Chip Dale's Thought Experiments: The Campaign

I've decided to do something about a travesty that has befallen one of our own. Bryan Appleyard’s Thought Experiments hasn’t updated in days and Bryan is now struggling to get Blogger’s support staff to recognize his problem . I feel his pain. Last week, I too fell victim to Blogger's victimization of the brightest and best and the injustice brings tears to all three of my eyes like I'm wearing a salt and vinegar flavoured thong.

The situation has clearly got out of hand and it's time for The Chipster to pull some strings. I've decided to launch a campaign to free Thought Experiments and Big Frank had produced a rather tasteful logo, which I ask you all to wear on your blogs until Bryan is released from his virtual cell.

Blogger must learn that when they silence one of us, they silence us all. This is about personal liberties, the freedom of the press, and about the virtues of having a stable backend. With your help, I hope to make 'Thought Experiments Saved Through Individuals Campaigning Loudly Enough' the big issue of the coming week and I want T.E.S.T.I.C.L.E. to grow enormously in size. To get the ball rolling, I want 10,000 angry and determined bloggers ready to march on Whitehall on Friday where I hope stage a mass strip involving cats dressed as clowns. Gabby has already taken it upon herself to write the campaign’s song.

What has happened to Thought Experiments?
Oh, what has evil Blogger gone and done?
You weren’t like animal experiments,
Smoking beagles, monkeys with makeup on.

She says it will be better when she’s had a couple more days to work on it…

Some of you might be wondering why I’ve decided to lead this fight. You know how busy I've been lately. But I was persuaded to act when Gabby roused me from my mid-afternoon nap.

Before I was woken, I had been dreaming about Cameron Diaz and a jar of chocolate flavoured mustard so you can no doubt imagine my reluctance to open my eyes. I can normally sleep through one of Gabby’s heckles, only this one had something hard attached to it and resonated as it bounced off my head.

‘Chippy Dale!’ she snapped or more accurately barked from the armchair across the room. ‘Are you awake?’

I raised my eyelids and found myself looking at a slightly dented tin of Cornish shortcrust biscuits lying on my chest.

'Are you even listening to me?' asked the voice full of Romanian impatience.

‘O, speak again, bright angel,’ I said, ‘for thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head, as is a winged messenger...

I didn’t get chance to finish. The bright angel sent a permanent marker pen fizzing my way. It was more than enough to stop a man misusing Shakespeare for sarcastic purposes.

‘You are a bad man,’ she said, sitting with my laptop on her knee. ‘You let people down.’

‘Me?’ I protested. ‘Who have I let down?’

Didn’t she know the lengths I go to in order to help people? I wanted to tell her about the last week, about the two thousand word piece on Wallace Stevens I’d written for Ms. Baroque, the trouble I went to attending the Blog Power Awards, and the free show I gave everybody when I whipped off my clothes as I picked up my award. I wanted to mention previous months and all the charity work I’ve done, the time I took attending the British Thong Society. I felt like reminding her of my visit to the old folks home…

She held up hands as if to stop me before I could begin to recount my charity work.

‘You not reply to people who email you,’ she said.

I shuddered at the thought that she’d been reading my mail.

‘Who didn’t I email?’ I asked, suddenly feeling a little exposed lying there naked on the sofa.

‘Mr. Blister,’ she said. ‘He email you this week and you never answer.’

Blood through my heart ran cold. She was right. Dear old Montague Blister had emailed me last week but I’d received the message as I'd been heading out the door. I’d forgotten all about replying to the poor man.

Gabby just tutted with the arrogance of one who is rarely wrong. She tapped away at the keyboard.

‘Lots and lots of emails,’ she said. ‘And you not answer every one.’

I made a resolution that I would email Mr. Blister as soon as I got my laptop back.

‘If you want to be good person like me,' said Gabby, 'you must be good friend to people. You must learn to be selfless, Chippy. Good people do good things.’

