2009 will be remembered for a lot of events. The inauguration of the first black American President, the death of a pop icon; Michael Jackson, and the worldwide spread of an infectious contagion that originated from a porker… no, not swine flu. SuBo (Susan Boyle).

Not only is it the end of the year, it’s the end of the decade – a period in which the phrase “I’m going to play with my wee (Wii)” became a normal thing to say, rather than something to be immediately sectioned for.

It’s now time to look forward to the new decade and that means the usual new year rituals. So, are you going out with friends, staying in with family, hosting a party, joining a party or burgling the houses of those people who are out celebrating? Here are the options, laid out:

1) Going out with friends

One of the most fun and eventful ways of seeing in the New Year is to go out with friends to a local pub / club / strip bar and have a drink / dance / young, naked woman / man / could be either (depends on how much you pay) dance and sit on your lap. You drink lots, party hard and see the new year in in style. Whoohoo!

For extra fun, have a bet with your friends, at the start of the evening, on which one of you will be the first to pass out with your head over the toilet bowl, with the smell of alcoholic wee wafting up your nose.

2) Staying in with family

As you get older, this becomes the preferred method of seeing in the New Year. Sitting in your lounge with a drink whilst people on the television do the wild partying and celebrating for you. It’s always such a long build-up to midnight, as you sit there sucking on a Werther’s Original or chomping on some of the sweets, mince pies and rotting fruit that are still left over from Christmas Day. Finally, midnight arrives. You hum a rendition of ‘Auld Langsyne’ to yourself, wish your family a happy new year and then, as the fireworks go off around the neighbourhood, you go to bed. New Year celebrations over for another year.

Unfortunately, you forget to switch off your mobile phone and are woken up at 3am by a message from your drunk brother… “Heppy Nu Yar”

3) Hosting a party

So, you’re hosting a party. That means a lot of preparation – you need to ensure there are enough snacks, that you have entertainment and that you move everything that is precious to you… from the house and the surrounding neighbourhood. In fact, it’s probably best to be completely safe and move it all into storage… in the Netherlands.

You purchase a LOT of alcohol and the usual selection of party snacks – crisps, biscuits, sweets, chocolates and those horrid cheesy footballs that no-one ever eats (leaving you to feed them to the foxes the next day… who also reject them). Once the guests have arrived, you spend the entire evening running around making sure everyone is ok. This means that by midnight, you lie exhausted in the corner of the room, asleep, and miss the celebrations. Next morning, you wake up to find your lounge is a mess. The carpet is covered with cheesy footballs and red wine and, as you survey the devastation, you spot Wayne lying slumped over the arm of the sofa with a cocktail straw sticking out of his ear.

4) Joining a party

The New Year house party, without all the cleaning up. Fantastic. You make your way around to your friend’s house to join the party, only to discover that all of the fun people have changed their minds and absconded to the local pub. This leaves you to have a party with all the boring, unsociable people who sit there staring at the carpet all night, unable to decide whether the colour is light brown or beige. Still, at least Alan is there to chat to – the guy who spends every weekend adding to his impressive collection of jam jar labels.

Hey, it’s a party, you need to look at the positives – there’s food and wine. You pick up a wine bottle to fill up a glass and discover that it’s Tesco Value red wine, which tastes of squirrel piss (you should know, you accidentally drank some whilst out camping last year). You reach for a handful of snacks and… it’s those bloody cheesy footballs. Pissed off, you sling them onto the floor, spilling your wine in the process.

Luckily for you, your cheeky idea to post details of the party onto Facebook pays off, and the house quickly fills up with strange people that you don’t know. Things quickly liven up and before you know it, it’s midnight. So, you take another sip of squirrel’s piss, give a snog to the two woman hanging off either arm and then pass out across the arm of the sofa, with a cocktail straw sticking out of your ear.

Getting The Message Out

Whichever choice you make for your New Year celebrations, one thing is for certain. At midnight, you’ll try to wish all your friends and family a “Happy New Year”. You decide that you’re not one of those spoil sports who sends a text message BEFORE midnight, to try and beat the mad midnight rush (is there anything quite so pointless and disappointing as being wished a happy new year before it’s even happened?).

You’re also not someone who actually likes to talk to your friends and family. So, that leaves you with two options:

1) Wish all your friends and family a Happy New Year on Facebook… you miserable sod. Where’s the effort in that?

2) Join the fight for mobile phone network space and attempt to send a standard ‘Happy New Year’ text message to the 443 people in your contact list (no time for personalised text messages). Based on past experience, you have come up with an ingenious plan. You prepare the text message a couple of minutes before midnight, put your finger on the ‘send’ button and hold the phone by your side. Then, at the very second of midnight, you hit send and… “message sending failed.” You then spend the next hour hitting the ‘retry’ button until, at 1.13am, the message goes through. Ok, so that plan didn’t work very well.

