Scatman John!

Upon perusing the statistics of this blog, I found out that the search query that draws the most traffic is 'Scatman John.' That's right. The musical legend himself.

Now, I want this blog to be a big success, like that one written by a hooker, so I've prepared a series of tags that will draw big numbers. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you again, same Scat time, same Scat channel!

Imagine...

Imagine a beautiful sunset over a calm, blue sea. Nice, isn't it?

Now imagine a man who can't find his car because it's gone dark, so he has to get the bus home. But he gets on the wrong bus! And he's too proud to admit his mistake and stays on that bus for the rest of his life! And his children have no inheritance because he spent it all on fares! And they have to turn to crime to make ends meet! And his only son is shot in the spine in a paracetamol deal gone bad! And he grows bitter, lying paralysed on his bed, day after day, so much so that when a nurse comes to change his bedding, he bites her on the nose! And that nurse just happens to be a nose model on the side, and had to cancel a lucrative job that weekend, posing for 'Noses Weekly!' And 'Noses Weekly' can't take the shock and go out of business! And the editor is forced to take a job at a McDonalds drive thru, but gorges himself on too many Big Macs and dies of a heart attack! And he just happens to be driving a bus full of orphans at the time, for some reason!

Not such a beautiful sunset now, is it?

Lightly jabbing

Dain Ratchett came out of work one afternoon to find a well-dressed man punching his car. When he asked him why, he said, ‘If only more people hit cars.’ Not being satisfied with his logic, Dain got inside and drove off, leaving him to punch a mountain bike chained to a fence.

This little episode put him in a bad frame of mind for the rest of the evening, and completely scuppered his chances of relaxation.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’ his wife, Tiffany said from across the dinner table. ‘You’ve barely touched your dinner.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ he said, pushing the plate away and upsetting a vase of lilies.

‘Why?’ she said, chiding him with her big, blue eyes.

‘I don’t know, I’ve just been in this awful mood ever since I caught this man punching my Land Rover this afternoon.’ He stuck his fork in his steak and left it there.

‘What?’ she giggled.

‘There was a man, punching my car.’

‘How very odd,’ she said. ‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do?’ he replied, picking the fork up with the steak still on the end. ‘It was just so odd, I drove off. What is the proper thing to do in that situation?’

‘Well, if you catch him at it again, call the police. You shouldn’t have to put up with that. Did he leave any dents?’

‘Not that I could make out,’ he said. ‘He was jabbing it lightly when I caught him.’

The next day was very much the same, Dain emerged from his office after a long day to find the same man jabbing his car.

‘Hey there!’ he called. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Punching your car,’ he replied nonchalantly. ‘Why, you got a problem with that?’

 Now, Dain was not the sort of person who was accustomed to confrontation. In fact, you might say that he once allowed a family of Gypsies to live on the bridge of his nose for a fortnight, so he looked him squarely in the eyes and said, ‘No, not at all,’ before scampering back into his office and calling the police.

They arrived approximately forty-five minutes later, after a very protracted conversation with a sceptical operator, to find the man long gone and the car without a dent.

‘But he was jabbing it lightly!’ he implored, while the two officers exchanged meaningful ‘crazy’ looks.

Tiffany was sympathetic  but firm.

‘Dain , you just have to stand up for yourself. I know you can do it,’ she said as she took away his untouched supper.

‘I don’t know, Tiff-’ he began.

‘Now come on,’ she cut in. ‘You didn’t get to be head accountant at Moran-Heimenstein by pussy-footing around, now did you?’

‘No.’

‘Well then show him what you’re made of!’

The next day, Dain asked around the office to see if anyone knew about a man who liked to hit cars. People looked at him askance but it didn’t bother him too much, he had a meticulously prepared speech memorised and when he found the car-puncher, he was going to let him have it.

‘Ratchett, can I have a word?’ a voice cut through the hush of an early afternoon Solitaire session. Startled, he looked up and saw a tall man in a lab coat smiling at him, he looked familiar.

‘Certainly,’ said Dain. ‘And you are?’

‘Crispin Unctious,’ he held out his hand. ‘Chief Engineer.’

Dain took his hand and gave him Customary Business Shake No 3 (one large pump)

‘The reason I’m here, Mr Ratchett, is that I’ve heard on the grapevine that you’re having a little car trouble, is that right?’

