Knife Fight

Beckett fact no. 6.

Beckett's first full-length play was Eleutheria, written in French in 1947 but not published or performed in the author's lifetime.

The first English translation by Michael Brodsky contains a number of amusing howlers, of which my favourite involves a knife-wielding boatman. In French (note similarities to boating episodes in Krapp's Last Tape and That Time):

M. Krap: Nous étions sur l’eau. Ton canotier avait un couteau. Je ne ramais plus. L’onde nous berçait. (Pause.) Lui aussi l’onde le berçait. (Pause.)

Brodsky translates:

M. Krap: We were on the water. Your oarsman had a knife.

What?! A canotier is a straw hat. The couteau is not a knife but an osprey feather.



'Your boater had an osprey', as Barbara Wright puts it in her subsequent and much better version.

Beckett facts

To mark Samuel Beckett's centenary in 2006, I thought I'd do a hundred Beckettian facts. Here are the first five.

One of the addenda to Watt is all of two words long: 'Watt snites'. Sniting is how footballers blow their noses, holding one nostril and violently expelling the snot through the other.

In the late prose text Company Beckett describes swimming in the Forty Foot in Sandycove with his father and a friend. The friend was John Manning, brother of Mary Manning (model for the Caleken Frica in More Pricks Than Kicks). I once came across John Manning's copy of Endgame, inscribed by Beckett, in Greene's bookshop on Clare Street, across the road from Beckett senior's former office. Prices in Greene's are marked inside the back rather than the front cover, luckily for me. Though the inscription is fairly illegible anyway. Not that I'm complaining.

In Beckett's first novel Murphy works in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, but in the French translation it sprouts another m to become the Maison Madeleine de Miséricorde Mentale.

Someone once told me that having visited Cork he could confirm that Beamish doesn't travel -- doesn't travel from the brewery to the pub across the road. Despite this, Beckett's favourite Irish stout was Beamish, not Guinness.

A good place to drink Beamish, or Guinness, is the Stag's Head, outside which there is a drain cover emblazoned with the words 'W. Beckett & Sons'.



Why did the waitress sham pain? Because the stout porter bitter

Octopus

When faced with danger, a BBC end-of-year review informs us, an octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs. Or so scientists have discovered.

When faced with danger a coconut, by contrast, is incapable either of disguising itself as an octopus or of walking away backwards. It can always fall on your head but only as a last resort, much preferring the view from the top of the tree to being buried in the sand, with the attendant risk of featuring in a Fanta or Bounty Bar commercial.

The plural of octopus is octopodes.

Toads (cont.)

The Philip Larkin toad. Well-known in toad circles for its humorous poem 'Philip Larkin', which begins 'Why should I let the Philip Larkin work squat on my life?' , toads loving to moan about the inordinate amount of time they devote to writing scholarly articles about the English poet Philip Larkin, compiling bibliographies of his work, only slightly hampered by their inability to read or write.

Toads (cont.)

The Venezuelan Julian calendar toad. Twelve days behind rest of world, and has therefore slept through festive season. Edits Julian Calendar Appreciation Society Quarterly very, very badly, given absence of opposable thumbs, word-processing skills, brainpower in general.

Likes: Julius Caesar
Dislikes: Pope Gregory XIII, remembering Christmas is next week and he still hasn't bought any presents.

Bunch of Clowns

Popular Northern Ireland Office post-Sunningdale back-to-work slogan








Bunch of clowns




In state papers released today
Concerned at the wholesale slaughter of the British light entertainment tradition by young 'alternative' comedians Morecambe and Wise in 1975, Stormont official Michael Cudlipp suggested the Northern Irish parliament be used as an alternative venue to their preferred North of England theatre circuit, to help introduce some reality back into the sick and twisted, introverted little world the pair inhabited.

Sick alternative universe parody version
The above-named Stormont official suggested a 'clean up Ulster' campaign in 1975, to be headlined by Frank Sinatra and Morecambe and Wise performing at Stormont, in conjunction with a 'beauty competition for the title of Miss Good Cheer'.

Animal Proxy Blog

Hi! I'm the world's stupidest llama, but that's all right because Daddy loves me anyway. My name is {snip}

Ugly Dog

World's ugliest dog dies; had heard all the Father Jack jokes, thank you; hairless, gap-toothed, wild-eyed dogs in Tasmania, Moldova, reported 'very ugly', possibly now world's ugliest; keen to hear from animal proxy-seeking bloggers, befriend them with their cutesy little kill-me-now-please ugly ways.

