The Fishwhacker Swindle?

Your beauty hypnotised me as a boy,
My raging sap threat’ning to engulf me.
In pref’rence to baked beans and saveloy
I’d eat naught but your music for my tea;
So sweetly did you part your lips and sing
Of Heathcliff, Cathy, and heights Wuthering!

Ten years my senior were you, yes, and more;
But in my deepest heart I nurtured hope
That if but once you met me, you’d adore
My eagerness, and permit me a grope;
Meanwhile, your songs spoke to me clear and true,
And I put up with balls of darkest blue.

I didn’t like The Dreaming much at first,
But genius takes time to make its mark.
At length the two tin ears with which I’m cursed
Perceived the beauty of that record’s spark.
Now three copies of it I’ve worn right through;
O how I wish you’d play my didg’ridoo!

Then suddenly you vanished, and we wept!
Where was our Kate? Dead? Mad? Abroad? Depressed?
Like Rip Van Winkle, you had merely slept,
And with a baby boy you had been blessed.
We greeted your return last year in rapture,
Convinced that the old magic you’d recapture.

A double album! Aerial, it’s named.
And though no doubt it’s full of good intent
And of the quirkiness for which you’re famed,
It lacks a certain crucial element:
The lyrics thud to ground like lead balloons,
And where, fair Kate, are all the bloody tunes?

I love you still, and this will never fade,
I’m glad you seem contented with your life.
But this new record twenty times I’ve played,
And each time, disappointment wields its knife.
After twelve years I hoped for more than this –
Aerial, frankly, dear, just takes the piss.

Rabble-rousing Ulsterman Professor Richard Lynn reckons we Brits are thicker than the Germans, Dutch, Poles, Swedes, Italians, Austrians and Swiss but smarter than the French. Apparently Northern European brains are on average 8 cubic centimetres bigger than their Southern counterparts. Why this has anything to do with intelligence is anybody's guess, as the Neanderthals had bigger brains than ours but never produced a single Nobel laureate and were by all accounts crap at Sudoku. It seems British university undergraduates have the second-highest average IQ score in the world, and are beaten only by the Yanks. That makes more sense to me. Considering some of the bullshit degree courses available at universities in both countries, it's obvious that the really bright school-leaver would opt for three years of Bob Dylan studies or whatever instead of moronically putting him- or herself through a gruelling course in engineering or law as they do in such backward countries as, say, Taiwan.

Further revelations in this highly dubious piece of work are that cleverer people live in cities, especially London, and that in wartime the side with the higher IQ normally wins unless there's a huge disparity in numbers. Like, duh. And geography clearly isn't Prof Dick Lynn's strong suit, because he claims Northern and Central Europeans are more intelligent than South-Easterners yet asserts that Italians, for example, are smarter than Brits.


I'm reminded of a joke, only tangentially related to all this. A journalist at the Olympics is going round interviewing athletes. He approaches one man and says, "Excuse me, are you a pole vaulter?"

The man replies: "No, I am German, but how did you know my name was Walter?"

I’m having a garden furniture coffee morning. Such a day one can almost taste as honey on one’s tongue. A noteworthy addition to the encyclopaedia pantheon is the recent All-Universe Almanac by Laertes. Fucking bareback is inadvisable in midwinter because of the possibility of knob frostbite. Liar! screamed the hen woman as she mutilated the screaming monkey-puzzle trees. As a screenwash aficionado Peter rumbled the bicycle through the chemistry railings. I bought guavas, kiwi fruits and a fossil trepanner. Don’t let windows break slowly because when the payback comes, it will be with the fury of seven hells. Really warm dogs are a joy to nuzzle as long as they don’t smell. Stuff happens or shit happens? Corpses claw their way from the foetid earth on the final day of reckoning. For want of a nail, Rome wasn’t burned in a day. A great way to spend your holiday afternoon is pegging bollards on tree socks. Living this way makes me smug and sad. Email frightens doves and pigs when they first encounter it. Me, I've never really liked the sky; it's too high up. If one more world is discovered the universe will invert. You don't believe any of this, do you? Get a life, get a hold, get a grip. This is the end, till the next post. Message over.


