We’d have to put out a thousand page, hard-bound almanac to cover them all, so The Fix has decided to just cover one classic Stallone movie moment every month.

#1 – The Specialist (1994): Busted!

Stallone plays ex-CIA explosives specialist Ray Quick, a bomb maker for hire who travels everywhere by bus. Whilst helping Sharon Stone get revenge against evil henchman Ned, Quick boards the No. 5.

A gang of ponytailed hoodlums sit at the back listening to loud Rumba music on their boom box. An elderly, pregnant Latino lady makes her way down the aisle, but there are no seats.

“Here, take mine” offers Quick, but before she can sit down the seat gets stolen by a thug.

Shocked, Quick explains through gritted teeth, “That seat’s taken”.

“Fuck you”, the thug responds.

“Excuse me?”

“Fuck you”, he repeats.

Handing his sunglasses to the old pregnant lady, Quick somersaults the ruffian onto the floor, kicking him in the groin and thorax. A second brute attacks. Quick elbows him twice in the throat, slamming his knee in his face. A third rascal attacks with a knife. Quick breaks his hand, slaps him five times, finishing with an uppercut.

“I’ll kill you, you…you…sonofa…”, the first yobbo shouts.

But Quick swings on the handrail, smashing him through the bus window and on to the hot, unforgiving tarmac of the street. The pregnant gran steps forward and hands Quick his sunglasses. “I believe there’s a vacancy”, Quick quips wryly, gesturing to the empty seat.

Justice is done.

* including today

How To React To Your Impending Baldness

When you’re twenty-six and find you’re losing your hair, it’ll be wretched. You’ll wonder whether anyone will ever find you attractive again, and whether your girlfriend dumped you because of it (this was a couple of months ago, but she may have given you head rubs and noticed your hairline receding before you did. On the other hand, you’re sure to have noticed first – you’re quite vain and look in the mirror maybe a dozen times a day. This may have been why she left you). You might start thinking about dying, for the first time since you were seven. You’ll think about having children with the next woman who’s prepared to sleep with you, and about poking holes in condoms with pins like a jolly old papist. You’ll certainly start thinking about how you’ll look like a big bald chimp in a couple of years, and about how we’re all monkeys really. You’ll stop using a glass to drink milk, and become less selective about the places you masturbate.

Author: unknown

Bob Slayer - Fix live nights compere, amongst other things - counts down the most degenerate countries in Scandinavia…

Slayer’s Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a beautiful part of the world that I like to visit as often as possible. However, it is also very expensive, and so I highly recommend that you get someone else to pay for the booze. My way of having booze on tap is to tour with rock bands, but you could take a rich friend along or you could become a bar slut and prostitute yourself that way. Either way, the question you will be asking is which country is top of the Scandinavian debauchery tree?

5th = Denmark

The entry point to Scandinavia is Denmark, a country that is a little like Germany, only with slightly less porn and more bacon. Spend any time in Denmark and you will soon be whispering, “I see lesbians everywhere”, as they enjoy the highest per capita ladies that love ladies of any country in the world. This may go some way to explaining why Sild is not only a type of fish, but is also the Danish word for “kiss”.

4th = SWEDEN

Next stop is Sweden, a country which could move up the rankings if it was not held back by the bible belt towns of Jonkoping, Linkoping, and Shopping, that run down the centre of the country. However, get up into the north and you can find the wild, free Sweden. After one night drinking Brännvin (a schnapps that literally means ‘Burn Wine’), I was invited to play the national drinking game of Kubb in the way the vikings intended: by seeing who can throw the bones of their victims around the best. 

3rd = ICELAND

You may have expected Iceland to have ranked higher, but in Scandinavia the debauchery competition is high. Many Icelanders are certainly not wired up right, but in 2007, Iceland was ranked as the most developed country in the world by the United Nations’ Human Development Index, and they could not have achieved that if everyone had been like Björk. That said, her and her wayward son - whose dreadful heavy metal band once supported a band I toured with - do certainly contribute to keeping their country above Sweden. Johanna Sigurdardottir is the world’s first openly gay head of government, which is nice.

2nd = FINLAND

Has got naked saunas, vodka, and Eurovision-winning monster rockers Lordi. But Finland also has my favourite island in the world: Aland is in the Baltic Sea, midway between Stockholm and Helsinki. For some strange reason, the island is duty free and is the only place in Scandinavia that booze is cheap! After one show, I got on the wrong side of a particular local nutter who picked up a shovel and vehemently declared, “Michael Jackson is the King of Pop!” while angrily trying to chase me via the means of a moonwalk.

1st = Norway 

Back in the middle ages, in an effort to stop public drunkenness, Norway was the first country in the world to impose taxes on booze, but this hasn’t deterred them: those crazy Norwegians are shit-faced 24/7. At the 2004 Quart Festival I was stood on the side of the main stage clutching a mug of Karsk (moonshine and coffee) when Norwegian band The Cumshots announced a young couple on to the stage in the middle of their gig with the words, “How far are you willing to go to save the planet?” The pair immediately stripped naked and proceeded to have sex on the stage. A large banner declared that they were “Fuck for Forests” - this eco-debauchery is part of what puts Norway top of the tree in my book. 

Shhhh!

Michael Hutchence, singer and extreme masturbator

Despite being easy to mock the manner in which Michael Hutchence died, it is overlooked what a truly amazing feat it is to die wanking. One of the easiest skills for a human or monkey to master, it is also impossibly hard to die fromp.