Maybe next year you could try sending carrier pigeons instead? That’ll work… as long as everyone else in the world doesn’t send carrier pigeons too. It could get very messy!

However you celebrate the New Year, I wish you a happy one…

“Heppy Nu Yar”

Alastair Hazell
© Chasing a Noodle
http://www.chasinganoodle.com

Some people do it in January. Others leave it until much later in the year. No, I’m not talking about the shameful breaking of New Year’s Resolutions. It’s Christmas shopping. You can certainly tell it’s Christmas. The women featured on the covers of men’s magazines are all wearing red thongs…

What is it with Christmas shopping that makes it become such excruciating torture? Never mind about jail sentences for convicts, send them out with a difficult Christmas shopping list on December 24 instead. That’ll sort them out.

Perhaps those traumatic feelings are caused by the way in which the festive season has been taken over by retailers; continually pushing their Christmas offers in our faces from as early in the year as possible. “There are only 242 days of our Christmas sale remaining…”

Your Christmas shopping story…

After beginning your Christmas shopping ordeal expedition, you invariably end up in a shopping centre full of chain stores. You enter a shop and walk around, hoping that something will pop out and hit you in the face, saying “I think I’ll be an ideal present for Auntie Mabel. Buy me!” Whilst browsing the tat on offer, the shop offends your ears with a horrendous selection of cheesy Christmas music to get you in the ‘spirit of things’. However, all it seems to do is irritate you to the point where you want to grab a piece of tinsel and hang the shop manager from the end of it….  “Chipmunks roasting on an open fire…” Bah humbug!  You walk out and into another shop, where you encounter a refreshing change: this store is playing non-festive music… “why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?” (that probably has something to do with the box of Trill that I emptied into your back pocket this morning)

1 hour later

Having left it to the last minute (a month before Christmas) to shop for Christmas presents, you find yourself buying items at twice the price that they were three months ago. Sure, the shops have “SALE” plastered all over their windows, but it’s certain that the stuff that you’re interested in isn’t reduced.

We’re in a recession, so you’re looking for a bargain (defined as something no-one really needs at a price you can’t possibly resist) and the shops are quite happy to push all sorts of stuff at you. Being under pressure, you’re considering everything, including the sort of crap that ends up down the charity shops two days after Christmas, or the female pampering packs that are left to rot in the receiver’s bathroom cupboard before being passed back to you three Christmasses later. You can bet your bottom dollar that eBay will be full of that stuff on Boxing Day (so, a great opportunity to shop early for shit presents for next Christmas!).

3 hours later

You’re beginning to lose the will to live – you’ve bought presents for so many people. But you still have to find something for that difficult person who seems to be impossible to buy for. Auntie Mabel – a woman who doesn’t eat chocolate, has a hayfever allergy, changes waist size like a puffer fish watching a horror film and doesn’t have any hobbies, favourite foods… or a bath! To frustrate you further, whilst scouring the shops for a gift for Auntie Mabel, you spot brilliant ideas for those people that you have already bought for!

5 hours later

You enter Poundland for the fifteenth time. Whilst walking around with a bewildered look on your face, a member of staff, wearing a silly Christmas hat, approaches you to try to assist you. “Are you ok, sir? Can I help you at all?”. The guy acts so jolly that you instantly hate him. So, you turn to him and say, “Yes, I’m looking for a present for a 3 foot tall midget with webbed feet and eyes that look in different directions. Can you suggest anything?….. hello?”

6 hours later

After another hour of looking, you’re now dribbling profusely and leaning to one side with only one eye left open. Then – miracle – you spot that there’s £10 off a George Foreman grill. Perfect. Afterall, it’s been a while since Auntie Mabel had a Lean Mean Machine in her house…

You snatch the box off the shelf with both hands, causing a stack of other grill boxes to avalanche down onto the elderly couple standing to your left. Your focus remains intact as you turn around to search for the checkout. You spot the checkout far away in the distance and, inevitably, there is a queue. It’s not a small queue either – the line of people snakes around every aisle, from one end of the store to the other. So much so that whilst your eyes follow the line, your head rotates 360 degrees around your neck.

After three months of walking, you locate the end of the queue and join it. Infront of you is a little old lady and, after joining the line, a group of teenagers join the queue behind you. Standing there, promising yourself that you won’t leave it so late to do your shopping next year, you get battered from all sides by wafts of pungent smells. First, the little old lady’s perfume, ‘Musty Barn’, enters your nostrils, hammering on your sinuses like a woodpecker on a tree. Then, as your headache builds, you get hit from the back by the stench of teenage deodorant. The so-called ‘Lynx effect’, presumably because it sinks its teeth into your neck area and suffocates the life out of you. Why is it that teenagers feel that spraying an entire can of deodorant on to themselves makes them extra attractive to young ladies? Yes, they probably do seem attractive; if the girl in question is wearing a gas mask or has a heavy cold.

