Breaking News!

Oh my god! Outside my window there are flashing lights in the sky! Coming to Eath – I don’t know what they are. A hideous screaming sound! Something’s coming – I don’t know what. Oh god they’re landing – my wife is urging me to flee but I must get this message out, must warn everyone. They, they, I can see them, descending from their landing craft, great bulbous shaped things. Repulsive, wobbling, slimy, making sounds like distressed walruses. They’re coming across the lawn to the house! They’re breaking in! Smashing through the walls with terrible ease. Tentacles, tentacles, a jiggling mass of tentacles. They’re coming for me! One long mottled green tentacle is worming across the floor towards me! It’s coming! There’s nowhere to hide. And now it’s creeping up my leg and heading for my anus and hgwqdo ad[ krosdgk dngd

* * *

April Fool! Earth hasn’t really been invaded by aliens! Ha ha, made ya look ya dirty chook. Boo sucks to those who rushed to the window to scope out the night sky or gingerly rubbed their rear ends in anticipation of extra-terrestrial back-door conquest…

(And sincere apologies also to anyone who took their own life or fled with their families and a few choice belongings to a remote rural hide-away to begin a new life of subsistence and armed vigilance. Sometimes I don’t know my own (prose) strength and I really should be more careful.)

Biggest. Highest. Fastest. Grossest. Lesser known world records (vol 1)

The largest white-head in recorded history belonged to Keith Aaron Clark of Solihull in the West Midlands in the United Kingdom. The pimple, located just off the centre of his right cheek was so large that little children would toboggan down it, in the process scaring small birds and animals who were foraging upon it. In secondary school, the zit was forced to occupy another desk and was ultimately required to register with the school in its own right (and almost surpassed Clark’s own exam results).

On medical advice, the pimple was burst. Two burly firemen ran from opposites of a football field and shoulder-charged the white-head. The resulting rupture contaminated the field for a period of three year before hazardous materials experts deemed that it was again safe to tread upon the surface without special protection.

Today, Clark is a dentist living in Tottenham in London. He hides from the limelight caused by his earlier fame but sometimes visits the scale model of his zit on display at Madame Tussaud’s.

Things certainly were different before all these new-fangled changes

We can all remember a more innocent time, driving through the country-side and spying a copse of 'black boys' -- how they cheered our hearts as we imagined them to be a clutch of aboriginal youths, waving at us merrily from some delightful patch of dirt.

Of course, it was not so long ago that the bureaucrats, wowsers and pointyheads got together and deemed that it was unacceptable to call this happy plant a 'black boy' -- for reasons that remain beyond me to to this day. But this band of black-hearted killjoys did not stop with this humble plant in their bid to cast a dark pall upon the human spirit by way of sucking the poetry from our noble language. Alas not!

Therefore, more in sadness than anything else, I present two further kingly representatives of the plant kingdom whose true names were torn from the bosom of our English tongue:



The money-grasping, hook-nosed Jew bush

Alas this shrub, first named by Joseph Banks in 1785 in respectful homage to his wife's Hebraic physician, no longer wears this name. Today it goes by the rather more soulless sobriquet of the 'Eastern Sunrise Tree.' Hardly rolls off the tongue, does it? Chalk up another victory to the spineless technocrats in Canberra.



The get-your-tahini-and-dirt-encrusted-toes-off-of-our-golden beaches, you monobrow-sporting, bath-and-bacon-dodging lebbo thug bush

Another piece of our history seemingly gone forever, this plant is now called the 'Levantine Banksia'. These new words, which taste to me of urban decay and corrupt centralised government, stiffen and rot in my very mouth. And this is progress?

I weep sometimes as I look back on this earlier less suspicious time when we knew where we stood as a nation, did not have to lock our doors at night and knew that words could be relied on with the solidity of housing bricks. Today, negotiating the shifting sands of our 'politically correct' but poetically stagnant 'culture' surely means giving up another tiny piece of our soul that we will never get back...

Recently overheard in a federal government office

"The question will make people ask: why are you asking the question?"*

"...not until the last clown has been drowned in his custard bath or run over with his tiny car, will this nation know greatness. We must take back our country from the pierrots, punchinellos and funny men who spread across it like a smear of rancid greasepaint. I propose nothing less than a Banal Solution, a grinding of the amusing by the forces of blandness and beigeness. Let the 26th of March forever more be known as the Night of the Long Shoes! Let a thousand frowns curl across this mighty land!'**

"I'll see your Lithgow and Toowoomba and raise you Hobart and Adelaide."***



* true
** eh, not so much
*** but it has the ring of truth, no?

Mob picks over process issues around hard-worked compromise: pix!

It was with some sadness that I read this front-page from the PNG Post Courier last week. Whatever happened to those nice mobs from the olden days that hankered for nothing more than a handful of fairy floss and a few kind words?

Three Billy Goats Gruff with self-destructive mutual interdependency issues

Note: Posting will be even more half-arsed and sporadic than usual for the next week as I'll be overseas. Please leave lots of funny and warm comments in the interim to validate me as a human being. See if we can't break double figures, huh?


…. ‘Oh, no! Don't take me. Wait a little till the big Billy Goat Gruff comes. He's much bigger.’

‘Very well! Be off with you,’ said the troll.

But just then up came the big Billy Goat Gruff.

Trip, trap, trip, trap, trip, trap! went the bridge, for the billy goat was so heavy that the bridge creaked and groaned under him.

‘Who's that tramping over my bridge?’ roared the troll.

