Bring on the Bronco Burgers

So cheap burger patties are part horsemeat.

It was kind of a non-story. 

Surely we all know that any  kind of processed meat product is just a bunch of animals indiscriminately lined up and shoved into a mincing machine.

I mean, hellooo, have you seen polony? Remove the ‘l’ and an ‘o’ and there you have it.

Polony. Pony. Polony. Pony.

And the thought still doesn't disgust me as much as the thought of a McDonald’s Fillet ‘o Fish.

I’m not sure what I find so repulsive about the Fillet ‘o Fish (I've never tried one) but I suspect it’s the unnatural square shape. It doesn't make sense as I've seen the chicken burgers and I still eat those by the dozen. Yum!

But horse isn’t so bad. The French eat ‘em. It’s not panda or rhino meat. It’s not KFC.

From a humanitarian point of view, I’m sure the horses were treated better than the average factory chicken – even the free range ones – and that they lived to an old age before their corpses were tossed in the patty-grinder.

In my opinion people should be more concerned about how much sugar and salt is in their processed beef than how much of it comes from an animal that isn’t a cow.

To Tesco: Just repackage as 'Bronco Burgers - What Real Cowboys Eat!' and you'll be fine.

THE TEDDY BEAR DEATH SQUAD

At first I wasn’t sure if it was a rescue or kidnapping. Later it would all make sense.

Well, as much sense as it could possibly make.

I’m out back having a smoke by the bins on my own. By myself I don’t have to stop people grabbing my balls.

Because everyone wants to grab Elvis by the balls.

I know Rod Stewart has this problem too.

Okay, maybe not the real Rod Stewart, but certainly the one getting on stage now. Oddly enough, his name is Josh Stuart.

After his set is done he’ll come outside and be mauled by women. They’ll be all over him asking for autographs and wanting to buy him drinks. One or two might even slip their panties into his pocket with a wink and a phone number.

Sounds great, right?

The problem is they’re not the young, nubile women we all got into music for in the first place.

Rod Stewart was popular, what, thirty years ago? So the women who come to Josh’s show and pinch his ass or cup his nuts were eighteen and nineteen about thirty years ago.

He thinks he’s got it bad. He needs to take a look at me. The women trying to get in my pants could be my grandma.

But I didn’t choose Elvis, I remember, Elvis chose me.

It’s not just the old women with sagging tits and crow’s feet that get me down. It’s the hair and that ridiculous voice.

Uh huh huh huh!

 He wasn’t even like that. It’s like so many people created this caricature of the King that now they think the caricature is the real thing.

The bins stink of stale beer and rotting meat. From inside I can hear Josh belting out Maggie May. Next it’ll be Hot Legs and then I Don’t Want To Talk About It and then I’ll be back on.

I flick my cigarette into the darkness. Maybe I’ll mix it up a bit. Start with Jailhouse Rock and try out that new version of Suspicious Minds I’ve been working on.

The voice sounds like honey and broken glass in a blender, “Hello, Mister Robertson.”

It’s coming from across the street, “They say you’re the best Elvis Presley in a hundred mile radius.”

The man who steps into the streetlight is tall and so pale. He’s dressed in a black coat and top hat. His long, skinny legs don’t bend as he walks towards me.

I got to find myself a new gig. Too many weirdoes around here.

“Always nice to meet a fan,” I smile, “I’m back on in fifteen. See you after the show.”

“You’re seeing me now, Mister Robertson.”

It’s his turn to smile, but it’s not a Kodak moment. The corners of his mouth rise up and up until it looks like someone took a knife to his cheeks.

When they reach behind his ears his lips part. They’re not human teeth, more like a cartoon shark’s. Long and thick and scalpel sharp.

“Damn,” is all I can think to say.

My hand is on the doorknob. I know I should run through the kitchen and into the safety of my fans.

But I don’t.

Smiley walks like he’s moving through mud. His eyes are crazy. The pupils vibrating, epileptic. Slowly his arm reaches out to the side.

He takes a violin out of thin air.

With his other hand he pulls the bow from nowhere.

He holds the violin between his head and shoulder, stops in the middle of the road. The smile gets even wider, “Here’s something I wrote especially for you.”

And that’s when the van hits him.

Thud!

Screeching tyres!

The grinding noise of gears being hastily shifted.

Then a whirring sound of the driver reversing.

The van jolts up and down as Smiley takes another hit.

“Uh… hey…” I stutter. My brain frantically tries to process it all, but pops a gasket when the van door slides open and three guys jump out.

Three guys dressed like me.

Three guys dressed like Elvis.

Two of them grab me. I’m too confused to struggle. The third, the one with the machine gun, steps round the back and shouts, “Hey, Pork Chop. All I’ve got is some feet here. Move it forward.”

Gears grate again.

The van moves forward.

Smiley is revealed.

He’s looking rosy. He’s still smiling.

The machine-gun-Elvis spits on him and opens fire. Smiley’s body bounces rapidly with the rounds. The other two pull me inside the van.

The driver is a black dude with serious sideburns. He’s also Elvis. I wonder how safe his driving is with those sunglasses on.

He looks in his rear view at me and says, “You better be worth it,” then looks past me, behind the van, “Oh shit! Shitshitshit!”

He sticks his head out the window and shouts, “Trigger! Move your ass!”

I turn to look out the back window. Smiley is on his feet. He looks like he’s laughing.

Trigger swings into the van, “Go, go, go!”

The van screams away but before we round the corner Smiley has a chance to play one note on his violin. 

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but as he slides the bow across the strings the back window shatters and something slices my earlobe clean off.

Blood seeps from my ear, through my fingers, all over the place.

Picking my lobe off the floor I say, “Sorry about the seats. Must have been some glass.”

