A bad back is the gift that keeps on giving, offering you an exciting opportunity to wake up each morning without knowing if you'll be able to get out of bed at the first attempt. To make tomorrow morning a little easier, I booked myself in for a massage. Google, who are the best thing in the world ever for finding things - or they will be, once they unveil Google House, so I can find my keys - have been undone on this occasion. It seems that "massage" is a not-so-secret codeword for a House O'Handjobs. My search turned Google Maps into a literal wankers' paradise. It's amazingly shameless, with these tug-shops having big flashy websites ...

When I last moved house, I was painfully aware of how difficult those first few weeks are before having all the techy bits set up - no Sky (the house didn't even have an aerial, so it was gathering round a 14 inch portable with a mini aerial hanging out the window) - and no Internet. So, in a way that shocked and confused me, BT were really helpful and moved everything across from Old House without any fuss, problems or hassle. In fact, the day I moved into New House, I plugged the router in to see what would happen, and it only bloody worked. Yay, Internet! And that's the end of the story, the Internet worked and ...

Weekends used to be brilliant, spending hours sat in my boxer shorts on the floor watching shit on TV and playing computer games. Now I'm supposed to be a bit more grown up, and can't bum about all the time, I have to actually Do Things at the weekend. The things I should do during the week but am too knackered to. Doing Things means Old Person things, the sort of thing that you don't even think of until you're old, wouldn't consider even needed doing. Things like "going to Ikea", "mowing the lawn", "getting rid of the sofa with the fucked spring that's been sat in the garage for weeks" or "defrosting the freezer". And so ...

As Britain's Got Talent testified, "talent" can be pretty diverse, and doesn't just encompass "good things" like singing, dancing and turning somersaults. Terrifying and bullying a dog into standing on two legs and ballroom dancing doesn't take talent, it takes a sadistic streak. Plate spinning too is spectacularly pointless. I'm not trying to piss on the dreams of people who do these things, well, I am a little bit, but since my discernable talents are, in order of impressiveness: 1) being able to fit my entire fist into my mouth 2) being rude and sarcastic about stuff over the internet and 3) juggling three balls, I've not really got a leg to stand on. The only time I have ...

The war in Iraq has been rumbling on for six years now, despite nobody really knowing what's going on there. Saddam is long dead, and in a plot twist that was written precisely for this decade, his death was shown on YouTube. And apart from that, not a lot has actually happened. World War 2 lasted for 6 years, and enough happened to make over a million movies. What has this war produced? Ross Kemp fannying about in a desert somewhere. Of course, "things happening" in a war generally means "people dying", but WW2 managed to spawn a sit-com, which, even though it was loose with the "sit" and rubbish with the "com", managed to last for ...

Remember the 90s? Of course you do, unless you're one of those irritating sods that's sprung up over the last couple of years that were actually born in the last decade. Even so, thanks to Satellite TV's need to fill hour after hour of airtime with cheap programming, you can experience 90s telly in all it's non-widescreen, blocky glory. The crowning glory of 90s TV wasn't big budget drama or groundbreaking documentaries. No, it was the filmed-in-a-studio-for-the-price-of-a-tin-of-beans gameshow. And here's ten of the best. Catchphrase How it worked: Low-tech animations representing a well-known phrase are shown on a screen. Guess what it is. Why it was wonderful: This is the only program on the list that makes me ...

As much as I love having gadgets, toys and new technology, I hate buying them. No matter what you're buying, a computer, TV or Optimus Prime, there's hundreds of different options to take into consideration, a thousand online reviews letting you know about what's important, and tens of gormlesstwonks stood around in Currys not knowing what you're talking about. And of course ten minutes after you buy it, it's obsolete. Got a standard definition telly? It's not even worth keeping as a doorstop, even if it's one of those enormously chunky ones that take up half your living room. The computer that you deliberated over for hours in 1996 and spent nearly a month's salary on? Won't ...

Victorian children sound like they had a bit of a shit time of it. If they didn't die (which most of them did), then it was a rubbish life of picking bits of coal out of the ground, not playing X-box and dying. In a shocking statistic that I've just made up but sounds about right, only one in twenty of them got to go to school. Kids sat there quietly having the shit beaten out of them by vindictive teachers, with boys learning manly things like woodwork, while girls did the things their little brains could cope with, like cooking and sewing. Just how it should be today, eh Mr. Daily Mail? The only thing that they got ...

Being an overworked occasional TV reviewer for esteemed celebrity website HecklerSpray and spending most Sundays unwilling to do anything more strenuous than sitting still, I spend a lot of time working out my eye muscles in front of the idiot's lantern. The haunted fishtank. The bloody telly. Growing up, there were four channels and you jolly well had to like it. Missing a program meant scouring the TV listings for a late night repeat - usually signed for the deaf (do they ever sleep?) - and programming the 25 digit VideoPlus number in to watch it. And it was terrible when everyone else was discussing something the next day, and you'd only gone and missed it. Now ...

Now we've had three uninterrupted days of sunshine, Summer is officially ON. No more dragging yourself out of the house with a black trenchcoat on - goths of the world, listen - it's T-shirt weather. Being an indoorsy-typist type, I'm blessed with the sort of puny white arms that look like nobody bothered to drop anything on top of the bones, so I resist this weather as much as your typical vampire or Margaret Thatcher. If it were up to me, and it should be, then I'd quite happily wear the same free, promotional t-shirts long after the point that the item being advertised has been consigned to the £1 bin in PC World. Unfortunately, there's that whole society thing, ...

Google, the benevolent overlords of the Internet, have invented a thousand different ways of efficiently getting pornography from the big wide world down the phoneline and into your home. Search their image database for just about anything, and you'll end up with page after page of grot. In fact, go and search for snooker or bleach, with the safe-search option off. Of course you've got the safe search option off already, haven't you? You make me sick. Oh, don't do it at work. Horrible, isn't it. And it's all a bit your fault. Even with YouTube, G-mail, Google Reader, Maps and all their other weird categorisation tools, their best feature by an absolute sodding mile is ...

Darts is one of those hilarious non-sports that Sky Sports use to pad out their schedule, up there with showjumping, bowling, snooker and rugby. Think of a darts match, and you'll probably think of two pot-bellied pub dwellers ambling drunkenly up to the oche and accidentally hitting double barmaid, best summed up in this sketch from Not the Nine O'Clock News: But here's my slightly shameful secret: I bloody love darts. Sky Sports cover the PDC and, as they always do, have gone to town with the presentation. It's no longer two middle aged guys with beer guts and crap facial hair in the function room of a badly lit pub. No, they're playing in front of 5,000 people who can't see ...

Weren't school assemblies great? Before I carry on, I'd like to assure you that this isn't a Stuart Maconie talking-head style "didn't we all ride around on Chopper bikes and then your mum would call you in for fish fingers" article. See this video for his masterful command of talking-headery. What I've got in store is far more tedious than an 8 minute video of a publicity obsessed idiot talking about Morrissey. For those of you who were spared the wonder of a Church of England education, assembly was one of your religious five a day, where the whole school gathered in the hall (sitting on the wooden floor, unless you were in the top year, in which case you got a ...