‘Like threatening to make sausage meat out of the newspaper boy’s liver?’

‘He noisy,’ she replied. ‘But warning good. Gabby not have him waking neighbours.’

‘I suppose,’ I said, rubbing my head where my own sleep had been interrupted.

She slammed the laptop lid down. ‘You do okay, Chippy. No messages Gabby not like but you must be more considerate to people.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied calmly.

‘No, Chippy. You do very well. No other women. No naked pictures on laptop. No. You do very very good.’

‘I just have to learn to be a better person,’ I agreed.

Gabby just smiled. She had clearly made her point.

I’ll get plenty of chances to be a better person later this week. I have something else to write for Ms. Baroque’s blog, which I’ll get done as soon as I’ve finished groveling to Blister and asking for his forgiveness. For the moment, I just need to thank Ian Grey for the fleshy gift he gave me at the Blog Power awards, though this might need some explaining...

You have to picture the scene. I’d gone up to pick up my award for ‘Most Articulate Wordsmith’ when I decided that I’d give everybody an extra treat my whipping off my thong. A couple of clicks of my mouse and I'd disabled the 'clothes' option and I was standing there, surrounded by dozens of virtual visitors, in my virtual birthday suit. There were, of course, a few gasps and virtual gasps, which I naturally acknowledged with my usual humility. Until, that is, somebody pointed out that I didn’t have any genitals.

The room fell silent.

It was true. I was like an Action Man figure below the waist. I didn't know what to say. I was ready to blame my computer for lacking the processing power to render my genitalia when, thankfully, Ian stepped in and presented me with some genitals from his own collection. So relieved, I foolishly tried them on, without giving any thought as to how they were meant to be worn. I was stunned to discover that they attached themselves to my elbow. It was not a pretty sight and there were some screams in the room. I also attribute the genitals on my elbow with my computer choosing that moment to crash and to dump me back to my desktop.

And that's when I decided that I'd fight the evils of technical glitches. It's why I've decided to head T.E.S.T.I.C.L.E. and it's also why I'm so sure we'll win.

After all, when was the last time you knew a man with a large penis attached to his elbow to be wrong?

I Give You: The President

Well loyal thonglateers, your friendly neighbourhood Chipster has decided to take your sagely advice and accept the high honour offered to him and become the new Chairman of The British Thong Society.

Your messages of support had me firmly convinced but my decision was hardened even more by this weekend's phone message from Fern Britton. I thought I better get in there before she tries to outdo me and promise them the earth and Philip Schofield. And to be perfectly honest about it, I began to realize that this might be the only honour coming my way in the near future; what with the Blog Power awards now slipping from my slightly oily grasp. Unless we can stage a recovery, I think James will be presenting himself with the award.

Knowing I wouldn't be able to go up and pick up a Blog Power, I turned my attention to the BTS over the weekend and was very pleasantly surprised with what I discovered. I’m to be the head honcho of one of the most well established and respected societies in London. They have some quite auspicious links. Wikipedia doesn’t throw a damn thing up about them (I'll have to see to that) but once Gabby noticed that they'd provided a web address at the top of their letter, I began to see that I was onto a winner. Did you H.G. Wells was one of the founding members?

They have a rather poor website, which I think it would be my first duty to improve, and a proper domain name might help them connect with the younger generation. However, that’s all for the future. For the moment, I just want to mention that Gabby has decided to mark the occasion by destroying a little more of the planet.

She’s bought me an air conditioning unit the size of a small fridge. Because of the orientation of the flat, the main living room and my office get intolerably warm during the day. During the summer, I can barely sit down and write for more than five minutes without getting frustrated with the heat. That's why last summer I did most of my posting from the local library, full as it was with the winos in their Bermuda shorts and wearing straw hats. Gabby says that the President of the British Thong Society needs to take more care of himself and his thong. Which is why, though the heat is splitting the concrete outside my window, the thong between my thighs is barely body temperature and as for my body temperature, it is 'oh-so-cool-thank-you-very-much’.

