Friday, March 26, 2010

Send them back to India

Support these idiots!

Who knows? Maybe if you raise enough cash they might not come back.

For those of you suffering from irony deprivation syndrome, I should explain that some of these people are in my extended family. I can't afford to give them much money, but those of you wealthy enough to spend enough time twatting about on the internet to find this page may be able to spare ten bob.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Countdown to the Royal Divorce part 25

Astute readers (pls to avoid oxymorons. Ed.) will have noticed that the princess royal, or “bouncy tits” as her equestrian friends know her, does not appear as often in my journal as other members of the SC&G clan. This is not because of any particular frostiness in our relationship, but due to her seldom venturing indoors during the hours of daylight, apart from the occasional gallop (on horseback, of course) through the dining room at Sandringham or Windsor to grab a scone or flask of chicken noodle soup. (She only does this to annoy Philip, and has perfected a way of squeezing the stomach of a mare so that it passes wind immediately. Unlike her siblings, she has never been intimidated by Old Marbleless, as she wittily calls him.) She seldom has time to chat on the telephone, and as I equate equestrian activities with entertainment for the brain dead, we seldom communicate.

I was not surprised, however, to find her on the telephone this week. I do keep abreast of international news as I find that it sometimes gives a clue as to what these people are talking about – not a skill acquired easily, I can tell you.

For those of you, and you only have yourselves to blame, who do not keep themselves up to date with the “Auckland Advertiser”, I can report that a young lady with the unlikely name of Denise L'Estrange-Corbet (real name Mavis Dawkins) was reported to have described Mrs Lawrence as “as boring as fucking bat shit”. No reports that I can find define whether she used that ubiquitous and unnecessary expletive as a verb or adjective. I am not particularly troubled by this gap in my vast knowledge, but feel it would give some insight into the psychiatric map of Ms L’Estrange-Corbet. I also feel that the comparison was a tad unfair. Those who saw the excellent episode in the Attenborough comedies where the hero met a huge pile of bat shit would have been far more enthralled than had they been called upon to converse with a member of the house of Windsor.

Without pausing to ask about my health (I have been a little under the weather these few days with a seasonal cold), Anne launched in to a florid description of the event. “For the love of buggery”, she began, “I travelled right the way round the naffing world to one of the most anachronistic cities on the planet”, she is virtually unique in the family for having mastered the art of the use of multi-syllabic words, “and even find time to attend a ‘Save the Children’ fundraiser. You know what they’re like, don’t you? Full of well-intentioned but very dull and dim people.”

“Just like home from home then”, I interjected.

“Apart from the ‘well-intentioned’ bit” we both said in harmony.

“Any road up”, she continued, determined not to be put off her stride, “I politely make my way round the room, and eventually find myself face to face with this ghastly wench who looks like a knickerbocker glory with acne, and all she wants to talk about are the piss-poor clothes that she designs. So, as I do on these occasions, I affect not to understand her accent. I ask her to repeat everything that she says, and then reply very slowly in the same way that I talk to my horses, or used to talk to Mark, and hope that she will shut the buggery up. It’s at times like these that I miss daddy. He would have said something witty, such as “are you wearing those clothes to win a bet?” or “why don’t you shut your poxy gob”, but I am always too drained. Eventually I just ran out of energy altogether, and fell back on asking her if she had come far in reply to everything she said. After that the twenty minutes I spent chatting to the transgender nun who had been a flanker for the All Blacks about his, her or its latest project – something to do with recycling – seemed like the most interesting conversation I had ever had.”

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Ichthyophobia

I am delighted to read the report in the Torygraph this morning on the research of this gentleman, clearly in line for the TCM of the year award.


He has been researching into phobias, and has devised an injection that will cure people of phobias, including, no doubt, helping those folk who have a fear of needles.

You may be thinking that this is good news. Allow me to be the first to disabuse you of that misconception, by describing some of the research.

This centres on feeding lidocaine to goldfish.

