Friday 28 June 2013

People You Barely Knew Reunited


Please don't hate me, Loz, she wrote in block capitals, you know I always loved you. I assumed the message was in response to something I'd said through the medium of facebook, the popular social networking conglomerate. I couldn't recall making any specific comment from which Marsha might have deduced herself the object of my hypothetical detestation, although that hadn't stopped her before. I'd recently left the words tolerance of morons decreasing as a status message, the import of this being that my tolerance of some specific morons on a particular bulletin board had recently decreased, which seemed roughly self-explanatory to me. I supposed it could have been that which set her off, but then it might have been almost anything.

The messages came around roughly every few months with depressing regularity, Marsha begging me not to hate her and referring to me by a nickname I strongly dislike when used by anyone outside of those five people who get special dispensation by virtue of genuine friendship; and she hadn't even spelled it right, typing out Loz as Los with an S, over and over, like in the phrase los idiotas que prueba mi paciencia, which means most of my facebook friends in Spanish.

I need you to tell me you don't hate me, Los, she would plead, please, I need it...

It's a myth that the heterosexual male is easily operated by means of treats in much the same way as a Cocker spaniel. There may be a few of us who respond to bouncing breasts with Pavlovian enthusiasm, but leaving aside the more helplessly mammotropic representatives of our vast global community, I would like to think that at least some of us have standards.

I discovered my own standards when Amanda Banner propositioned me back in 1985. I was a student, taking my fine art degree and living in a beautiful and possibly Elizabethan farmhouse in the village of Otham, Kent. The rent was twelve pounds a week and I had somehow ended up sharing with three girls which, if nothing else, at least spared me beer drinking competitions and conversations about football. Due to the antiquity of the house, the fifth and smallest bedroom could only be accessed by walking through mine, which I believe I found more awkward than did Amanda, the girl who ended up with a room that may as well have been my walk-in wardrobe. I was nineteen, full of testosterone, and I wouldn't have said no to any advances made by two of my housemates - advances which never came because they had more sense - so typically, it was the one I didn't really like who suggested the possibility of naughty naked nudity.

Amanda was bullish with a slightly upper-class lilt to her accent and a snorting laugh which came loud and with great frequency, somewhere between a horse and Lucy, the nemesis of Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoons. After about a month, I realised we would never have anything to say to each other, and then one evening as I lay in bed reading my Marvel comics, the door opened. It being Amanda heading for her own bed, I didn't look up until I realised she had tarried awhile afore seeking the comfort of her rest, as Shakespeare would probably have put it.

'I've been thinking,' she suggested with a sheepish grin that I found terrifying. 'We've known each other for a while and well I—'

'Yes?,' I squeaked, hoisting up the covers like Charles Hawtrey surprised by a randy Hattie Jacques in a Carry On film.

'Well, I like you a lot and I think we get on really well together, so I was wondering,' - I didn't hear the rest as I could already see where this was headed, and my mind was reeling at how the frosty silence I'd been cultivating could have been taken for anything even remotely amicable. I stuttered through something amounting to how I saw her more as a friend, which wasn't strictly true but seemed least likely to add to the poor girl's embarrassment. Amanda took rejection in her stride and within a week had met some guy in one of the pubs in Maidstone, a sort of counter-cultural Ronnie Corbett ten years her senior, and it became my burden to listen to the two of them banging away in my notional walk-in wardrobe, grunting and groaning every other night for a further three or four months. It was annoying, but I took strange comfort from the thought that it could have been me suffering in that room. I felt oddly proud of my restraint, my ability to keep a sense of perspective even when presented with the possibility of free boobs; and the appearance of Ronnie Corbett seemed to confirm my suspicion that Amanda had viewed me as the owner of a penis who was unlikely to receive any better offers, and who would therefore respond to flattery.

Going back about five years prior to Amanda's failed attempt to access the contents of my trousers, I was sat next to Marsha at school. As we entered the fifth and final year of the comprehensive, the line up of forms changed due to certain kids having become either more or less intelligent at the close of the previous term, and in all the chaos Marsha bagged the desk next to mine during registration. She seemed to find me entertaining, and although this puzzled me it was also quite flattering. I mean I thought I was hilarious and probably a genius, but I didn't really expect anyone else to hold the same view. I tended to be painfully shy around girls, but Marsha and her friends were okay, and our little group got on well enough. I would sometimes find myself bemused by her getting the wrong end of the stick, her tending to find lurid meanings in otherwise innocuous remarks. For example, the band I was in, the Pre-War Busconductors had recorded a tape called Little Blue.