Llama

This is Llarry, my pet llama. His name is actually Larry but because of my stammer the man in the key-cutting booth put 'Llarry' on his name tag and it stuck.







This is Captain Haddock. He looks a bit annoyed, doesn't he. Maybe a llama has just chewed his beard again, as happens several times in Prisoners of the Sun. Here is a full list of the names he calls it/them:


Ungrateful brute
Fire-pumps
Moth-eaten imitation camels
Miserable iconoclast
Raggle-taggle ruminants
Cushion-footed quadrupeds
Morons

Coriolisanus

Other uses for decommissioned toilets include kettle drum substitutes for underfunded orchestras



That's what Shakespeare could have called his play if that old Roman had ever visited the southern hemisphere and discovered the phenomenon that makes water go down the plughole the other way down there. It's called the Coriolis effect. You may recall the anti-Coriolis effect machine installed in the US embassy's toilet in the Australian episode of The Simpsons. A little-known fact about the Coriolis effect, however, is that in some remote parts of Ecuador a combination of being on the equator and the salinity of the water means the stuff refuses to go down the plughole altogether. Instead, it performs the whirlpool dance known as txlxloa in Quechua. Skilled water-potters, or mxlxloa, can even fashion pots from the dancing liquid. The one small problem with these is that the water only dances in a six-inch wide strip along the equator, outside of which it reverts to its normal, all-over-the-place state, spilling your flowers/cutlery/llama pet food all over the floor. The other problem of course is that it becomes impossible to empty the toilet. Or it would be but for the fabled Cotopaxi toilet dancers, who once a week move from Coriolis-affected privy to privy and perform the sacred vxlxloa dance, or cha cha cha de la cacaca, to the accompaniment of the time-honoured words:

vxlxloa vxlxloa
Log vtidace
qarou, rabevtzugi
de nepomra lemlovlodk

(Enough of this degrading charade
why can't you move your bathroom
off the equator you idiot
you think I enjoy treading in your poo?)




Sturdy boots required

Brr!

Lewis Gordon Pugh beats world record for most southerly swim, with 1000m front crawl off popular Antarctic resort Petermann Island; braves water temperatures of minus fifteen degrees; passing equator on return sailing notices iceberg that thought he was kind of cute still following him, still offering bits of self for one more celebratory Jack Daniels.

Bun-Shaped Nun

Enough about nuns. The bun-shaped bun thread has been cancelled. Did you hear me? You can go home now. Because it's NOT going to happen.

Nun-Shaped Nun

Nun-shaped nun. Generally inedible. Surprisingly good at piano tuning and tae kwondo.

Nun-Shaped Bun

Wizened, ugly, xtra-devout but oh so delicious






Bun-shaped nun abducted from Nashville coffeeshop by protestor in search of nun-shaped bun.

(Burp)

Speaking on the phone today to nearby Greystones, Bray confessed to an even bigger than usual Christmas binge. Waking up to a colossal hangover on St "Stephens's" day, the already grossly overweight Co. Wicklow town noticed its waistline had expanded by two overpriced housing developments, a Spar, a Jury's inn and an estate agent's. Offering its sympathy, Greystones noted it still had an unused voucher for a local health club left over from last Christmas. Failing which, Newtownmountkennedy had mentioned just the other day on the phone about this bunch of disaffected locals it was itching to try out on some yuppie commuter scum. Bray then told Greystones it loved it when she talked dirty and hung up.

Regurgitated Fish

Likes: exiting larva, regurgitating fish, seventeenth number one
Dislikes: flies and death, holding straw

Having now passed the larval, regurgitated-fish-eating, and seventeenth number one stage, Mariah Carey remains on schedule to hit the crucial straw-holding stage in time for her now-lensing Warner Bros production, Holding the Straw.

PS The line about "When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean, I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff" is, sadly, an urban myth. Reporting to the UN yesterday, Mahomed ElBaradei found a clear lack of evidence for any flies and death-related Mariah Carey soundbites, and urged UN sanctions on all further Mariah Carey charity appearances rather than any hasty resort to direct military action, though if Iran or North Korea fancied testing their nuclear arsenals on her, he hinted to the assembly (hint hint), he could probably arrange to be busy (nudge nudge) looking in Saddam Hussein's mouth that day (wink wink).

