The British rail network is a joke.

Video: a train recently leaking. Britain confirmed for third world country.

The rail network in Britbongistan is the oldest in the world and runs like it hasn't been updated since. Delays of anything from half an hour to several hours are considered normal, carriages are generally overcrowded, and there's always some old hag reading the Daily Mail. It's getting so bad that this generation of Britbongs don't even know simple rules of Bongish etiquette, like never sit next to or opposite someone. When I were a lad (I were never a lad), up to two thirds of a carriage's inhabitants would stand to avoid the terrible awkwardness of sitting next to someone. Diagonal was acceptable, but still frowned on, as it should be.

I was at a station recently where we weren't sure which of two late trains would arrive first, and on which platform. When we asked a worker which way we should gamble, she said "stay at the top of the stairs, and whichever one gets in first, run for it".

Do you remember when people in the 20th Century thought the 21st would be like the Jetsons? But instead, it was like the Flintstones.

I think we should add up all the times trains are delayed, and for every twenty-four hours of delay-time, we should keel-haul Richard Branson behind one of his shit-ass trains for ten minutes. I think this would see a dramatic improvement, but the government has yet to reply to my letters :(

12 rebel flags too hot for public viewing!!!

Mad Max Ripoffs: The New Barbarians!!!

Mad Max and The Road Warrior were among the most important movies of the late 70s and early 80s, a golden age in which the trashy and the classy briefly merged, resulting in a slew of genre pictures that were way better than ever before, like Halloween, the Star Wars trilogy, and The Shining. What was trashy? What was classy? People were literally confused. But never fear, anxious reader!!! For based Italy stepped in to restore genre movies to their wonderfully crappy B-roots with a bunch of post-apocalyptic ripoffs. Possibly the most infamous was...The New Barbarians!!!

"Books. That's what started the whole apocalypse!" - actual dialogue

You can tell a lot about a movie by its first image, and this one opens with a bunch of dead bodies in hazmat suits. The first one has boob domes; it has domes for boobs.

For the exhibitionist hazmat enthusiast.

So the plot involves the Templars, a group that drives around killing people to "purify" the earth, and their enemy, Scorpion, who spends his time driving around in circles and engaging in periodic shootouts with a small child who acts as his mechanic. The boy uses a catapult, Dennis the Menace-style, and Scorpion uses his handgun, which is very responsible. At first I assumed he didn't know it was a child who was attacking him, but the dialogue confirms they know each other and do this all the time, so I guess post-apocalyptic Italy just has less of a taboo about shooting at kids.

The Templars want to kill Scorpion, but they're not that fussed about it, as several scenes of conflict end with them pulling up next to each other, exchanging a few words, and then driving off like nothing happened.

"lol don't worry about this bad guy. We'll get him next week"

Along the way, Scorpion rescues a big-haired woman and is in turn rescued repeatedly (but very slowly) by a guy named Nadir, who dresses like a cross between a samurai and pimp, and is obsessed with being "the best", presumably to spite the parents who gave him a name that means "the worst".

The kid, the Templars and Nadir all know Scorpion, and it sort of seems like everyone just follows him around for want of anything better to do. No one really likes him, especially Nadir, who, on finding Scorpion being dragged behind a procession of Templars, very slowly shoots each one of them in turn, saving the one doing the dragging for last. Thanks, Nadir!

Nadir poses with Scorpion's car. Note the glowing green dome screaming "here I am" in a hostile wilderness.

There's also a completely inexplicable scene where the main Templar, Juan, apparently rapes Scorpion, except the way it's edited it kind of looks like he never removed his crotch piece, meaning he just awkwardly dry-humped Scorpion in front of all his minions.

You should definitely see The New Barbarians, because it's stupid and awesome. The movie also has a great moral that I can totally get behind:

"The more of a bastard you are, the surer you are to win" - the wisdom of a child

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: one, purple.

SHOULDER PADS: all the Templars and Nadir have them.

CUSTOM CARS: Scorpion's has a detachable driver-side door, extendable drill, dome that lights up green at night, and rocket launcher in the boot. The Templars' have extendable whirring blades, drills and flamethrowers.

MUTANTS: some scavengers look like they might be.

GOGGLES: Big Hair has a fuckhueg red-tinted pair, for great justice.

TOTAL: 5/5 - totally post-apocalyptic.

Blunt Force Troma: Graduation Day!!!

Troma is great and slasher movies are great, so how great must a Troma slasher movie be? Well, the director's name is Herb Freed, perhaps in honour of 4/20. The killer stabs someone with a football-on-a-sword, for no fucking reason. And it features one of my favourite, and the stupidest, kills of all time.

Gaze into the armpit of terror.

So Graduation Day opens with a runner at a high school sporting event. She wins her race but keels over at the finish line. The film then cuts back and forth between her boyfriend cradling her dead body and the crowd watching about fifty billion times, perhaps because the editor had freed some herb that morning. We're then introduced to the runner's sister and Final Girl, who's returned home from the Navy just in time for Graduation Day, even though she doesn't go to school and her deceased sister presumably isn't graduating anymore.

The plot involves someone killing off members of the sports team, prefiguring all-time classic Night of the Dribbler, which is a real movie. Who is the killer? Could it be the coach who pushes his athletes to the limit? The principal who's boinking his secretary? Linnea Quigley? Yes, Linnea Quigley is in this movie, replacing some other actress who appears in early scenes they never bothered to reshoot. Or could it be...roller disco?

mfw no roller disco at my graduation: :{

Despite being a roller disco, this scene revolves around a band who wear fedoras and makeup and sing interminably about "The Gangster Rock". The whole scene seems like an attempt to one-up the flamboyant gayness of Prom Night, and it almost comes close.