Lovely.

Ned Sherrin's Busted Lip

I got in last night to find the Chipster’s answer phone producing a light show that would induce a fit in man less healthy than I, or at least, one who hasn't spent the last ten years stripping under strobes. At first, I thought it must have been a message of complaint from James Higham, asking me to stop encouraging you all to vote for me in the Blog Power Awards. We’re running neck and neck, though for a few moments last night, I pulled out into the lead for Most Articulate Wordsmith. The idea is that we can each vote once a day and if we can only keep these votes going until Wednesday, we might just steal this one. The question is: can you keep it up? The Chipster intends to push you every inch of the way.

It turns out, however, that the message wasn’t related to the Blog Power Awards. It seems I’d been too hasty in making a judgement earlier in the day. It was a pretty terse message from Fren Britton, telling me that she would be interested in becoming the new honourary president of the British Thong Society and that she’s pretty annoyed that she hadn’t been asked.

If I wasn’t convinced before, this gives me an extra reason why I should now accept the honour. The thing with Fern is that once she gets it into her mind that she wants something, nothing will stop her from getting it. The woman is like American foreign policy. It might take an eternity to decide to move, but once it’s going, it can shift continents whether continents want to be shifted or not.

I had this problem with her a year or so ago. Those of you new to Chip Dale’s Dairy probably don’t know about the run in I had with dear Fern when ‘This Morning’ came to Wales for a week during the assembly elections.

I’d been invited on the show to talk about my life as the country’s top male stripper and also explain why I was then such a huge supporter of the Lib Dem cause. At first, everything was going well. The lawyers had passed my thong for morning viewing and, so long as I didn’t turn my back to the camera, I'd be litigation free. I’d been fully made up by a make-up lady who said she hadn’t seen a tan as real as mine since the days she used to work with the late Bob Monkhouse. Of course, he wasn’t the late Bob Monkhouse back then and his tan was better than it’s been lately, which made it quite the compliment.

After that, I went out onto the studio floor where I began limber up in a corner. That's when Fern came across. Turns out that she’d taken offence at the way I’d bent over. I don’t want to get into the biological descriptions of what she claims to have seen but there was an accusation that my thong had not covered something that should have been covered and a previous evening’s meal had been on display. She mentioned 'prawns'...

You might say that her interest in thong development began at that moment because it turned into a heated argument about the right way to wear a thong. Then she told me that she didn’t want me on the show and asked me to leave the studio. Of course, having travelled all the way from Bangor to Cardiff, I wasn’t too happy and I told her as much.

I regret pretty much everything that happened from that moment on.

Old Schofield tried to act as peacemaker but the man has too kind a heart. He tried to lift Fern off me as we scrapped on the floor. He should have kept well back. He caught Fern’s leg in his mush and then he just went crazy! He was lashing out in all directions and even Fern looked frightened as he overturned a studio camera and then turned his fury on Ned Sherrin who ended up with a busted lip. Poor old Ned should learn the time and place for a wry bon mot.

In the end, it took the common sense of Shane Richie to calm things down. Fern nipped back to make up to have power put on her bruised knuckles and I was led limping from the studios, swearing that I’d never make another appearance on morning TV. And to this day, I haven’t.

I don't know why I've told you all this except by way of asking you to vote for me. But I hope you've done that already and all ready to vote for me again tomorrow.

Milky Words

I’ve been plagued by words. Nasty, horrible, loathsome little things. You think you’ve mastered them, rounded them up on the page, contained them inside the fence posts of commas, semi colons, and full stops. And then they overrun you again.

But that’s the trouble with being an articulate wordsmith. The very thing you try to master always has a greater hold over you.

It began this morning when Gabby committed another gross violation against the English language. We were sitting at the breakfast table and Gabby had her foot wedged against the toast rack as she painted her nails.