Update!

Dr Maroon is a crafty devil.

Update!

FatMammyCat is with the programme.

Update!

Binty joins the ranks of the codebreakers.

Update!

And so does Philip Challinor.

Update!

Sam the ProblemChildBride too.

This was going to be about the miserable ingrate Norman Kember but Harry Hutton and Dr Maroon have beaten me to it. Instead I'm going to point you towards the story of the Prick Of The Week, Jakub Fik, who, when cornered by police at the end of a violent rampage, assailed them with assorted missiles including his own severed penis. (The eagle-eyed polyglots among you will note with wry amusement that 'Fik' is pronounced like the German slang term fick, which means fuck, which is presumably something Jakub won't be doing for a while.)

An innocent enough tale, you might think, but taken together with this, this, this and this, I believe it indicates we have something of an epidemic on our hands.

Gentlemen, take a little more care.

You know the feeling you have when you’re at an international arms fair and you bump into your old university sociology professor, the one who was the first to step forward and place a flower down the rifle of the head riot policeman? I don’t, never having had any truck with all that tree-bothering pacifist nonsense, but I imagine it would be similar to the feeling I experienced when I found myself in a gay situation recently with one of my oldest friends.

Mike was over from South Africa and staying at mine for a few days. We were at high school together and later at university. I went into corpses and he into gynaecology, so I suppose we shared an interest in exploring orifices. One morning I had problems with a blocked drain in the kitchen. Mike offered to sort it out, saying it was just like doing a dilatation and curettage. Being a person of obsessive tidiness I went into the spare room where he slept in order to straighten it out (he being a person of obsessive slovenliness).

And then I saw it.

Nestling in his overnight bag, its little head peeping from between the unzipped flaps, was something so shocking I’m clenching my buttocks even now, writing about it. I’d seen its ilk before, of course, in specialist shops and increasingly in family supermarkets. Vampirella herself has a few. All sorts of rationalisations forced their way into my confused head: he’s bought it for his girlfriend, it’s a gift for his mother… but I knew the truth even as I struggled to deny it. I picked it out of the bag and carried it delicately between thumb and forefinger, holding it at arm’s length as if to avoid contamination. Downstairs he was crouched under the sink wiping bits of gunge on his trousers. He twisted his head round as I came in, and was about to say something smug about having cleared the tubes when he saw what I was carrying.

“I can explain, Foot,” he whispered.

Perhaps I should explain. South African culture, especially back in the eighties when we were at university, was unrelentingly macho. Homosexuality was in a lead-lined vault welded shut and dumped in the ocean. You held your heterosexuality aloft as if it were a rampant phallus. If you knew what was good for you, you liked rugby, served your compulsory two years in the Army with pride, and ate raw meat. The very idea of a man applying grooming products to his tanned leathery skin was beyond the pale. We had both sworn that we’d never in our lives, on pain of dismemberment, use moisturiser.

“It’s just that when you get to a certain age, you need something to give your skin a little lift - ”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear it.

“It’s got anti-oxidants in it, to neutralise free radicals which damage the dermis as well as the epidermis.”

I looked at the tube properly for the first time. L’Oreal Ultra-VitaLift Plus. A smiling smooth-skinned woman was on the front.

I looked at Mike again. He’d been an athletic type back in the old days but as soon as he’d stepped off the plane I’d noticed a softness, almost a chubbiness to his features, making him resemble Brian the Snail from The Magic Roundabout. Now, I noticed the twin swellings in the front of his T-shirt (with two unpleasant dots of moistness which I didn’t want to think about), the gentle flare of his hips and the peculiar highness in his voice.

“This stuff contains oestrogens, Mike,” I said quietly.

There was a shift in his demeanour then, a sudden hardness. “Don’t push me, Foot,” he said icily. And then I knew: he held the trump card. As if reading my mind he pushed past me and went upstairs. I felt too weak to stop him, following instead. In the bathroom he opened the cabinet and rummaged in the back before turning in triumph, a small tube of Nivea Wrinkle De-crease formula in his small hand.