Flashmobbing

I particularly like the Sitemeter World Map feature that tracks readers by location with a red or green dot. So as agreed, tomorrow we all log on in formation at 12pm GMT and spell out the word TWAT! across seven continents. Make sure and haul your sorry asses out of bed in time, too, Antarctica -- we need you for the dot on the exclamation mark.

The Recipe Section

Christmas dinner for ten.

Take nine family members, one turkey and ham, one sackful of potatoes, sprouts, stuffing, carrots, fool around with aimessly for half an hour, place in bin, leave take-away menu on table, leave house, never see the shower of miserable ingrates again.

The Dark Side (The Frog)

Not-toad








Feels he is being constantly propositioned by: not-toads




Have you ever been solicited for sex by an amphibian? Don't be shy. You have, you know, you're just unaware of the fact. Let me explain. Jean-Pierre Brisset was a nineteenth-century French savant who believed humanity was descended not from (ha!) the handiwork of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or (ha!) monkeys, but frogs. Frogs are also speakers of an ur-language from which all later human speech derives, and most of which is taken up with demands for sexual gratification, apparently. As John Sturrock explains:

The frog, is, at a guess, the one creature whose characteristic call is spelt out in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after the form found for it by Aristophanes' ancient Greek frogs: in the ODQ's transliteration, "brekekekex coax, coax". Brisset's nineteenth-century French frogs went, more curtly, "coa, coa" -- "coasser" is the standard French verb meaning "to croak". This gurgled monotone would have struck all but a rarely attuned listener as thin evidence on which to conclude that frogs were the earliest language-users. Brisset, however, was rarely attuned, so taken up with the acoustic aspect of language that he accorded it an all-embracing precedence over the semantic. What he heard the frogs coming out with was not the meaningless - to a human ear -"coa", but the common interrogative pronoun, quoi? In his own charming account: "Un jour que nous observions ces jolies petites bêtes, en répetant nous-même ce cri: coac, l'une d'elles nous répondit, les yeux interrogateurs et brillants, par deux ou trois fois: Coac. II nous était clair qu'elle disait: quoi que tu dis?" [One day when we were observing these pretty little beasts, repeating to ourselves the cry 'coac', one of them answered us, with shining and inquisitive eyes, two or three times: coac. It was clear to us that it was asking: what are {quoi que} you saying?] The fact that frogs turned out to speak what was easily recognizable as French seems at no point to have fazed Brisset, and since the original human language has willy-nilly to be universal, all other known languages must be capable of being derived from French, which was pleasing news for a Frenchman. Coa/quoi can serve as Brisset's founding homophone or paronym, on which his extraordinary theory of language was to be erected. This theory was paronymic to a maniacal degree. There were seemingly no French words or phrases into which he couldn't, by tweaking the syntax if need be and as it were respelling them, read the new meanings that he required, in his construction of a historical anthropology all his own. If you had Brisset's ear for picking up double entendres, it was relatively simple to trace the primordial passage out of the batrachian and into the human condition, when the evidence for it was glaringly apparent in the word-forms of spoken French. It had struck him about frogs that there is no telling by looking at them what gender they are, from which he concluded that as they began to evolve - and what more logical than that a creature which had already changed from a sperm-like tadpole should change again, into a human being? - they were intrigued by the appearance on their bodies of a burgeoning sexual organ. What more natural again than that they should greet it with the words: "Je ne sais ce que c'est" [I don't know what that is], or verb sap, "Jeune sexe est" [It's a nascent sex organ]. Thus equipped, with sexual organs and the words to go with them, they were off down the path of verbal creation, whose direction for the by all accounts celibate Brisset was invariably settled by the urgings of the ancestral frog-man's libido: "Je sais que c'est bien. Je ou jeu sexe est bien. Le premier jeu était le sexe. De là vient la passion du jeu. Le prudent cachait son jeu. Le pronom je désigne ainsi le sexe et quand je parle, c'est un sexe, un membre viril de l'Eternel Dieu qui agit par sa volonté ou sa permission" [I know it's good. 'I', or the sexual game is good. The first game was sex. Thence comes the passion for the game. The prudent player conceals the game. The pronoun 'I' designated sex and when I speak, it's a sexual organ, the virile member of God Almighty which acts by his will and his say-so.]