‘In a way,’ he began. ‘What it is, every day when I leave work, I find a man outside, punching my car.’

‘Punching your car, you say?’ he said, ruminatively caressing his moustache. ‘That is a puzzle. Is he a drunk? Someone with mental difficulties?’

‘Well, he looks perfectly normal; well-dressed, well-groomed. Not the sort of person you’d expect to find assaulting a Land Rover.’

‘Hmm, interesting,’ he mumbled, and then added after a long pause, ‘You know what, Ratchett, I think I can help you.’

‘Electrical currents?’ Tiffany cried after he told her. ‘But that’s crazy!’

‘Oh but it isn’t,’ he replied, as nonchalantly as he could muster. ‘I warned him this afternoon, that if he does it again, he’ll be shot through with five hundred volts.’

‘But what if someone were to just knock it by accident? Would it kill them too?’

‘No no no my dear. Professor Unctious has ensured me that it will only be set off after a light jab. A real, deliberate punch in other words. Besides, I thought you wanted me to stand up to him.’

‘I did, Dain, but there’s a difference between standing up for yourself and having your car booby-trapped,’ she said.

‘I used to think so too,’ he said, ‘but now I’m not so sure.’

Dain arrived at work the next day to find that someone had left a pair of boxing gloves on his desk.

‘Ha ha, very funny,’ he said with a healthy dollop of sarcasm, which would have been even more potent if someone had actually been listening.

For the rest of the day, his work colleagues would mutter snarky asides about ‘crazy old Ratchett in Accounts’ and some of the more daring ones would lightly jab his arm as they walked past. But it wasn’t until a gang of ten stood around his desk, punching his PC monitor, that he snapped.

‘I don’t know why you find it so hard to believe that someone has been hitting my car,’ he yelled. ‘How would you like it if it happened to you?’ With that he had stormed out of the office, barking a severe, ‘Follow me,’ to the rest, who did so purely for entertainment purposes.

He led them to his car, which Professor Unctious had just brought back and was standing behind, and pointed at it furiously.

‘HE WAS STANDING HERE!’ he cried. ‘AND HE WAS PUNCHING MY CAR AND I DO NOT CARE IF NONE OF YOU SAW IT BECAUSE I DID AND I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH IT!’

At the back of the pack, someone giggled, and then it spread out until all of them were in hysterics. Even Professor Unctious broke into a chuckle.

‘Oh, you think this is funny?’ he said. ‘You think this is a joke? Some evil man, was standing by my car, my property, and jabbing it! He was lightly jabbing it, like this.’

The Dark Knight Rises - Film Review by Basford Harper

Naturally, I was horrified when my editor, in his infinite wisdom, asked me to review a film that was showing at my local multiplex.

'But, Walter, surely you cannot expect Basford Harper, Bolehall's most influential arts critic, to review such a populist film, especially while the Tibetan Yodelling Symposium is taking place?' I said to him.
'Shut up, you bender,' was his reply. I begged him to reconsider but he grew angry and threw a laminator at my head.

So it was with a heavy heart and a dented cranium that I trooped down to the cavernous multiplex, where I sat amongst the great unwashed as they chomped their "popped corn" and "malted teasers" and wished I was immersing myself in the intoxicating delights of the Tibetan's full-throated yodel (STOP TALKING ABOUT YODELLING YOU BENDER - ED)

The film began with a black screen, with just the name of the film, the number/letter combination 12A and some signatures. Initially, I was puzzled at the meaning of this scene. What was the director, one Christopher Nolan, patriarch of the famous Nolan sisters singing group, trying to say? I felt that the key to unlocking this mystery lay in that complex letter/number code.

After some considerable cogitation on the subject, I painstaking unravelled it. In the Bible, there are the twelve sons of Israel, and in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlett Letter,' heroine Hester Prynne wears the letter A on her nightgown, as a sign that she is an adulteress. Putting these two facts together, I think it is safe to assume that the director wants an extra-marital affair with a dozen Jews.

By the time I'd deciphered this conundrum, the film was almost over, but isn't this revelation the most telling thing you'll ever read about this mainstream fluff, dear reader? Even though I can't see you, I can already sense you nodding your heads in vigorous agreement.

