I was talking to Sea Dave, and he referred to someone as a "land lubber" - a phrase I have often heard uttered from nautical lips. I wondered exactly how one goes about lubbing? What could it involve? Is it fun? Is it painful? Is it dirty in any way?

It turns out that "lubber' is from Scandinavian origin, and means "big, clumsy, stupid fellow who lives in idleness" - so it works as an insult regardless of the "land" prefix. I could call Sea Dave a lubber, and it would make perfect sense. This does beg the question of what the hierarchy of insults is. I checked, and it goes like this:

(MOST OFFENSIVE)
land c**t
land lubber
land person
c**t
lubber
Moon c**t
Moon lubber
Moon person
sea c**t
sea lubber
sea person
(LEAST OFFENSIVE)

So if you are talking to a sea person and he calls you any of the above things, you now know where they go in order of relative offensiveness, and you know how much or little offence to take.

In other news, I've whacked up a new batch of photos, at the usual place on flickr- have a butcher's if you fancy.

A terrifying blizzard howled through the Danish night, furiously tearing at the fabric of the remote cabin, and threatening to rip it from its very foundations. As if the very spirits of the ancient Vikings had broken free from the great feasting halls of Valhalla, and descended in a whirl of fury upon this fragile domicile dwarfed in the vastness and savagery of this Norse wilderness.

Inside, a flaxen-haired maiden was in the throes of labour, her screams of defiance mixing with the roars of the ancient wind. Finally, with one great bellow to the furious skies, she delivered a baby boy.

The boy's father, a huge-bearded behemoth of Viking stock, cradled the newborn in his arms.

"What shall we call this boy, our first-born son?" asked the maiden as she gasped in amazement at the beauty of this primal experience.

"La la la la laa la laaaaa la laaaa la la la laaa lala la la" sang the Norseman.

"We can't call him that. It is far too long. There are too many syllables, and it will not fit on the forms when he applies for important stuff like personal loans or store cards. That's a stupid name."

"Hmmmmmmmmmmm" pondered the great Dane.

"We'll shorten it to Lars. The plural of La. Lars. And with such a happy name he will spend his life singing happy happy songs!"

"Uuurrrrghuurrplsprprpssslplpls" croaked the big man.

For that man was Torbin Ulrich, and the little boy, his son, was to fulfil the destiny his mother had forseen for him as Lars Ulrich, the drummer in easy listening group METALLICA! The greatest heroes of copyright enforcement in all the world!

Helloooooooo! And welcome to the 77th EVER newsletter from Rathergood!

Well, the main news this week is that I have constructed the world's most advanced William Shatner's Brain Simulator - The Shatnotron!

It uses bleeding-edge science to simulate in exact and perfect detail the experience of being INSIDE WILLIAM SHATNER'S BRAIN! It is totally immersive, and you will find yourself actually thinking you are William Shatner. It's amazing! It really is:

http://rathergood.com/shatnotron

As well as that, I thought I'd let you know that if you tweet on twitter about rathergood it will now show up on the rathergood site! Have a look - in the left hand column. There it is! It's a good thing there aren't any idiots on the internet to abuse it eh? Ooh, thank goodness everyone on the internet is nice and trustworthy with the ability to tweet on to our web site. Phew.

Also, I've whacked some more photos up on the old flickr malarky. Oh dear I've come over all Jamie Oliver. Anyway, they're mainly family stuff and all that, here if you fancy having a gander, lahvely!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelveitch/

Anyway, I think that's about it for this week. Except to tell you how HOT you are, and how much I LOVE YOU. I love you so hard, I'd make a noodle for you! A rice noodle! One enormously long noodle! It would be the same width as a normal noodle, which is actually quite thin as it happens, but it would be the LONGEST NOODLE KNOWN TO MAN! I would make it by hand, slave over it until it was 30 miles long! Then I would delicately engrave the entire length of the noodle with poetry about how much I love you and how HOT you are!

I would TOTALLY do that for you! Except I don't have any rice here, so I guess I won't. But if I did I TOTALLY WOULD because I LOVE YOU THAT HARD!

