When it’s over a week between posts
And ideas come and go just like ghosts,
There’s nowt wrong with tosh
Or a bit of old bosh –
Though it might not bring plaudits and toasts!
Image: Left Field Wander
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Tag: humour
When You Find Yourself in a Hole, Stop Digging …
… although it can be surprising what comes to light when you look. Here (as the ‘Blue Peter’ presenters would say) is one I prepared earlier:
When buying things it pays to read the labels
For sell-by dates and sugar overload,
But never trust those advertisers’ fables –
Their promises will sell you down the road.
No product yet invented makes you cheerful
When sad and lonesome feelings fill your head –
The more you buy, the more you will be fearful
That folk are out to rob you in your bed.
When future archaeologists dig landfill,
They’ll wonder why we needed so much stuff!
Then suddenly they’ll come across a handbill:
BUY GLUGGO – YOU CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH!
They’ll see the advert model madly grinning –
Poor sod, they’ll say while safeguarding the proof,
To muddle mere consumption up with winning,
Mistaking greedy lies for grown-up truth!
Image: The Creative Cottage
Clucked!
Here’s a further find from my furious foragings …
They ask if he would care to rule the roost -
Too chicken, me! he says and turns them down.
Responsibility's not quite his thing -
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
And then they come a-pecking on his door -
Carte blanche, they say, to come and do it his way!
See how they trust him - gullible buffoons! -
So keen are they to have their bright new day!
OK, he gives them that - but just the one -
To wave their little flags and scoff their cakes.
The morning after that, he cracks the whip -
The dream's asleep when real nightmare wakes.
The more it hurts, the deeper their devotion.
O punish us, great monarch, we are dirt!
And never do they seek his abdication,
While each endures the itch of rough hair-shirt.
By then he loves unquestioning obedience,
A pampered prince and lord of all he saw!
They never know their minds - this captive audience! -
Once he's made 'thinking hard' against the law.
They teach his book (on etiquette) in schools.
It tells them what to do and what to say.
They have no need of any other rules.
He whistles as they learn to act his way.
To make them love him more, he stages death -
Pronouncements from the palace, funeral rites -
But lo! a miracle resuscitation,
A strong man never giving up such fights!
And back he comes, a phoenix from the ashes
That bears bold news of bliss beyond the grave -
How only those that do his will may gain it -
How those that disobey him won't be saved.
The royal scam - abandoning commitments
And making sure his subjects feel the blame.
He tears up their petitions, spends their money -
Fast cars and faster persons on the game!
Image: Savage Chickens
Alphabetti Spaghetti
Here’s one I did earlier – thought it deserved its moment in the sun before they shut the window of satirical opportunity and return us to our customary state of well-governed happiness and contentment.
On second thoughts, to misquote Captain Oates, we may be some time …
Plan A is lost – Plan B will cost
Plan C‘s just schemes – Plan D is dreams
Plan E‘s no fun – Plan F won’t come
Plan G‘s G Plan – Plan H they’ll ban
Plan I is pants – Plan J no chance
Plan K needs facts and counteracts
Plan L – Plans M and N are wool
Plan O is cock – Plan P is bull
Plan Q‘s half-baked – Plans R, S, T
Are shelved – Plan U is for the birds
Plans V and W – mostly random words
Plan X is feared – Plan Y‘s just weird
We’d better get Plan Z prepared
Image: BBC
Coming from a Shopping Channel Near You …
Sorting through my paper mountain, I unearthed this attempt at cultural exorcism from 2012:
I can’t tell you, my friends, how thrilled I am to be bringing you this next item … There it is … I mean, you only need to look at it to appreciate the quality … Wow, absolutely stunning, with every beautiful detail lovingly crafted by genuine artists … That, for me, encrypts years and years and years of matchless experience … A pure work of art that will not only beautify your home … Not only a precious treasure that will be the envy of all your friends … But an objet d’art that will be a constant delight for you and your loved ones for years and years and years to come … Just look at the charming way it catches our studio lights … Simply gorgeous … No other word to describe this wonderful piece … Not only really unique … Not only a strictly limited edition … Not only are the phone lines on fire tonight but I can tell you here and now that the last time we offered this to our viewers it positively flew away … I kid you not, it sold out in minutes … And here we are again giving this remarkable creation away at silly prices … We must be round the bend, my friends … This exclusive offer you won’t find in the shops, search all you like … Ah yes, a superb investment for the future … A truly magical heirloom that will not only give your children and your children’s children something really special to remember you by … But a lasting testimony to your impeccable good taste … Congratulations to Margaret of Greenock … Colin of Lowestoft, well done … Not only will this exquisite purchase grace the stylish collection in your own personal display cabinet … Not only will you delight in taking it out from time to time and running your quivering fingers up and down its truly sensuous lines … Oh goodness, they tell me the lines are closed … Never mind … Coming up next, my friends, the absolute highlight not only of the night … Not only of the year … Not only of my lifetime … Not only of the whole history of humankind, but …
If this sounds like a spoof, you may be surprised to learn that it’s an almost word-for-word transcript of an actual shopping-channel pitch. OK, I might have taken a liberty or two in the final fourteen words …
Sorted!
