They weren’t to know it, for true history had long ago been unknown to them, but the attacks that they made on the farmlands to their south were no longer against yet another of the small tribes or statelets that now patchworked the whole island with their small territories.
One of the Brazilian explorers, who later made a big academic reputation with a book about the island, suggested, unoriginally enough, that the attacks were like sticking pins in an elephant. The elephant might ignore one or two pinpricks, perhaps even ten or fifteen of them, but beyond that, at some inexactly defined point, the slightly perforated elephant would respond with massive force.
Actually this analogy was not quite right, what was happening down on the fog shrouded island in the estuary marshes, was that a blasted hacked and long-ago burned organism was, after a lengthy period of comatose recovery, starting to grow again. Like a buried tree stump putting forth new shoots, but only a little bit like that, because it was a matter of people re-inventing their history in the light of a new understanding of themselves. This owed much to previously ignored or forgotten understandings. It was renaissance and reformation.
There wasn’t much sign of either of these when the Lootinluton burned down a barn, having first stolen a horse and cart from it. They had loaded this vehicle with as much food, drink and other transportable plunder as they considered compatible with a swift escape back to the north. They were scarpering in this direction promptly because they wanted to be in the forest before pursuit could be organised. Once concealed by trees they could easily hide and, if necessary shoot up or down any band or farmers’ militia or even border guards sent after them. Out in the open fields they were nervous; a couple of them mounted on the fastest looking of the ponies that they had recently stolen were stationed behind the main group as a rearguard. These two looked back to the south as the dampish thatch of the burning barn caught properly and began sent up a churning black-grey column of smoke. They looked back at the dead man who they had left lying in the mud just outside the barn doors, as if expecting him to get back up and start raising an alarm. He didn’t, he was well dead, but he might as well have done, because the uprolling, swirling column of smoke would now be visible for miles around, proclaiming what the Lootinluton had done as clearly as any bell or siren.. In fact both the rearguards wondered why they had set the barn alight, but neither voiced this thought, since farm and other rural building arson was what one did when was in the Lootinluton. They faintly heard shouts and a bugle or horn blowing, so they trotted off along the route taken by the stolen cart.
That was the pinprick; this is how a message was sent up nerves to a brain.
About forty eight hours after the barn was burnt, a tired man put his hired horse in a stable nearby. He wanted to clean himself, to have a meal and to sleep, but before he could do any of these, someone brought him a message, a summons in fact, that he thought that he had to obey almost immediately. He stuffed a cold sandwich into his face, whilst getting a fresh horse. Then he set off again, almost as quickly as this narrative has described it. The ride that he was now commencing was much easier than the previous one. That had been a hurried rides across country which progressively became more wooded treacherous and dangerous. It had basically been a futile uphill ride and he felt fortunate that he and his companions had returned alive.
Now he was heading down hill and southwards mostly along clearly defined and well maintained tracks. The fresh horse more or less knew the way itself and he could doze off into half sleep as he rode along. In fact he was glad that there was a slight cold edge to the breeze which blew just enough to stop him nodding off totally and falling from the saddle.
As the tired man dozed and daydreamt atop the less tired horse, the countryside through which they passed changed. It became tamer, there were more houses and villages, there were more other people about; and after a few gentle rolling descents they came towards the wide marshy flood plain of a dirty old river. The air began to smell watery and slightly salty. The calls of sparrows, pigeons, thrushes and the like were supplemented by manic gull cries and the sandpiping of small shore fowl. There were willows, streams and ponds about, the road that the man was now riding down got muddier and wetter, the horse splashed and splattered down it into a hamlet of about ten single storey wooden buildings. At the end of this small street one such was slightly better kept than the others which had one glass window. A path beside it led to landing stage where punts and rowing boats of various sizes were moored.
The tired man dismounted and tied the reins of his horse to wooden railings set there for that purpose. Others came and spoke with him, a boat was arranged and a crew for it was found, a fee was paid and now, sitting in it as others rowed it down the creek to the main river, he let himself sleep at last, to the distant almost unregistered sound of a bittern booming in the reedbeds.
The tired man embarked is dreaming, of vast grey granite faces, of vast greygranite sheer slabs of rock and limestone and flint broken into differing patterns as it piles up high to the skigh. Of strange niches in the face of the slabs where some pines have rooted and grown, where wolves might still survive. He does not know the name of what he sees in his dream. He has always only been conscious in relatively moderate flatlands, where wrens flit between bushes and bitterns boom over the necks of their empty beer bottles. What are these high grey things stabbing the sky? His grand uncle once told him something about them, mountains he called them, ravens, choughs and eagles fly about them. Recalcitrants herd goats on their slopes and they have glinting windows too. And these ants, these small insects on the slopes and running in and out of the openings. Where had he seen them? He could smell the full tang of the sugar and dirt mixture used to sweeten the acorn coffee, and the rain through the thatch and the fug of unwashed clothes in grand uncle’s hovel. Back then there was still one solar panel in the village, made in one of wrecked palaces on Hay lane, but like everything else up there, it had eventually got burned and/or looted. The panel, when it was their turn to use it, could power one ancient DVD player and a flickering screen. And when the disc ran (only for about ten minutes max), it showed bomb blasts around some flat roofed and domed buildings in a dry sandy land. “Hah, hah.” His grand uncle had cackled.
The sleeper did not know what it meant, in dreams sometimes people who he had never met before spoke about the urgency and size of Royal Doulton urinals. “And now wash your hands!” a fringe faced, leaf eared bat flew directly at him screaming.
“Watch your hands, mate! Watch your hands!” Someone was really saying, a bearded man, one of the boat’s oarsmen. “Don’t puttem in ther watter, like vat! Crocs an’ big fucking pike rahnd here!” the gnarled boatswain explained. The now awakened sleeper now knew, he could feel the wetness between his fingers, and, though he no more knew what Crocs or pike were than he understood his dream, he took his hand back on board.
There was a slapping splash from the grey water near where the sleeper had, inadvertently, let his hand trail.
“Vicious fuckers!” the wizened inshore mariner opined, “Snap orl yore fingers orf and then stick vere eds aht and arsk for fucking custard! Heh, heh, heh!” he cackled at his own joke, but the wakened passenger did not appreciate it the seasoned salt’s humour as he glimpsed a broad scaly back or side turning just beneath the water where his hand had been. However he was distanced from these real or rumoured perils, as with a series of shouts, the boat was moored to a stinky green and black landing stage.
He was, sort of, helped ashore by the wrinkled but tanned coxswains , i.e.: they attempted to ensure that he slipped or plunged into the brown river, apparently by accident, when it seemed likely to them that he had no intention of tipping them. Although he wore riding boots and spurs, their attempts failed, and he was still standing upright as they rowed the boat away again into the powerful Thames current to collect another fare. He did however, fall over when he was almost at the landward end of the jetty, by then the boat men could not see him fall, and know that there is some justice in the world, because, even if there is, tossers like the almost senile waterboatmen should not know that it exists, otherwise how could they savour the tang of justified grievance, which although, strictly speaking salty and vinegary, was almost the only sweetness possible in their drudge lives.
A landward functionary helped the Captain to his feet, “Are you alright there ..er…Sir?” the guard anxiously asked, (he had been about to say “mate”, but his social stratification radar took in the fact that, although bleary eyed and travel stained, this man carried some middle-status weapons and gear), Furthermore, if one such individual was ferried here and came voluntarily, (as opposed to shackled and under armed guard), someone important must want to see him, he might therefore also, temporarily at least, be important himself.
“I’ve, ..er.. got an appointment, my name is Captain Walsh of Fryent.” The traveller said whilst attempting to brush some riverine slime from his trousers.
“Captain Walsh of Fryent!” the doorman bawled respectively. He was half-turning his head so that the sonic force of his shout was mainly directed almost backwards over his shoulder through the doorway of the vast, creeper festooned edifice behind him.
“Yuuuw!” or ”Wuuuw!”, a vague and indecipherable reply came to the Captain’s ears from inside.
“Go in Sir, report to the reception desk” was the interpretation that was given to Captain Walsh, he complied with it. And entered a shadowy, wetly pungent, cool space. It took several seconds for his tired eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the building and, for someone who seldom went into any building larger than a barn or a village temple, to the strange interior proportions and arrangements of this building. Its doorway was small, Walsh, though only 5ft 10ins tall, had had to bob his head slightly to enter through it: its floor area was probably about 29 yards square, although the shadows in the further corners of the room did not allow the Captain to discern whether it was actually square in shape or even straight edged. For some reason he suspected that it wasn’t and , looking up, he saw it was high, very high, over fifty yards perhaps, with beams of sun light crossing it in places from windows , or cracks and holes in its sides.
“Here, Sir!” a man called and turning towards the voice, the Captain saw a heavy stone or perhaps dark wooden desk in front of him, behind it a hooded Human (?) stood. The Captain walked up to the desk.
“You will be having an interview with the Marlon in the presence of Man Agingdir Hector the Nine Hundred and Fifty Eighth.” The hooded Human sombrely announced.
The captain was awestruck, such an important event, as he had heard, could lead to Death or Glory. He had never himself seen this Marlon, The Four Hundred And Twenty Ninth, and he was just beginning to describe himself as ‘middle-aged’; his father and grand father and two of his uncles and seen him/her/it in earlier incarnations. They had not described their experiences in detail, but they had told him about it when he was a boy; they seemed almost too overwhelmed to recall anything specific about the event, although they stressed its great importance to him. All his ancestors had explained to him the importance of the Marlon to the regeneration of the City. So he was not entirely surprised when his journey to the place where the meeting was to take place was elaborate, partly ritualised and deliberately confusing.
Initially the cowl-clad receptionist picked up a small rectangular carved piece of Portland stone. The Captain could not quite see all the detail of it as it was partly concealed by the functionary’s hand; but it seemed to be carved into a series of small regularly spaced squares, each with several tiny characters scribed into them. The Hooded human took a small wax taper, lit it from a candle that was on his desk and inserted the taper in a hole in the Portland stone so that it burned there.
Then he went (i.e. he ‘said’); “Pee-pee-pee. Peep.Peep-ee, Peep-ee, Peep-ee, ee-Peep.”
Whilst making these micelike noises, he was poking at different squares on the stone with his finger in a sequence that he appeared to have memorised. After a few seconds, he stopped poking the stone, and then exhaled as though he had just completed a complex and finicky task; however his exhalation extinguished the small taper in the stone.
“Fucking vegetarian cyclist!” he swore in a mutter just audible to the Captain, then turning his head to face as far behind him as he could manage, he shouted; “Message Abort!”
From somewhere in the interior darkness another voice replied repeating his words and adding; “Please Resend!”
Hoody relit the taper and went through the finger pointing handjive again and repeated the high-pitched “peeping" squeaky chant, but this time after he finished it, he managed to exhale less violently than before, so that the taper in the stone in his hand stayed alight.
Now he made an even stranger chant:
“Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Der….”
“CLICK!” Someone else shouted out of the darkness. It seemed to the Captain that it was the same person who had called out earlier when the hooded human’s taper had been extinguished.
“…..derr” the hooded one briefly continued and then his brain registered the reply.
“CLICK!” he then bawled. “Please send the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager, a Captain Walsh of Fryent to audience the Marlon. CLICK!”