‘Chippy,’ she said. ‘Monica say she stay one more weeks.’

I went cold.

‘A week not long,’ she carried on. ‘A week only six days.’

‘Stop thinking in Romanian,’ I snapped and promptly dropped my newspaper into my Alpen. ‘You’re in Europe now. A week is seven days.’

‘Well even seven days isn’t long,’ she replied as she applied another layer of Ronseal to her toe nails. She leaned back, admiring the finish.

‘Even one day is too long,’ I told her. ‘I wouldn’t mind it if she didn’t practise her knife throwing in the flat. It feels like a lifetime when you’ve got razor sharp blades whistling past your ears at all hours of the day.’

‘Every hour of the day? And what does that mean?’ sulked Gabby. ‘Six days or seven days. What difference? Only twelve hours.’

‘There you go again!’ I groaned, as I inspected my ruined paper. ‘Europe, Gabby. You’re in the EU now. A day is twenty four hours and an hour is sixty minutes.’

‘Sixty?’ She looked puzzled. ‘What happens to the other fourteen.’

In Romania, you see, each hour has seventy four minutes.

‘They go into the next hour,’ I explained as I squeezed the milk from a lactose intolerant Daniel Finkelstein.

‘So the next hour has seventy four minutes?’

‘No, the next hour has… Look,’ I said, throwing the paper to one side, ‘does it really matter?’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But only so long as Monica can stay an extra week.’

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘How about she stays an extra month?’

‘Really? You mean that?’ She furrowed her brows. ‘Chippy mean Gabby’s sister can stay an extra 45 days?’

‘No,’ I sighed. ‘You’re in Europe, remember. And in Europe a month is four days long. I want her gone by Monday.’

Who's The Daddy?

The Chipster is first to admit when he’s wrong but only the second to point it out.

Thanks to Steve at The Daily Referendum, I now notice that I declared my opponents the victors too early in the night. I’ve actually made it through to the next stage of the Blog Power awards. Of course, it's only one category when I hoped to get through in nineteen, but the fact that it’s for the ‘Most Articulate Wordsmith’ has not been lost on me, though I don't know what to say. I mean. Er... Cripes. Cheers...

Of course, I’m also very grateful. And I suppose I should also say congratulations to the other nominees, some of whom have the good sense to pop occasionally into Chip Dale Central and leave comments and otherwise bask in the glow of my greatness. I hope you'll all go and vote for Steve and Rilly at least once whenever to take you five minute cigarette breaks when repeatedly clicking on my name long into the evening.

It means, of course, that I’ll be pestering every single one of you to vote from now on. If you have relatives (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) I want you to pester them too. Who knows, I might be the cause of a family reunion. Of course, if you pester them enough I might be the cause of a family meltdown, but that’s really none of my concern. I mean, I’m a stripper for God’s sake! I’m not some emotional councillor…

You can also assure yourself that you won’t be the only ones voting like right wing pensioners in Florida. Gabby has already written to her Romanian clan to get them voting. I expect the pigeon to hit Romanian airspace some time tomorrow morning, so look for a sudden surge of peasant votes, smelling faintly of potato gin, around that time.

Finally, I want to make us of this late and slightly drunken post, to thank all five of you who voted for me. It really goes to show what a huge and devoted readership can do when they put their minds to a task. If you’re interested, you might like to know that I have plans in a drawer somewhere which would involve us in overthrowing old world order and creating a utopia based around the thongs. Unfortunately, my plans need nine of us, and with five of you out there, Gabby, Monica, and myself, that’s only eight. Still, in a few months time, perhaps we’ll have the numbers to make a go of it.

For now, it’s good to have been nominated.

[I'm sure there are spelling mistakes in the above and some pretty dodgy grammar too, but even we articulate wordsmiths have to rush off to watch the football occasionally...]

