Me, myself and I (really need a year on a good diet)

For once – once, mind you, in the last 20 years or so – I have a picachewer of me that almost makes me look human. Instead of the claw-handed sallow internet Morlock that I truly am. Look ye. Look ye.

Yes, I know that I still look like a crack addict/hillbilly Wendigo, but that’s what ten years of poor to no sleep does for you.

Why is it here? Why now? Is it vanity?

Well, I am terribly vain - but that’s my problem, not yours. Hopefully.

No, the reason is that I plan to go all multimedia on you. Only ten years behind the rest of the Interwebsphere, I’m going to try out a podcast. For starters.

(Maybe a Half-life 2 webcomic or two, to boot. I’ve got Garry’s Mod, and there are only so many times you can launch Professor Kleiner from a makeshift cannon at a wall before you have to justify the cost to yourself. That would leave me only about five years behind the rest of you, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? I’m trying to catch up, honestly.)

It’s actually so you’ll be able to put a face to the voice (which has been likened to an angel’s fart) when you hear my Northern twang in full flow. Which is coming next. Which is coming soon. Be aware. Or beware, if you prefer.

It’ll probably be about Britain’s Got Talent. Unless something else irritates me more in the meantime, which is unlikely.

p.s. For Sweet Hairy Jesus’ sake, don’t go upping the gamma on the image. Not only will you see the dark shadows and huge bags under my eyes – but you’ll be able to make out the ghostly imprint of Thanatos’ hand reaching for me in the background. Hey, I’m near the halfway mark in my four score years and ten. I’d be elderly a millennia ago. Just remember that.

p.p.s. Yes, I do live inside a featureless magnolia cube. It’s not as bad as you’d think.

p.p.p.s. My face and voice are not CC licensed. They’re mine, I tell you, mine - and you can’t have them. Even if for some bizarre reason you wanted to.

p.p.p.p.s. I can do the Roger Moore eyebrow on both sides. How’s that for fucking talent, Britain?

The dream that I awoke from this morning

No apologies for the lack of formatting, editing for readability, etc. It was a dream. They generally play out unformatted, unedited and stream of (sub) consciousness.

I had been taking to someone in the internets (a chap called Percy, a shroom blogger and excellent wit, but whom I have never met or seen, so in the dream he was about 35, tall and black – I don’t know if he really is) but we were actually lying down in the middle of a road in a ‘next instant’ kind of thing. As I got up a van ran over my companion, temporarily stunned he took a while to groggily get up while complaining that his legs tingled. We were both spattered with his blood.

When he felt better he insisted that we go to this nearby amphitheatre/coliseum/arena where he climbed down onto a rocky promontory and threw himself to his death in front of me. I went to a futuristic police station that was more like a bus concourse – with those sexy robots that certain Japanese artists draw all wandering about, up until the point more of them arrived by coach and then they all stood at the windows and watched them disembark.

In my questioning and forensic examination I noticed that I had been wearing surgical gloves and gave them to the investigating officer to inspect. He, a pretty policewoman (who may or may not have been one of my exes) went back to the amphitheatre to retrace my steps. To do so we had to walk over displays of live crocodiles which clacked their powerful jaws at our ankles - and boxes of snapping turtles, frogs and other amphibians set into the floor around the walls of the amphitheatre, and gingerly cross yawning crevasses (like climbing out of lofts onto loft ladders where you have to swing yourself onto them from a seated position) as the investigating officer helpfully put his boot in my back to hasten my movements.

When we got to the point that Percy had killed himself, his body was gone – as if it had never been there - someone from a Cirque du Soleil type performance rehearsing there gave me a flyer with a message to meet someone else on the floor of the pit. Accompanied by the policewoman who entered into banter with a friend waiting in a queue about their past exploits in their student days, the cirque du s employee balled up the flyer and threw it away. I was crestfallen at this as I wanted someone's autograph on it. Instead of being taken to meet a performer we were led a a booth of people sitting cross-legged swami-style with needles sticking out of their skins, one of those people was a complaining ninny from the suicide scene who had complained that watching my companion die had ruined the show for him.

