Ghost Dog – tagline “Live by the code. Die by the code” – is a funny old movie. When I say funny, I mean a little bit boring. It’s a flick that people who I would let go to the video shop unaccompanied like, and yet I fell asleep in it. Pretentious, action packed with a wicked Wu Tang Clan soundtrack (and whilst we’re on the subject of the Clan, check out Ol Dirty Bastard life story) – it’s my type of film. Hmmm, a puzzler.
The reason I mention it is that during the movie the pigeon fancying wannabe samurai, played by Forrest Whitaker, occasionally reads from the Hagakure, the code of the Samurai, and one bit stuck with me :
“Each day a samurai should contemplate his own death and consider various ways of dying, from being torn apart in the jaws of a wild beast, to falling from thousand foot cliffs, and during some part of the day, the samurai should consider himself dead.”
The reason that stuck is because I think contemplating mortality is good for the soul. However, now we’re so over-protected you can’t even teach kindergarten classes to juggle with flaming hedge strimmers, without the ‘elf and bloody safety busy-bodies breathing their nanny state fumes down your free decent English yeoman neck, I’d advise you get real, and start thinking about cancer.
A good place to start is the cheery sounding Cancer Stats webpage. It’s like YouTube for hypochondriacs. Did you know there are 24 types of cancer, and yet four types, breast, lung, bowel and prostate – account for over half of all new cases? Good to see that cancer, like any good business, roughly follows the 20/80 rule of getting 80% of your business (read deaths) from 20% of your service providers (read cancers).
For your viewing pleasure, here are the 24 types of cancer. And if we’re contemplating our impending dooms, allow me to paraphrase the Wu Tang Clan : 24 ways to die, chose one.
Bladder cancer Bone cancer Bowel cancer Brain and CNS cancer
Breast cancer Cervical cancer Hodgkin’s lymphoma Kidney cancer
Laryngeal cancer Leukaemia Liver cancer Lung cancer
Malignant melanoma Multiple myeloma Non-Hodgkin lymphoma Oesophageal cancer
Oral cancer Ovarian cancer Pancreatic cancer Prostate cancer
Stomach cancer Testicular cancer Thyroid cancer Uterine cancer
Which one do you want least? And really try to imagine it. To my mind they all look totally rubbish. Except, that is, Multiple Myeloma. I just can’t stop saying it to the tune of My Sharona. Whenever I said I had cancer I’d be able to say “I’ve got a Multiple Myeloma, ma-ma-ma-ma-My-yi-yi-yi-yi-eloma”.
Obviously Cancer Research UK are doing all they can to stop anyone having to sing which terminal disease they have to tunes by The Knack. And the Kill Cancer Death Rally is doing all it can to raise money for those bad ass cancer killing research doctors. Go on then, give us some money.
GSOT : I’ll have it with a side order of fries, please
Wouldn’t it be rubbish if you did the Kill Cancer Death Rally, then realised that no one else gave a shit. There you were, in Barcelona, you’d rallied, you’d tried. You’d raised money, and your game. But all around a bloated, complacent, sick world carried on in degeneracy.
Luckily, life isn’t like that. Instead, all around there are good folk who are trying to do their best to raise money to beat cancer. So from now on I’ll highlight some of the people who are doing good as we speak (except we’re not speaking). It might be that someone who can’t make it on the rally will be able to, for example, go on a hill walk like James Wallis. And you can follow his progress here.
Whilst stuck on the hillside James might come across (pun intended) The Breast of Canada Calendar girls. Using their chest puppies as weapons against cancer, these Canuck beauties are walking the walk with their waps waggling in the wind. Those of you set on using your anatomy to raise money could also visit FlipCancerTheBird.Com (link via The Mad Admin – if you feel IT workers are undervalued agree with him here).
However, all these normal people doing charity are more than a little dull when you compare them to Look To The Stars, the blog that records celebrity giving. As I worship celebrity then it would be a dream to appear on that site. Oh, to enjoy basking in the reflected glow. To get on their I’m going to need a celebrity. I’m going to need the Hof. Please, can someone get David Hasselhof on the Kill Cancer Death Rally. In full Night Rider gear.
The Hoffmeister with puppies. Twice.
ps. if you’ve come here after I said I’d popped you on my blogroll, then I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ll link to you soon as I can, but sourcing photos of Hasselhof with puppies takes time and it’s already late.
Back from the Ibiza. Relaxed as you could possibly be after landing at four in the morning and catching cattle class flu. However, that’s no longer a worry as we make the big party! Yes, you heard it right. Not only will there be a Kill Cancer Death Rally, there will now be a Kill Cancer Death Party.
Shit, a death party. Sounds like it should be in a Brasseye sketch. Chris Morris turns to the camera looking serious next to an adolescent boy with an organ on his head and a young girl looking intensely at a ballcock. ”Welcome to a modern day death party. He’s flipping a porpoise in a death lid, whilst she’s waiting for her ball spasm to backflachate.”
You know the sort of thing.
Death lids aside, this party is, in fact, being organised by the wonderful Yunes of Static London (please send me a link to your site) and Alex Sheridan. Alex will be putting the might of Protest Recordings behind it. Or at least some of the might.