They all trade glances and Trigger, the guy with the gun, says, “Right… the glass.”

This is an extract from 'The Absolute Evilness of the Anti-Santa and other stories' by Nathan Casey.

Available for download: 

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Angels, ghosts, superheroes and the best place to live after the inevitable Apocalypse. You’ll learn why you shouldn’t buy a 3D TV and why the world really, really needs Elvis impersonators.

Plus a support group with a grim revelation – Santa Claus might not exist, but the Anti-Santa does… and she’s coming for you.

Kitty Curry

Standing by the bins at the back of work having a fag break and a ginger kitten scampers across and into the back door of the Chinese take-away. I wander over and call the kitty to me. Partly because I think it’ll scoff some food and partly coz, well, I’m afraid they’ll throw it in a pot and serve it up as chicken.

This may brand me as ridiculous at best and racist at worst, but there you go… A few years ago in Plymouth a take-away was shut down because Health & Safety found a bunch of pigeon traps in its courtyard; so maybe the shards of this story are embedded in my unconscious.

The funny thing is that when I call the cat over the Asian cook, in very broken English, tells me it’s okay, he can come in. I ask if it’s their cat and he says yes. The cat strolls into their office and the cook makes like his hands are holding invisible cutlery and he’s feeding himself, “Dinner! Dinner!” he says.

Okay, I reply, and while I’m finishing my smoke I wonder whose dinner he was referring to.

Why You Should Watch The Paralympics

I have to admit I’m more excited about the Paralympics than I’ve ever been for the regular/normal/ordinary Olympics.

Maybe it’s because of the cool ad campaign for the Para’s –the Public Enemy track banging while the Paralympians look all surly on-screen, Murderball wheelchairs slamming into each other, and the blades that Oscar Pistorius runs on look a bit like alien legs, awesome.

Or maybe it’s because regular, normal and ordinary is a bit boring.

A while back I had a beer with a marathon runner. He had lost his leg in a motorbike accident and what would make most people shrivel up under the bedsheets and bemoan their potential invalidity didn’t stop him from sucking it up and just getting on with his life.

He told me that after running for tons of hours it was his ‘good’ leg that ached and gave him gyp. His lost limb, as you’d expect, didn’t give him any problems at all. He even mentioned that it would be a lot easier if he had two prosthetics instead of only the one.

Kind of casts doubt over the expression: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

According to all the sci-fi flicks we’ll soon be replacing our ears with mobile phones and iPods, exchanging our eyeballs for digital thingies that can upload holiday snaps to Facebook and zoom in like Superman’s, and chopping off our arms so they can be replaced with bionic ones. And when all this ramps up we’ll be jostling for mega-legs that run faster, jump higher and turn footballs into cannonballs.

A couple of years back the Olympic committee didn’t want SA’s Ozzie Pistorius to compete with the norms, saying his blades gave him an unfair advantage. So it only seems logical that in a few decades’ time it’ll be the Paralympians that break all the records.

But the Paralympics is about more than sporting achievement, and in my mind is more important than the regular/normal/ordinary/boring Olympics. The Paralympics has the power to inspire not just the disabled, but every one of us. In fact, it should make the rest of us feel shame for every time we gripe about the weather or our boss or anything for that matter.

The boring Olympics might highlight the physical triumphs of exceptional men and women, but the Paralympics does more – it showcases the triumphs of the spirit, and the strength of the soul.

A Reboot with Soul

So I got up nice and early and made bacon and eggs and coffee to take up to the missus in bed and still didn’t get to see the new Spiderman movie.

It’s not like she doesn’t go in for comic book movies – she loved Iron Man and enjoyed Avengers – but she just doesn’t get all giggly about the impending ‘Dark Knight Rises’ like I do.

At least superhero films these days manage to get decent actors and an actual live scriptwriter. I shudder at the thought of the pre-Nolan ‘Batman & Robin’ with Arnie Schwarzablahblah and she-of-the-weird-feet Uma Thurman.

It was fucking embarrassing when I insisted a group of us went to the cinema to see it. When we all left I was mortified and my girlfriend at the time patted me on the shoulder and said, “It wasn’t that bad” as though she was consoling me for the loss of my dog.

If they’d taken the piss out of me it’d have been okay, but they consoled me, for Christ’s sake. It was THAT bad.

But the good thing about these films is if you fuck up you always get another shot. Hell, the ‘reboot’ was invented by the comics. There are so many versions of Batman it’s hard to keep track so when I heard grumbles about it being “too soon” to reboot Spiderman I waved the notion away.

The Tobey Maguire Spiderman got a bit naff, so instead of wringing their hands about it they just had another go. I hear the acting's better in this one, anyway.

Comic companies are always reinventing these myths. They do them in creative ways like ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths” in the Eighties or “Zero Hour” in the Nineties, or they have cool asides like the fascist Superman in “Elseworlds” and the brilliant “Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller. If you think about it, the Batman turds that came after Tim Burton’s two were so different they were practically reboots; it’s just that there wasn’t the concept of ‘reboot’ in Hollywood yet so they called them sequels.

I hear so many new Batman fans sad because Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is coming to an end. They think there’s not gonna be another Batman movie for ten years.

Personally, I think that if the Bane character in “Dark Knight Rises” does what he does in the “Knightfall” storyline in the comics (i.e: breaking Batman’s back and putting him in a wheelchair), there’s going to be another trilogy with the new Batman/Azrael character and how he goes psycho and Bruce Wayne has to come back and fight him and reclaim the mantle.

How cool would that be?

My wife knows better than to want a lie-in when Batman hits the big screen. Coz then she’d be waking up to an empty house while I’m munching popcorn and staining my trousers with excitement.