He was sticking syringes into his neck and face in some sort of reverse smackheadery/drug addition. As he blustered at us that he should be left alone to enjoy himself the scene changed and the policewoman and I were in a stationery shop buying pens and paper for my statement. Outside she waited for a lift back to the station as I hugged her and told her I’d see her later. Then I realised that my dead companion had given me his ability/curse of seeing into the future. I had a vision of bank robbers in pink Mack trucks trailing pink containerised loads behind then(yeah, I know. Freud would have had a fucking field day with it) and a double-decker bendy-bus were driving en-masse into an intersection further into the now darkened/night-time town that we were in.

Running to the intersection I climbed aboard the back of the bendy bus and faced off a grim Teutonic female robber dressed as a bus conductor and her male friend who was dressed as a chef. I threw them both off the bus. moving down the  aisle - which was bordered by vol-au-vents individually set on small square metal platters, another robber came out of a glass-walled area near the front of what was a bus and now became more of an underground station. As he tried to escape through a door marked ‘recycle’ I threw (ninja-like) one tray at a button near his head which locked him in – then another at a switch that presumably mangled or crushed him from the screams. The driver himself, a driver no longer, but a passenger on the underground, I tussled with on the platform before he fell into the path of a train.

and that’s when my alarm went off.

Note to self – while cheese, peanut butter and baked bean toasties may be a delicious and rewarding experiment, they probably make you have really freaky dreams.

I wish that alarm hadn’t gone off though.

The Conspirinterocitor #3 – Looking up at stuff turns you into a subservient zombie

Hey there. One of my hobbies is making up conspiracy theories. You know - just to see how wild you can get on the possibility that some swivel-eyed madman somewhere will cut-and-paste the bits in between the piss-takings and disseminate the information among a network of other swivel-eyed lunatics. Probably via the medium of tin-can telephones…because every other avenue of communication is being listened to by the government and lizard-aliens.

Anyway, here’s the latest faux fevered fanatical fulmination.

 

LOOKING UP AT STUFF TURNS YOU INTO A SUBSERVIENT ZOMBIE

Looking up at shit makes the blood flow to the brain change, thus affecting how the brain balances supply of blood, causing globally protective changes in neurotransmitter types and amounts that have a negative effect on our willpower while saving us from braindeath.

Throughout all walks of life we are encouraged by religion, design, architecture, our peers, etcetera to LOOK UP

Children look up to their parents

Congregations look up to the image of God

We all look up at Apollo, Ra, Helios (name him how you like, we all look up to feel the sun on our faces)

We are encouraged by our peers to keep our chin up when we are down

We look up at the screen in the cinema and now in our homes at wall-mounted televisions

We have to look up at road signs to save ourselves from accident

To look up is to OBEY!

To look up is to bare your throat.

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I love making this shit up.

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Previous Conspirinterocitor communications:-

The Conspirinterocitor #2 – Where’s your balls man?

The Conspirinterocitor #1 – I bet this comes back to bite me on the arse

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My anti knife crime poster

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Version 2. Version 1 had the word ‘use’. Carry sounds better.

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Spanglox Sally the call centre robot takes a call

Spanglox is always there to help you. That’s why we have a customer care line for all of our products.

Spanglox is constantly being sued for damages. That’s why you can’t have the number.

My profile page now has an audio clip that gives a brief glimpse into the hard work our call centre robots do to provide you with complete product information.

Below you will find any tenuous links to claptrap I already spouted and should have buried deep within my psyche alongside the memory of those terrifying days I spent wandering around Skegness that one time.

The ads they’d love to make – Spanglox dishwasher detergent

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I tried to post this on my Posterous three bastard times. It doesn’t seem to understand that an outgoing Googlemail address is the same as an incoming Gmal address. Bah!