An Evening With Jan Leeming

I think we can all agree that it’s been a frantic few days and I haven’t really had chance to explain what I did during my enforced absence. But before I do that, I’d like to direct your attention to my previous post. For some odd reason, people have failed to read between the lines and left here with the impression that I asked them not to vote for me. Of course, I did ask people not to vote for me but do you really need any greater incentive to go and throw your car keys in the Blog Power salad bowl? You might end up going home with the Chipster. What more can I say than that?

So far I seem to have nominations in the categories for ‘Most Articulate Wordsmith’ and ‘Most Consistently Entertaining Blog or Column’, so please go and add your nominations to the pile smelling of hazelnut scented buttock scrub. If I get through the nomination stage, I vow to use every contact in my little black book to help my campaign for election. And when I become king of the blogs, things will change around here… All those people who mocked me, they will become the mocked. And if you've not been with me, then you've been against me and I shall smite yea with the wrath of...

Sorry.

The Chipster can get a little carried away when wearing his black leather thong of world domination.

Which, by a rather odd quirk of circumstance, is what I was wearing over the weekend.

I’ve been promising to tell you about my weekend but now’s my chance. I’ll be honest and admit that all my best thongs were in the wash on Saturday when it came to attending the charity bash I’d help organise in aid of the local leper hospice. A whole galaxy of stars were on hand to see me in my black leather thong and they seem properly impressed by the scale and quality of the pouched beast as Gabby and I mingled with the likes of Jeremy Beadle, Jan Leeming, John Noakes, Mike (the barman from Only Fools and Horses)…

I can't say enough good things about the event. It was a fantastic evening of song, dance, a little animal cruelty, and lots of drunken merriment. And at the midway point, we all had ourselves a raffle and put ourselves up for sale for the evening..

And to cut a long story short, I won Jan Leeming for the night!

Well, what can I say about Jan? She's a lovely lady with many funny tales to tell about life in the BBC. Things I discovered: Nicholas Witchell is double jointed and Michael Buerk collects teabags. Gabby wasn’t too impressed, of course, when I pulled out Jan's name and neither was Alexi Sayle who drew the shortest straw in the barrel, so to speak, and walked away with my Romanian buttercup. Never have I seen a bald slight-overweight man go as pale as I did when Gabby decided to show him how to skin a dog. I grant that it all got pretty gory for a while and poor Sharon Osbourne’s shitzu will never be the same again. By the time we managed to prise it out of Gabby’s hands, the poor animal was wearing its own ears around its tail.

But I’m a big enough man to not allow such a thing to spoil my evening. Around ten o’clock, I slipped out with Jan so we could enjoy the fresh air. We got talking and it turned out that she has a great fondness for yoghurt. I also have a great love of the well cultured stuff and we nipped to a local all night delicatessen which sells the best strawberry yoghurt imaginable.

When we got back to the party, the thing had gone with a rowdy mess. Keith Chegwin can always be relied upon to ruin a good show. He was standing on the stage singing vulgar ditties about the Welsh and Pat Butcher (the one from Eastenders) had Terry Griffiths (the snooker player) on the floor and trapped behind her pink. That’s when Chrisopher Biggins came running from the crowd and snatched the tub of yoghurt out of Jan’s hands. Jan, of course, wouldn’t put with that. I couldn't stop her grabbing the nearest object – which happened to be a sink plunger – and went lurching into battle. I didn’t want to get involved. Nothing worse than celebrities fighting over scraps of food.

Instead I went and found Gabby who was alone in a corner of the room picking at an antique grand piano with her pocket knife. She wanted to slip away without anybody noticing our leaving but I had to give Jan a wave. I also promised to send her some more of the locally produced yoghurt but I don’t think she heard me. She was dragging an unconscious Christopher Biggins around the hall by the plunger which was stuck to his forehead with something pink, sticky and produced by a quality Welsh dairy.

Overall, it was a bloody good night that raised plenty of money for charity.

Corruption In Higham Places

Corruption! Scandal! Outrage! Hamsters with switchblades!