“CLICK!” was the reply.
“He’ll be ‘ere in a sec sir” the hooded said, turning to the Captain.
“er,… thanks” Walsh answered not knowing what else to say as the man before him seemed to think that he had done him some kind of personal service, although Walsh was not sure what it was.
At no time during their meeting could Captain Walsh of Fryent see the hooded man’s face so when the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager arrived, the Captain was almost surprised to see that he had a face. It was very, very pale, pointed hairless and angular. This man, who stood about 5ft 8½ins tall wore lensless and often string repaired spectacle frame and had a desiccated dead magpie strapped to the top of his scalp. Small whitish flies flew about him in a cloud. He was clad in yellowing cabbage leaves and stank. He held a flickering, spluttering light on a thin stick in his left hand.
“Foller me, foller the lie!” he said and without waiting to see if Walsh was complying, set off back the way that he had come.
Again the Captain realised, he was about to comply with the instructions and assumptions of others in a situation that he did not fully understand, nonetheless he followed the light held by the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager away from the daylight, which he wished that he could have looked back at, but being scared of getting lost in the dark recesses of this place, did not.
Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager, led him to a corner, and then, he thought, down a corridor. The DACCFOM was a slinky, (albeit stinky), and fast mover; so Walsh did not feel that he had time to stretch out his hands and use his sense of touch to confirm the fleeting impressions of his eyes and other senses that walls were closing in around , above , below and beside him. He followed the DACCFOM’s light for probably only two minutes at most although it seemed much much longer to him.
The DACCFOM stopped and they were in a small space, but a room rather than a corridor, although in the light of the DACCFOM’s taper. Walsh could yet again not surely discern its true dimensions. Two smooth metal doors were in front of the Captain; actually they were the pocked, pitted, scarred, battered and scratched remains of what once had been two smooth faced metal doors.
“This is the lift.” DACCFOM announced. “Captain, I have to ask you a question before you can use it” he continued.
“Yes?” Walsh responded.
“Have you eaten recently?”
This question was more difficult than it might at first seem for the Captain to answer. He ‘rewound’ his memories; what had he been doing when he had been asked to chase the Lootinluton? He remembered some tea and biscuits on a mosaic tray, but was it then or was it at the stables after he returned? Being obliged to participate in a sports team, being asked to ceremonially urinate on the compost heap of a new village school, needing to hire a ratcatcher, needing to regrind his pikeheads. These were all interrupted activities that he remembered from the recent past, but he had no idea what order they had taken place in relation to his call to martial duties regarding the Lootinluton, or where in the sequence the ingestion, or attempted ingestion, of foods and drink fitted in this. He came to the conclusion that, although he did not actually feel like it, he had probably not eaten or drunk for about five hours, apart from the odd drink of water or dry biscuit, he felt in his jacket pocket. Crumbs, only crumbs.
“No”. He said.
“How unrecently?” The DACCFOM asked.
“About five hours.”
“You have to have beans and cabbage” The DACCFOM announced. “sorry about that,” He apologised.” But you’re a Captain of Militia and I am sure that you understand that you have to emit methane under these circumstances.”
Again Walsh did not understand at all, but as some sort of deference appeared to be being paid to him, went along with it.
“Yes” He said.
“One moment, please. “ The DACCFOM produced a small wooden stool and gestured for the Captain to sit down on it. “I’ll pray for you. “He told Walsh, who sat and watched his produced a wad of white woolly textile from under his clothes which he inserted into his mouth. The cabbage clad man began speaking, perhaps praying, Walsh could not tell for the cloth wad inside the man’s mouth made it impossible to discern any single word that he said. Eventually he finished by uttering the sound “Urrrgh!”
Whilst he had been muttering and mumbling the DACCFOM had been rummaging around putting some beans and cooked cabbage in a bowl, and putting this bowl on a small wooden tray with some condiments. He spat out the textile wad from this mouth at the end of the prayer and held out the food to the Captain who took it.
“Season to your taste.” He was encouraged.
“Ta” he replied. “Spoon?” he asked
“Spoon? Spoon?” the DACCFOM mocked, “You are a Captain of Militia and you can’t even provide your own eating utensils!”
This insolent bollocks was too much for Captain Walsh. He carefully put the food down on the floor, then suddenly stood up, sweeping out his trusty glistening razor sharp blade and with one swipe cutting the dead magpie off the DACCFOM’s head.
“I wield a sword not a spoon!” Walsh yelled ferociously.
“H-hh-here’s a spoon sir” the trembling sub-bureaucrat whined as the deathly sharp point of Walsh’s weapon pointed at this throat.
“Thank you toe-rag.” The Captain said in tones more emollient than his recent actions, “Now let me eat this shit and do the necessary with no more lip form you, sonny, or I’ll have your guts for garters!”
He resheathed the sword ‘Yobcutter’, took a stained plastic spoon from the DACCFOM, resumed his seat on the stool, and ate the nasty vegetable broth.
Whilst Walsh ingested this mess of pottage, the DACCFOM went to corners of the room and dragged several life sized scarecrow like figures out to prop them next to the steel doors. These homunculi were symbolic of humans in a very rudimentary way; a hoop for a head, a stick for a spine, arms a simple crosspiece fixed on with string, legs a V shape. On these basic skeletons tatters of variously coloured clothes hung. The DACCFOM started mumbling again, perhaps to himself perhaps to the stick people.
“….one middle manager, a female secretary and a janitor,..oh…and three other nondescripts, they could just be passers-by. I don’t have to do that you know, strictly speaking a Captain of Militia only gets two nondescripts and it doesn’t specify middle manager….”
Although he felt like saying; “Just fucking shut up and get on with it!” Walsh did not utter these words, now that he had established some sort of top-dog butchness over the DACCFOM, he could afford to be patronising to the muttering sniveller.
“Thank you, I’m sure that you know what is appropriate.” He proffered a paltry coin to the cabbage clad one who he had recently threatened to kill.
“Your Honour.” The recipient of the fake charity falsely grovelled.
Walsh finished the cabbage and beans. The DACCFOM, levered open the lift door inserted the simulacra of employees into the small shiny chamber. The Captain joined them; with painstaking pushing and shoving the lift doors were closed.
“PPPPrrrpttttppFRRRPPPPPTTTTT” Walsh farted and without waiting for the DACCFOM to open the lift doors, clawed thrust, and pushed them open; perhaps fearing that in view of the earlier altercations, he might be left shut up in there.
“You out now, Captain.” The DACCFOM said. “The lift is out of order, I’m afraid that you will have to take the stairs. Doorway to your left.” He gestured to a doorway that had the letters ‘MRGN Y RS’ on a sign above it, Walsh walked through it.
It was a long climb and a hard one. Walsh was, in truth, not a fit man, he preferred dozing off on the backs of horses and sleeping boats bobbing on tranquil waters to the exertion of exerting himself. The more he climbed the stair the more his leg muscles throbbed and burned as if they were on fire inside, he panted and sweated. He puffed and blew more and more loudly with each step he struggled to mange; thus he disturbed bats, (pipistrelles and noctules), pigeons, rock doves, rock thrushes, flying mice, tree frogs lizards, silverfish, ants and dormice. These fauna were frightened from their comfortable, camouflaged roost and perching places by the puffy, farting Captain. He had to use his noble sword as a walking stick, he felt sick, but he carried on and on, up and up. Oftener and oftener, he had to rest, his heart thumping as though wishing to smash its screaming way out of his ribcage; the sweat pouring irritatingly down his spine and between his buttock cleft. Once the thumping had subsided he would push himself on again, one step, one step, ever upward on this low climb. To add irritation to the fatigue and unfitness, he could not just mentally ‘switch off’, (as he was so fond of doing), and climb like a chattering monkey riding on the shoulders of an an invincible iron-limbed robot. No, he made very step carefully, since, over the centuries, each riser of this staircase had rotted and been repaired in different ways. It was miraculous that the entire antique staircase remained in tact until now, but somehow it had. So whilst some steps might give way when the Captain trod on them, nearly all creaked or cracked, and all sent fragments of debris and dust back down the stairwell as he ascended. By now flobbing on and on like an elephant seal, Walsh eventually reached a small metal platform where there were no more stairs and one plastic chair.
Blown out and with small dots swimming around in front of his eyes, the Captain was staggering when he reached the top landing. He extended his hand to grip a railing and lean on it as he recovered from the climb.
“No, not that one! Grab the chair1” An unseen woman shouted.
The Captain looked at the railing that he had been intending to lean on, although still entire, it was severely rusted and corroded and the sudden imposition of a weight on it, especially a heavy one such as the Captain’s, would most like snap it and send anyone who was leaning on it plunging sown the stair well. So, as instructed, Walsh altered his lunge in mid-lunge and grabbed the top of the chair instead. However, this had already been broken by another obese and out of breath pilgrim to the Marlon and had only had three legs for the past 35 years or so. It therefore collapsed as soon as the Captain’s hand connected with it, bringing his full 18 stone body down beside it.
The hero falls a second time, now onto a dry and dusty artificial plateau rather than a wet and slimy surface as before. The metal panels of the landing sagged beneath Captain Walsh’s suddenly prostrate from, as well as adding more leaves of rust and other detritus to the stream of particles which continually floated down to slowly solidify with other muck below and allow this half-submerged skyscraper to start becoming firm land again. Also a few bolts and heavier pieces of metal popped out and fell down the stairwell and pining and cracking ricocheted from walls and rails on their way down.
This sound alerted a priestess (aka Customer care systems supervisor) who threw a grappling hook attached to a light rope woven from scrapcloth. The hook snagged on Walsh’s trousers and he had the indignity of being hauled prostate off the stair landing and into a small concrete floored room that opened on to it. The burly men who had done the hauling, the priestess’s assistants, now set about preparing Walsh for another, more perilous stage of this journey.
“You will now simultaneously fly and swim, something that, it can be argued, is achieved by many fish but few birds except Guillemots and perhaps cormorants.” The priestess announced to the captain, who wondered who was speaking to him and why she had chosen this time to give him some sort of natural history lesson. He did not get long to speculate about this, for the priestess’s duo of powerful henchpersons seized him, firmly strapped his arms to his sides and his ankles together. They pulled up his jacket but not down his trousers, as the syringes that each one deployed were powerful and so sharp as to be easily pushed through the leather bumpatch of Walsh’s leg apparel and thence to pierce his buttock skin.
“Arrgh! Errrgh!” he screamed, because they were big needles, carrying big doses of soporific drugs into Walsh, rendering him immediately unconscious.
He was picked up and held standing, his breathing was checked and his handlers made themselves sure that his nose and mouth were free from obstruction. A snorkel was stuffed in the latter and a bucket was strapped over his head. He was firmly clipped into a harness attached to a wheel which ran along an overhead cable that went out of a large window into the open. Someone blew a whistle loudly three times and from a distance outside another such whistle could be heard replying. Walsh was pushed out of the window.
He whizzed down the slack, concave cable which spanned the gap between the decaying remains of two ancient office blocks. At its nadir, the cable touched the grey-brown surface of the water that separated the two partially submerged buildings. When the metal wheel, attached to the harness from which Captain Walsh of Fryent hung, rotated it at first clicked repeatedly, then as slack-bodied Walsh speeded up as he approached the water’s surface, the clicks blended into a buzzing sound. This called the birds and once the birds were called, they called too, calling more birds and attempting to discourage others.