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A troika of pictures that I’m lumbering you with

In the jetstream of data that is the internet we are constantly buffeted by forces that threaten to send our blogs plummeting downward into the sea of forgotten sites below. Today, my passengers, we are shaping our metaphorical airframe for a burst of speed and lift. it won’t help of course,…but I’ve got all these buttons and levers here and I’m damn well going to use them all. Even the one marked ‘DO NOT PRESS’.

All that has nothing to do with what you are going to see below, which is just stuff I scanned, our took photographs of. I just wanted to pull some levers I’ve never used before.

Tayto don’t seem to make these any more. I wonder why? Oh, wait…it might be because because they sound like they taste of sweaty workman’s scrotum. Their Flash games and stuff on their website ( http://www.tayto.com) are fun though if you have had a series of devastating head injuries or are blind drunk. Fortunately, both applied to me when I visited. Five fucking stars, Tayto.

I should bloody well think so. I won’t tell you which branch of Thorntons I saw this in. Zero stars, Thorntons.

The day when the inkling I had that my workmates in my old firm didn’t like me became a certainty. Not really. I actually had to move it outside while we cleaned up a chalk outline and some blood. We had a tontine-style pension plan, so it got a little bit competitive at times.

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Hey, I could have given you a big block of text instead.

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I’d be the worlds worst bingo caller

I’m not very good at brevity. I also have a problem with preventing the mental artist who paints the mental pictures inside my head from embellishing them endlessly until what should be just a funny internal visualisation of an event, a tiny vignette perhaps, becomes a bloody trompe-l’oeil  triptych behind my eyes.

I’ve long suspected that this might hamper any real-world activities or professions that I might otherwise enjoy and excel at. So I tried to practice brevity and simplicity in the comfort of my own home using a time-honoured method.

I tried my hand at being a home-brew bingo caller.

Not wishing to lessen the experience any I made a bingo machine from a hairdryer (on cool) blowing into the bottom of a Rainy Day Cricket box with a straw sticking out of the top of it. With a disk pen and a magnifying glass I marked polystyrene bean-bag balls with numbers in accordance with the Gaming Act of 1968.

I wore a waistcoat. A spangly one I found in the attic. I did not fasten it however, as I have somehow put on weight in the twenty years since I wore it last.

Then I had to fashion a long tube for the bottom of the Rainy Day Cricket box (from a vacuum cleaner hose that I still own despite throwing out the machine years ago. No, I don’t know why) so that  the polystyrene balls would stop bouncing off the ceiling. Then I had to make a stand for the whole assembly from bent wire coat-hangers and blu-tack so that the hairdryer wouldn’t burn out or the box fall over. I considered giving up, but armed with the knowledge that my task was both onerous and completely fucking pointless I knuckled down. Magnifying glass at the ready, and thumb over the end of the straw I began.

Four seconds later (or thereabouts) the whole fucking shebang fell to bits. The Rainy Day Cricket box was seemingly unhappy with its new, dual role and flew apart at the seams - spewing my tiny balls everywhere.

So I emptied out (by which I mean ate) the contents of a box of miniature Coco Pops from a Kellogs Variety pack and tried again. Success! Hammering a lump of blu-tack flat on the desk as a bingo board that I could embed the balls in, I began to test my calling skills.

“Two identical positive pregnancy test pens that your youngest daughter has held up in front of her; at which she is looking back and forth in growing horror and panic – like a spectator at a tennis match being played by zombie strippers…eleven.”

Not good. I tried again.

“Sheila and Melanie over there by the bar – who between them have enough liquid grease surging through their veins to fry a thousand sausages and still have enough left over to lubricate all the moving parts of a fleet of ocean liners…eighty-eight.”

Hmmm. Okay, one more try.

“The act of coitus that involves you and your husbands lying top-to-tail and stimulating each others genitals orally…but lets face it ladies…they’re not getting any younger, so at some point you know you’re going to have to stick an unspecified number of fingers up their bums and stimulate the prostates within that have enlarged over the years - to the point where they now resemble a goat’s kneecap…sixty-nine.”

It was at this point that the realisation dawned that I wasn’t cut out for this line of work.

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Next time: I’d be the world’s worst flotation device.

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