I hope you're having the most wonderful day of your life! You deserve it! That's the LEAST you deserve because you are SO WONDERFUL!

Love kisses and superhugs

Joel Andrew Veitch MA

I spent a couple of days at an aquarium in New York a couple of years ago for a shoot. I spent a good while with the walruses. I liked them. Also sea lions and penguins too, but walruses are hard to beat. Anyways i read up about walruses and thought they deserved a song. This is where the song Love Your Blubber comes from.

The lyrics are basically all true. The walrus really is the loudest sounding creature in all the Arctic - the dinosaur roar from Jurassic Park had a lot of walrus roar in it. Also, they really are pretty rubbish at climbing trees. In fact they are totally shit at it. They are massive, and can be quite aggressive. Truly fearsome beasts!

We also used some seals. Singing seals. In real life there has only been one seal who made it as a singer - he did a song called Crazy and married a human. We haven't let that stop us though. Actually we are using sea lions - hardly anyone knows the difference. The difference is ears and ankles, if you're interested. Seals are long and floppy but sea lions still have ankles and ears- they aren't so far down the evolutionary path to wateriness. This means they can run along on the land, while seals can only flop like fishy-smelling sluggy idiots.

Anyway, it felt good doing that song. It's educational, and it's always good to be educational. Giving something back to the kids and all that. Also I like to think we may have brought walruses a few new fans. We'd do anything to advance walruses and walrus issues. I'm seriously thinking of starting a magazine for enthusiasts - Walruses and Walrusing.

I'm happy that we are probably the world's most eminent writers of songs involving walruses. The greatest walrus-themed song of all time is, of course, Pink Floyd's epochal "Another Brick In The Walrus" but that's just one song. On balance we are still the best. I do hear though that Radiohead are producing an experimental walrus-themed album. DAMN THEM. I bet it's shit.

All of Radiohead's reviews - and I mean ALL of them (that I'm aware of) say that they are just like a shit version of us and they don't know their walruses properly. They are just walrus wannabes. I bet they don't even know that the walrus is a large flippered marine mammal with a discontinuous circumpolar distribution in the Arctic Ocean and sub-Arctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. They are aquatic mammaltards, with no respect for pinnipeds of the odobenus genus.

They think they're so great with their million-selling albums and stuff, but have they ever gloried in the fishy stink of a walrus's breath blown all over their face? I think not.
Have they ever run their work-shy hands through a walrus' damp whiskers? I THINK NOT.
Have they ever been impaled on a huge fishy tusk and then dragged to the Arctic seabed? FOR FUN? I THINK NOT SIR!

This morning at the office there was a worm in the toilet.

The worm was alive and wriggling. It was a large, fat, wriggling, live worm, and it was undeniably, really, genuinely, in the loo.

It was a Monday morning - clearly it couldn't have been swimming there all weekend. A nice friendly earthworm could never have found its way to our loo on the 4th floor. It certainly couldn't have swum there. All in all, it seems clear it must have been some kind of nasty worm. An evil worm. A pestilential worm.

However, it was Monday morning, first thing, and when it was discovered nobody had been to the loo in THAT way - the way that might have enabled a pestilential, unspeakable worm to get into the loo. To put it nicely, a couple of people had done number 1s, but nobody had yet been in for a number 2.

A mystery! Clearly no worm could have come from a wee. Could it? Surely you wouldn't wee out a nob worm, and leave it in the bowl. Such an event would scar you for life, emotionally, and leave you screaming in a corner. No, it couldn't be that.

So, a mystery. Not a nice, happy, friendly earthworm. Surely not a nobworm for such a thing cannot be possible. And not an unspeakable worm of the bowels, as no-one had done a poo that morning. A mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself.

My personal theory is that someone in the office has an unusual life cycle involving a planktonic stage of development. This worm is almost certainly the larval stage in their life cycle. I expect the worm, which has now been flushed away to the ocean, will spend the next few years floating amongst the oceanic currents of the world, feeding and growing, until it metamorphoses into an adult human, and swims, like a salmon, back up the sewers to the loo in which it was spawned. There it will emerge as a majestic viral marketing expert.

A majestic viral marketing expert in need of a wash and a change of clothes.