In my self-appointed role as moral guardian of the UK blogging scene, I’ve stumbled across some pretty shady operations in my time. Let’s not forget the night I sent the coast guard after that high profile blogger who we all knew to be attending illegal hamster fights on a freighter moored at the mouth of the Thames estuary. And I’m sure we all remember the photographs the police later released of the poor little creatures with knives sellotaped to their backs. Is it no wonder that certain people never mention such things in their blogs? And if you don’t believe me, go run a search and you’ll find that the same gentleman never mentions ‘hamsters duelling’. Condemned by his own words, you might say… Shameful.

Yet, no matter how great the depravity of my past discoveries, nothing could have prepared me for what I read this evening.

Tonight I found proof that The Blog Power Awards are fixed.

You heard me right. I said ‘fixed’ and I don’t mind revealing the extent of the corruption.

You see, I’ve discovered that they are nothing but a cheap popularity contest!

You ask how I know this? Well take a look for yourself. There are bloggers out there who are actively canvassing for votes.

I know what you’re thinking and I found it just as hard believe myself. To think that a man we all hold in such esteem is so desperate for approval that he’s asking his readers to email James Higham and nominate him for an award. You don’t see me asking for help, do you? And that’s despite my being nominated in two categories. All I can say is that I’ve had my illusions shattered. I’ve cancelled my order for a dozen black roll-necked sweaters and I’ll never pick up The Sunday Times again. I only worry which of my illusions is next to face a high drop onto a hard surface. Am I to discover that Clive James spends his spring days going from nest to nest in order to hit hatchlings with his tennis racquet? If so, then I only ask that he waits until I've managed to save up and by my signed copy of his Cultural Amnesia...

The simple fact is that your favourite Welsh thongman would never stoop so low as to ask you to love him. And he wouldn’t do that for one very good reason.

It’s all a matter of scale. To make a relevant analogy: when a man feels comfortable with his body, he doesn’t need to add inches the next time he measures himself against the Dear Deride column. You don’t find The Chipster including hips and navels and thumbs to his arithmetic. There is nothing but Dale in his calculations. And when people ask me why I’m a ‘Big Dale’ and not an ‘Average Dale’, I’m always honest and tell them: it’s why I don’t measure myself with a ruler but use a builder’s theodolite. Alternatively, if it happens to be noon on the day of the summer solstice, I do as the Egyptians did and measure myself by calculating how far a shadow is cast in the direction of Luxor.

You see, when it comes to blog popularity, there can be no fair winners. Every loser will have been poorly measured for simple reasons of scale. It’s another example of the big blogs succeeding where we small folk fail. And, for obvious reasons, I chose that term ‘small folk’ very carefully. Popularity can only be measured one way and that’s by visitor numbers and the small fraction who can be bothered to vote for a man in a thong.

It puts a man like me at a great disadvantage. Am I being measured by the length of my readership or the girth of the read? I like to think that my seventeen regular visitors share an experience that comes as close as possible to a night in Bangor town centre on a Saturday night. Can’t you just smell the fragrance of body oil, warmed on the Chipster’s highly toned muscles? Each comma is as calculated as a hip thrust over a tepid glass of Babycham. Each posting amounts to a tangible experience of the best that Welsh stripping has to offer and that, my good friends, is the only reward I expect and care for.

I’m sorry to have had to break this news to you. It’s made for a post full of solemn reflection. I’m a lesser man for having had my illusions shattered. As that great stripper Hugo ‘The Hosepipe’ Cooper used to tell me: leave them with a bang. Even when he was sentenced to three years for male prostitution, I never doubted his advice. Yet today I won’t leave you with a bang. I won’t seek an affirmation of your love. I won't be so cheap as to demean the wonderful thing we have together. I ask that you don’t go voting for the Chipster. No, no, please don’t.

You see, if I don’t play their games, nobody can ever say that I’m small.