“Early tests showed that goldfish given a dose of the drug lidocaine were unable to be scared.”

Bugger me! I never thought of that!

Old Masa (for it is he) decided to conduct an experiment in Pavlovian fashion (he performed “The Dying Swan” wearing diaphanous tights), by causing the poor goldfish to associate flashing lights with electric shocks, and demonstrated that they feared the lights even when there was no accompanying shock. He then administered said narcotic and broke the link.

We are then left with a bunch of drug addicted, epileptic, Japanese goldfish with third degree burns and totally lacking inbuilt danger warnings. If you see a very sorry looking member of the family Cyprinidae displaying bravado in the presence of a shark, you can feel justified in sending the bill for the funeral to Professor Yushida at the university of Hiroshima.

Would you welcome the recommendations of this man?

I look forward to his helping me to overcome my fear of one day being taken in by the absurd propositions of the scientific community.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

A bogler's daughter

I know that all of you (AMToNW) come here to make sure that no matters of consequence that may have occurred have escaped your notice. Indeed, I pride myself upon the accurate and timely dissemination of wisdom. This time, however, I feel I may have let you all (AMToNW) down a little.

Tonight, I am reminded of my schooldays, and am conscious of many of the reasons that resulted in my failure to achieve what was expected of me in the world of academia. Of course rampant laziness was prominent in that conglomeration of reasons. It may be even the reason that I never learned the collective noun for ‘reasons’. (An accumulation, perhaps? An ostrich? A settee? I’m sure Christopher will know).

Getting sidetracked was another reason. In fact had there been a course in getting sidetracked I would have gone to Oxford. I didn’t take kindly to plain boredom, and looked for distractions in those classes where the subject matter seemed of little consequence and the presentation even less interesting.

It paid to be inventive – the hours flew by, as did all of the course content. Sometimes it could be as simple as looking out for the quirks of the teachers, for example, would Mr A. say “as it were” more times than “as I say” in this particular lesson? At other times the game became more complex; my very good friend, who, in order to protect the innocent, I will call Neil Ritchie, would sit next to me during one particular subject where most of the time we seemed to be simply taking dictation, and interject colourful nonsense, which I would dutifully record in the midst of the narrative in my notebook, caring not a jot for the consequences when the time came to revise for examinations.

The most enjoyable ways to avoid education, however, came as a result of spontaneity, usually by being amused by something that the teacher said. Looking back, it all seems very silly. Silly in a good way. The example that springs to mind is during A level geography when Mrs Williamson used the phrase “tortuous meanders”. No, I can’t explain why it was funny, and even were I to attach a sound clip to this piece, I doubt my ability to imitate said lady. If, for example, you think of Edith Evans saying “a handbag”, there is no reason why it should be risible. It just was, all right? Anyway, a very naughty girl, who, in order to protect the innocent, I will call Pam Wright, turned round and gave a very mischievous look, which caused me to lose concentration for the rest of the lesson, and possibly for the rest of the term, and I still remember that phrase, if nothing else, from the two years devoted to the works of some dude called Monkhouse.

That was all by means of a prelude, and to give some background as to why my report on this week’s episode of “Horizon” on the electric television, may not include all of the salient points. For those of you wanting a more informative report, go over to our dear friend I,LTV.

You see, even in the midst of writing this, I have been distracted and written a very silly comment on a photograph on facebook. I will never learn.

Within the first two minutes of the Horizon program, young Sam West (son of Bradley Hardacre and Sybil Fawlty) the narrator, for it is he, mentioned “Dark Flo”. I spent much of the rest of the hour wondering about this young lady, and her importance to cosmology. Flo, of course, features in a famous Derek and Clive song, and in another ballad carefully alluded to elsewhere on this page – there will be house points for spotting that one – and so the name is inherently given to ribaldry.