Found dead in a hotel with a belt round his neck, a lot is made of what a great lover Michael was; a fact that - for those of us who were unlucky enough not to have been bedded by the pockmarked lothario - is easy to believe. If he paid that level of attention to his own self-abuse, imagine how elaborate the experience would have been for another human being.

Celebrities through the ages are famous for having people on their payroll whose job it is to make sure that - if they should mistakenly die - any evidence of their seedy life is covered up: wiping the porn off their hard drive, paying off their underage lovers, hiding their illegitimate children. It is likely Hutchence employed one of these shadowy servants, but their once-only role would probably have involved wiping clean and tucking his likely-huge pecker away, and breaking his stiff fingers out of their claw-like grip. A job which they quite royally fucked up.

Comedy is always claimed to be the new rock and roll, and the two disciplines rarely merge so seamlessly. His death echoed hauntingly with masturbation metaphors. Bono kindly wrote Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of about him, which was played on MOTD and Big Brother best bits, so that we - and his mum - would always be reminded that he wanked himself to death. A film of his life, Slide Away, is in pre-production. Surprisingly, it currently has no major male star attached.

Michael Hutchence, 38, died on November 22, 1997.

Degeneracy Across The British Isles, as witnessed by Carl Donnelly

Espionage Night Club, Edinburgh

It’s said that Dante spent years training in the art of meditation to research and then document the journey between hell, purgatory, and paradise. He could have saved himself a lot of time had he spent an evening in the multi-floored Espionage on Cowgate - although he would have had to skip the part about paradise. Once inside, it is like Bruce Lee’s game of death, where you have to fight your way to the top before getting out alive. It’s worth the visit just for the challenge!

Copper Face Jacks Pub, Dublin

Mentioning the name of this pub to any right-minded Dubliner is similar I imagine to bringing up the My Lai Massacre to a Vietnam veteran. They may have been there, but will die never having spoken of the horrors they witnessed. Its reputation as a meat market does not do it justice, as it is easy when walking in to be taken aback by the overwhelming smell of Calvin Klein and semen. One visit made me see the positives of Sharia Law.

National Express Service 425, from London to Newcastle

Have you ever woken up and thought, “I’ve got seven hours to kill and what I’d most like to do with that time is sit with a bunch of borderline mentally ill people in a hot confined space?” If so, then this is the experience for you. The random shouts and smells of the people around you are only broken up by stops in such beautiful locations as Milton Keynes and Darlington. They should issue valium as you board this torture bus!

It’s Tuesday, which means some more choice spots from our degenerate-hunting Fix writers/experts.

Elephant and Castle shopping centre, Elephant and Castle, London

Despite being a place of commerce, there isn’t a single thing of aesthetic, recreational, or practical value here. As the epicentre of the apocalypse, all this place is missing is a Thunderdome. The traders look like they take pleasure in firing harpoons into litters of kittens, and to so much as look at a fellow shopper is to be shivved like a lifer. You’ll leave this place disoriented and sickened, like you woke in a park to discover a tramp defecating on your chin. A zombie flick set in this mall would be so horrific as to redefine the genre. David Bussell

Seven Sisters, London

What happens to dogshit after it’s been emptied out of the dogshit bins? Well, every night men in overalls carefully empty the bins, placing millions of fresh, unused dog turds around Seven Sisters in an attempt to make the inner city more rural. The real artistry can be seen in the seemingly random nature of the drop points, but it’s all been carefully orchestrated by the council. Of particular note is the care taken to remember to put that one extra special shit outside The Fix’s front gate every morning. The one we have to jump over and warn guests about. That’s attention to detail. There really is a lot of shit in Seven Sisters. Nick Helm

We are all of us daily surrounded by scum and decay, and it is sometimes all we can do as human beings to surround ourselves in our own thin bubble of moral certitude, normality, and a weekly shower. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t look outside these bubbles as tourists of degeneracy, to remind ourselves again why we’re in them in the first place. Sometimes we even have to step right outside that bubble, just to procure ourselves a service. In the first of what will now become Degenerate Tuesday, The Fix points out some places to avoid.

Helen

Internet Café and Organic Sandwich Bar, Hackney

This is a degenerate find of some serious value. The white truffle of degenerate ex-organic internet cafes. You don’t even need to go inside, such is the rich stench of degeneracy whafting from that sign. It had aspirations to trade organically. It realised its customers didn’t actually care, as long as there was a row of stained computers confiscated from local sex offenders and won at police auction, and an internet connection. Besides that, they can’t even read. The bottom line rules, and they don’t care who knows it. Forget getting a new sign, just cross the ‘organic’ part out. And forget doing it in a pen that you can’t actually see through. The Fix is the Indiana Jones of degenerate hunters, and this is our crystal skull.

Centrepoint Int’l Services Ltd., Hackney

This is a useful one-stop shop. The internet for checking your e-mail and finding out a distant relative has died in a plane crash in Nigeria, one of whose population is kind enough to have taken the trouble to track you down and let you know that you have inherited their life’s fortune. Money transfer to wire them the cash advance they need to unlock their account for you. And a cargo service to ship a box full of rocket launchers and machetes to them, in the case that you prefer to fund genocide in this more direct manner instead.

Do you know of any rogue traders deserving of the Degenerate Tuesday treatment? Let us know, send a photo, and let’s give them the publicity that no one with proper content to fill web pages with will.