Crows cawed, jackdaws and rooks were slightly more tuneful, various species of gull sneered and hawed, ravens gave solitary ‘kronks’, ospreys mewed. However disparate these calls sounded their main meaning was,’food, (glorious), food’. This was because the cable run between the two towers that Walsh was embarked on as an inert and passive passenger was not solely used as a means of transport. The competing coalitions of priesthoods, sects, orders and sub-sects that controlled the various semi submerged towers that rose out of this swamp like acid-eroded tusks, used cable runs and other similar devices to execute and torture heretics. They also used them a fishing and corpse disposal devices, (sometimes simultaneously). The sound of something coming down the cable often heralded a meal for the birds and the denizens of shallows: fish .crocodilians, snapping snake-necked turtles, mutant lampreys and moray eels.
As Walsh whooshed down, these creatures assembled around his probable point of impact with the water, altered to possible lunch by the screeching and wheeling of their skybourne cousins. But, the servant-priests in the tower where Walsh was being sent had not intention of letting him become fish or amphibian dinner, because they knew that if they did, that was precisely what they would become. They therefore hauled hard fast and enthusiastically, chanting a rapid shanty the while:
“Heave, monks, heave!
And heave even faster!
If we don’t fish this bloody fucker out,
‘Twill be a disaster!
“So, heave, monks, heave!
Like there’s no tomorrow!
If this one gets eaten by the fish,
We’ll all suffer sorrow!”
Thus self-encouraged by this little ditty, the monks in the receiving tower hauled strongly on the rope attached to Walsh’s harness, so that, although he was, at one point completely under water, save for the tip of his snorkel, he was already in the process of being hauled out again, up the second half of the cable, into the second tower.
The monks of the second tower, who were doing the heaving, had generally found that the application of sufficient enthusiasm to their task at crucial moments generally served to get a bucket-protected human out uneaten, uncrowned but somewhat disoriented; (and the last was no bad preparation for the reverent state of mind required for a meeting with the Marlon.) however, in this instance, they had reckoned without Walsh’s spurs which had hooked an adolescent Cayman in the mouth.
They hauled and hauled and hauled and their load rose out of the brown smelly Thames more slowly than they had anticipated for it was not only Walsh of Fryent, it was Captain plus reptile.
It was hard graft for the muscular monks, but they pulled on with vigour, especially as they enjoyed eating alligators, pike, caymans and the like, and when they saw that a plump young juicy one was likely to come their way as well as the sodden Captain, one of them improvised another verse to their shanty:
“Heave, monks, heave
Heave like I urge yer!
When we’ve pulled this fucker in,
We’re going to have crocodile burgers!”
So Walsh and the four foot long cayman were hauled into the tower. The noise that the haulier monks had made with their extra verse, and excited shouting as their task was completed attracted the attention of a supervisory Abbot;
“Get the Captain untapped and get the bucket off his head and wake him up and bring his to the Doorwarden Obfusc Supernumary NOW!” This Abbot ordered as Walsh was winched through the window.
The abbot had sized up the situation through his spy-glass and suspected that the cable-run operator monks would leave Walsh to suffocate with a bucket over his head, whilst they dismembered, disembowelled, decapitated, skinned, cooked and ate the reptile speared on Walsh’s spur rowel.
Grudgingly and with mutterings under breath, the monks complied and the captain was de-bucketed, disharnessed, unstrapped, stood up and sat down. This processed entailed smashing the alligators head with a crowbar to detach it from the Captain’s boot. However, when this was done, something unprecedented happened. The beast’s skull split open, sure enough, but not with the crunchy splat of shattering done to reveal grey thinking porridge cells within. It split neater than a drilled block of hard limestone when wedges are hammered in. it split like it didn’t need to split, like it hadn’t split but had been opened by switch from side by something for its own reasons. It neatly bifurcated, there was no smell of blood or salt and two little men ran out.
These homunculi or avatars, (for that is what they were), glowed bright orangey-yellow and ran between the hauling monks feet and out onto the ledge of the window wherein Walsh had involuntarily entered.
“Nyaaahhh!” a greater black-backed seagull opined, diving down yellow beak open.
The gull got the first little man, slicing him/it to bits with beak’s edge; the second little man turned and blew the Gull’s head off with a miniscule atomic weapon. He was then recalled by his operator and vanished.
The supervisory Abbot and the haulier monks had not noticed nay of this. The Abbot was clamped into a rigid need to complete ritual, whatever else happened, that was his duty. He demanded Walsh be made ready and it was done; however some of the monks who were not engaged in this task, discovered that it was impossible to make crocodile burgers out of a computer controlled robot disguised a young r3eptilian predator.
“This is fucking inedible” One monk said, picking up the now floppy simulated cayman.
“Yuh” Another monk agreed, and then they threw the machine that might have ended this re-run of the dark ages out of the window.
“Splash!” It went, as it hit the Thames like a beautifully worked ancient chieftain’s shield or a dead baby.
In the meantime Walsh , sat on a bench, was slapped round the face and given a bowl to be sick in. they also gave him warm water to wash is face, flannels and a towel, and a cup of hot sweet tea. Wash blearily and gradually woke, bewildered as he washed and drank. He felt a bit sick and tired, although he knew that he had sort of slept, and had done so dreamlessly, which was unusual for him. He looked around. Another dusty grey room, n another strange building. He had been moved but he did not know how.
A priest in a neat, clean, fresh robe came up to Walsh. “Come with me Captain.” He said.
Slightly impressed by the divine’s unusual personal cleanliness, which often denoted high status and/or importance, Walsh complied, shivering slightly and reeking of river in his own soaked clothes, leaving a trail of small puddles as drips piddled off him to mark his progress to a place denoted as sacred.
As stated above, Walsh was only really used to the rustically simple interiors of various rural hovels, so the new room that he entered now, where seats rose up in high tiers before a large stage on the fourth side of the room was an uniquely novel experience. It was, or once had been a lecture theatre; its stage was mostly concealed behind a long thick blue curtain patterned with white pinstripes.
The Captain was led to a seat in the middle of the front row. Soon about twenty other dripping militarists joined him and were seated on either side of him or in the row directly behind. Shuffling and quiet voices alerted Walsh to the fact that he auditorium was now filling up. He looked round to see that the theatre was now mostly becoming full of monks, in several types of nasty habit, menacing in their pious watchful intensity. They were both guards and a congregation; witnesses and watchmen.
“The Man Agingdir Hector the Nine Hundred and Fifty Eighth!” A pompous Cannon boomed out in a fine tenor voice that rang like a clear bell. .
A thin man stepped forward into the torchlit space, between the Captain and the stage. Like the curtain his clothes were made of blue and white pinstriped cloth. He was bareheaded and clean shaven, he had long grey-yellow hair falling down over his shoulders. He began to speak and as he did so, a senior priest appeared behind him and poured warm glowing golden oil from a jug over his head. The oil flowed down through the combed hair over the pinstriped shoulders and permeated the rest of the speakers clothing. The speaker orated on apparent obliviously, and as the first priest’s jug ran out another priest replaced him and poured more oil from a jug that he held. Meanwhile the first priest knelt at the speaking man’s pinstriped trouser hem and collected drops of the oil that had flowed over him in small ornate glass. This sebaceous residue was a bit bluish in colour as it had taken some of the dye from Hector’s clothes. Once he had filled his glass, the first priest to the person at he end of the first row ,commending him to drink with gestures and muttering; “Be Unctuous My Current Bun”.
He repeated this procedure and these formulaic words with each person in the front row in turn and by now the second priest was collecting oil from Hector’s trousers and a third poured more over his head.
The three magi symbolising “Sum”, “Bloodynonsens”, and“Orother” now exchanged tasks in rotation continually through the service until all present had drank a drop of the oil that had been poured over Hector.
When this part of the ritual began, Hector spoke, spluttering and occasionally wiping oil from his mouth or eyes.
“Behold the Marlon, He is immense
Behold the Marlon, He is not insane.
And he does not have a spike on his head,
Like the large sea-going fish with a similar name.
But, less fame.
For he personifies in our humble eyes
Limitless sustained growth
For his fat comes from the freedom to consume everything
And his expansion is endless
And he does not hang upside down idly
Like a sloth
He is what he does; he grows and grows and grows forever.”
Hector repeated this strange mantra again and again until the ceremony ended, his speech and the muttering of the oiling priests formed a bizarre acapella background track for the ritual’s main event.
As oiled Hector sang the pinstriped curtain covering the end of the auditorium was raised by creaking monk-pulled ropes. When the curtain was furled and tied in the upper darkness near the ceiling, Walsh at first though that it had merely been covering another identical curtain, for a second large amount of pinstriped cloth was now revealed, but slowly Walsh realised that this cloth was different in shape and character. It was vaguely and curvedly pyramidal and at its apex, there was a white globule framed in hair with a thin equally white hose, which hung down from above, leading into the centre of it. This sight was so unusual to the Captain that it took him a minute or two to work out what he was seeing. He looked up at the hairy white globule more intently; it had two pairs of dark dots on it positioned almost like two eyes and two nostrils.
It was even as a pair of monks placed light bamboo ladders against the sides of the very chubby pinstriped pyramid and began to scramble up these ladders that Walsh understood that the was looking at a human face, the scared visage of Marlon the 429th.
One of the ladder-climbing monks then pulled the white hose out of the Marlon’s mouth. Marlon the 429th blew a few white bubbles, dribbled a bit of spittle and expectorated small splats of the cold dessert, (ice cream) that he had been almost continually ingesting up until then. The detached hose nozzle also lightly spayed some of the audience with the frigid confection until a monk tied a knot in it and it bulged slightly and then swung, vertically down about six foot to the left of the Marlon’s head.
“Urrr, urrr, urrr hurve thus turrble appetite on muh.” The Marlon said, in strangely soft, sibilant, but carrying voice, but before he could say any more, the second ladderbourne priest, had sharply pinched his nose, pried his mouth open and stuffed huge wads of cotton wool into his cheeks.
The Marlon continued speaking, but all that Walsh could discern were muffled senseless mutterings, which went on and on and on, he could not make out any discrete or comprehensible words.
The monks up the ladders, knowing how to interpret the secret speech of Gods (which was only vouchsafed to The Marlon), due to their years of intense training, and the more recent memorisation of a script written a week beforehand for this occasion by the Corporation, began to tell the audience a version of what Marlon the 429th was trying to articulate through the cotton wool
“Hark to the word of the Marlon!” the monk on the left hand ladder began.
“He is the obese oracle, who paddles the coracle of our economy.” The right hand one intoned the second line, and then one after this pair began intoning the mixture of age-old, time-encrusted tradition and new fangled pragmatic expediency which was the means of political and economic policy making in this ancient city.
“He is the best Chancellor that we can ever ever have.”
“Who advocate and maintains”
“Steady and sustained growth.”
The litany was then interrupted, (not entirely unexpectedly for those in the know, although it did not always happen this early in the proceedings). Just as the interpretation of the Marlon’s fluid mumblings into a rigid authoritarian discourse was getting going, it was interrupted by a vast and sudden sound
““PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPR
RRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTT
TPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRR
RPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPP
TTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“
PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRR
RPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTT
PPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRR
PPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPT
TTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“P
PPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRR
PTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTP
PFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRP
PPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTT
TTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“P
PPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRP
TTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPP
FRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT!”