Well, that went well. Plenty of action, anyway. No more big piles of paper.
Plenty of small piles, though – so many that my spare room has all but disappeared. My other half looked in at one point and commented – a little tactlessly, I felt:
Thought you were supposed to be tidying up! That bin’s still empty.
I explained how some of the piles were moving closer and just awaited a final check to see if there was anything – a pleasing turn of phrase, the merest germ of a good idea – that might save them from being pulped. And then there were those pieces that weren’t much good but had nostalgia appeal … little poems I wrote to stave off the crushing boredom of exam supervision back in the day, slightly inebriated dialogues written late at night when I should have been getting my beauty sleep, hastily scribbled accounts of incomprehensible dreams I’d woken from … and there, in a pile all its own, my historical novel whose narrator’s heavy dialect made its eighty-thousand words well-nigh unreadable.
That thing? You’ll never get round to doing anything with it. Unless it’s a comic short story about a bloke who reckons he’s a writer.
When she stopped laughing, I told her it wasn’t a bad idea. I’m well known for my stoical acceptance of mild adversity. Don’t know how I’d go in a real catastrophe but that, perhaps fortunately, is for the future.
29 March, at the earliest …
Actually, anything rather than recycle something I spent the best part of five years researching and writing! One of these days, you never know, I could get my second wind and turn it into a smash-hit stage-musical or a block-buster movie-scenario. Laugh all she likes, bless her, she’d be happy enough to sip exotic cocktails on our luxury yacht moored in Monaco or Cannes …
She left, still chuckling, perhaps planning her own best-seller. Perhaps not.
My Walter Mitty moment passed and I gazed despondently at all the paper covering the carpet and single bed like giant wedding confetti. My own plan, to pass all these rough drafts through the eagle eye of my hastily-devised list of aesthetic principles, was in tatters. Night was gathering and I’d got nowhere.
Time was of the essence. I had to act and act fast or I would be crying myself to sleep in the spare room surrounded by the appalling evidence of my own failure.
Yes, time was ticking by. No last-ditch flight to Brussels for me. It was either all in the bin or else back into big piles as if nothing had ever happened. Was I a complete and utter waste of space?
And then, in a blinding flash, it came to me …
The fault lay in my plan, of course! It had been too hasty. My red lines were far too rigid. Or else far too pink and hopelessly vague. And as for that ludicrous catch-all conditional at the end, what fool would devise a set of rules which ended with Rules are there to be broken?
It would have beggared belief if I hadn’t already known what an idiot I was. But there was no time to be lost. I had to come up with an alternative set of aesthetic principles and fast! However, too much of my intellectual energy – such as it was – had been frittered away trying to decide whether old scribblings were Almost Finished or Barely Begun or Half-Baked But Could Cook Through or Good In Parts or even Patchy But Full Of Unfulfilled Potential. It didn’t help that my ability to judge was hopelessly inconsistent, veering between feverish delight and febrile despondency as my ego and id battled it out before a supremely indifferent superego.
As chance would have it (and any readers of this account who are still awake might hope) there was a deus ex machina in the form of one I’d prepared earlier – the ‘one’ in question being a set of aesthetic principles I’d devised for an epic poem about something or other which I’d never even begun – the ‘set’ in question having come to light while I’d been going through my papers but which, preoccupied as I was with the search for literary gold, went unrecognised for what it really was.
I’ll leave you with a copy, in case it’s of any assistance in your own fruitless searches, because I must take to my bed tout suite so that I can be up bright and early tomorrow morning. After all is said and done, who knows what a new day will bring?
Besides, my crystal ball’s down the mender’s …
- First thought, best thought (Ginsberg)
- Intuition attains the absolute (Bergson)
- Unity in diversity (Hegel)
- Without contraries, no progress (Blake)
- The words must be irrefutable (Orton)
- Show don’t tell (James)
- Write the story only you know (Fountain)
- I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew (Frost)
- In art, the subject matter is nothing (Maurois)
- What then? No then. (Kafka)
- Be true to the earth (Nietzsche)
- Re-enchant the world (Brazilian eco-artist)
- It is necessary to be absolutely modern (Rimbaud)
- Make it new (Pound)
- Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order (Proudhon)
- Invent new values (Nietzsche)
- Forget yourself (graffiti)
- I is another (Rimbaud)
- See all beings in yourself and yourself in all beings and lose all fear (Eastern saying)
- Only connect (Forster)
PS The above are paired – meant to be 10 of them but I couldn’t get the numbers right!
Bon nuit!
Image: America’s Survival
Unsocial Climbing – a story in 100 words
You and I, my friends, we stand side-by-side. Others, envious of our beautiful bond, seek to divide us. Look, they shriek, that gulf between my wealth and your poverty!
Don’t let them worry you. Turns out we’re on the same ladder, different rungs is all. Up here it’s raining golden eggs, believe me! Stick around and pick my brain on how to climb good. Things they don’t tell you.
Like they give some folk that can’t climb a helping hand. You elbowed out while these raid the nest. Silent majority won’t squeak, they reckon.
They reckoned without me. Your voice.
Image: Math Tutoring & Learning Centers | Mathnasium
Stimulus: majority, raid and brain from https://randomwordgenerator.com/