'Is that because it's a bit blue?,' she asked, giggling. I knew the term from television comedy sketches with greasy old men sweating in strip clubs and talking about what they called blue films. I found the association unpleasant, not least because it reminded me that Marsha had reputedly had a boyfriend in his twenties, openly lusted after one of the male teachers, and was of the view that Don't Stand So Close To Me by The Police was a ballad.

The Pre-War Busconductors' tape was called Little Blue because one of the first songs we recorded was a sweary and purposefully ludicrous cover version of the theme to a children's cartoon. I found the misunderstanding unsettling, resenting that even the most basic and stupid jokes sometimes require an explanation which will inevitably undermine the point of telling them in the first place.

Sitting next to Marsha was fun for a while, but the strength of the friendship was probably revealed in our having no contact beyond the school gates. Once the year ended, we never saw each other again. I can't recall a single instance where it had occurred to me that there would have been any point to our keeping in touch, and I presumed it was the same for Marsha. We both had other plans, and very little in common beyond the fact of our knowing each other, and that apparently we both thought I was a genius.

Three decades pass and of course she turns up on facebook, as does everyone eventually. She has, it seems, had a hard life, and says she has been thinking about me for the last thirty years, and that consideration of my amazingness has helped get her through all the suffering and degradation. She tells me she will die if she doesn't get to meet me, and that she always loved me. So far as I can tell, this isn't even sexual, just intimacy taken to an invasive extreme, the sort of intimacy that could strip paint. I really have no answer for any of it. If I'm honest, I find the flattery unpleasant, but if it helps for her to unload, then I decide that the right thing to do is to take that bullet, to smile and pretend she didn't just write four hundred words in the name of clinging insecurity.

She tells me her child has a life-threatening but unspecified illness, and then later that she herself has been given mere months to live. In spite of how it sounds, I believe her, or at least I believe that whatever she's trying to say is based in reality, and that given how it looks, it's just an unhappy coincidence that some medical condition should have arisen concurrent to her mental health becoming dependent on my approval, on my being grateful for, as she says, all she has done to protect me - although I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

During lucid moments she writes clearly, apologising for the mania of her affection, regretting that it has already driven away other mutual acquaintances of our childhood. She hopes the same will not happen again with us, but even if there were such a thing as an us, we both seem to know that it's inevitable. She has become an expert at the formulation of self-fulfilling prophecy.

We communicate for a year or so, on and off, sometimes just catching up which is wonderful because it's fun to connect with people from the past, to see how things worked out for them; other times it's just bouncing back and forth.

No Marsha, I don't hate you.

No Marsha, I'm not in any personal pain despite having just posted a link to the video clip for
Low Self Opinion by the Rollins Band. It's a song that I enjoy. It is not indicative of my state of mind, so please don't be concerned.

No Marsha, that comment was not about you.

Yes Marsha, I do appreciate everything you've done for me
, because it's easier to just dish out the positive reinforcement than work out what the hell she thinks she's done for me and so risk the possibility that it will entail terms like vibes or psychic love emanations.

It becomes exhausting after a while, and eventually she catches me at the wrong moment, again asking for confirmation that I don't hate her. I tell her that I don't, but add that I'm getting tired of the same question over and over, and I ask that she kindly desist from continually expressing her love for me as I find it disturbing. I appreciate that she has problems, but problems so great as to depend on the fleeting approval of someone she hasn't seen for thirty years are never going to be set right by words alone.