We spent many hours talking after that, the air cleared between us. I promised not to tell anyone if he made the same pledge. And I persuaded him to switch to a product for men, even though he claimed the women’s creams were more effective (and yes, he was looking remarkably smooth).

I’m telling you this in confidence so please don’t go spreading it around. I hope you understand what tremendous courage it took for me to bare my soul like this.

Proper post tomorrow, possibly. For now, the comments thread in the last post threw up a few suggestions about what the title of this blog stands for, anagrammatically speaking. Binty McShae has suggested The Few Childish Wankers, which is brilliant. Kim offers Re: Whelk Sandwich Fetish, which is also great. Can anyone do better?

If you're looking for more interesting fare, read about the gormless Arlington's asshole problems or try the truly bizarre novella squirming its way out of SafeTinspector's grey matter.

Who said this about a certain cartoon?


"There is a place in this world for satire but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs begins."


Was it: a) Osama bin Laden?

b) George Galloway?

c) Isaac Hayes?



Answer: c)! The silly sod, who provides the voice of Chef in South Park, has quit after nine years because he's offended by the show's ridiculing of religion. Turns out he's a Scientologist. I'm sure he's not gay either.


Update!

It seems Tom Cruise himself (who is still not gay) might be weighing in.

WheeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee


Thank you, thank you, Dave. And thank you all for coming out tonight.

I became a member of The Swansea Optimists’ Club a while ago. Last night I was expelled because when the chairman said, “Are we all going to be positive?” I yelled, “We’re all going to, Dai!”

Barrrrrrroom – tish!


Thank you.

Political correctness has gone mad, I tell you. I got evicted last week for installing a skylight… without planning permission. What?… yes, boo, exactly. Bloody council. And you know who’d reported me? The people in the flat upstairs.

Badoom badoom – tish!




I was going into a shop the other day when I saw a beggar by the door. I said, “Get a job!” She said, “I have Alzheimer’s.” Stricken with remorse, I reached into my pocket but realised I had no change. I told her, “Remind me on my way out.”

Tarrrrrrr-rump! Ti – (sssh)




No?


cock! ha ha ha haaaa burp



......I gave my two sons enough money to buy their own farm, on the condition that I got to choose the name of the place. They spent it wisely and reared beef cattle. One day I was talking to an old friend and I told him I’d named the farm Focal Point. “Why Focal Point?” he asked.

“Because that’s where the sons raise meat.”


Tarrrrrrrrrr-rump

Think about it -

- badoom badump tissshhhhrrrrrtish!!!


Guys… guys. That’s too much.



boooooo get offhoooooooyousuckboooooooocuntwankertsssssssssssssssOOOOOOOOOOOOOOsssssssss



…………………………





What?



What the fuck is the matter with you people?


Wanker!


WHAT?



stupid fuckhole



OKAY, YOU FUCKERS, YOU FUCKING CLEVER LONDON TYPES. OOOH, I'M SO TRENDY AND SO CLEVER IN MY ISSY MIYAKI SHIRT AND MY MARC JACOBS SHOES AND I THINK TONIGHT I'LL GO OUT TO A CLUB AND TAKE THE PISS OUT OF A STUPID STAND-UP COMIC WHO ACTUALLY WORKS FOR A LIVING. HERE’S A FUCKING JOKE YOU'LL LIKE. PITCHED AT YOUR LEVEL, I THINK.

A MAN WALKS INTO A PUB WITH A DWARF UNDER ONE ARM AND A FLAMINGO UNDER THE OTHER. HE ORDERS A PINT FOR HIMSELF AND ONE FOR THE DWARF. THE LANDLORD SAYS, THAT’LL BE SIX FIFTY PLEASE. THE DWARF SAYS, FUCKING HELL, THAT’S EXPENSIVE.

