Bernard Watson's blog

If someone offered me some New England Patriots playoffs tickets, or better, New England Patriots Super Bowl tickets, well, what could I say? Even I, the esteemed Doctor Watson, am speechless with awe at the invincibility of the New England Patriots right now. I mean, how good can one team be? The systematic demolition of pretty much anyone who fancies their chances this season has meant that the Patriots are now officially the top dogs of the NFL, and everybody else must bow, wow, wow, down to them and say "Yes, Sir!!!"
read more ...

Well, this past year had us rolling in the aisles, didn’t it? And weeping, and gnashing our teeth, and even crawling on all fours (if we were a photographer) in order to snap a pic of a young woman’s crotch as she struggled against the combined forces of alcohol, cocaine, and Oxycodone while alighting from a parked vehicle. Drug interactions such as the above can, er, cause you to forget to put on all your clothes, apparently, and photographers quickly seized the initiative as only the gutter press can – by appropriately lying in the gutter. But worthier things occurred this year, so let’s move away from the gutter and spend some quality time to look back on important stuff, like Classic Rock.
read more ...

It’s been a busy week for famous idiots, this. First we had Amy Winehouse’s utter toilet brush of a husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, being jailed for – wait for it – grievous bodily harm (or assault, as common people call it), resulting in Mrs. Winehouse arriving one hour late for a concert, while hundreds holding Amy Winehouse tickets traipsed out onto the pavement (as British people call it), chanting obscenities and generally making asses (as Americans call them) of themselves. That this streak of piss actually managed to successfully assault another full-grown human man I find extremely doubtful, unless the guy in question was:
read more ...

Bombarded as we are here in the United States with news items about cops shooting glass jars off the heads of skunks, and Coke and Pepsi deliverymen engaging in fisticuffs, we sometimes need distraction from the mayhem. And what better salve than to cast one’s mind to that fairer ground of the autumn glades of Olde Englande, where conker season is just beginning. When the skies turn that leaden grey over Blighty, and the leaves flash their golden effulgence in the late afternoon sunshine that cuts suddenly through the clouds, autumn has arrived. Throngs of children comb the woods, searching for plump, mahogany jewels. These jewels are horse chestnuts, or conkers, as they call them over there, the fruit of a massive tree, proud as an oak and easily as tall as a sycamore. I well remember scouring the fallen piles of orange and amber leaves as a lad, my eyes straining in the pale light of the shortened days, and the jolt of excitement upon spying a big polished brown orb. But finding a conker was only the beginning, whether you knocked it down with a well-aimed stick, or scaled a horse chestnut tree to shake the branches and send the conkers raining down on friends who were forever grateful.
read more ...

Well, the great man is no more. Pavarotti, he who gave us the most useful accompaniment to European soccer, to doing the dishes, to life itself, has finally popped his clogs, as they say in Northern England. He's dead.

Pavarotti exploded into the popular consciousness after performing Nessun Dorma at the opening ceremony of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. For the first time, England's beer-bellied idiot fat slob violent thugs were able to experience the soaring joy of release provided by the legendary Italian tenor, in between vicious baton charges and truncheonings from the Italian Carabinieri. Where the working classes in most countries were more accustomed to lending an ear to pop music or jazz, Pavarotti introduced the great tradition of Italy to the European masses that memorable year, and soccer and opera were forever wed. The first of the now globally loved "The Three Tenors" concerts was held on the eve of the World Cup Final, when Pavarotti performed with fellow tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. From that moment, the common people of Europe, even the pig-ignorant English, developed a great love of opera. The rest is history.
read more ...

Is it just me, or was there a ludicrous spectacle broadcast live on national TV last weekend? I refer, of course, to the long-awaited debut of David Beckham for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Never has a single (and apparently not very intelligent) individual allegedly rocked America since Elvis Presley in the late 1950s!

General Manager of the Galaxy Alexi Lalas – whose team finished second bottom in the league last season - declared recently that Beckham can be "bigger than Tiger". At first I took this to be a reference to an aspect of their relationship that was best left to the tabloids, until I realized Lalas was actually inferring that Beckham was perfectly capable of picking up a golf club and becoming the best player in the world. Outrageous! Further in that article, which is featured on an unofficial Beckham website, Lalas says that Beckham can be bigger than Michael Jordan, which frankly had me laughing out loud. One, Beckham’s skeleton is over twenty one years old, and if my years at Harvard Medical School taught me anything it’s that the human bone machine stops growing at that point. And two, Michael Jordan was a basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, and so is really very tall and not likely to be topped by a dimwitted Limey superstar whose wife has never read a book in her life.

read more ...

Well, it’s almost that time again. I’d almost forgotten about football season, to be honest, until the Mayor pulled up in his car the other day while I was tending my herb garden, honked his horn and shouted, “Watson! Let’s take a trip down memory lane!”

The Mayor’s trips down memory lane are legendary in this part of town, and this one was no exception. My herbs had to wait another day. Having made a brief visit to a certain, er, gentleman’s club downtown to pick up some lady friends of his, we installed ourselves in his plush private theater and he brought out a stack of DVDs to play on his six-foot television screen, with surround sound. And once more the magic began.

read more ...

Several evenings ago I was invited round to the home of the Springfield Police Chief for dinner. After the meal (which was frankly inedible) we sat around his Ikea table and amicably chatted as we smoked third-rate cigars the Chief insisted were Cuban (if they were Cuban, I shudder to think what they must’ve been immersed in for the journey across the border, as they literally tasted like camel feces. You’d sleep better in your bed at night if you didn’t thoroughly believe your city’s Chief of Police was an utter nincompoop, not least due to his inability to detect counterfeit garbage).

read more ...

Ricky Hatton climbed into the boxing ring in the desert a while back, and faced a quite diminished Jose Luis Castillo, destroying him with a fourth-round liver shot that sent his giblets through his ribs and his frame to the canvass. During the after-fight interview, Hatton proclaimed himself to have delivered more action in those four rounds than Floyd Mayweather had produced in his entire career, and now the American has lashed back. The Hit-Man’s post-match euphoria, undoubtedly justified to some extent, has hurt Mayweather, who has surely discussed the matter of sorting Hatton out with his close friend, rapper 50 Cent.

read more ...

Police guitarist Andy Summers is scheduled to perform a book signing for his biography, One Train Later at a London branch of Borders on April 4, a few weeks before the once-mythical tour they've all been waiting for begins in North America.
Andy will read from the book he has written, thereby smashing the myth that guitarists (and people from northern England in general) are thickheaded dullards who spend their lives eating tripe and racing pigeons (that's racing pigeons, as in engaging in the sport, not consuming them in pies, as they do wood pigeons, confusing, I know) but are actually quite intelligent when they want to be, they just don't want to be very often.
read more ...