Infinite Bussell Overdrive

Revolting developments over at davidbussell.com.

New videos!

New blogs!

New picktures!

New sense of self satisfaction!!!

Come visit. I promise it's more exciting than glancing over to the guy at the next urinal and realising he has a fully functioning hotwheel track running out of his fly!

06:07 - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos

ByeSpace

Well, chum bags, the time has finally come.

I've battled longer than most but I can scream into the void no longer.

MySpace is a purgatory haunted by nought but spammers and the ghosts of teenagers past.

I'm moving my shit to Blogger.



I'm aware of the irony of wasting too many words writing a blog explaining how I won't be writing blogs here anymore, so I'll wrap this up quick like.

I hope you'll carry on reading my stuff, I really do. There's a contest waiting if only you'll follow. Fancy dress? Hmmmmm?

I just wish I could port all your comments and pictures over to Blogger too. Without your contributions the fifty blogs I've archived are lacking a lot of colour. I hope in time that will change.

See you at davidbussell.com!

01:33 - 20 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

Unhappy Snaps
Category: Art and Photography

And they say the camera never lies...

23:55 - 22 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Laughed? I almost died
Category: Blogging

What's the name of that sordid habit one indulges in on an almost daily basis that, if left unchecked, will overwhelm one's waking hours and destroy any hope of a wholesome life?

That's it: a job.

So, I was at my job the other day when a colleague across from my partition pulled a pained face and started making 'ouch' noises. I asked what the matter was and she told me she was having some sort of a chest spasm. She looked anguished, but then she's a serial exaggerator when it comes to this sort of thing. The kind of person who leaps to her feet screaming and flapping her hands by way of a paper cut.

"Holding your left arm like that", I quipped, "I'd say you're more likely having a heart attack than a chest spasm."

It got a nice laugh. Not so much from her (she was really putting on a show with this spasm thing!) but from co-workers in the vicinity. I felt pretty good about myself. Then she toppled off her swivel chair and went still.

As the paramedics stretchered her to the ambulance I looked to my co-workers and realised a strange thing happened. Suddenly I was the arsehole. Pardon me? Was I the one laughing at this poor woman's misfortune? No. I was only a delivery system. My joke (if you could even call it that) may have been the gun, but their laughs were the bullets.

I was making excuses and I knew it. I felt bad about what had happened, of course I did. Rotten in fact. I kept imagining the scenario from her point of view – brain scrambled from lack of blood and oxygen - my leering face, disembodied and wild-eyed as it floated before her. The braying laughter of her executioners as she slipped into oblivion.

It was all leading to this. I always knew my wanton lust for an easy laugh was going to end in some tragedy. How could it not? That relentless craving for a fix… it's a junky habit, and since when did those stories ever end well? Everything in my life is geared towards comedy. I look in the mirror and ask myself, "Is this haircut funny enough?" What's wrong with me? Where does this compunction to make total strangers laugh come from?

People ask me, "How do you write comedy?" (honestly, it's happened, like, twice) and I have an answer for them. I say writing comedy isn't a talent, it's a failure to be able to take a single thing in life seriously. If my best friend died, sure, I'd be cut up, but I'd be lying if said there wouldn't be some lizard part of my brain thinking, "How did he die? Was it funny? How can I make a bit out of this? I hope he fell down a big hole; cancer jokes are so played out."

So, in an effort to assuage any personal revulsion I might have felt as I loomed over my colleague's prone body, I thought back to a story a friend once told me. A story of absolution. A story that proves that this sick need to find funny in even the most unpleasant of things isn't just in me, it's endemic to the human condition.

The story of the brain tuna.

The way he told it (and it's been a while now so I may have rounded off the unsightly corners) it was a conversation between himself and a girl he went to college with. It was one of those post-pub chats where the girl's had enough to drink already and decides to break out the wine. That time of night when her lips are showing a black tide line and she makes that sudden bank towards maudlin. She got to talking about the woes of her life; particularly her dad who, as she described it, had been diagnosed with… a brain tuna. It was all my friend could do not to wet himself. And it wasn't enough she made the mistake once, no, she kept going with it – "Brain tuna, brain tuna, brain tuna…" This baring of the soul, this emotional outpouring, this human pathos - all scuppered by a humorous mispronunciation.