ONCE THEY’VE NECKED THEIR PINTS THE MAN SAYS, YOUR ROUND. THE DWARF SAYS, FUCK THAT. I’M NOT FORKING OVER SIX QUID PLUS FOR TWO FUCKING PINTS. YOU MUST THINK I’M FUCKING MENTAL. YOU BUY THE NEXT FUCKING ROUND IF YOU’RE SO DESPERATE.

THE DWARF STORMS OFF FOR A PISS. THE LANDLORD LEANS OVER AND SAYS TO THE MAN, SORRY FOR BEING NOSEY, BUT WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THIS DWARF AND FLAMINGO AND ALL? THE MAN SAYS, WELL, I WAS CLEANING OUT THE ATTIC THE OTHER DAY AND I FOUND A LAMP. I RUBBED IT AND A GENIE CAME OUT AND SAID, I’LL GRANT YOU ONE WISH.


SO I WISHED FOR A BIRD WITH LONG LEGS AND A TIGHT LITTLE CUNT.


……….


Tarrrrrr-arrrrrrraboomtish!badoomdoomdoombadoomtish!barrrump.







Ah, fuck the lot of you.

My father was a passionate Arsenal supporter and his greatest ambition was to see his team play Manchester United at Highbury. He died before this could come to pass. I decided to honour his wish by granting it posthumously. So, when events conspired to bring the two titans together at that very stadium, I collected his ashes in a bottle and set off.

At the gate I was stopped by two very rough sorts, who told me I could not bring a glass receptacle into the grounds as it was a potential missile. Not having a suitable plastic container to which I could transfer my father's remains, I had to return home, and his modest desire remains to this day unfulfilled.

What are things coming to when you can't take a bottle of pop to a football match?

Happy birthday yesterday, Slobodan Milosevic! You now qualify for a bus pass and are officially an elderly person according to (most) NHS psychiatric health trusts. Retirement can be a difficult thing to cope with, but don't let… oh, for fuck’s sake, I’ve done this all before in reverse.

The vomiting has stopped at last, not that I’ve eaten anything worth spewing in the last 48 hours. The awesome, death-defying, month-in-advance-planned big night out didn’t happen last night, for obvious reasons, so, the better half being on call at the hospital and my being on my ace (being [temporarily] single; get it?), I watched a couple of DVDs. Land Of The Dead was the first. It’s George Romero’s fourth flick in his Dead sequence which began in 1968 with the astonishing Night, progressed through Dawn in 1978, was resurrected groaning and clawing with Day in 1985 and has finally unearthed itself 20 years later. Utter brilliance, all of them. Most readers of this blog are probably zombie fans by definition so I’m preaching to the choir, but let me allow myself a little heresy here to say that I’ve loved all four of the films, even the much-maligned Day, and the latest offering is simply terrific.

Then I watched The Devil’s Rejects by Rob Zombie. Not a zombie fillum, this, but rather a loving homage to 1970s Southern horror, and apparently a sequel to the Oscar-dodging Night Of 1,000 Corpses. I wasn’t expecting much, but Rejects is probably the most stylish, gripping and, yes, intelligent horror movie of the last ten years. Essential viewing, and it’s given me some ideas about a lengthy continuation of the Fenby story. Switch off now if you're faint of heart or easily bored.

Blogosaurus entry idea: Poodlecringe (Brit.) – the pathetic delaying of a new blog post until North America has woken up and commented on your last one. Violated with this post, obviously, as it's not even 11 p.m. here in Essex. (The permalink to the blogosaurus is coming, for those who care.)

Rum old day I've had. I woke vomiting after a fevered night, despite having felt fine yesterday evening. Haven't been able to keep anything more than a banana down. I just got sent home from rehearsal for looking green.

A bloke in the am-dram group told me he'd once been the ballet critic for the Socialist Worker newspaper, despite having no knowledge of or interest in ballet and never having been a member of the Socialist Worker's Party.

Now, I find four messages in my email inbox, for the first time since I put the address up on this site. They're all in Japanese.

Perhaps my illness is interfering with the rational faculties but I can't dispel a lurking fear that all these things are related in some cosmic way, and that the Old Ones are about to appear through a crack in the sky.

