Christmas Cracker

Even Christmas crackers are hip to the Intarweb!!!0!0!!

Enjoy the eating, drinking and merriment, and I’ll see you on the other side.

21 December 2005

Gullzilla

Darth GullAs everyone knows, one of the best things about blogging is the dialogue it opens up between reader and author, either via comments or, in the case of more sensitive or private subjects, via email. The last entry proved to be no exception, raising an especially significant question for one Australian reader, who emailed yours truly for reassurance. That question being: “HOW FUCKING BIG ARE THE SEAGULLS IN BRITAIN?”

Read More · 17 December 2005 ·

Methuselah

Methuselah boasted, “My dears,
I’ve confirmed all my enemies’ fears:
I’ve neglected to die,
And so celebrate my
Bicentenary—200 years!”

Read More · 14 September 2005 ·

Lightness

Walking back from the train station I feel that sense of voyeuristic detachment, that stepping outside of oneself, that makes me think of Milan Kundera’s famous novel—more specifically its famous title, because I’ve never read the book, although I have seen the film. The story attached to it has weighty themes about life under communism, but you could cast them all off and lose nothing that mattered; you could throw away a lifetime’s writing if the five words you kept were as pithy and lasting as those.

If only they didn’t work best as a title; then he wouldn’t have had to write a novel around them. He could just have walked to and from the train station, saying to his neighbours, when they asked him why he had that odd look on his face—that one you get when you become overwhelmingly aware that you’re alive and physically present in the world right here and now, hovering between tears of happiness and complete emotional collapse: “Oh, you know. Lightness of being. Unbearable, really.”

16 August 2005 ·

Our Friend the Vulture

The vulture is a picky bird;
He picks a creature from a herd
And waits until it’s fallen dead,
Then perches on its swollen head
And pokes his beak beneath its hide
To peck at offal tucked inside
Of all the stuff the sun has fried.

Read More · 31 July 2005 ·

The Ancient Art of Tikegami

Materials: 1 x UK bus ticket; 1 x bus trip of at least 2 minutes duration; 2 x pairs of opposable digits (thumb, index finger or similar); 1 x childhood obsession with paper-folding.

Read More · 24 July 2005 ·

The Gothic Hippopotamus

The gothic hippopotamus wears lots and lots of black,
With crosses underneath the tresses dropping down her back.
She stocks her home with records from the gothic hippo shop
To bop to all the toppermost of angsty rock and pop.
Her friend the antelope’ll spring a bob or two as well
To hop along to Joy Division’s stroppy songs of hell.
The antelope and hippo scrub up properly, at least—
The grotty mob are all the heavy metal wildebëëst.

14 May 2005

I wonder, did it say “No animals were harmed during the making of this motion picture” at the end of Old Yeller?

And at the end of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, did it say “No animals were harmed, unless you count human beings”?

28 April 2005

Googleburgh

Scotland’s capital city must be too English for Google:

Read More · 25 April 2005

Whatever in 2004