These are some other thoughts I had about the piece:

• The protagonist is described as a knight, and yet his behaviour is completely unbecoming as one of Her Majesty's knights of the realm. Is he a thinly veiled fictional representation of a real knight? If he is, my money is on Sir Terry Wogan.
• I found it very hard to believe that a wealthy socialite like Bruce Wayne would hire such a common butler.
• I've got a feeling that this Bruce Wayne fellow may have been in on this whole Batman thing. I'm not sure why, but there were several subtle hints dotted throughout the film that an uneducated eye wouldn't have noticed.

So, that is that. I hope I never have to review such a base piece of "art" ever again. Next week, this column will resume normal service, with my review of jazz virtuoso Strabek Vaglips's latest opus 'Magna Doodle Dandy,' an album of hard-bop classics played entirely on a stylophone.

Dyed two Jung

Happiness is...

... skipping through a meadow and laughing so loud that neighbouring farmers are forced to soundproof their barns.

Unbreakable

The following poem is taken from my forthcoming collection, The Goose Fancier's Almanac, published by Rita's Vanity Press Ltd.

Unbreakable


You think you can break me, don't you?
Well get this:

You can't.

You can break my car and break my bike,
You can break my yellow Fisher Price trike,
You can break my paper and break my pens,
You can break my cockerel and break my hens,
You can break my library card and my bus pass,
You can break my commemorative Batman glass,
You can break my apples and break my pears,
You can break my drainpipes and break my flares,
You can break my windows and break my doors,
You can even break my Filipino whores,
You can break my guns and break my coke,
You can break my Imperial Leather bath soak,
You can break my legs and break my nose,
Break my arms and break my toes,
Break my face and break my ribs,
Break my knees, shins, tibs and fibs,
You can break all that, but can't you see,
The one thing you can't break is me.

Although really, if you'd broken my legs, nose, arms, toes, face, ribs, knees, shins, tibs and fibs, that would be me, wouldn't it? Oh well, I sold my delete key to pay for my drug habit, so I can't go changing it now.

Shalom.

My Agony Column

That's right I've started my own Agony Aunt column! Of course, you're probably thinking, 'Who the hell would take advice from that dribbling imbecile?' But you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking you smell of piss. Anyway, on to the first question!

Whenever I write things down, it comes out all slanty. What can I do?
- Slanty Sarah, Dorset

Well Sarah, ask yourself this, do you need to write anything down at all? Think about it. And while you're thinking about it, go and make me a sandwich, you slanty freak. Next question!



Ou est la piscine?
-Claude, Paris

Haha! Sounds like pissing. Next question!



What is the proper way to wear a cummerbund with a waistcoat?
-Patrick Bateman, New York City

Fuck off you fictional character! Next!


Whenever I make love to my wife, I can't reach climax without imitating an owl. How can I stop it?
-Jim Perkins, Appleby de la Zouch


Do you mean hooting or turning your head around so you're facing the other way? Be more specific.


My penis burns when I urinate. I've consulted my GP, but he just keeps telling me not to urinate. Is he even a real doctor?
-Veggy Blinker, Crewe Alexandra


Well, Veggy, there are many ways to tell if your doctor isn't genuine.

1. He operates out of a caravan.
2. He answers to the name 'Curly.'
3. Instead of putting on latex gloves, he simply spits into his hands and says, 'Clean as a whistle.'
4. He seems overly keen on checking your prostate gland with his erect penis.
5. His stethoscope is just some grass.

My husband wants me to dress up for him to spice up our sex life. Any ideas what costumes to get?
-Marigold Queef, Splotchley


In the bedroom, the following costumes are acceptable:

• Sexy nurse
• Sexy nun
• Sexy police woman
• Sexy Chief Environmental Officer for Leicester City Council
• Sexy nudist

The following are unacceptable:

• Sexy ghost
• Sexy dog
• Sexy child
• Sexy Hitler

Hope this helps, Marigold and do let me know how you got on. Especially all the filthy stuff. Phwoar.

Anyway, that's all for now, I'll be answering more of your problems on this page in the very near future.

I sometimes wonder...

... why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had to wear masks. I mean, what were they trying to do, protect their identities? As if there were thousands of other giant, mutant turtles walking around? COME ON! Who are they trying to kid? Am I right, guys?

Guys?

Hello?