What's red and crawls up Mother's leg?

Was going to call this post ByePod HiPod, seeing as the fucking thing has broken and miraculously repaired itself twice since the last time I mentioned it. It'll probably continue this loop indefinitely until August 29th, at which point the warranty runs out, and it'll just explode, probably taking out my face with it.

Croak. CROAAAAAAAAAK. I sound a bit odd today. To be brutally honest, I sound like the unholy lovechild of Papa Lazarou, Darth Vadar and a 40 year old chainsmoking bullfrog. You know that advert for Strepsils with that little cartoon man, and every time he talks, it just makes engine revving sounds? Well, my voice is actually like that. When I say that, I don't just mean 'it's a bit croaky'. I mean that it does literally sound like an engine revving. Imagine a Hell's Angel driving his Harley up a 45 degree hill. Thats the sound that comes out of my mouth when I speak. Exhaust gases pour out of my throat when I sing tenor.
This interesting croakyness is probably somehow connected to the vast amounts of random yellow phlegm that keeps pouring into the back of my throat. This is probably the best symptom of my current condition, as every half hour I can have some long coughing fit and produce a great big hunk 'o gunk. I can then either re-swallow this, chew it for a bit appreciatively, spit it into my palm and poke it with my fingers while marvelling at its colour, size and texture, or just huck it off the side of a tall building and laugh as it hits a bald man wearing green overalls.

As you might be able to tell from the following paragraphs, I am ill. To be honest, if you were unable to figure that out, then you probably are too stupid to live and should go drink the yellow stuff under the kitchen sink. Go. Now. NOW!
That's right, my unassailably powerful immune system is having its yearly breakdown. Long-term readers of this blog might remember that it was nearly exactly a year ago that I threw up partially digested tuna-fish all over the toilets at school. Mmm, creamy. This just goes to prove my theory that, seeing as my white-blood cells are just the most awesome miniture fighting force this side of 2D, they have to take some time off once a year to allow the enemy to regroup and attack again. If they didn't do that, then there would be literally no germs left on the planet Earth. They would have all been drawn to my bloodstream and been plasmolysed into next week by my ninja-antibodies. There'd be no disease left. And then how would we get rid of all the hobos and weird-looking bald children? We'd have to do it the old fashioned way (pool cue to the back of the head).

So it's my theory that, in order to avoid all this unecessary bloodshed, my immune system just shuts down for a bit once a year. The antibodies all take some time off and go play golf in my colon, or smoke huge cugan cigars in my alveoli, or go skinny-dipping in my skin (HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHHAomgHAHahhahahahAHHAHAHHAH!H!H!H!H!!! LOL!!!!! HAHAHAHHA! BECAUSE IT'S SKIN AND THEY'RE [lmao]SKINNY DIPPING!!! LOLLERCOPTERS!11!!! ROLFF!!1HAHAHAHHA!!! YES I WENT THERE!!!112!). Perhaps they go to my bloodstream and laugh at all the red-blood cells as they go by.

"Hey, look at that dickhead."
"Yeah, he got no nucleus."
"And we're like fifty times bigger than him!"
"Hell yeah!"
*High five*

Whatever. It doesn't matter. It just means that all the hardass germs who think they can mess wit' me have a chance to pour into my body (because Christ, it's not like I wash my hands or anything. Hell, my chosen sporting activity has me slowly scraping the skin off my already hole-filled hands with a piece of rubber-covered wood soaking with water from the River Thames, the only river toxic enough to kill a whale in less than a weekend). These germs will cause a little havoc, mess with a few red blood cells, fuck up the mucus production for a bit. Because, after all, they're mean mofoing bacteria. None of this 'friendly bacteria' shit you get in adverts for Yakhult.
My white blood cells won't do anything, though. They'll just sit there, smoking their cigars, oiling up the bullets in their biological AK47s, watching everything and remembering everything. Then, in a few days, they'll decide that enough time has gone by, and they'll slowly stand up, stretch, do lots of cool clicky things to their guns, lace up their hiking boots, zip up their fleeces, then stoll into town. The result will be something like this:



Just check out all the cell death that's going on there. Actually, thinking about it, that diagram might be a bit complicated for people who didn't get A* on GCSE Biology (with 29/30 on the coursework), that is to say, genii like me. Here it is in a slightly more simplified form:


NAPALM'D!!!!