This was the sound of vast cliffs of buttock fat colliding and rapidly bouncing off each other, like flabby islands partly and temporarily separated by a forceful blast of fetid jet windair spurting Chinook-like from the huge cavern of the prophet's stomach as he drowned in his own fat.
A sultry, pungent rotten smell like pig choc ice wafted up, up and around. Small trickles of brownish liquid seeped out from under the hem of the prophet’s vast robe. The crazy crusaders, rabid dog soldiers, mad jihadis and bonkers bashi-bazouks in the front row (i.e. about five people), leapt up and shouting ecstatic cries, hurled themselves grovelling forwards in frantic attempt to lick the divine diarrhoea and actually participate in the mystic state of “trickle down”. Bouncer monks rushed up and dragged and shoved these nutters back into their seats.
As The Marlon was convulsed by his immense eructation and shook like a small alp in an earthquake, the monks up the ladders were severely shaken about but somehow hung on and maintained their positions, and as the holy disturbance subsided resumed their public reading of Marlon’s mind.
“Villages are violated.”
“And the villagers within them”
“Barns are burnt”
“Kine and carts are stolen”
“Our land is green but…”
“Presently unpleasant.”
“Our glades are not just the haunt of…”
“Warbling thrush”
“And cackling pheasant”
“There are theifs there”
“Polluting our air”
“With their hot greedy breaths”
“Containing our growth.”
“With a corset of crime”
“Undermining the trust”
“And cultural stannerds”
“That we share”
“Smelly nasty ASBO men”
“Are crawling everywhere”
“We must comb out these lice”
“From our city’s hair”
“Squash the lice and crack the nits”
“Until none remain”
“No one from Lootinluton”
“Shall trouble our domain”
“We’ll stomp Luton into the ground”
“Then we’ll stomp on it gain”
“So go out now bold soldiers”
“On this mission you are sent”
“And your commander for this one will be”
“Captain Walsh of Fryent!”
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Monday, July 18, 2005
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
50 MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
1) Where, (the fuck) is it?
a) I left it in my other trousers
b) It is being pounded into a squashy worthless lump of pulp in a washing machine in a flat in Dollis Hill, (North London)
c) It is being pounded into a squashy worthless lump of pulp in a launderette in Cricklewood, under the gaze of a vacant Albanian who is waiting for a van to pick him up for some casual building work.
d) I had it all the time but it had become stuck between my plastic work ID and my RSPB membership card in my trouser pocket.
2) Would you like an election leaflet?
a) No
b) No thank you
c) I’m Australian
d) Er, Errr, Yes?
3) Why didn’t I notice the etchings?
a) I was not used to being inside a fictional submarine.
b) I thought that they were damp stains on the flock wall paper of the Indian restaurant.
c) I thought that they were grease stains on the inside of my spectacles
d) I am a sightless neonate salamander, an axolotl, and I live underground and under water and in total darkness in Mexico.
4) Is the main interest in Georges Sand the life or the work?
a) the life
b) the work
c) the two are inextricably intertwined
d) the invention of a famous abrasive
5) Who, what or where is Yrrr?
a) It is a character in an allegedly plagiarised German sci-fi novel.
b) It is in Wales
c) It is a Welsh fart
d) It is the Welsh for fart.
6) How many people worry about the 200 or so women that Victor Hugo allegedly slept with?
a) None
b) 1095
c) A gigaperson
d) Rhetorical questions do not have quantifiable answers.
7) Why do think you’ll have a problem in the future when the countryside opens up?
a) because people are swine
b) because swine are people
c) because people in towns do not understand the countryside
d) No, I won’t have a problem, because it means that there will more for me to eat.
8) Are the majority of those holes open?
a) There are no rights without responsibilities and responsibilities are only conferred by ownership
b) Some are covered by railway sleepers
c) Forty three of them gape eagerly, black, deep, sinister and Tzar-hungry
d) The seventh hole is in and of itself a majority
9) What do you get when you cross a woodpecker and a claw hammer?
a) nails knocked in very quickly
b) squashed ants
c) noisier forests
d) easily grippable woodland birds
10) How do you describe a hierarchy or tree structure to a goldfish?
a) hypersonically
b) ultrasonically
c) By drawing on the outside of its bowl with a felt tip pen
d) repeatedly
11) When will it be time?
a) when the small hand covers the big hand
b) when the small axe cuts down the big tree
c) when the ninth clock goes bong three times
d) when the edge of the hedge claws the dawn out the night sky and the bat gives a last fart
12) What is that high pitched drumming sound?
a) a greater spotted woodpecker advertising its sexual prowess
b) an internal hallucination
c) internal, but not a hallucination, a virus is drilling holes in your brain
d) it is an alien being that has hijacked Radio 4 to broadcast its filthy propaganda to stag beetles and their ilk
13) What happens if you throw a claw hammer at a greater spotted woodpecker?
a) the claw hammer sails past the greater spotted woodpecker and kills the Shi’ite mullah who lives next door thus provoking World War Three (or Four?)
b) you loose the claw hammer
c) you kill the woodpecker and are persecuted by animal rights extremists who eventually burn down your house.
d) the woodpecker seizes the hammer and, mistakenly assuming it to be a woodpecker of the opposite sex, mates with it.
14) What acts of agriculture did Nigel carry out before 1939 in regard to the Rhineland?
a) shower and onslaught?
b) goats and monkey wrenches
c) the woodpecker and spillage
d) Sealion Toothpaste?
15) How useful is the concept of ‘charisma’ in understanding earwigs
a) it at least is a new face at the ’table’
b) it rips up your laundry like a night on fire
c) it lights up the sky like a laundry on fire
d) it is indispensable for butter public transport
16) What is the ordinarily number of stodgy needed to make up a set of buildings?
A)Two
B ten spotted woodpecker
C) A single computer
D) Enmesh
17) Which be a devotee of best replica?
a) Software that can store humanity in tables
b) Software that can be used to manage officialdom on a handle
c) Software that can be used by an ‘punter’ for a purpose external
d) virtuoso performer
18) What is the best term for this pimply little device?
a) A free standing piece of peripheral input hardware that is controlled by and connected to the system unit
b) A free standing piece of software that is controlled by and connected to the system unit
a) A free standing piece of hardware that is only used for ancillary (extra) borage
b) A free standing wryneck
19 Which of the following statements is true?
a) VDU's can only show text if it is satanic
b) Bit map images are a type of spreadsheet covered with jam
c) Scanners are input devices so stick them up your bottom
d) Scanners are output devices vomit them forthwith
20 Why would biometrics make illegitimate access to a computer network very difficult for tiny tiny light brown flitting lizards?
a) because they can be regularly
b) because they mix text and numbers in pisswords
c) because they are random
d) because they are based on biological characteristics unique to the individual digital squirrel
21) Which of these statements is TRUE?
a) the following illustrates a star network topology.
b) A TRUE network is one where All machines on the network have equal access to no programs and data is known as Osvaldo von der Virusdamage
c) Most Zip drives are not part of the Freudian Id which only encompasses buttons and hook and eye clothing fixtures
d) let alone velcro
…
22) Which one of the following will not make a password system more secure?
a) Biometric bathing in bodily fluid
b) Mixing letters and numbers in passwords in a wok with some hot oil
c) Regularly changing passwords into woodpeckers
d) Registration under the Official Procedure Crust
23) Which type of hardware uses a concentrated beam of light to produce long magic farts?
a) A fartbed scanner
b) An INVERTED plotter
c) A pertaining drivel
d) A obsession printer
24) Which one of the following is an advantage of notworking computers?
a) Reducing the costs of peripherals.
b) Speeding up data transfer.
c) More efficient use of office space
d) Possible rapid spread of virus damage.
25) Which of the following is the best definition of trellis gibbonery?
a) A paper orientation which can only be used for overextending
b) A supercomputer which controls the other corporeal and corporate ants on a lawn
c) A green woodpecker which controls the other computers on a standing mingle
d) Slipping the constitution through the back door
26) which type of log is usually located in one place or a few places which are close to each other?
a) The Drum of Saunders
b) Pox matrix
c) A Local area piece of wood
d) Any log with any length, (when length is anything (as opposed to no-thing), shorter than infinity, (which cannot be short because it is not Long now))
27) Ephemeral honour is best bestowed on
a) The printer buffer
b) Goldfish
c) The office clipboard
d) The dot matrix of a mayfly’s brain
28) Which UK law/or laws makes it illegal
a) The Benevolent Dictatorship Act
b) The Total Protection Act
c) The Health And Safety of Life Act
d) The Happiness for Hardworking families Compulsory Consensus Shareware Agreement (1998)
29) Which software can be legally downloaded without paying a license fee?
A) whatever you can steal
b) volatile and poisonous software
c) disintegrated software
d) open sauce or brown stain on the nice new tablecloth software
30) Which input peripheral controls all?
a) Abbangawbanggaarrbanggabanggabangga the loudest woodpecker ever
b) A microphonic mouse mincer
c) The quietest slug whose name is written only in slime
d) Nothing but a faint metallic burning smell
31) What is the usual term for a network in one or a few physical locations?
a) Fucking machine
b) Poxy Fucking machine
c) Stupid Fucking machine
d) Sex machine
32) why do Most seagulls just scream at one another meaninglessly?
a)Nyahhh
b) Yeaaahh! Yeaaahh
c) Yaaah yaaaah !
d) Yes ! No!
33) Why would teachers need Individual Learning Contracts/Plans?
a) to provide nesting material for pet rodents
B) all slaves need a good kicking
C) to keep bureaucrats in work
d) because stress sharpens the senses
34) which of the following is something that humans do?:
a) integrating a more diagnostic role in their teaching, in order to detect emerging learner needs, with an actionable approach;
b) having some model of learning eg some learning cycle, for instance, the competence cycle, or Kolb (getting beyond subject-specific teacher skills, product skills if you like); this gives a necessary insight into how learners learn, and the relationship between the process and product of learning;
c) having an awareness of some model of change: a model which gets the learners to functions in three modes:
Cognitive: about thinking: eg. what do I need to know to complete this assignment.
Affective: about feeling eg. how do I feel about the position I am in?
Performative: (behavioural) about actions: eg. what will I do now?
d) apprehending difficulties experienced by learners, which still seem to operate only at the cognitive level, the purely rational stage, which is probably insufficient for learner changes necessary to overcome the difficulties.