Days later I discover that she has blocked me on facebook. In many ways it's a relief, although part of me finds it more than a little insulting. The worst thing is perhaps that I still can't really bring myself even to resent her, and hatred would be strange and pointless; my life is neither improved nor made worse by her self-imposed virtual silence, simply because my life is fine as it is and Marsha's crazy missives had very little impact on it either way. All that flattery was, as ever, wasted on me, not because I doubt my own status as the crowning achievement of human evolution, but because I dislike people who have nothing to say, but nevertheless expect me to pay attention whilst they vocalise something resembling meaning but for the lack of actual content. Somebody telling you that you're awesome over and over is not a dialogue, and after a while it becomes insulting because it presumes you to be as stupid as the mammotrope who drools and hoots and slaps his flippers because someone has let him have a go on some boobs.

It's a shame of course. There are plenty of messed-up people out there all requiring approval, often persons damaged through no fault of their own, and if one can spare the time of day or contribute in some way towards making somebody's life seem just a little bit less horrible, then that's a good thing. On the other hand, some problems just won't be fixed with a few simpering words scattered hopelessly across the neurosis event horizon, and sometimes it's more helpful to just shut up and say nothing.

If only I didn't have to keep reminding myself of this.

Friday 21 June 2013

The Brilliant and Unauthorised Doctor Who Book of the Name Doctor Who Repeated 75,466 Times in an Assortment of Differing Fonts for No Obvious Reason


Hey reader, have you ever wondered how it would be to own a book comprising the name of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor repeated over and over, page after page, 75,466 times? Have you ever gazed forlornly at your bookshelf and noticed a void of solitude between The Unofficial Doctor Who Guide to Doctor Who Stationary and Office Supplies volume four 1976-1980 and Friends Call Me Toba: A Life of Kenneth Ives, a void which can only be plugged by the important purchase of your one-millionth Doctor Who book, perhaps even a fun book comprising the name of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor repeated over and over, page after page, 75,466 times? Well, wonder nor gaze forlornly no more nor further, fellow Whoist for Brilliant Publications can now exclusively convey unto you The Brilliant and Unauthorised Doctor Who Book of the Name Doctor Who Repeated 75,466 Times in an Assortment of Differing Fonts for No Obvious Reason by renowned typographer and devotee of the adventures of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor, Brian R. Pantaloon, beautifully presented in a numbered hardcover edition with colour cover and black and white interior, as a collector's hardcover. Inside you will be delight to have find of the name Doctor Who on many page in Arial, Consolas, Comic Sans, Gills Sans, Times New Roman, Tahoma and a wide range of three other popular fonts, all rendered in varying sizes and with a special section of italics and bold text, and all beautifully presented in a numbered hardcover edition which will be individually assembled one at a time as orders are received. You have bought the rest. Now you will buy this one too. You will enjoy it very much!

Friday 14 June 2013

Why Aliens Didn't Build the Pyramids

The question of whether the Egyptian pyramids were really built by mysterious visitors from beyond the stars has puzzled humanity since the dawn of time, specifically that small section of humanity who shun conventional wisdom on the subject for fear of being misled by the truth of the so-called facts. Aside from those people, I'm not entirely sure it has puzzled anyone else, and certainly not anyone you would want to know or meet in a social situation. In other words, it's one of the most stupid arguments ever set forth, the stupidity of which was rather neatly illustrated by my friend Urizen (possibly an alias but who knows?) on a bulletin board from which he was subsequently banned for controversially posting a Gilray cartoon, and which is reproduced here with his kind permission:


This is one of those things which is as baffling as it is annoying, to me. I mean no-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Tomb U-j, belonging to King Scorpion [I], c. 3150 BC, at Abydos.



No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Tomb of King Den, 1st Dynasty, Abydos.



No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Pyramid of Djoser, 3rd Dynasty, Saqqara.



No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Maidum Pyramid, built either by Huni or Sneferu, 4th Dynasty.



No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Bent Pyramid, built by Sneferu, 4th Dynasty.



HOLY SHIT, ALIENS MUST HAVE BUILT IT!!!!

Pyramid of Khufu, 4th Dynasty.



HOLY SHIT, ALIENS MUST HAVE BUILT IT!!!!

Pyramid of Khafre, 4th Dynasty.



No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Pyramid of Unas, 5th Dynasty.




No-one thinks this was built by aliens:

Pyramid of Sahure, 5th Dynasty.

I just don't get how you can miss the progression here.


This was originally posted over at Ce Acatl but has been moved here in order to make more room for exciting conversation about the brilliant Doctor Who Man Telly Show.

