, asking a potential audience of millions of Internet users (many of whom almost certainly use the World Wide Web to satisfy their desire for grumble), whether the world was reading for a free adult entertainment newspaper. A resounding 60 per cent of voters agreed that, yes, the world is reading for a free adult entertainment newspaper.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking where on earth is Barry going to find enough filfth to fill the pages of a London freesheet five days a week, 52 weeks a years?

Well, that's easy. The Internet. It's completely riddled with the stuff. I don't have time to catalogue the sheer volume and variety here, but don't take my word for it. Go home and type something insanely filthy into Google. You can bet your bottom dollar that someone has not only already thought of it, but they've taken a video of it and uploaded it onto the Internet.

Trust me, The Oyster won't struggle for content. It won't struggle for readers. And now, I know, having sold you the concept, it won't struggle for advertisers!

What do you think readers? It's not bad is it? I thought I'd probably charge £1000 per quarter page. My friend Dave, the roofer, knows one of the blokes involved with CFCUK, Chelsea supporters' fanzine, and he reckons he'll be able to get some reasonable printing fees. I'd take care of repurposing all the material and all the journalism, so my overheads would be nominal.

I spent today going around the phone boxes of London collecting prostitutes' calling cards, I'll give them a ring later and see if they want to hear the pitch. After that, I think I'll probably go and see some of the strip clubs dotted around town, and then the sex shops of Soho. All in the name of research and new business leads, of course.

I wonder if I'll bump into Jacqui Smith's husband. The dirty tinker. ;-)

Who knows, if things are a success in London, maybe I'll take the idea into Europe, Amsterdam first I dare say, then Paris.

PORN!!!

OMG!

OMG!

You won't believe what I've discovered!

Two days ago I announced my new concept: The Oyster - London's first free commuter pornographic magazine.

I was inspired by the ten-year success of my fav newspaper, the Metro. It seems such a simple concept, handing out a free newspaper to commuters in the mornings, where the content had already appeared in the London Evening Standard the night before, and selling advertising space against it.

It's yesterday's news tomorrow.

It's bloody genius really, so much so that The London Lite, The London Paper, City AM, Sport and Shortlist have all ripped off the business model and attempted to undercut the Metro's advertising spend by offering the commuters of London an alternative version of the paper they love.

Essentially, though, it's reinventing the wheel. It's diluting the advertising cordial. There must be another way?!@?

Two days ago, I spotted a gap in the market based on the success of newspapers such as The Sun, The Star, the Sunday Sport and Razzle.

Boobs.

I dreamed up with the concept of The Oyster - London's premier adult entertainment freesheet.

Sex sell readers!!

In order to build a business model, I decided that I'd need to carry out some research.

The success of the freesheets is based around repurposing material. That's literally copying something and selling it as something new. For The Oyster, I'd need to repurpose adult entertainment.

But where the hell was I going to find an almost limitless supply of filth?

I decided to research content for The Oyster online.

It didn't take much work. Try it for yourself, just type 'porn' into Google. You'll be amazed.

Although, I would add that if you work in an organisation that has IT support or Systems Administration in place, you should probably wait until you get home.

I know someone who was accused of looking at porn at work and he was totally innocent. The management called him aside and asked him about his "surfing habits", they said "maybe there are sites you shouldn't look at". He definitely wasn't looking at sites with material that was unacceptable to company policy, he suggested that it was probably one of the cleaners who was accessing his computer when everyone had left. In the end the management decided that they'd get a new cleaning contract.

Problem solved!

Frankly, I've found stuff on the Internet that would make a prostitute blush. Honestly readers, the Internet is literally riddled with filth.

Try it for yourself, go to Google and type in something soul-destroyingly obscene. I bet you a million pounds whatever you can think of, however depraved, already exists on the Internet.

I spent all evening looking at a wide variety of pornographic websites, of every possible persuasion, purely, I might add, for research purposes, and I can reveal that I can think of nothing that is not on the Internet.

A MONKEY WANKING A HORSE!!!!!

Jeesh, who gets a kick out of that?

There's so much porn on the Internet that I can't even begin to catalogue it all here. What I will say is that there is enough material freely available that The Oyster is never going to struggle for content.

All I need to do now is line up a few advertisers. I can almost certainly change the landscape of publishing forever. Who would've believed that sex sells on the internet?

The mind boggles.

The Oyster

It's been a tumultuous week readers. Last Sunday, I gave an in depth study into the religion of Astrology. It almost goes without saying that I thought predicting the future according to the time and date that you were born sounded about as plausible as transubstantiation or the X-Files.

Thing is, when I came to write a post today I thought I'd look back on the previous week's activities and compare them with my horoscope. Just to recap, here's what was said:

"Business relationships will require solid definition this week. Beginning early Tuesday expect office managers and officials to publicly demand results or announce key policy changes. Much of this may be simple dramatics; don't expect authority figures to actually implement long term changes. The next 11 days will determine the outcome of difficult office dynamics or business power struggles. Wait for concrete signs of change before making public statements. After Wednesday romance and social obligations will be complex. Expect loved ones to compete for your attention or make unusual statements concerning family relationships. Emotions are unpredictable at present: watch for minor outbursts and criticism. Friday calm attitudes return: pace yourself and avoid quick judgements."

Well, look at that! On Tuesday I had a massive run in with Richard at Blockbusters, I thought he was being dramatic at the time, maybe he really won't implement long term changes. And then on Wednesday, after I told Gill about Leigh and the goings on, she gave me a massively hard time.

It's black & white readers, almost everything that my horoscope predicted came true!!!

There's no smoke without fire, so they say, although Michael Jackson's lawyers would probably contend otherwise ;-).

Today, also saw the close of my latest poll on immigration. Not surprisingly the world did not vote entirely against an amnesty on immigration. I think it's fair to say my readers have proved yourselves to be open-minded liberal types with the vast majority coming out in favour of "it depends".

Though, it would probably also be fair comment to say that immigration is not perhaps as burning an issue as certain elements of the media would make out. Since a massive two less people voted in the poll, compared with the seven that voted in the previous week's great crisp debate.

Finally, I would like to wish my fav newspaper, the Metro, a happy tenth birthday. God, it seems like only yesterday that the Metro was born. Now though, the Metro is available in tens of cities across the globe. It's perfect balance of news and fun seized the zeitgeist of the moment and became a new paradigm of news.

There are plenty of imitators, but only one champion of the freesheet. That said, I don't think that the Metro will necessarily rule the roost forever more. There's a gap in the market that I think I have identified.

Sex sells readers. You've only got to look at the success of Britain's number one newspaper. The super soaraway Sun.

It's boobs. Pure & simple. There's a gap in the market for whoever realises that the commuters of modern London are ready for free porn.

I present to you, the readers of the blogospehere, my business plan to really take it to the Metro and hit them where it hurts. I'm not talking about the bollocks, I'm talking about the wallets.

I present you with The Oyster. London's premier adult entertainment freesheet newspaper.

I'll pop up a poll, not the sort that the models in The Oyster would be dancing around, but one that gauges the weight of public opinion on the subject of commuter grumble.