[End quotation]

And now some sample Brisset potty-mouth frog-speak:

Eh? Sais que? èque-çe? çe-a? Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?
sexe, sexe, sexe...ai? ai? ai? ...eh! eh! eh! ...ai que? ai que? ai que? ... eque, eque, eque... ec, ec, ec...ai que ce? ai que ce? ai que ce? ...
sais que ce? sais que ce? sais que ce? ... exe, sais que ce? exe, sais que ce? exe, sais que ce? ... ce éque ce, ce éque ce, ce éque ce... ce éque ce, ce ex, ce éque ce, ce ex...(sexe, sexe, sexe...) ce éque ce, ce ex est, ce éque ce, ce ex est... (sexe est, sexe est, sexe est...) ce exe est, ce exe est, ce exe est... exe est, exe est, exe est... sexe est, sexe est, sexe est...ce ex est, ce ex est, ce ex est... ce exe, sais que ce? ce exe sais que c'est? ... Excès!
Excès, excès, excès... ce excès sais que... ce ex est excès... ce exe est excès! C'EST LE SEXE!
sexe, sexe, sexe... je ne sais que c'est... jeune sexe est... je ne sais... jeune ce ai... tu sais que c'est bien! TU SEXE EST BIEN!
Oh! Cache ton tu, ton tutu... tu relues tutu, tu relues tutu, tu reluques ton sexe! Je me exe a mine ai.Tu te exe a mine as. Y le sexe à mine a.Il s'examinait. Sexe à mine ai. Son examen. Son exe à main. Son sexe à la main.
Que ce à? Que ce à? Que ce à? ... C'est que ce à? C'est que ce à? C'est que ce à? ... Que aie ce que c'est que ce à? ... Exe est que ce à? ... Que exe est que ça? Que excès que ça? ... Qu'ai que sexe a? Qu'ai que sexe a? ... Que exe ai que ca? Que exe ai que ca? ... Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça? ...
Kékséksa. Kékséksa. Kékséksa. ...C'est le SEXE!!

Eh? Know what? this thing? this? What is that?
Sex, sex, sex...Have, have, have...Eh! Eh! Eh! ...Have that, have that, have that...It, it, it...Uh, uh, uh...Have that thing? have that thing? have that thing? ...
Know what it? Know what it? know what it?...ex*, know what it? ex, know what it? ex, know what it? ... [* "ex" = protuberance!]this thing? this thing? this thing?...this thing, this ex, this thing, this ex ....(sex, sex, sex) ...this thing, this ex is, this thing, this ex is ...(sex is, sex is, sex is...)this ex is, this ex is, this ex is ...ex is, ex is, ex is ...sex is, sex is, sex is ... this ex is, this ex is, this ex is ... this ex know what it? this ex know what it is? ... EXCESS!
Excess, excess, excess ... this ex know what... this ex is excess... this ex is excess! IT IS SEX!
Sex, sex, sex ...I don't know what it is... it's a young sex... I don't know, I don't know, I don't know...have this young, have this young... you know that it's good! Sex, you are good!
Oh!Hide your willie! your willie! your wee-willie! your wee-willie! You expose your willie, you expose your williewee-willie-wee, wee-willie-wee you're gaping at your SEX!
I've got my ex in hand. You've got your ex in hand. The ex is in hand. The sex is in hand. Sex in hand. He examines himself. Sex in hand. His examination. His ex in hand. His sex in his hand.
What's this have? What's this have? What's this have? ... It's that this have? It's that this have? It's that this have? ... What has this that is that which has? ... Is it ex? ...What ex is that? What excess is that? ...What does sex have? What does sex have? ... What does ex have? What does ex have? .... What is that? What is that? ... Kékséksa? It is SEX!!

[End quotation]



The Budweiser frogs: had what in their hands?!




After this brief and possibly disastrous flirtation with frogs, we now pledge ourselves afresh to our first love, the toad. As long as we can get our trousers clean in time. Frogspawn is such a persistent stain.

Headscratch

A woman stopped me in the street and asked if I could spare a minute for cancer research. We huddled down for a bit and decided it had something to do with mutating genes and cell division. Also, that it often causes death. By then I was right out of ideas and still had some shopping to do. So off I went.

All-Seeing Eye

Good evening Solihull, good evening Oregon. I have installed a site meter (foot of page) that tells me where you are, angry loners/long-term unemployed drunks/readers. It also tells me your credit card numbers, so now you know who to blame when that lap dancing club turns up on your statement. If you run the needle backwards across the meter, though, it gives you my credit card number. Consider the weekend in Wetwang on me.