35) what would not be a step forward to a Green Europe, but an increased obstacle to that?
a)Big finches
b)Blue back benchers
c) wayward file nomenclature
d) obvious Russians
36) One method of ensuring data corruption is to make frequent and regular flies
a by squeezing maggots and rotten matter into all computer disc drives
b by downloading bluebottle DNA from any Conservative website
c by crapping in a laser printer
d by bringing back-up flies from your compost heap or dustbin
37) What Beast is likely to damage a poor floppy disk?
a. A Tungsten MITE
b. Magnetic field vole
c. An Electrostatic medium spotted woodpecker
d. A brasion
38) What is the short back and sides for unsavoury reputation?
a Incipient fructifications of the lamentable Dardanelles
b Ant-appliers of non-emollient packaging
c Slightly intensified woodlarks
d A wireless networking connection for the nostril of everyman
39) How can a bazalgette be described as “crassly” lenticular?
a Nanoverbally
b Altruistically
c. In barely audible whispers
d. protozoically
40) An Internal organs package allows
a. Transmitting a disease
b. Jobbo sent directly to the benefactor
c. Ciberespacio
d. Webbed ducks seeming to laugh in the swampy twilight
41. Which two deceptively explain economic failure?
a. Conglomerate ossifications
b. Imbursement en arboretum
c. Prophetesses towering in the tumult
d. the madrigal start of permissive nipples
42. To give full formulate for become successful of afforest
a) Spit out all Path & filenames to inquisitive points
b) Drive dismal drivel down in the sewers of this sad town
c) bathe in his four gold mercies
d) snip at skittering snipe with the scissors of electrical horror
43). Which best describes the structure of a Linier Hierarchal Oracle
a. Tabular but reverential
b. Circular yet squidgy
c. Righteously rectangular
d. Lard curbed throughout
44). A Tree structure, with root & shrub directories, can be described as
a) Aboretumimbursement
b) Furtive thrushland
c) Spingallobongular
d) A café for Dunnocks
45 Ladyman’s. “A History of Snails Tomorrow” is
a) an anachronistic atlas of despair
b) the last gasp of dead nutritive discourse
c) a svelte pocket book for the trouserless
d) the only certain bedrock for identifying antelopes whilst comatose
46) Which three of the following four attributes is it essential to have if you wish to drive a 266 bus very fast between Hammersmith and Brent Cross?
a) the ability to speak and understand some dialects of Somali intermittently but no fluency in any other known human language
b) an addiction to Khat
c) a talent for braking suddenly at times when this will smash the maximum number of passengers into internal bus fittings
d) a love of woodpeckers
47) Do you really think that heads want this power, or that they will use it?
a) you bet, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac
b) they will use it to urge violent yobs
c) the decent majority of people fart into their upholstery
d) heads want all powers, but sadly, they ride around on the bodies of maladapted apes
48) when is it right to justify the manslaughter of a cyclist?
a) in the context of a poem published by Eatlatinandie Books
b) when the cyclist is not wearing a helmet to protect him/herself from dangerous drivers
c) when the driver is a terminally neurotic single parent
d) when the incident took place in Peckham as in this context it is minor
49) Why have you sawed down a dwarf oak tree?
a) because it was not small enough
b) I did not saw it, I hacked it with a samurai sword whilst shouting ‘Bonsai!’
c) To save it from the incessant sharp and repetitive probing of woodpecker's beaks
d) to make stout desks for the proper formal education of the young
50) Which type of storage so-so is preferred by some ordinary people (such as mounds) because it provisions on the trot ?
a) looped pylonage
b) Magnetic crap (a poodle steamer)
c) Dutch Auctions for Dutch Actuaries
d) Under Sea Boot pens
a) I left it in my other trousers
b) It is being pounded into a squashy worthless lump of pulp in a washing machine in a flat in Dollis Hill, (North London)
c) It is being pounded into a squashy worthless lump of pulp in a launderette in Cricklewood, under the gaze of a vacant Albanian who is waiting for a van to pick him up for some casual building work.
d) I had it all the time but it had become stuck between my plastic work ID and my RSPB membership card in my trouser pocket.
2) Would you like an election leaflet?
a) No
b) No thank you
c) I’m Australian
d) Er, Errr, Yes?
3) Why didn’t I notice the etchings?
a) I was not used to being inside a fictional submarine.
b) I thought that they were damp stains on the flock wall paper of the Indian restaurant.
c) I thought that they were grease stains on the inside of my spectacles
d) I am a sightless neonate salamander, an axolotl, and I live underground and under water and in total darkness in Mexico.
4) Is the main interest in Georges Sand the life or the work?
a) the life
b) the work
c) the two are inextricably intertwined
d) the invention of a famous abrasive
5) Who, what or where is Yrrr?
a) It is a character in an allegedly plagiarised German sci-fi novel.
b) It is in Wales
c) It is a Welsh fart
d) It is the Welsh for fart.
6) How many people worry about the 200 or so women that Victor Hugo allegedly slept with?
a) None
b) 1095
c) A gigaperson
d) Rhetorical questions do not have quantifiable answers.
7) Why do think you’ll have a problem in the future when the countryside opens up?
a) because people are swine
b) because swine are people
c) because people in towns do not understand the countryside
d) No, I won’t have a problem, because it means that there will more for me to eat.
8) Are the majority of those holes open?
a) There are no rights without responsibilities and responsibilities are only conferred by ownership
b) Some are covered by railway sleepers
c) Forty three of them gape eagerly, black, deep, sinister and Tzar-hungry
d) The seventh hole is in and of itself a majority
9) What do you get when you cross a woodpecker and a claw hammer?
a) nails knocked in very quickly
b) squashed ants
c) noisier forests
d) easily grippable woodland birds
10) How do you describe a hierarchy or tree structure to a goldfish?
a) hypersonically
b) ultrasonically
c) By drawing on the outside of its bowl with a felt tip pen
d) repeatedly
11) When will it be time?
a) when the small hand covers the big hand
b) when the small axe cuts down the big tree
c) when the ninth clock goes bong three times
d) when the edge of the hedge claws the dawn out the night sky and the bat gives a last fart
12) What is that high pitched drumming sound?
a) a greater spotted woodpecker advertising its sexual prowess
b) an internal hallucination
c) internal, but not a hallucination, a virus is drilling holes in your brain
d) it is an alien being that has hijacked Radio 4 to broadcast its filthy propaganda to stag beetles and their ilk
13) What happens if you throw a claw hammer at a greater spotted woodpecker?
a) the claw hammer sails past the greater spotted woodpecker and kills the Shi’ite mullah who lives next door thus provoking World War Three (or Four?)
b) you loose the claw hammer
c) you kill the woodpecker and are persecuted by animal rights extremists who eventually burn down your house.
d) the woodpecker seizes the hammer and, mistakenly assuming it to be a woodpecker of the opposite sex, mates with it.
14) What acts of agriculture did Nigel carry out before 1939 in regard to the Rhineland?
a) shower and onslaught?
b) goats and monkey wrenches
c) the woodpecker and spillage
d) Sealion Toothpaste?
15) How useful is the concept of ‘charisma’ in understanding earwigs
a) it at least is a new face at the ’table’
b) it rips up your laundry like a night on fire
c) it lights up the sky like a laundry on fire
d) it is indispensable for butter public transport
16) What is the ordinarily number of stodgy needed to make up a set of buildings?
A)Two
B ten spotted woodpecker
C) A single computer
D) Enmesh
17) Which be a devotee of best replica?
a) Software that can store humanity in tables
b) Software that can be used to manage officialdom on a handle
c) Software that can be used by an ‘punter’ for a purpose external
d) virtuoso performer
18) What is the best term for this pimply little device?
a) A free standing piece of peripheral input hardware that is controlled by and connected to the system unit
b) A free standing piece of software that is controlled by and connected to the system unit
a) A free standing piece of hardware that is only used for ancillary (extra) borage
b) A free standing wryneck
19 Which of the following statements is true?
a) VDU's can only show text if it is satanic
b) Bit map images are a type of spreadsheet covered with jam
c) Scanners are input devices so stick them up your bottom
d) Scanners are output devices vomit them forthwith
20 Why would biometrics make illegitimate access to a computer network very difficult for tiny tiny light brown flitting lizards?
a) because they can be regularly
b) because they mix text and numbers in pisswords
c) because they are random
d) because they are based on biological characteristics unique to the individual digital squirrel
21) Which of these statements is TRUE?
a) the following illustrates a star network topology.
b) A TRUE network is one where All machines on the network have equal access to no programs and data is known as Osvaldo von der Virusdamage
c) Most Zip drives are not part of the Freudian Id which only encompasses buttons and hook and eye clothing fixtures
d) let alone velcro
…
22) Which one of the following will not make a password system more secure?
a) Biometric bathing in bodily fluid
b) Mixing letters and numbers in passwords in a wok with some hot oil
c) Regularly changing passwords into woodpeckers
d) Registration under the Official Procedure Crust
23) Which type of hardware uses a concentrated beam of light to produce long magic farts?
a) A fartbed scanner
b) An INVERTED plotter
c) A pertaining drivel
d) A obsession printer
24) Which one of the following is an advantage of notworking computers?
a) Reducing the costs of peripherals.
b) Speeding up data transfer.
c) More efficient use of office space
d) Possible rapid spread of virus damage.
25) Which of the following is the best definition of trellis gibbonery?
a) A paper orientation which can only be used for overextending
b) A supercomputer which controls the other corporeal and corporate ants on a lawn
c) A green woodpecker which controls the other computers on a standing mingle
d) Slipping the constitution through the back door
26) which type of log is usually located in one place or a few places which are close to each other?
a) The Drum of Saunders
b) Pox matrix
c) A Local area piece of wood
d) Any log with any length, (when length is anything (as opposed to no-thing), shorter than infinity, (which cannot be short because it is not Long now))
27) Ephemeral honour is best bestowed on
a) The printer buffer
b) Goldfish
c) The office clipboard
d) The dot matrix of a mayfly’s brain
28) Which UK law/or laws makes it illegal
a) The Benevolent Dictatorship Act
b) The Total Protection Act
c) The Health And Safety of Life Act
d) The Happiness for Hardworking families Compulsory Consensus Shareware Agreement (1998)
29) Which software can be legally downloaded without paying a license fee?
A) whatever you can steal
b) volatile and poisonous software
c) disintegrated software
d) open sauce or brown stain on the nice new tablecloth software
30) Which input peripheral controls all?
a) Abbangawbanggaarrbanggabanggabangga the loudest woodpecker ever
b) A microphonic mouse mincer
c) The quietest slug whose name is written only in slime
d) Nothing but a faint metallic burning smell
31) What is the usual term for a network in one or a few physical locations?
a) Fucking machine
b) Poxy Fucking machine
c) Stupid Fucking machine
d) Sex machine
32) why do Most seagulls just scream at one another meaninglessly?
a)Nyahhh
b) Yeaaahh! Yeaaahh
c) Yaaah yaaaah !
d) Yes ! No!
33) Why would teachers need Individual Learning Contracts/Plans?
a) to provide nesting material for pet rodents
B) all slaves need a good kicking
C) to keep bureaucrats in work
d) because stress sharpens the senses
34) which of the following is something that humans do?:
a) integrating a more diagnostic role in their teaching, in order to detect emerging learner needs, with an actionable approach;
b) having some model of learning eg some learning cycle, for instance, the competence cycle, or Kolb (getting beyond subject-specific teacher skills, product skills if you like); this gives a necessary insight into how learners learn, and the relationship between the process and product of learning;
c) having an awareness of some model of change: a model which gets the learners to functions in three modes:
Cognitive: about thinking: eg. what do I need to know to complete this assignment.
Affective: about feeling eg. how do I feel about the position I am in?
Performative: (behavioural) about actions: eg. what will I do now?
d) apprehending difficulties experienced by learners, which still seem to operate only at the cognitive level, the purely rational stage, which is probably insufficient for learner changes necessary to overcome the difficulties.