It’ll be shake your coconuts time in mid-September and all the money will go to - you’ve guessed it – buying Kalashnikovs for the Lord’s Resistance Army Cancer Research. Whomsoever would like to have an invitation to le knees up send in your proper home address to me. If you have any other friends who’d be interested ask them, get their addresses and we will send them, like, an actual invitation in, like, the post.
Kalashnikov. Cancer.
Dr. Death. Innocence massacred.
(Due to some strange blog malfunction I wasn’t able to get the photos in the right order for this line ‘We’re helping him, kill this. Not buying these, for them’ under the photos. It is rather weirder now.)
If you’ve got any fantastic ideas about what we should do, then please let me know. But not by email. Just go to the Kill Cancer Death Rally wiki here and you can drop your ideas right in.
Tell everyone about how you’ll decorate your car, the history of your chapter and everything else that you’re doing.
It’s really easy to use, and fun, too. The opposite of condoms, I suppose.
Being told that your mother has died sticks in the mind. However, it is not something that I have played back especially often. There are parties and books, movies and feats of outstanding sporting endeavour that I hunt out from my cerebral cortex more regularly – if that is where you store memories.
One of the reasons for that, is because when I was told, I didn’t cry, and I could never understand this. I stood in between my sisters in my Aunt’s sitting room: brown carpet, my grandmother in a blue cardigan, all of us in Barnes.
We’d finished breakfast – you don’t want to unleash tragedies on kiddies with empty stomachs, after another night of oh-my-god-it-won’t-happen-will-it?
“I’m afraid this morning Mummy died”.
Everyone collapses in on each other, as though the air had been sucked out from between us. In a way it had been.
I’m there and I’m wondering “Why the hell am I not crying?”
Why didn’t I cry then when my throat’s choking up now on a train to Bristol, tears poking out of eyes?
Why did I not cry, and I sure as hell didn’t have an ‘I’m the man in the family now, there’s no room for tears’ moment?
Why? Why? Why?
And I think it’s because I just didn’t think Mummy could die. It was impossible. No way. Really it wouldn’t happen. When hearing “Only a miracle can save her now” it just meant that a miracle would fucking happen.
Unfortunately people do die, miracles are painfully unreliable and you can’t raise money for them.
You can, however, raise money for Cancer Research. You can come on the Kill Cancer Death Rally, celebrate life for four days and help make sure that those teary, tragic, enormous, little gatherings happen a lot less.
I’ve mentioned before (here and here) why I’m doing this but, in case you’re new to the blog (and to you I say “Welcome! Have a crumpet.”), I’ll tell you again. When I was 11 my Mum died of cancer. It first came as breast cancer. This had the impertinence to come back a second time, but she rocked so much she beat it again.
Then she was given the all clear. And then she died. Drag.
You see cancer is a tricky little bitch, it makes like a gritty north-eastern football team in a relegation dogfight, and never knows when it’s beat. It came back, manifested itself in her liver and then chilled on out through her spine and her blood.
The problem is, not only does cancer suck, but the ‘medicine’ they use to treat it is rubbish. Chemotherapy is, essentially, as much poison as your body can handle without dying. Now, not only did my beautiful mother have cancer but all her hair fell out as she slowly died.
Which is where the sexy doctors at Cancer Research UK come in. They spend all their waking lives trying to kill cancer. In April 2003 they found out more about how cancer spreads (Link). The little evil bastard puts all it’s building materials at the part of the tumour moving forward, so that it spreads faster. What a shit.
But knowledge is power and these guys are learning how to Kill Cancer. Please come on the Kill Cancer Death Rally and raise lots of cash for these wonderful guys. Go to www.justgiving.com, follow the instructions and you can start raising money now.
All Just Giving sites will be linked to from this blog so send them in the moment you get them. Mine is here, please give generously.
When Jesus was swaddled in the manger, thinking whatever a divinity would think having been expectorated in human form down some sort of insanely slow-moving painfully constricting water-slide, he was attended by kings from the east and shepherds from the west.
Luckily that was in the days before the Eastside/Westside beef had kicked in. Otherwise Melchior would have pulled his nine from his side and said “Any bitch with a sheep is gonna get wet. I’m frank-incensed by your disrespect, wool boy, now you ready to eat clip”.
He came from the East
“Yeah, well I think you look like the three wise queens with that funky get up. And anyway I’m the only star in the east bitch” and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Bitchus.
It transpired that, though the kings were high net-worth individuals, and the lowly shepherds came from a very different socio-economic background, with the consequence that the gifts they brought were very different in cost-price, this mattered little to Jesus. What mattered was that each had brought what they could.
That story has little relevance to raising money for Barcelona or Bust because everyone should raise £250 each.
Because if each car has four people in it. That’s £1000 a car minimum.
If 20 people come on the tour, we raise £5000.
If 10 cars come on tour we raise £10000.
You too can play the “how much we can raise game?” with the help of an Excel spreadsheet and a university degree. Clearly, there is no maximum. That would be stupid. But, and this is the point, but if everyone does raise £250, we can make a difference.