Christmas Card

'I told you I was angry', local man Fred Chubb wrote in a post-murderous rampage yesterday on the only writing surface he could find, a Christmas card with just the cutest picture of Santa and a lickle bunny rabbit watching all these adorable lickle kiddies walking through the snow. 'I TOLD YOU I WAS ANGRY', Chubb repeated in capital letters, underlining the phrase not once but twice.

Chad

After a Sudanese attack on the border town of Idre, the central African republic of Chad has declared itself to be in a 'state of war' with its eastern neighbour.







This is some American guy called Chad whose picture turned up on a google image search. He has nothing to do with the central African republic. He is not at war with Sudan. He is, however, at war with Burkina Faso.







This is a hanging chad. Could hanging chads have had something to do with President Blaise Campaore of Burkina Faso sweeping to a third presidential term in November, with 80% of the vote? Hardly. Or that's what he says anyway. Chad (Chad no. 2) might have something to say about that.

Boas Festas/Joyeux Noël

In a spirit of seasonal good will and reconciliation, and inspired by a Paul McCartney song on Jose's iPod, Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger have decided to play a game of 'football' for Christmas. This will involve both men assuming the role of 'manager' and watching from their dugouts as their 'teams' kick a 'ball' round a 'pitch' in search of 'goals'. After the fun and games though, sadly, it's back to the day job (of sitting through endless press conferences moaning about each other).

Face-Off

Local paper hates local paper






Local paper takes on local paper in local paper deathmatch: More readers of our paper than of yours will die in Christmas drink-driving pile-ups, claims local paper; I think you'll find more readers of our paper than of yours will die in Christmas drink-driving pile-ups, replies local paper; It's a deal, say local papers in badly written, laid-out, designed, all-round piss-poor local papers.



Other local paper also hates local paper (the first one, not itself)

Not So Intelligent Design

Dover Pa. intelligent-design-is-science school curriculum not so intelligently designed itself; crumb of comfort as judge rules school board too moronic to have evolved on its own; suspicion falls on sarcastic, very hungover, just-goofing-around all-powerful being.

Tolerance Plea

Gay rights groups have issued a plea for tolerance of Elton John's laughable records. 'Anyone who can record "Candle in the Wind" and keep a straight face probably needs some time alone in a locked room with Mike Tyson', a spokesman said, 'but we're appealing for tolerance and respect, even for someone as musically perverted and unnatural as Elton John.'

Anger

The hounding of Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell from his Rathcoole home has been greeted with anger and condemnation by loyalist spokesmen: 'We angrily condemn these stories linking loyalists with having heard of a writer, never mind having actually read a book --' {snip}

Ljubljana

The city with the loveliest name.

Toads (cont.)

The Bolivian master race toad. Believes passionately in the historical destiny of the master race, the master race in question being Costa Rican arm-wrestling toads. On discovering that they are not Costa Rican arm-wrestling toads but, sadly, Bolivian master race toads, adult Bolivian master race toads commit suicide by jumping off the nearest tall building while performing the celebrated 'deathsong of the Bolivian master race toad'.

Waitress

You want fries with that? And a chance to do your bit for the future of the European race? Oh you! I get off at eleven.

Spotted Owl

Got problems, spotted owl? We'll get right back to you once we've sorted out the possible imminent extinction of the European race. In the meantime, sit on that tree and try to look picturesque. Or go make some little spotted owls. That'll show those pesky Muslim owls.

What the ****?!

Likes: future of European races



‘Most European races are going to be out of business in a couple more generations… So today we're the endangered species, not the spotted owl... Next time you're in a rundown diner and the 17-year-old waitress is eight months pregnant, don't tut "What a tragedy" and point her to the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic. Leave her a large tip instead. She's doing the right thing, not just for her, but for all of us.’ (Mark Steyn)

The cuss-symbols are in deference to anyone reading this from behind a firewall.

To pick up on a theme from ‘Quintonians’ (below): has anyone noticed how obsessed Mark Steyn is with f***ing? He’s noticed that there are too many Muslims around the place, and how fond they are of reproducing. He’s also noticed how pale-skin non-Muslim (sorry, 'European') folk can’t be bothered having children these days. The solution: pale-skins should f*** their way back to the top of the tree. Are you worried about the size of your non-'European' neighbour’s family? Are you worried about the future of the depopulated Russian far east? Are you worried about the sustainability of EU welfare dependency? Then get f***ing, because otherwise soon there won't be enough 'European' people to go round, and I sure as hell can’t see any on my main street or television screen. And if that teenager in the diner isn’t pregnant, slip her a really big tip and suggest meeting up beside the dumpster in the car park. You’ll make a world-syndicated eugenicist with a soft spot for the purity of the 'European' race very happy. (Mark Steyn, I mean! I'm a world-syndicated eugenicist with a soft spot for the purity of the stripey green and purple race, obviously.)