Thankfully for you, standing in the line, all that practice in your bath at home has paid dividends. Not only are you the world record holder for holding your breath underwater, but it means that you are able to survive the nasal bombardment.

7 hours later

Having bought your item, you stagger out of the store, navigating your way through the Christmas clowns, stilt walkers, jugglers, thieves, murderers and men in tight shorts (yes, there’s always one, even in winter). Then you spot one of those ‘wrap for charity’ stalls, where, for a small donation to charity, a little kid will wrap your present for you. You decide that it’s worth a pound of your money to get them to wrap the present that you bought for your Great Grandmother earlier. So over you trundle. “Hello, can you wrap a present for me, please?” you ask. “Yes, sure, where is it?” he replies, with a polite smile. He isn’t smiling for long, as you open your shopping bag and reveal a giant cactus…

8 hours later

Exhausted, you head off home and find yourself summing things up with a Churchillian line: “Never, in the world of shopping, has so much effort been given by someone, for so little!”

Conclusion

Christmas shopping can be horrendous. It should come with a public health warning and a free shot of valium. Perhaps the answer is to get pissed on mulled wine beforehand? Just don’t throw up in Poundland… (would it cost you a pound if you did?)

Written by Alastair Hazell
© Chasing a Noodle
http://www.chasinganoodle.com

At a time when they’re saying that Father Christmas is too fat and that Sex Makes Men Healthier, surely it’s time for Santa to put two and two together and get himself a partner? It’s certainly not the time to be discussing unhealthy, fattening Christmas dinners. Or is it?

I was chatting with a friend of mine about Christmas dinner and he mentioned the idea of making a ballotine. “What the hell is a ballotine?” I asked him. He explained. “A ballotine is a multi-bird roast.” The most common type of ballotine in the UK is called a turducken. To make one, you stuff multiple birds (ooh-err missus), one inside the other, before cooking. As an alternative, if you use a Goose in your turducken, instead of a Turkey, it’s called a gooducken (I’m glad there’s no ‘f’ in the middle there).

All of this got me thinking, in my usual mischievous way…

I wonder what the biggest number of birds ever put into a ballotine is?

Well, I looked it up and here is the answer, courtesy of Wikipedia…

The largest recorded nested bird roast is 17 birds, attributed to a royal feast in France in the early 19th century (originally called a Rôti Sans Pareil, or “Roast without equal”) – a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an Ortolan Bunting and a Garden Warbler.[4] The final bird is very small but large enough to hold just an olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds. It appears illegal to make today as some of the species are endangered.

It appears that the demand for multi-bird-roasts at Christmas time has risen over the last few years. This may be partly due to TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s creation of a ten-bird roast on his television show a few years ago.

After looking further into the concept, I found a Daily Mail article from 2007 which talks about a 12 bird turducken; a huge feast of protein dubbed ‘The True Love Roast’ because it contained one bird for each day of Christmas. The cost of this Christmas delight? £665. It weighed in at almost four stone, took over 8 hours to cook and served 125 people. So, what birds did Devon farmer Anne Petch choose to use in her creation?

1. Turkey, 2. Goose, 3. Barbary duck, 4. Guinea fowl, 5. Mallard, 6. Poussin, 7. Quail, 8. Partridge, 9. Pigeon squab, 10. Pheasant, 11. Chicken, 12. Aylesbury duck

A photo of the meat used in Anne’s turducken is below. You can read the full story in this Daily Mail article.

The 'True Love Roast' Ballotine

So, it’s a 12 bird creation. But, that doesn’t beat the record of 17 birds. To get that record, it would need to be produced without using some of the endangered birds in the Wikipedia list. So, here is my list. I just need someone to offer to make it…

Robin (Merry Christmas Mr Robin), Garden Warbler, Blackbird, Poussin, Quail, Partridge, Pigeon, Dove, Chicken, Duck, Guinea Fowl, Grouse, Pheasant, Goose, Turkey, Emu, Ostrich, Susan Boyle.

Who wants to give it a try?

I saw this on another blog and thought I would share it. Jonathan Macdonald decorated his house with this brilliant Christmas creation this year. However, it proved rather controversial and he had to take the fake man down after only two days. The most impressive incident occurred when a 65 year old lady picked the ladder up (weighing 35 pounds) and attempted a dramatic rescue. It was only when she got to the top of the ladder that she realised that the body was fake. I bet Jonathan was wiped from her Christmas card list after that.

So, what does Christmas mean to people? As a festive experiment, I used the information provided by Wikipedia’s Christmas article to produce this . By inputting the text into the fantastic tool at http://www.wordle.net, I was able to produce a tree shaped word cloud. I then used some basic Photoshop Christmas artistry for extra effect.