Once she had added the peppers, butternut and aubergine to the roasting pan and turned down the heat a little, Lucinda stood at the sink to rinse the chopping board and, this done, treated herself to a small glass of burgundy. She gazed through the window at the lengthening evening shadows and noticed that Victoria hadn’t put her bike away as she had asked. Too distracted to bother about this now, she gnawed on a knuckle. Genevieve, their 18-year-old, was bringing home Clive, her latest crush (Lucinda still saw the heady swirl of infatuation in each of her daughter’s affairs, despite the girl’s protests that she was deeply in love), for the first time, and both Lucinda and Colin wanted everything to be just right. By all accounts Clive was a hunky specimen, scrum-half for the university rugby team, and his photograph in the email Gen had sent had radiated easy charm and confidence.
Little Vicky, their seven-year-old, skipped squealing in, chanting “Supper soon, supper soon.” Lucinda turned to her and groaned at the mess.
“For goodness’ sake hold your tongue, child.” But her enthusiasm was endearing.
The gravel crunch in the forecourt announced the arrival of Colin and Vicky raced to greet him. He wandered into the kitchen, heaved the carrier box of wine on to the counter and put his arms round Lucinda.
“Good day, love?”
He grimaced. “Bloody accounts department. I’ve had a bellyful.”
She smiled and kissed him. “Hope you’ve still got an appetite. Dinner in an hour.”
“Great.” He busied himself with the salad things. “Rupert about?”
“Upstairs.” They both knew he was up there with a joint, but they also knew that a little tolerance would stand him in good stead. He was only 15, after all, and needed to find his own way in life.
They chatted about her day: the door-to-door salesman pushing household cleaning products whom she’d shown through to the chaotic kitchen for a demonstration and eventually left there to stew in his own juice, the visit from the Jehovah’s Witness who, Lucinda concluded afterwards, was half-baked in his ideas. Afterwards Colin went upstairs to change and shower while she set the table for five. It was a special occasion: quite apart from the new boyfriend, it was the first time Genevieve would be home since the beginning of term. Damned if the girl wasn’t turning out all right, she reflected warmly. There had been a time two years ago when she had been running with the wrong sort of crowd, some boys and girls from the estate (a council estate, for God’s sake!) a few blocks away, and one of her friends had ended up in a pickle; but Gen herself had matured since leaving home and was if anything better adjusted than Lucinda herself had been at that age.
Rupert was still a worry, for the opposite reasons. He didn’t run around with any crowd at all, rarely went out at all in fact. He had even flirted with vegetarianism at one point, though thankfully he’d outgrown that. He’d had one good friend, a nice boy called Roger, but he didn’t come round any more. Roger had been full of life, an active ebullient sort, and had his fingers in many pies.
Colin appeared again, refreshed and groomed and wearing his best shirt. He uncorked a bottle of Rioja to let it breathe, and together they tended the vegetables and sipped the rest of the burgundy. At six-thirty precisely (Gen was always a stickler for punctuality) they heard their daughter’s voice as her open-topped Mercedes cruised down the driveway.
“Rupert,” yelled Colin, “your sister’s here. Drag your carcass downstairs.”
Muttering and cursing, the lanky boy complied, the head banging on each step. Colin sighed and went to help him with it. It was time to throw it out; he’d had it up there for a week. Lucinda glanced around in a final automatic check, tipped the knuckle bones into the bin, picked up the tongue Vicky had dropped on the hallway carpet, and, Colin at her shoulder, the child squeezing between their feet, opened the front door.
Genevieve, blonde and radiant, leant forward and kissed all three of them. “Mummy, Daddy, this is Clive.” He was big, oh yes, and hearty, and shook hands all round; and as they ushered him into their home and Lucinda closed the door behind him, even Rupert, who had been standing sullenly at the dining room entrance, began to slaver.

Dr Maroon
Had better continue his tale soon.
Or his fellow Blunt Cogsers, as one,
Will scourge his flesh with a nailgun.