35) what would not be a step forward to a Green Europe, but an increased obstacle to that?
a)Big finches
b)Blue back benchers
c) wayward file nomenclature
d) obvious Russians
36) One method of ensuring data corruption is to make frequent and regular flies
a by squeezing maggots and rotten matter into all computer disc drives
b by downloading bluebottle DNA from any Conservative website
c by crapping in a laser printer
d by bringing back-up flies from your compost heap or dustbin
37) What Beast is likely to damage a poor floppy disk?
a. A Tungsten MITE
b. Magnetic field vole
c. An Electrostatic medium spotted woodpecker
d. A brasion
38) What is the short back and sides for unsavoury reputation?
a Incipient fructifications of the lamentable Dardanelles
b Ant-appliers of non-emollient packaging
c Slightly intensified woodlarks
d A wireless networking connection for the nostril of everyman
39) How can a bazalgette be described as “crassly” lenticular?
a Nanoverbally
b Altruistically
c. In barely audible whispers
d. protozoically
40) An Internal organs package allows
a. Transmitting a disease
b. Jobbo sent directly to the benefactor
c. Ciberespacio
d. Webbed ducks seeming to laugh in the swampy twilight
41. Which two deceptively explain economic failure?
a. Conglomerate ossifications
b. Imbursement en arboretum
c. Prophetesses towering in the tumult
d. the madrigal start of permissive nipples
42. To give full formulate for become successful of afforest
a) Spit out all Path & filenames to inquisitive points
b) Drive dismal drivel down in the sewers of this sad town
c) bathe in his four gold mercies
d) snip at skittering snipe with the scissors of electrical horror
43). Which best describes the structure of a Linier Hierarchal Oracle
a. Tabular but reverential
b. Circular yet squidgy
c. Righteously rectangular
d. Lard curbed throughout
44). A Tree structure, with root & shrub directories, can be described as
a) Aboretumimbursement
b) Furtive thrushland
c) Spingallobongular
d) A café for Dunnocks
45 Ladyman’s. “A History of Snails Tomorrow” is
a) an anachronistic atlas of despair
b) the last gasp of dead nutritive discourse
c) a svelte pocket book for the trouserless
d) the only certain bedrock for identifying antelopes whilst comatose
46) Which three of the following four attributes is it essential to have if you wish to drive a 266 bus very fast between Hammersmith and Brent Cross?
a) the ability to speak and understand some dialects of Somali intermittently but no fluency in any other known human language
b) an addiction to Khat
c) a talent for braking suddenly at times when this will smash the maximum number of passengers into internal bus fittings
d) a love of woodpeckers
47) Do you really think that heads want this power, or that they will use it?
a) you bet, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac
b) they will use it to urge violent yobs
c) the decent majority of people fart into their upholstery
d) heads want all powers, but sadly, they ride around on the bodies of maladapted apes
48) when is it right to justify the manslaughter of a cyclist?
a) in the context of a poem published by Eatlatinandie Books
b) when the cyclist is not wearing a helmet to protect him/herself from dangerous drivers
c) when the driver is a terminally neurotic single parent
d) when the incident took place in Peckham as in this context it is minor
49) Why have you sawed down a dwarf oak tree?
a) because it was not small enough
b) I did not saw it, I hacked it with a samurai sword whilst shouting ‘Bonsai!’
c) To save it from the incessant sharp and repetitive probing of woodpecker's beaks
d) to make stout desks for the proper formal education of the young
50) Which type of storage so-so is preferred by some ordinary people (such as mounds) because it provisions on the trot ?
a) looped pylonage
b) Magnetic crap (a poodle steamer)
c) Dutch Auctions for Dutch Actuaries
d) Under Sea Boot pens
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Courgettes
What kind of mental process supports a vision of courgettes? By posing this question he was not seeking how it is that he factually saw an actual courgette, or any other actual vegetable, or indeed any other actual object at all.
He posed the question to himself without answering it after he had had a vision of courgettes, unprecedented in his previous experience, when he was doing an Elvis Presley impression on the lavatory of his small north London flat.
Recently whilst on holiday, he had witnessed an Elvis Presley impersonator, but this person had merely focused on the externals, mimicking the late Vegas period Elvis in a white, bell-bottomed suit embroidered with fake diamonds; he should instead have sat on the shit pan, semi-comatose, half naked and fat whilst falling asleep. That kind of thing could get someone a professorship in Fine Art nowadays, but what would the tattooed drunks who normally witness Elvis impersonators have made of it?
"Kim Sable?" as Tonto said to the Lone Ranger.
It was whilst in an advanced "Elvis" state, verging on consciousness, verging on death that he saw the courgettes. It was a state where thoughts extend themselves, the brain internally supplies half the next part of perception processing as the sensors shut down (or at least go into a "guard" state). In this state you can start off with an orange in your hand, you can peel it, you can eat it, taste it, throw away the peel, spit out the pips, feel the juice drip into your beard and be reminded of the evening in Cornwall when you sat on the beach with the curly haired girl; and still wake up with an untouched orange in your hand.
Or you might be woken by the thud of an orange hitting the floorboards of the lavatory and bathroom (combined) of a small north London flat and see it roll to the skirting board.
You could be here, there or anywhere, on any number of bus, on any street, in any concrete canyon, up a down or alp, hopping across any boulder fields, gliding in any pleasure boat. So why does one see courgettes?
It is not quite a dream, it is more vivid than a thought (for all his thoughts were typed on beige paper) but it is green repetitive and relentless. The wretched vegetables seem to be positioned horizontally overlapping one another like roof tiles and they're not doing anything. In "fact" no stems or leaves or ground from which they are growing can be discerned by him, so it is not clear whether the envisioned veg is a living, growing plant or plants or plucked fresh and shown in some sort of Greengrocer's display.
If the pseudo-sight of these green fruit was dredged up from some sort of brain disc de-fragmentation process, whereby semi-recollected globules of memory whizzed about between sections of his cold porridge, then these courgettes had once somewhere been presented by some irritatingly jolly costermonger or on some soulless hypermarket shelf.
He had probably never seen a courgette growing, he could only recall the obese marrows of the paternal compost heap in Fulham, so the origin of the courgettes was as a random offshoot of processing. If so could they genuinely be termed a vision?
They weren't technically a hallucination, because he knew that he was "Elvising" when he saw them (or almost immediately thereafter) but did they, like the visions of the Peyote-god reported in some (probably faked) accounts of cactus -induced visions, originate in some numenological manifestation of a meta-courgette?
They could still be part of a collective consciousness passed down faintly from whatever proto-celt neolithically domesticated the first wild courgette. Perhaps what he was seeing was a long lost memory of the huge courgette herd that once covered almost all the Eurasian landmass and, probably, the lost continent of Berenginia.
"The Pope has a urinary infection." A radio announcer said.
The courgettes vanished and with an arthritic knee-creak, he went over to the medicine cabinet, he placed one foot on a wooden stool, leant across and pressed a lever which sent some other stools off on their journey to the sea and now he was ready to commit fungicide between his toes.
He posed the question to himself without answering it after he had had a vision of courgettes, unprecedented in his previous experience, when he was doing an Elvis Presley impression on the lavatory of his small north London flat.
Recently whilst on holiday, he had witnessed an Elvis Presley impersonator, but this person had merely focused on the externals, mimicking the late Vegas period Elvis in a white, bell-bottomed suit embroidered with fake diamonds; he should instead have sat on the shit pan, semi-comatose, half naked and fat whilst falling asleep. That kind of thing could get someone a professorship in Fine Art nowadays, but what would the tattooed drunks who normally witness Elvis impersonators have made of it?
"Kim Sable?" as Tonto said to the Lone Ranger.
It was whilst in an advanced "Elvis" state, verging on consciousness, verging on death that he saw the courgettes. It was a state where thoughts extend themselves, the brain internally supplies half the next part of perception processing as the sensors shut down (or at least go into a "guard" state). In this state you can start off with an orange in your hand, you can peel it, you can eat it, taste it, throw away the peel, spit out the pips, feel the juice drip into your beard and be reminded of the evening in Cornwall when you sat on the beach with the curly haired girl; and still wake up with an untouched orange in your hand.
Or you might be woken by the thud of an orange hitting the floorboards of the lavatory and bathroom (combined) of a small north London flat and see it roll to the skirting board.
You could be here, there or anywhere, on any number of bus, on any street, in any concrete canyon, up a down or alp, hopping across any boulder fields, gliding in any pleasure boat. So why does one see courgettes?
It is not quite a dream, it is more vivid than a thought (for all his thoughts were typed on beige paper) but it is green repetitive and relentless. The wretched vegetables seem to be positioned horizontally overlapping one another like roof tiles and they're not doing anything. In "fact" no stems or leaves or ground from which they are growing can be discerned by him, so it is not clear whether the envisioned veg is a living, growing plant or plants or plucked fresh and shown in some sort of Greengrocer's display.
If the pseudo-sight of these green fruit was dredged up from some sort of brain disc de-fragmentation process, whereby semi-recollected globules of memory whizzed about between sections of his cold porridge, then these courgettes had once somewhere been presented by some irritatingly jolly costermonger or on some soulless hypermarket shelf.
He had probably never seen a courgette growing, he could only recall the obese marrows of the paternal compost heap in Fulham, so the origin of the courgettes was as a random offshoot of processing. If so could they genuinely be termed a vision?
They weren't technically a hallucination, because he knew that he was "Elvising" when he saw them (or almost immediately thereafter) but did they, like the visions of the Peyote-god reported in some (probably faked) accounts of cactus -induced visions, originate in some numenological manifestation of a meta-courgette?
They could still be part of a collective consciousness passed down faintly from whatever proto-celt neolithically domesticated the first wild courgette. Perhaps what he was seeing was a long lost memory of the huge courgette herd that once covered almost all the Eurasian landmass and, probably, the lost continent of Berenginia.
"The Pope has a urinary infection." A radio announcer said.
The courgettes vanished and with an arthritic knee-creak, he went over to the medicine cabinet, he placed one foot on a wooden stool, leant across and pressed a lever which sent some other stools off on their journey to the sea and now he was ready to commit fungicide between his toes.
The courgettes had prepared him for this act, perhaps they were a harbinger of the Pontiff's demise?
P.R. Murry
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
SQUID ID
The psilocybin mushrooms are in the fridge but he dare not take them because of the things that can be seen in the non-patterning of the beige tiles in the hotel bathroom. The effect is like a smoke image produced by holding a candle under white paper or a pale surface, or perhaps like floating an oil based or semi-soluble paint in water over a white surface. Totally irregular, no two tiles are the same, but given a fairly lively imagination and a bit of concentration, many snapshots from other places were being shown on the bathroom wall tonight:
· The land of the flat faced bat-cat with tufted ears and a knife-sharp-toothed grin
· The sheikdom of the eyeless Arab
· The skies flown by the awe inspiring pterodactyl
· The planet ruled by the monkey with lightning coming from its eyes
· That location of which the blunt-toothed gargoyle speaks animatedly
He cannot tell, because he cannot go there, perhaps even with the assistance of psilocybin mushrooms, ( although the quantities of them that he has taken so far give him the feeling that he might be starting that journey), but none of the above seem as though they might be good places. Yet, although the faces of their denizens and rulers, as shown in the bathroom wall tiles, have fearsome aspects, they do not seem to be bad places either. Merely very, very different places with unknown rules based on huge tessellated and towered mental structures discerned dimly through the swirling patterns of the bathroom tiles and the complicit smirks of their understanders, for demons are always good and bad.