Anyway, the point of this what-may-have-been-an-interesting documentary was to assess the state of the understanding of the universe. In short, “Do we have a fucking clue? Of course not!” Much time was spent discussing “the standard model of cosmology” (SMC). In order to try to convince us that the SMC is not just the babblings of a lunatic, the programme was interspersed with film of some chap writing equations on a white board. This was intended to convey the idea that the SMC was the result of careful mathematical calculation. Unfortunately, the equations portrayed were actually part of an ideal recipe for semolina pudding and proof that the word “boobs” is funny in any language.

There were two other really irritating visual effects used throughout. Whenever someone said “Big Bang” there was film of an explosion. I am fairly certain that, with the exception of some marijuana addled students in Glossop who thought they were watching an episode of Star Trek, anyone choosing to watch a programme about particle physics would be bright enough to grasp the concept of a “bang”. I am pretty sure, also, that the bang portrayed was nothing like the “Big” one; at least it probably wasn’t as big. Whenever someone mentioned the theory of inflation (why the universe expanded phenomenally very early on), they showed a large cloth balloon being inflated. FFS. This happened so many times that I was tempted to join the Glossop students.

Without exception, all of the scientists represented had very silly names. I would propose that in any attempt to prove that physics is not all nonsense there should be at least a representative proportion of people whose surnames are likely to be credible to a majority of the audience. One gentleman was called Alan Guth (to rhyme with ‘tooth’) Obviously a contraction from his original name of Godstruth, which is no doubt sighed by all of his colleagues whenever he speaks.

Anyway, I think the point of it all was to convey the idea that the SMC does not make sense without inventing a load of stuff to make the physics work, in the same way that some bright spark in Geneva has decided to spend a sum of money enough to keep Dave in cream cakes for ten years on finding the nonexistent “Higgs Boson”. Our physicists/cosmologists have said that in order to fill the gaps left in the SMC, there has to be “Dark Matter”, “Dark Energy” and “Dark Flo”.

This is the good bit (at fucking last, Ed.). Dark matter is invisible, undetectable, and everywhere. It is needed in the SMC to provide gravity, otherwise bits at the outer reaches of the universe, such as the Thatcher fan club, would spin away at vast speeds. There was a chap in Minnesota or some such place, who had built an underground laboratory to try to detect dark matter, which is invisible, everywhere, and capable of passing through ordinary matter, which I believe is what his laboratory was constructed from. In order to make the SMC work then, boys and girls, we need something that is omnipresent, beyond our comprehension and invisible. Shall we call it God, perhaps?

I can see that I am losing the attention of some of those at the back of the class. Dark energy fills a similar hole in the scientific theory and Dark Flo is anything you want her to be, the slut, in order to explain stuff that you don’t understand.

I hope that you have taken careful notes during this lecture. I would hate to think that any student of mine would be tempted to write “This is all bollocks” on their GCSE examination papers.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

I wish it had been Thatcher.

Today I am saddened, more than I expected to be, by the death of Michael Foot.

I am also angered, if not surprised, by the snide and unkind "tributes" paid to him. I expect nothing more of the Murdoch press, but cannot believe how ignorant the BBC is. Of the broadcast soundbites, only Ken Livingstone has had anything admirable to say. The ill-informed opinions of the lickspittle tory holders of office in the current Labour party are as vacuous as everything else they have to say. I have not read anything in the Mail or the Express, any more than I would examine the contents of the local sewer.

For those of you young enough never to have heard of socialism (and the rest of you as well) can I recommend you spend five minutes reading a fitting obituary in Tribune.

As a demonstration of irony, at a time when I am remembering a man who put fairness, tolerance and peace at the centre of his beliefs and practices, I shall be deleting dissenting comments.

Monday, March 01, 2010

What larks

Most of you will not have seen this story, even though The Leicester Mercury is always first with the big stories.

It has everything, summed up by being a successful struggle against adversity.

A young lad, (and lapsed blogger) fighting against a savage environment where vegetable-related cheating is a way of life, forges a career and gains international recognition.

I feel a strange empathy with Dickens in passing this on.