Friday 7 June 2013

The Pork Judge



Our destination was the Texas State Aquarium. Junior finds sea creatures fascinating, and has long insisted that he wants to be a marine biologist when he grows up. This is an interest we try to encourage, although personally I'm happy to go almost anywhere in Texas because it's always an adventure, and I'm always sure to encounter something astonishing. Being from England, I sometimes only have to step out into the garden to encounter some creature of improbably exotic constitution; so the prospect of a road trip, even with the certain knowledge of it being mostly mile after mile of highway, seemed loaded with potential, besides which it was a good excuse to make corned beef sandwiches.

We set off in the morning, and after an hour or more, Junior finally gave up repeating the word pandemonium over and over in a portentous voice to what he clearly considered hilarious effect, at which point we passed the turning for a town called Swinney Switch. I was thinking about the name when my wife announced that she had  been there whilst serving as a pork judge.

I looked at her, wondering if I'd heard right. 'You were what?'

'I was a pork judge at Swinney Switch,' she repeated.

To my ears, pork judge sounded lurid and strangely futuristic - a creature that mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha would have encountered in the pages of 2000AD comic.

My wife's previous husband is something big in the world of barbecue, which in Texas is as much spectator sport as setting meat on fire in the back garden. I first became aware of this when I moved here and learned that Byron, the first husband in question, had his own barbecue team, this being a bunch of guys who take a trailer around various outdoor events, cooking up ribs and beans for whoever happens to be hungry. Barbecue teams regularly compete to see who can come up with the best marinade and that sort of thing; and Byron has achieved the accolade of having his beans judged the mightiest in all Texas - or something along those lines. Bess told me the details, but it's difficult to remember things for which you have no frame of reference. Barbecue in England is a miserable pastime where people stand around shivering as they dutifully gnaw on undercooked Walls sausages on the understanding that it's fun because it's outside and there will probably be beer. In Texas it's closer to a way of life, sort of like the force in Star Wars.

Anyway, Byron's barbecue beans were declared the finest out of around three hundred submissions from other contestants. I still have no idea of the criteria by which the beans would have been judged, and assume that really tasty would probably be my taking an overly simplistic view. I can't even imagine what the judging process would entail other than someone eating dangerous quantities of beans and gradually narrowing it down by a process of elimination. Suffice to say, I would think you have to really know what you're doing to get ahead in a competition of this sort.

So Byron's team were competing in one of these events at Swinney Switch, and for some reason they were lacking a pork judge. Bess explained to me that a pork judge was, quite logically, a person who judged the pork prepared by the various contestants. Assuming that judging pork was roughly the same deal as judging beans I asked how she managed to reach a consensus.

'Well, you don't eat every last piece,' she told me. 'Some of that pork looks pretty funky, still with the hairs on and everything.'

'So you just pick an entry that seems okay?' I was distantly aware of potential double entendres all backed up, but the subject already seemed too bizarre to fritter away on lavatorial humour.

'Yeah.' My wife shrugged. 'I mean whatever.'

I realised that the role of pork judge might not require quite the same level of commitment as I had anticipated, and it really isn't such a big deal for those born here in Texas. Nevertheless, for those of us who weren't but got here just as soon as we could - as the bumper sticker has it - it's one of those textural details that makes life in this land so interesting. Texas is brimming with this sort of thing, sights which leave me once again struggling to scrape my eyeballs off the glass of the passenger window. Even the most unremarkable landscape seen from the monotony of the interstate seems somehow bigger than anything I ever saw in England; the plants and animals are stranger, more exotic, and there's more of them. Life in Texas happens in full technicolour, as distinct from the apologetic and dripping wet mid-grey of the old and seemingly forever cold country. My state of perpetual wonder is perhaps typified by how even under the potentially dullest of circumstances, an innocuous observation from my wife can open up a whole new world so weird as to require a good two or three minutes of explanation.

Having received the daily expansion of my horizon, there wasn't much more to be said about the work of the pork judge. As we drove on towards Corpus Christi our conversation wandered off in other directions like a pig questing for truffles, and I wondered why my life couldn't have been more like this for the first forty or so years.