‘It's I! The big Billy Goat Gruff ,’ said the billy goat, who had an ugly hoarse voice of his own.

‘Now I 'm coming to gobble you up,’

And with that the ‘big’ Billy Goat Gruff’s façade of strength crumbled and he burst into a terrible sobbing.

‘Oh God, don’t eat me. Why are you eating me? Why didn’t you eat my goddamned younger brothers? They told you to wait for me, didn’t they? They said, “don’t eat me, oh no, I’m all trim and gym hardened and buff – wait for lardy mclard-arse Gruff, didn’t they”?’ Said the goat, now shrieking hysterically. Twin trails of snot ran from quivering nostrils parallel to the streaks of hot tears on his cheeks.

‘Well, I’m not big, I’m not fat and if I am, just a little, well, it isn’t my fault. I’m big-boned. It’s freaking genetic. I got my deadbeat Dad’s fatty fat fat chromosomes and they got Mum’s silky lithe chromosomes. And I’ve been paying the price ever since! Those punk arse bitches! How dare they tell you to wait for the porky one! I bet they said I was half-goat and half-pig right? They told you I was adopted and my real Mum was that slutty Meggy McBacon down the road, didn’t they?’

The troll stood there, idly scratching his forehead and regarding the goat coolly.

‘Um, yeah, something like that. One of them said I should actually let you over the bridge so I can see you from behind and check out how your arse wobbles.’ He said, looking over his shoulder at the two younger goats, now making obscene gestures at him from the safety of a nearby hill-side.

The goat sobbed again, holding its chubby face with its hooves.

‘You don’t know what it was like growing up as the fat responsible one. The one who always had to keep a watch on the time, and follow the rules. And clean up after the other two. They were always, like, getting into the fly nanny goats, while I was picking the dags off Dad’s bum. I was always left behind because I’m not as quick as they were. The only reason they were first across the bridge was because I can’t run as fast as them. I try to get to the gym, try to pound the treadmill, but I just don’t have time. If I was a freakin’ part-time student you can freakin bet I’d have time to get in shape but I have to work late at the office. And you know I just grab hamburgers and shit cos I don’t have time to make a salad. And when I get home I’m so tired all I want to do is eat ice cream and watch CSI.’ The goat said, whispering hoarsely.

The troll stared at the larger goat with a mixture of pity and disgust.

‘Look, I hear ya buddy. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m still gonna eatya. But how about I chase down your brothers and eat them too?’ Said the troll.

The goat blinked back his tears.

‘You could do that?’ He said. ‘Really? I thought you had to stay under the bridge?’

‘You have no idea how handy it is that everybody believes that.’

‘Uh, could you eat the little one first?’ The goat said, now recovering his demeanour somewhat.

‘Eh,’ the troll replied, with a small shrug. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

Unexaggerated tale of woe and redemption

Edgar K. Harman considered his life’s work complete the day after his 43rd birthday. It was the day his favourite tattooist, Marty ‘Shank Man’ Longhi, inked the final panel of Harman’s enormous tattoo which stretched from his face down to his shins. The tattoo, which he had begun 22 years earlier, now featured -- Every. Single. Page -- of the very first issue of the world’s greatest comic: Unexaggerated Tales of the Purple Wasp, first published by Jack Sikorsky and Myron Staples in New Jersey in 1952.

Issue #1 featured the very first encounter with the Grey Honey-Eater, the Purple Wasp’s nemesis and the object of his secret doomed affection. It had the first look at his cliff-top hide-away, the Royal Hive in the Sky, and showed his bookish alter-ego, Jerry Lancaster, nervously going for an interview as a file clerk with the Police Department – a position he would later use to great effect from Issue #6 onwards to glean intelligence on numerous hard-nosed crims.

Various hard-core members of purplewaspreturns.com – the world’s preeminent Purple Wasp fansite and webportal – would swear that Harman, if not actually a god, had become more than merely human, as they liked to say. He was the coolest person ever with the exception of the deeply troubled Purple Wasp himself.

But tragedy struck, as it so often does, quickly and quietly in the night. A short post to unexaggerated.blogspot.com – an otherwise no-account fan blog published out of Sheffield in the UK – suggested that there was an even earlier issue, soon dubbed Issue #1a by the fanoscenti.

Only 12 issues of #1a were ever printed and 3 of these were immediately destroyed due to ink problems. 4 others were given to unappreciative family members and promptly lost. 2 were later destroyed in a house fire in 1965. Only 3 remained, treasured forever by Sikorsky’s widow, Jean, in her attic, and only discovered at her death.

Within 3 weeks they were on ebay and within 12, scanned copies were on the web itself. 1a was a revelation, the biggest thing to hit the Purple Wasp world, the biggest thing that could hit the Purple Wasp world. Issue #1a explained how the Purple Wasp got his mysterious powers (and that scar on his back). It introduced the Red Arachnid who, teaming up with the Honey-Eater, finally managed to kill him in Issue #146. It also explained his slightly icky psycho-sexual relationship with his side-kick and younger half-brother, Michael (the Green Firefly).

Overnight, Harman became a freak and an outcast, a laughing-stock and a cautionary tale whose infamy spread quickly across the Internet. But after a brief bout of depression, he bounced back, starting TheRealNumberOne.com and attracting a small but loyal following. He made it his life’s work to attack what came to be known as the One-A Fallacy. By the time his 45th birthday had rolled around, Harman had again found that inner peace that only comes from a life well-lived.