The more frequently a word features in the Wikipedia Christmas article, the more prominently it appears in the tree.

The Nutz Christmas Word Tree

The Christmas Word Tree

A funny Christmas music video created by the BBC’s Breathing Places team…

VUUHHTYQYKVR

So, you’re taking part in the office Secret Santa for this year. You’ve pulled the name ‘Derek’ out of the hat and you really have no clue what present to buy him. You don’t know much about the guy, other than that he is impartial to a curry on any night ending in ‘y’. Last week you went into the office toilet straight after him and, well, it smelled like an old tramp’s jockstrap in there (I’m only guessing at how bad that smells, by the way!).

Fear not, for help is at hand. I have found a way of killing two turtle doves with one stone. Here is the perfect gift for you to give to Derek; one that will make your (and every other office worker’s) daily toilet breaks much more bearable. Welcome to the world of:

Poo Pourri… “spritz the bowl before you go and no-one else will ever know”… (unless you then proceed to shit on the floor, presumably)

Poo Pourri

We are coming up to that time of year again and that can only mean one thing. As the Andy Williams lyric goes, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year…” No, parents, it’s not the end of the school summer holidays…

For those of you who can’t decide what they want for Christmas, I’ve come up with a helpful list of ideas. However, so-as not to be labelled ‘boring’, I’ve made things a bit more fun. I have taken all of my ideas from the first few pages of Google’s search engine results for “All I Want For Christmas Is…” So, here’s the list to choose from – take your pick…

All I want for Christmas is…

1. “You”. Well obviously, and it’s nice of you to say so. But you can’t have me, Mariah. Much as I appreciate your Festive hit, I’m not sure I could cope with a Christmas full of your high-pitched warbling!
2. My two front teeth. No problem. I’ll even wrap them up for you. Now then, where did I put my hammer…
3. A PSP viral marketing campaign. Be honest with me now, who doesn’t want one of those? I don’t think anyone of sane mind desires anything viral at Christmas time… especially not Herpes or Chlamydia. Office Christmas parties… they’re fun, aren’t they!
4. A Beatles gift collection. Nothing funny about that. In fact, that’s way too serious to be on my list, take it off…
5. A job. Is that a job or a McJob? I reckon there’s quite a few people out there wishing for one of those at the moment (not the latter one).
6. A Duckla Prague Away Kit. A what? It sounds like clothing worn by a choir of operatic mallards from the Czech Republic. Actually, it’s a ‘B’ side by Punk group Half Man Half Biscuit (as opposed to the Pop group Half Woman Half Twix).
7. A baby. You’re not getting one of those from me, so don’t even try it missus…
8. A pair of swim shorts. The ideal present for anyone planning on a New Year dip in the sea… The present comes with a free packet of Nurofen Cold and Flu and a New Year’s resolution not to be so stupid to do it next year.
9. A vampire. A nice idea, but you won’t find many blood sucking creatures around here (ex-girlfriends excluded) – Buffy and I are out every Saturday night seeing to that…
10. A bombed-out Dollhouse. Getting hold of one of those might be quite difficult, unless someone accidentally posts Barbie’s New Year house party plans onto Facebook…
11. To be sucked into a black hole. As long as the black hole isn’t inside Katie Price’s head – sure, sounds great. Just to check – there is a Starbucks there, right?
12. A tail. Yes, yes, I want one of those too!

Finally, some ideas of my own (feel free to thank me)

1. Some Facebook friends. In a world where popularity is becoming increasingly determined by the number of friends you have on social networking websites… here’s an opportunity to increase your popularity and feel like you’ve really achieved in life. Congratulations.
2. The CD ‘The Greatest Hits of John and Edward’ (not available for download as the Internet isn’t ready to cope with it)
3. Christmas in Prague with some operatic feathered friends. I think you’ll be pheasantly surprised how enjoyable it is.
4. A Swine Flu jab. Well, getting swine flu seems to be as inevitable as death and taxes. So, what better present to give to someone than a needle in the arm? (as one drug addict says to the other)
5. A clove of garlic. Why? For the same reason as above, believe it or not. The price of garlic has gone through the roof in China after rumours that it helps prevent swine flu. Perhaps swine flu is spread by vampires? Hint: when combining presents, don’t combine this idea with number 9 from the first list.
6. An E-Book Reader with Michael Jackson Biography. Bringing the two most talked about things of the year together. One birth and one death.
7. The rest of your teeth (accidentally knocked out when I was trying to get the front two out for you – sorry, I didn’t have a *small* hammer!)
8. Spinach doughnuts Hey, these appear to be getting a mention in EVERY blog post.
9. The bum and thong pillow. Apparently, it’s the ‘must have’ item this Christmas (according to me)…

The Bum Thong Pillow