On Christmas morning one can wake up feeling free of demons, for a second or two at least, until you realise that you are on a package holiday in Tenerife. Trapped in vast leisure Industry mega-factory thousands of miles from mainland Europe. Stuck on a strip of sand and lava between the saw-toothed mountains and the sad Atlantic, hemmed in by motorways and patrolled by short trousered police on electric scooters and private security dressed up in Tyrolean costumes or as gnomes. A temporary escape can at least be made on a whale watching catamaran cruise.
Grinning tanned reps assemble enough Angloid lardbuts to load up their catamaran and then sail slowly south, plying the lardy ones with free booze the while, lest they get any thinner. Riding low in the water, the catamaran soon comes across the pod of pilot whales that usually sleep on the surface near here.
The whales whistle to one another to maintain their relative positions and formation, the catamaran cuts its engine and circles them. The lardies look on, drink, point their videos and cameras, drink, stand up, drink, drink point at the whales, drink, eat sandwiches and , drink. The captain of the catamaran tells the lardies a story about the pilot whales.
“This whales are short-finned pilot whales. They is sleepings now, please do not shout, we do not want to disturb thems. This whales is not eat plankton, this are toothéd whales, have tooths. This whales eat gigante squid. This squid is living very, very deep in the sea, 400 metres perhaps. At this deep the whales cannot see, but each whale have in his head this echo-location, he is like sonar, so he find the squid. The giant squid is very, very big and the short-finned pilot whales is only quite small, you can see…..”
We could see, the pod that we circled was about ten or twelve beasts big. These beings were black, six or seven feet long, one at least with its smaller whale calf following. Their dorsals cut the sea’s surface and it was possible, after a bit, to see that individual whales had different fins. One was curled over, almost into an ‘S’ shape, others were almost sharply triangular, most followed the damned bell curve between these two extremes, being rounded off triangles. Sometimes the whales coasted along all fins above the surface, and at others, perhaps when the boat got too close, they dipped under the sea top and rose up again a few yards further on. This motion was like the way dolphins swim, but without all the showy leaping, squeaking noise and begging to track suited guards for herring.
Now the captain of the catamaran psychoanalysed the whales: ““This whales is very clever, they do not sleep like us who is dives deep in sleep and is probing the Id underneath, and all this collective unconscious and all this. Underneath whales is ocean, we fly over it like birdes is fly over us. To us ocean is one blue thing, is one mass of water, is saltwater, is wet water, is one blue wet thing. But ocean is not one thing, he is not homo, he is hetero watter….”
The lardies, who the captain was apparently addressing, were by now either so pissed on free beer and wine that they couldn’t understand what he was saying, even if they had been able to understand it anyway, (when sober, which was infrequent), or they were Dutch or Scandinavian, or as was the case with the two of them with the most developed mentation, they were arguing over the only one last free bocadillo left between the two of them and who to sue about it, given the zero-sum situation about bocadillos which appeared then to prevail on the catamaran i.e. that some other greedy lardperson had consumed two of them instead of his/her single bocadillo ration.
“….he is watter of different levels.” The captain continued. “ This levels I speak of is levels of temperature, of pressure, of consciousness, of being itself, which, (one assumes), entails different world views. But goes up, the other goes down, the whales and squids that is. In day, the ocean segment where squid is frolic descend, he go down and short finned pilot whale cannot dive so far, so he sleep here, but their breathing is voluntary, so they is trifurcate their brain: swim, sleep, breathe all at once. Clever whales.
At night the squid level rise and the clever whales dive, but unlike the psychoanalytically trained captain of catamaran, they is conscious when they go so deep. I can only reach the level of the squid when I sleep, sleep, and sleep. The squids are big, I know, I have seen the vast expanses of their tentacular reach, the enormity of their jet propelling ink-farts, the snip-snap-snapping of their cannibalistic beaks, and the rolling and focussing of their football-sized eyes. But whales is smarts, when they swim in id of squid, whale is ego, grab squid and climb, climb, climb. If you have dived, you know, even from small depth, too much pressure change too fast is bad, so squid explodes, bang and whales eat him.”
Lardies paid no attention.
“Please only take one bocadillo each. “ One of the Capitan’s assistants admonished, but it was too late.
“Now is time for swimming, we go to swimming, place.” the captain announced
The lardy-laden catamaran sailed away from the pod of pilot whales to an inlet where so semi-conscious lardies swam in the shallows, others slumped on deck, all drank. The boat now played music to accompany these proceedings, presumably as this would no longer distract the short-finned pilot whales from their quasi-sleep.
As the lardies swam, displaying the full extent of their tattoos, the music was sort of ambient, chill-out, Holgar Czukay style stuff. But then after the lardies were all back on the catamaran and as it glided along the coast on its way back to its harbour. Past the fish farms., the artificial jetties, the new luxury up-market style town apartment style complexes with double electric fencing, searchlights, watchtowers and very Tyrolean security staff, and the shacks of the island’s small underclass, made of bamboos and bits of old tarpaulin. As the catamaran glided past all of this in the dry hot merciless sunlight of a near equatorial Christmas which was at least not in Britain, the sound track changed to some kind of reggae filth. This moved a mother of chavs to wave her breasts at people on shore, they probably could not see what she was doing, but this did not deter her from sending messages in mammary Morse or titular semaphore, all the while shouting; “Whooo! Whooo! Whooo!” and “Whoooo!”. Fortunately the embarrassing woman shut up soon because she was sick, mostly over the side of the boat, (although some of her vomit got on the deck), before the catamaran docked.
The catamaran docked and he climbed back up past the ‘friendly’ Irish pubs and Scottish pubs and German pubs and English pubs and ‘happy’ English restaurants and German restaurants and the reassuringly English, German and Spanish supermarkets and mini-markets, some of which sold proper crisps, baked beans and Smirnoff at only €5 per litre. Until he reached his room in the Tenereifoplaza hotel where there was the psychedelic bathroom wall displaying:
· The land of the flat faced bat-cat with tufted ears and a knife-sharp-toothed grin
· The sheikdom of the eyeless Arab
· The skies flown by the awe inspiring pterodactyl
· The planet ruled by the monkey with lightening coming from its eyes
· That location of which the blunt-toothed gargoyle speaks animatedly
He did not feel psychologically strong enough to cope with these alternative realms yet (psilocybin mushrooms or not), especially as their analogous relationship to the relative depths, diving capacities, and predatory behaviour of short-finned pilot whales and giant squid were only just beginning to sink in/up/down/into his own sun-frazzled anglo-brain.
So he chilled out with some artisan style Gomerian potato crisps and a nasty 72% double-brewed malt beer called “Specialer Vole-Twaart” (or something), whilst looking at live TV shots of a tsunami drowning Sri Lankans on Sky News.
It was horrible, you saw the brown surge of water, you saw two men standing on the side of the partially capsized bus, the vast tide swirling round their feet and after a bit you realised what could be happening inside the bus. God rest their souls, they go to heaven or a better life. But why should God rest them? Wasn’t it He/she/It/None of the above who had an itch in the nose and went: “arrr, errr… errrr. Errrr
TSUNAMI
Never mind, what can you do?
Immediately the answer is eat the buffet hotel meal that he has already paid for. Drink too much red wine and have a piece of diced carrot from the Russian salad lodge firmly in his moustache to the disgaut of his fellow singles holiday clients. Then go and see the floor show in the Tenereifoplaza ‘Bougainvillea’ performance area. It is the great DERMO and his glamorous assistant Katrin Gigantbox. He is a sort of shiny black plastic trousered bad latin knife throwing act who saves himself by Tommy Coopering but has to speak 25 euro linguas so ‘communicates’ mostly by fast claps and stamps and shouting “OY” or “HAY” (or something like that). His major talent is balancing bits of furniture on his chin whilst accompanied by fat Polish tart. He balances:
- Plastic chair
- Stack of (approx) 20 glasses
- Plastic table
- Wooden armchair with stuffing
- Wooden coffee table
- Plastic lounger from next to hotel swimming pool
- Sofa (3 seater) (Polish tart removes cushions)
- Medium sized aluminium ladder
Then brings on puma cub on lead, end of act.
Now it is night, the level of consciousness is sinking towards the Id as the level of water in which the giant squid swims rises. The kingdoms concealed beneath the bathroom tiles emerge from their dimensions to connect a human brain and call it into their thrall.
Soon there will be an empty Hotel room.
P. R. Murry
Monday, March 21, 2005
Extract of Bus Blog From the Future (Zolan Zeitgeist's)
FRAN TELLS A STORY ABOUT GRANNY ADA
New was not a word they would have understood. On Planet Gossum people lived entirely off what had been made or grown before. If I had to say what creature they most resembled it would be a carrion one, like an ant, gleaning and cleaning and making do - except they were all too different to really be like ants - they were scavengers - yes - scavenger creators! that's what they were. People called Gossum: Poor Gossum - low grade - high activity, and said, "If you lived there, my dear, you would spend half your working time farming and half of it picking up things to make and mend, but mark this! you would spend all your waking life talking".
My granny Ada Dementiana was a great talker, she came from there to Oldearth by accident. She and her college friends were headed for Prisdel on a day out but the bus driver missed the 462 bus strobe and came in on a 47 one instead. By the time they had alighted and stopped talking for a minute long enough to realise their mistake - Prisdel being nothing like Oldearth - the bus had gone again.
You know, Gossums were very resourceful and clever but really had no idea what the rest of the universe was like. No-one had vids let alone threedee ones. None of them had been away from Gossum before so you can imagine what it was like to come to such a profligate planet as Oldearth. Ada kept a journal, she had stitched random photos together and wrote on the back of them - like everyone on Gossum, she believed in the spirit of the collage, the shock of pain and pleasure as we turn a forboding page!
We know from her journal that at first she thought everyone on Oldearth had poor eyesight because they wore spectacles and they often stumbled. Of course they had glasses on so they could watch soaps all the time and anytime, as well as see to negotiate their way. Vidspecs - she had never seen them before! but when she did find out I think she knew it was, well, as she said: "a bit unhealthy!"
She talks about the fact that everyone wore new all the time - she keeps on repeating new - playing with it - as if she is both shocked and delighted with the thought of it - " new cars, new clothes, new gadgets, new smoke, new cough, new sky, new this, new that!" But then after a few days: "Found some old new clothes in a second-hand shop, fancy patterns - very, very, very cheap - yum, yum, yummy! - did some unpicking, cutting and snipping - then some adding and stitching and - wow - what a sight! Look now! - I am made up! Now I am at home!"
A few pages on and she is going on about the rubbish: " Its up to the eaves in some places. I ask them why. They say all the valleys are filled, so there is nowhere else for it to go. I say to them, "'Look, where I come from we would have been all over this, ransacked it! its a treasure trove, there's enough prime material here to make you all trillionaires!' But the fact is that new is so easy to come by that new is what they must all have!" And a week later she is complaining about the air, and that she will have to wear a gas mask, and don't they know about converting polycarbonates to oxygen and the rest, and why does everyone talk about Buggerenders all the time, and why can't you get fresh water anywhere?