But here's the difference between my friend and I. Not only am I certain I would have laughed in her face, I'm pretty sure I would have scribbled her story in a notebook to enjoy at a later date. What's more, I might not have waited for her to go to the loo first. I mean look at what's going on here; it's not even my story and I'm using it to score a cheap laugh. I'm that kind of scum bag.

And as for my colleague? Motionless there on the office floor?

She died.

07:48 - 19 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Sanity Clause
Category: Blogging

Merry xmas, one and all!

THE HORROR!

14:57 - 23 Comments - 28 Kudos - Add Comment

Forget Paris!
Category: Podcast

Grab your hankie, it's time to make eye squeezins...

14:31 - 28 Comments - 24 Kudos - Add Comment

Petty Pois
Category: Food and Restaurants

07:50 - 17 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Things could have been so very bloody different...
Category: Blogging

Suck on this, all y'all sci-fi writers!

13:17 - 10 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Served Cold
Category: Podcast

All hail the rear cheer...

14:59 - 15 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Tight Dub
Category: Podcast

A little something I knocked up on my webcam...




(extra special thanks to Rollo Hollins for his direction and to Mat Davidson for additional sound work)

15:00 - 24 Comments - 20 Kudos - Add Comment

Awesome Wells
Category: Blogging

Welcome to my Gigli...

14:54 - 12 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Son of a Pitch
Category: Blogging

Two pitches for the price of fun...

16:00 - 11 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Writers Block
Category: Blogging

This writers strike is getting out of control...

03:05 - 24 Comments - 24 Kudos - Add Comment

Christian Rock
Category: Blogging

This picture has pretty much nothing to do with anything, but I'll be damned if I spent ten minutes on Photoshop for the fun of it.

03:04 - 26 Comments - 28 Kudos - Add Comment

Ebony & Irony
Category: Blogging

What up, peepholes?

Anyway, I'm at the gym this morning totally gunning my quads or whatever and there's this wall of a black dude sat opposite doing chest presses. He's got one of those badass girdles on and he's pumping every weight on the machine like he don't even know it.

I'm all like, "no way!" coz his face is a mask and he's on his gazzilionth rep and stuff.

I mean, damn.

So I'm doing my best to keep up with this thyroid case when I see this wasp swoop by. I guess it must have been that sugary sports shit he was chugging, coz the wasp makes a beeline (ha!) right for him.

CLANG!

The guy totally let's go of his weights mid rep! Just ups and goddamn runs. Now he's flapping around the gym like that bug got a bayonet or something. I don't know if he was worried about the panfalictic shock or nuthin', but if you ask me the guy was just a total girlywig.

A realistic wasp

Anyway, shut up, coz it got me thinking about other totally ironical situations. Here's a few that might happen to YOU if your life was more like one of those wicked sweet shows you see on the Paramount channel…

You're waiting to get into the gym to whale on your glutes and shit but the guy who own the place can't get the shutter up. Ha!

You're on a time management course and it totally overruns.

You're at this health and safety seminar and it's so overcrowded the floor, like, collapses.

You go to one of those Stop the Genocide meetings and it all ends up in a rumble (can you even frickin' imagine?!)

You're checking out an ad for a proofreading job and it actually reads 'poof reading'. I don't know where I get this shit from, I genuinely don't.

You're at a murder mystery thing and you get clobbered in the back of the head with a lead pipe.

Power cut in an Electrical shop. Nuff said.

The fire station burns down. I bet this has actually even happened. It blows your mind.

That's about all I could come up with anyway. Maybe you can think of some more. Knock yourself out, tough guy, I'll be chillin' with a bowel.

Hasta la bye bye,

The D

05:28 - 20 Comments - 20 Kudos - Add Comment