PS Spotted owls must die. We're the big endangered species round here! Though paradoxically that would make them more endangered than we are. I'll get back to you about that later.

Stroke Has Sharon

Stroke reported hospitalised.

Quintonians, An Occasional Series

I often wonder if the problem with my books isn't that upper middle-class academics just aren't very interesting people





Quintonians is a game invented by Iris Murdoch, and involves imagining the least likely thing someone would say.

Some opening suggestions.

George Steiner: 'The great thing about late period Wittgenstein is how crystal-clear and, in fact, quite simple it is when you think about it.'

Ron Silliman: 'Isn't it funny how having 700 bloglinks on my website makes post-avant poetry look strangely like a mirror image of the bloated consumer culture I hate so much? Well, with that in mind, I've decided to reduce them to the half dozen that are really worth reading.'

Judith Butler: 'Next semester's course will feature no reference to questions of gender, sexuality, the body, the psychoanalytic and the performative. Don't you think I've said enough about all those already?'

Tom Paulin: 'The important thing about Ian Paisley is that, in a just world, no one outside Ballymena would have heard of this jumped-up provincial bigot.'

Andrew Motion: 'The big problem with poetry these days is that way too many people are reading it.'

Melanie Phillips: 'The seeing to I got from that bloke I met down the pub last night has opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about drugs and promiscuous sex.'

Every Irish Studies academic who ever lived: 'Having said all I wanted to say about Ireland in my last book, I'm now turning my attention to the comparable, and probably much more interesting example of another minor European nation state like Slovakia or Belarus.'

Harold Pinter: 'The USA isn't so bad really. I mean, if Russia or China ran the world then we really would be fucked.'

John McGahern: 'What you've got to remember about Ireland back then is that it was run by complete bastards and sadists. I hated every last one of them and forgive nobody.'

Mark Steyn: 'Why do I always go on about Muslims in my columns? Because I hate them and wish they could all be deported. Next question.'

Mark Steyn, pt 2: 'If white European Christians in the welfare-addicted EU don't want to reproduce themselves, so what? They've had their turn. It's time someone else had a chance, like the Muslims for instance.'

Helen Vendler: 'You used to be so great, Seamus, but I thought your new book was a bit crap, to be honest.'

Tony Harrison: 'Dropping in on mam and dad, I found them discussing Kathy Acker over an Indian takeaway. No change there then.'

Alan Bennett: 'Noticing how this whole Northern childhood thing was getting out of hand, and fearing the effects on me in adulthood, my mother decided to relocate to Watford.'

Eavan Boland: 'I personally wouldn't care to feature in any anthology of women-only writers, would you?'

Seamus Heaney: 'The problem with growing up in the countryside was the chronic shortage of anywhere that did a good latte.'

Any Sky News or Five Live reporter: 'You. Know. The. Way. I. Put. Full. Stops. Between. My. Words? That's. Because. I'm. A. Moron.'

Christmas Presents, Buying of

His miserly attitude to Christmas present buying sadly curtailed Larkin's police career




That annual conversion of our indifference to other people into active hatred.

Philip Larkin. I paraphrase.

Situationism

Audience interaction special offer.

First email to the address on my profile wins free copy of album by band mentioned on post of 7 December. This post will be taken down afterwards and no mention ever made of this whole sad, sorry, sordid transaction again.

Get mailing me now!

Toads (cont.)

The East German gymnastic toad. Stripped of 1972 Olympic beach volleyball bronze medal for steroid use and not being human. The Olympics are for humans, not toads.

Toads (cont.)

The WLTM toad. GSOH, SBBF (single beige-y-brown female), non-smoker, Episcopalian, socialising first then maybe more. Must like free jazz and slugs.

Toads (cont.)

The bubblegum toad. Likes bubblegum. Bubblegum not pictured. That's its throat, stupid. It just LOOKS like bubblegum.

Toads (cont.)

The orange peel toad. Once the legal currency of Wallis and Fortuna. Extinct.

Toads (cont.)

Nicaraguan toad frog. Is a frog, not a toad. Not to be confused with the Nicaraguan frog toad. Also likes to play the spoons.