That picture isn't exactly accurate, I admit. The white blood cells would probably be screaming "YEEAH MUVAFUCKA!" or "WHOOPEE!" or "LETS GO SURFING!" or "RUN RUN RUN LIL PIGGY, AS FAR AS YOU CAN!" or "This is fun isn't it Timothy" or they'd be playing some Wagner or Mozart or Spice Girls or something as they blow away those pesky bacteriums. But I was somewhat lacking space in that picture and I feel that I'm pressing my luck on the whole 'speech bubble' thing already. And you don't know how hard it was to avoid having the bacteria saying "OMG RUN!!!". Hehe. I think that inanimate objects saying OMG is really funny, sue me.

But that's besides the point. The POINT is that, having bent all the bacteria in my system over a chair and viciously raped them, my immune system will be rejuvinated and ready to take on anything that the world has to throw at it.

Seriously, the first enemy bastard that thinks it's a good idea to enter my inner sanctum will rue the day it decided to mess with Thomas HW Phipps. And it doesn't matter how big or messy that disease is, my digestive system will take em all on and win. It'll see polio, machete its little spotty arse, then spit it out, bruised and bloody and incontinent. Flu? It'll kick it's fecken teeth in, before jumping up and down on its crotch and then beating it to death with the blunt end of a pillow. Smallpox won't stand a fucking chance, my white blood cell will castrate it with a pool ball before it gets past my epidermis. And if that twat typhoid comes near, well, fuck it, my immuno-system will pull out a towel, soak it with water, stuff it down typhoid's throat, leave it there for a few minutes, then wrench it back out, along with typhoid's stomach and gullet lining.
Who else wants some?
Oh shit, there's Veil's Disease. No, wait, panic over. My antibodies broke all its bones and punted it off a flyover.
Cholera? DRAGON PUNCHED backwards into a box of cheap chinese explosives.
Behind you, immuno system, it's branched-chain ketoaciduria! No, wait, you knew all along and you nailed it to the floor with nails made of splinters of branched-chain ketoaciduria's own TEEYH.
But wait, it's a double team of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and rosai-dorfman disease! And they're both armed to the teeth with grenades and small asian people! What'll happen now? I think we all know. BLAM. PUNCH. POW. KAPOWERY. KICK'D! OH MY GOD, IMMUNE SYSTEM, YOU JUST SET FIRE TO BOTH OF THEM THEN HURLED THEM INTO A ROOM FULL OF ANGRY KILLER BEES COVERED IN PETROL!
WATCH OUT, IT'S CANCER, AND IT'S NOT EVEN SPREAD BY MICROBES BUT MY IMMUNE SYSTEM KICKED IT'S ARSE ANYWAY. NO TUMOUR FOR ME. Whoopee.

I could continue. But you now see how great my immuno-system is. It's just so incredibly powerful. I walk down the street and germs literally bounce off me to either side. When somebody sneezes at me, it's like that bit at the end of the Matrix. I just frown slightly and the germs stop a few inches from my face, apologise profusely, then turn round and give a pensioner pneumonia. I go out and have sex with HIV+ prostitutes, just so I can get infected and laugh heartily as the virus attempts to take over but is brutally ejected. You know what? I hope that birdflu DOES evolve and DOES make it to Britain. I feel that my system needs a TRUE challenge. And I'm pretty sure that I'll win. Everyone else will get ill and die cuz they're pussies, but I'll just stand there, hands on hips, and CACKLE. Then the only one left will be me, laughing away atop of a huge pile of corpses of people who didn't have as good an immuno system as me.

MWAHAHAH! I AM UNBEATABLE! I AM BARON SAMEDI! I AM BORIS FROM GOLDENEYE! I AM CHUCK NORRIS! I AM THE WALRUS! I AM THE EGGMAN! I AM THE CLAM! I AM THE LEEEZARD KING!!

*Coughs bitterly, spits out some phlegm, blows nose*

Incidentally, the answer to the title question is: A Homesick Abortion. Heh. I'd like to say that I'm sorry for that joke, but I'm really not.