It turns out that Granny's lost party all got temporary jobs so as to get by whilst they waited to return to Gossum. Some of them made metal and electronic things from scrap they picked up, and some like Ada made fashion garments from rags and remnants for the costume trade and called their wares the New New New. But in the week before their bus was due the fuzz got to hear about them and they were taken in for questioning and then thrown in gaol on suspicion of unlicensed labouring, pilfering from waste sites, going round undesignated areas, not paying taxes and looking suspicious. Then there was a court case and they were declared illegal aliens and there was another case and they were accused of being terrorists and ordered to be deported to Oblov and other planets for reprocessing, which really meant that because one had been sent to another quite separate administration one could be tortured.
It was reciprocal really. When Oblov collected some suspicious visitors they would be shipped off to Oldearth and tortured there, and nobody the wiser where they had gone. Why does anyone want to torture anyone, eh? Is it retribution?
You ask why if they were all young and innocent they would be so mistreated? Why didn't anyone in authority say: "Hang on, this isn't right, this stinks, these people seem OK so why should we not believe them? It was our Interstella bus brought them here, why don't we just send them back?" But the fact was that they were different - I mean no basic difference physically - but they seemed different in a weird yet undefinable way and they looked like they could see what was going on and the Oldearthers felt that just by being there and asking questions was unsettling, especially when Gossums asked things like: "Look if half a trillion people are watching Buggerenders are you sure you want to as well? Wouldn't you like to be different?"
I think it was because Oldearthers felt guilty that they contrived all sorts of bogus accusations to hurt people from other planets and get rid of them. According to Ada they said things like: "You're after our blokes! You're scroungers after our generous welfare give-away thises or thatses! You've come to snatch our children! You have come to steal our jobs!"
It wasn't more than three years after this the waste caught fire and set the air alight and the whole of Oldearth went up like a catherine wheel, and then it was easy for people from other planets to say: "Well they should have done this and done that and it could have been avoided." But those Oldearthers were so soft headed from the vids they were blind to the signs, when the blaze started they thought it was the next spectacular episode of Buggerenders. The fact is, they needed strangers however weird they looked! They should have listened. If they had not been so keen to deport them, strangers might have shown them how not to die.
Most of Granny's friends disappeared on Oblov. She was on the run for a year before she got away dressed in gent's clothes. She slipped on board a188 and the bus conductor gave her a conspiratorial wink and didn't look at her papers or tickets and when she alighted in Farout at the end of the line she invited the conductor out to dinner - there still were conductors on Interstella buses at that time. They had fourteen children - all girls.
Why had no-one at Oldearth bus station suspected her of being anything other than a regular Oldearth female? Her gent's suit was brand new!
Emile Sercombe
New was not a word they would have understood. On Planet Gossum people lived entirely off what had been made or grown before. If I had to say what creature they most resembled it would be a carrion one, like an ant, gleaning and cleaning and making do - except they were all too different to really be like ants - they were scavengers - yes - scavenger creators! that's what they were. People called Gossum: Poor Gossum - low grade - high activity, and said, "If you lived there, my dear, you would spend half your working time farming and half of it picking up things to make and mend, but mark this! you would spend all your waking life talking".
My granny Ada Dementiana was a great talker, she came from there to Oldearth by accident. She and her college friends were headed for Prisdel on a day out but the bus driver missed the 462 bus strobe and came in on a 47 one instead. By the time they had alighted and stopped talking for a minute long enough to realise their mistake - Prisdel being nothing like Oldearth - the bus had gone again.
You know, Gossums were very resourceful and clever but really had no idea what the rest of the universe was like. No-one had vids let alone threedee ones. None of them had been away from Gossum before so you can imagine what it was like to come to such a profligate planet as Oldearth. Ada kept a journal, she had stitched random photos together and wrote on the back of them - like everyone on Gossum, she believed in the spirit of the collage, the shock of pain and pleasure as we turn a forboding page!
We know from her journal that at first she thought everyone on Oldearth had poor eyesight because they wore spectacles and they often stumbled. Of course they had glasses on so they could watch soaps all the time and anytime, as well as see to negotiate their way. Vidspecs - she had never seen them before! but when she did find out I think she knew it was, well, as she said: "a bit unhealthy!"
She talks about the fact that everyone wore new all the time - she keeps on repeating new - playing with it - as if she is both shocked and delighted with the thought of it - " new cars, new clothes, new gadgets, new smoke, new cough, new sky, new this, new that!" But then after a few days: "Found some old new clothes in a second-hand shop, fancy patterns - very, very, very cheap - yum, yum, yummy! - did some unpicking, cutting and snipping - then some adding and stitching and - wow - what a sight! Look now! - I am made up! Now I am at home!"
A few pages on and she is going on about the rubbish: " Its up to the eaves in some places. I ask them why. They say all the valleys are filled, so there is nowhere else for it to go. I say to them, "'Look, where I come from we would have been all over this, ransacked it! its a treasure trove, there's enough prime material here to make you all trillionaires!' But the fact is that new is so easy to come by that new is what they must all have!" And a week later she is complaining about the air, and that she will have to wear a gas mask, and don't they know about converting polycarbonates to oxygen and the rest, and why does everyone talk about Buggerenders all the time, and why can't you get fresh water anywhere?
It turns out that Granny's lost party all got temporary jobs so as to get by whilst they waited to return to Gossum. Some of them made metal and electronic things from scrap they picked up, and some like Ada made fashion garments from rags and remnants for the costume trade and called their wares the New New New. But in the week before their bus was due the fuzz got to hear about them and they were taken in for questioning and then thrown in gaol on suspicion of unlicensed labouring, pilfering from waste sites, going round undesignated areas, not paying taxes and looking suspicious. Then there was a court case and they were declared illegal aliens and there was another case and they were accused of being terrorists and ordered to be deported to Oblov and other planets for reprocessing, which really meant that because one had been sent to another quite separate administration one could be tortured.
It was reciprocal really. When Oblov collected some suspicious visitors they would be shipped off to Oldearth and tortured there, and nobody the wiser where they had gone. Why does anyone want to torture anyone, eh? Is it retribution?
You ask why if they were all young and innocent they would be so mistreated? Why didn't anyone in authority say: "Hang on, this isn't right, this stinks, these people seem OK so why should we not believe them? It was our Interstella bus brought them here, why don't we just send them back?" But the fact was that they were different - I mean no basic difference physically - but they seemed different in a weird yet undefinable way and they looked like they could see what was going on and the Oldearthers felt that just by being there and asking questions was unsettling, especially when Gossums asked things like: "Look if half a trillion people are watching Buggerenders are you sure you want to as well? Wouldn't you like to be different?"
I think it was because Oldearthers felt guilty that they contrived all sorts of bogus accusations to hurt people from other planets and get rid of them. According to Ada they said things like: "You're after our blokes! You're scroungers after our generous welfare give-away thises or thatses! You've come to snatch our children! You have come to steal our jobs!"
It wasn't more than three years after this the waste caught fire and set the air alight and the whole of Oldearth went up like a catherine wheel, and then it was easy for people from other planets to say: "Well they should have done this and done that and it could have been avoided." But those Oldearthers were so soft headed from the vids they were blind to the signs, when the blaze started they thought it was the next spectacular episode of Buggerenders. The fact is, they needed strangers however weird they looked! They should have listened. If they had not been so keen to deport them, strangers might have shown them how not to die.
Most of Granny's friends disappeared on Oblov. She was on the run for a year before she got away dressed in gent's clothes. She slipped on board a188 and the bus conductor gave her a conspiratorial wink and didn't look at her papers or tickets and when she alighted in Farout at the end of the line she invited the conductor out to dinner - there still were conductors on Interstella buses at that time. They had fourteen children - all girls.
Why had no-one at Oldearth bus station suspected her of being anything other than a regular Oldearth female? Her gent's suit was brand new!
Emile Sercombe
Friday, March 18, 2005
New Beast On Kilburn Streets
Ou sont les fucking Drunks de Kilburn d'antan
It pads as soft as a Yeti on snow,
It has no physical form or smell
Nor can its dread presence be discerned
By any bloodcurdling howl, shriek or yell.
It pads as soft as a Yeti on snow,
Through shadows, alleys, shop doorways and gates
Past the fragrant wheelie bins
To where the drunks used to congregate
There, by the side of the cash machine,
They loved to urinate, vomit and sing
And when stout citizens passed them by
To offer to smash their fat faces in.
But now those merry drunks have gone
Like yesterday's fashion, like yesterday's snow
Like dissidents wearing concrete boots
Flown out over the ocean where nothing will show.
There's a drunk-shaped silence beside the cash machine,
Stout citizens pass and start to forget
How bourgeois normality once was perfumed
With cider smelling breath and threats
For it padded up softly as a Yeti on snow,
Led the drunks away in firm legal embrace
It came and went, it was an ASBO
And when our turn comes, we'll be gone without trace.
Peter Murry
It pads as soft as a Yeti on snow,
It has no physical form or smell
Nor can its dread presence be discerned
By any bloodcurdling howl, shriek or yell.
It pads as soft as a Yeti on snow,
Through shadows, alleys, shop doorways and gates
Past the fragrant wheelie bins
To where the drunks used to congregate
There, by the side of the cash machine,
They loved to urinate, vomit and sing
And when stout citizens passed them by
To offer to smash their fat faces in.
But now those merry drunks have gone
Like yesterday's fashion, like yesterday's snow
Like dissidents wearing concrete boots
Flown out over the ocean where nothing will show.
There's a drunk-shaped silence beside the cash machine,
Stout citizens pass and start to forget
How bourgeois normality once was perfumed
With cider smelling breath and threats
For it padded up softly as a Yeti on snow,
Led the drunks away in firm legal embrace
It came and went, it was an ASBO
And when our turn comes, we'll be gone without trace.
Peter Murry
Monday, March 14, 2005
DOOM
Heavily plagiarised from extracts of OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT, Wackernagel and Rees 1996 & VALUING THE EARTH, Daly and Townsend. 1993. Found on the dieoff.org website. Any inaccuracies are my own.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases. The system runs down. All energy is used up, all concentrations of matter are evenly dissipated, all gradients disappear. There is no potential for further work. The system completely degrades.
Systems that are not isolated, such as the human body or the economy, are subject to the same forces of entropic decay. This means that to maintain life, stability and growth, they must import high-grade energy and material from the outside and export back degraded energy and material.
Nothing can live in a capsule of its own shit.
The human economy is complex and dynamic and although you would not believe it from the endogenous obfuscations of the economists, it is an open system dependent on a materially closed, non-growing ecosphere. The economy needs the ecosphere for its production of high grade energy and matter and its capacity to assimilate waste.
After a certain point, the continuous expansion of the economy, can be purchased only by increasing decay in the ecosphere. When and where consumption by the economy exceeds production in nature the depletion of the natural capital will become obvious. There will be reduced biodiversity. There will be air, water, and land pollution, atmospheric change, melting ice caps, disappearing glaciers, increasing desertification, moving monsoons, rising tides etc.
It will begin to feel as if you are living in your own shit and the only escape is to leave the planet.
Zolan Quobble
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