FatMammyCat
Extols the delights of boxing to her commentariat.
But has she considered that repeated blows to the head
Might render a man useless in bed?


El Barbudo
Is intrigued by the concept ‘camel toe’.
He’d do well to reflect that the object of his fascination
Is best displayed after thorough depilation.


Binty McShae
Won a Blogscar the other day.
A Blunt Cogs script about this would be fun
But I’m fucked if I can think of one.


Update!

Here's one I made later.

Monstee
Makes me
Laugh; so
Post, bro'!

Most weeks I refrain from struggling to come up with ideas for posts on this blog. A thought will arrive unbidden, undergo a rapid gestation and be born in a shower of dodgy grammar and typos. Since last Tuesday, however, the few ideas I’ve had have refused to grow, as if they’re stunting each other’s development in the womb that is my head, and now they’ve emerged sickly and mewling. Hence the briefly-sketched musings which follow.

I’ve been asked on this site and in the comments sections of other blogs why I seem to enjoy being insulted. Back before I started my own site and thereby became a bona fide blogger, when I used to scoot around the sites leaving comments which often did not go down well – when I was a troll, in other words – I used to attract, and sometimes even solicit, abuse. I’ve often wondered why. Since watching an interview with Larry David on one of his Curb Your Enthusiasm DVDs the other day, I’m beginning to understand this quirk a little better. David was talking about how difficult it often is to film episodes of the series as he can’t keep a straight face when people are shouting and swearing at him. I recognised this experience. Perhaps it’s perverse, but I find something inherently hilarious about insults, not just witty and well-crafted ones but raging tirades as well, and especially when I’m on the receiving end. I wouldn’t say I’m a masochist; I don’t for example enjoy being chained to a post with an orange in my mouth while hot wax is applied to my nether regions. Well, not by just anyone, anyway.

That wasn’t a lie, but I do lie quite a lot in my posts, as most of us must do, and I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with it. I suppose this follows the usual pattern of human relations: as you become more familiar with people it becomes harder not to reveal more about yourself.

An update to the Blogosaurus: decomposommentation – the growth of comments to astronomical numbers on a blog post when no new posts have been forthcoming for a long time.

To end, some good news from a recent survey: 87% of people would rather visit The Fishwhacker Swindle? than be fisted with a rusty gauntlet wrapped in barbed wire.

From time to time I submit short stories to magazines. None has been published yet and I’ve had plenty of rejection letters, one of which, from the editor of The Third Alternative, I cherish as it was handwritten and most encouraging. I’ve come up with a bunch of new ideas for stories and thought I’d run them by you lot.

1. A pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses use firearms to smooth their path across somebody’s threshold.
2. Members of a community of bloggers start getting picked off one by one by an Internet stalker. (I stole this one from a comments thread at Harry Hutton’s site.)
3. Grave robbers dig up Shakespeare’s bones and hold them ransom. A scholar outwits them using his expert knowledge of the Bard.
4. The Vatican hires an assassin to take out Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. (I’d do this one as a knockabout farce.)
5. A man finds a pair of spectacles in an antique shop which enable him to see people in their true colours. (Not really a new idea, this; I’ve already written this story but it’s been rejected so many times I’m beginning to think it needs an extensive overhaul.)
6. A man wakes up on a foggy country road, unaware of who he is but conscious that he’s being pursued by some dimly-realised but terrifying entity. (I have a killer twist worked out for this one.)
7. David Icke’s theories are exactly the wrong way round and a handful of people, including George Bush Sr., Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair, are the only humans in the world battling a population of lizard creatures.
8. Two patients in need of a heart transplant discover that a fresh heart has become available, and compete for it with violent results.
9. Apples acquire consciousness and begin a campaign of resistance against those who eat them. (Okay, a bit silly, that one.)
10. An impoverished student in 19th century St Petersburg murders his landlady and is tormented by guilt. (This one really has potential, I reckon. Might even be a novel in it.)

Positive feedback would be welcome. Negative, too, come to that.