The saddest thing about this movie is that the killer barely gets to do his own shtick at all before being discovered. He wears a fencing mask and carries a sword, but we only really see him once, carving up a couple of victims outside the roller disco. He hops out from some trees and does this hilarious little dance where he hops from one foot to the other before charging after his prospective mark. I think this guy and Prom Night guy should have a movie of their own, like Freddy Vs Jason.

come back I want to sword you

But the real high point of Graduation Day is a kill so dumb it makes sitting through all seven and a half minutes of "Gangster Rock" seem worth it. One of the last surviving members of the track team, seemingly oblivious to both the murders and the fact it's Graduation Day, goes out by himself to practise his pole vault. The pole hits the floor and we hear a scream, as it's revealed that he's pole vaulted onto a bed of spikes:

Right in the knee.

I love this kill so much I want it to be in every horror movie, even the classy ones like The Shining. How did the killer know this guy would be here on this of all days, and that no one else would be? Where did he get the spikes? Maybe he didn't know, and just put spikes everywhere he thought the team were likely to go: their lockers, the showers, even the track itself. What's even better about this scene is that it comes out of nowhere and is never remarked upon. Ah, Graduation Day killer, you were taken from us too soon.

Academia is carving out new frontiers in flimflam and chicanery.

Have Hugh ever wondered how to write an academic paper? What with the vertiginous standards of contemporary writing out there, no one would blame you for feeling intimidated out of it:

Real.

As you can see, this is real cutting-edge stuff. But don't be discouraged: with a bit of coaching, you too can write important essays on identity cults and the narcissists who love them. Follow these six simple steps to ensure your intellectual prolapse will pass for the real thing.

• Add "-ness" to words that don't end in -ness. Examples could include "unknowableness" or  even "being-ness". "Otherness" is a must.
• Always remember to pluralise words that don't need to be plural, in such a way as to imply that there are subtle differences within and around a concept that only you can understand. For example, never speak of "postmodernism" but "postmodernisms". Use this even with collective terms like "public" (publics). If you combine this with the above tactic, you score a combo which is worth at least 1000 ticks. Be sure to write about "blacknesses" and "subjectivenesses" for mad approval.
• Find someone who is different from you and accuse them of "othering" you (or the minority you purport to speak for, if you're feeling in the mood for condescending to yet another group that are unlike you). If you do this quickly and stridently enough, nobody will notice that you are the only one "othering" people by bringing up irrelevant details about them like their sex or hair colour.
• Make sure to "reclaim" words like "bitch" and "queer" so you can pretend to be rebellious while doing the opposite by diluting effect and meaning from language. I remember when I first learned that "queer theory" was used by professionals. You might as well call it "bumming studies". Troll academics by pointing out that this is cultural appropriation of black people, who invented reclaiming so they would have something to rhyme with trigger in their rap songs.
• Never write in the first person, as this makes it too obvious that everything you're saying is your unexamined left-bougie prejudices. Instead of removing your ass-ignorant worldview from your writing, just remove all references to "I", "me" and "mine" (this is what academics actually teach).
• Astute readers will note that all this stuff relates to form and style. This is because the substance of academic writing ceased to be important in, like, probably the 50s. No one cares, for instance, that Hamlet is all about Shakespear's Sister's depression over their dead son, the decline of empire, and the existential horror of not knowing what comes after death. Is Hamlet gay? Does he exhibit othernesses? Academia demands to know.

If you but follow these few steps, you'll soon be well on your way to balding, supercilious glory.

In defence of hair metal

In this article I struggle to articulate why, contrary to everything you've been told, hair metal is great and people who don't like it are communists. For the purposes of our article "hair metal" includes glam metal, sleaze rock, hard rock, and anything else I want it to, because it's all the same thing.

Lita Ford, or Sebastian Bach. Pic by Zoran Veselinovic.

1. Hair metal gives you priapism. Priapism is when you have a boner that lasts longer than nature or common sense would ordinarily allow. Exhibit A are these lyrics from Dangerous Toys:

Sport'n a woody, when you're walkin' by

Sport'n a woody, when your titties fly

Sport'n a woody, rippin' my fly

Sport'n a woody, till the day I die

As you can see, in addition to some of the most beautiful poetry ever committed to song, this represents an enormously long time to be presenting with a hardon. Note that the title is "Sport'n a Woody", because hair metal loves the -'n formation. You wouldn't want to write "Sporting a Woody" and look stupid now, would you?

2. Hair metal bands know no fear. Not only does Mötley Crüe routinely shout at the Devil, but Dokken actually scares Freddy Krueger. Nikki Sixx is mostly famous for dying of a heroin overdose, waking up, and going home to shoot more heroin.

3. Everyone had to be hair metal in the 1980s, including classic rock acts like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper. This means that if Jim Morrison had survived longer than is cool, he would have sprayed his hair and sung about dicks. I think we can agree this is definitely something that should have happened. Furthermore, "bad ass" 90s metal bands like Pantera and Alice in Chains used to be hair metal before their big breaks, generating endless lulz.

4. Also called "cock rock". Bands included Cycle Sluts From Hell and Faster Pussycat, and Danger Danger, all of whose songs had repeated one-word titles, like "Bang Bang" and "Dicks Dicks" (maybe).

5. Gave the PMRC (sort of the 80s version of SocJus) fainting spells over their lyrics. Dee Snyder hilariously trolled the retards by revealing that the song they thought was about sexual torture was about a trip to the dentist, giving us a good idea of how stupid the people presently whining about video games are going to look in a few years' time.

What's your favourite hair metal band??? Does it matter??? If a train leaves the station travelling at 45 degrees, how long does it take for Suresh to find x???