renowned novelist miss jessica fletcher will be available for a live web chat on this site at 8.30-9.30pm gmt. today friday 18th to talk about herself and her books, or whatever topics you wish to ask.
thank you.
]]>renowned novelist miss jessica fletcher will be available for a live web chat on this site at 8.30-9.30pm gmt. today friday 18th to talk about herself and her books, or whatever topics you wish to ask.
thank you.
]]>imagine a boy who had developed daydreaming to such an extent that it could be used as a physical force. a result of years spent staring out of windows instead of at blackboards. years spent staring at wallpaper or carpet patterns instead of listening to elderly relatives. so highly was his brain free of reality or consequence that he would drift-off mid conversation into another world. he would leave soup bubbling till the pot was so much twisted goo. meetings or appointments were merely future no-shows for him. such was the fractured, easily distracted nature of the imagineer. the power of daydreaming had reached such that the imagineer need only imagine his waitress slipping and scalding herself with hot latte and a series of events would occur to make it so. he need only imagine a smouldering housefly skywriting obscenities and a series of events would occur to make it so. the impossible was only a seconds thought away. purple seas. floating cars. 10,000 godzillas. creamcakes as far as the eye could see - childsplay. multiple bodies, time control, artificial intelligence in inanimate objects - harder. his powers were only limited by his own imagination. when the government found out his power they snatched him.
they now possessed the ultimate weapon.
they had kept him locked in a windowless room, on a chair 6ft above the ground. he remained in a half doped semi coma - but awake, believing that sleep would have dangerous dreaming capabilities. in the room was a tv with a preset list of non-offensive programs. laverne and shirley. cheers. nothing sci-fi or violent was ever broadcast to the imagineer in the fear that it would cause violent imaginings. all the actors faces were slightly pixellated so as to avoid celebrity harm. he was strapped up to brain monitors to catch any signs of imagining and to set guards to red alert. on the wall was a red sign with white writing.
"dont imagine! you will be destroyed!
until you are needed,-just watch t.v."
outside the 6ft thick lead walls of the room were rings of increasing concentric circles of guards and tanks and guards and tanks and guards and tanks. outside the labyrinth sat more tanks and men as well as beached battleships all pointing toward the hub, all watching the installation. poised to destroy at a moments notice. all ready to obliterate anything imagined and the imagineer should the need arise. he knew he could escape at any moment. all he needed to do was imagine quicker than the electric signals from his brain could reach the brain monitor and from there the red alert bulb and from there the radio signal to the 10,000 men on overwatch. but what was the point? when you had ultimate power, why not just watch tv?
]]>in this wizard of oz story. dorothy now 38 goes back to oz and falls in love with the aging wizard, he tells her it is not possible for them to be together. that the age difference is too great. that they are from different worlds. dorothy refuses to leave. there is nothing left for her in kansas. in this scene. the wizard battles with his conscience while dorothy struggles to understand his rejection. both appear on stage together. the wizard below water level. dorothy above. the water level rises and falls as each voices their thoughts. the entire play is spoken in paulrovian dialect. 'sleef en skiem, sleef en skiem' she pleads. 'no sush rien' he replies to the fishes.
]]>my flat is filled with too much crap. so much so that the walls have appeared to move inwards. i thought at first that is what had happened, that some guy stuck those goddam indiana jones inwardly moving walls in my flat but without the spikes. but its not that - just the slow inevitable collection of stuff. you see this is what a house really is. its a means to start buying books and other unnecessary things. before you had a house you would say 'but where am i going to put that?' before you bought something, you imagined yourself walking the earth with that thing on your back but now you just accumulate. i have only ever lived in top floor flats. really just by fluke. but i dont like the idea of someone living above me. i want to be highest. anyway living on the top floor makes the accumulation of crap all the worse. you drag the crap up four flights and when youre moving out you drag all the crap back down four flights. half the reason i havent moved is so i dont have to drag all this crap downstairs. and the thing is that even if you only bring a little shit into your nest every day, after a couple of years thats piles and piles of shit.
]]>virus killer companies must have some wee guy in a room looking up everything on the internet so he can catch all the new viruses, then they can find a cure for them. he must go on all the grottiest wee sites and apply for all the daftest stuff and open all the dodgy emails.
]]>what chance do you give your wean when you call her Maleficent? its no wonder she turned out a bad egg.
why do russian women tennis players look the way they do and russian women shot putters look the way they do? hmm? ill tell you.
if you take someone. put them on lush grass most of the time. give them white clothing. a lot of skirts. a nice little fuzzy yellow ball. someone to play with on the other side of a small net. you get lithe female tennis players with faces like pocket sunshine.
if you take someone. build them up. put them in a 1970s wrestling leotard. give them a cold metal ball. put them in the middle of a high one sided metal cage with nobody to play against. you get female shot putters who look like they're chewing a wasp.
]]>the microwave oven.
i think this is some sort of cosmic joke. it doesnt really make sense. you put the thing in the middle. it turns around on the little plate. tada!. it bings. you cant see the heat. no flame. no gas. no element. it cooks from the inside out and you cant put metal things in it or eggs.
gods playing a joke. of all the appliances in the white goods family, its the black sheep.
]]>among my girlfriends many part time jobs, she used to work for a cheap car-hire company. she would get a call from the office everytime someone didnt take out the extra insurance. she would have to race down to the garage on this little bicylce she had with a kickstart engine and follow the car as it left. then she would wait for them to leave the car unattended and she would scrape a dirty big line right up the side of the motor, kick out one of the lights and throw a brick through the windscreen. what a fuckin bitch. the poor optimist that hired the car would have to pay shitloads of money to the rental place and she got a cut. now my girlfriend is a car owner. and karma has taken it upon itself to come round full circle and kick the living shit out of this little motor from dawn till dusk. this car has every ailment. everything goes wrong with this car. it is a lemon. it coughs and bounces its way along the street like some cartoon jallopy. karma has performed the old switcheroo.
we are forever in the local garage. whilst in the mechanics last, we were ushered over by a throaty man who handed us a small beige card with gold filigree text. ive seen this kind of luck before he said, nothing mechanical can fail in this many ways, trust me, i used to work for a vending machine company. its not a car mechanic you need, its a karma mechanic. the card read,
dr ernest kilroy marsden
karma mechanic
the karma mechanic is another schyster in the rain doctor, travelling medicine man, feng shui consultant tradition. i am not usually a believer in the old 'what goes around comes around', but my girlfriends luck with cars made me doubt, so out of curiosity, i went to see what the future held in store for me.
karma consultancy works like this: you go in, tell them a few general things about yourself, answer a few questions and the guy'll give you a reading and tell you when and what you're coming back as. dr ernest was a short man.he had a very strange voice. sounded like hes pushing kittens into the business end of a tuba. it starts out squeky and ends up booming. i asked him to say certain words and we laughed. instead of degrees and certificates on the wall he had a cheap certificate that said hes qualified to handle cooked meats and has passed a general food health exam. he also had a picture of himself coming down one of those log flume things. he asked me for health advice in between chats. ive got this thing on my back he says. can you take a look. it looks ok i say. i dont think its anything to worry about. keep it covered. i told him all about the things i'd done and after he'd stopped crying he typed it into his computer-
'the next-life predictor 3000'
( it runs on windows 95, 98, me, and xp, but not vista.) it clicked out a little punched card. it said,
daniel brodwin
15 glen close
kirk douglas
pitlochry
scotland
due for borning 2018
i took the little card, still warm. 10 years time. me and kuv thought it would be fun to see what my next mum looked like, so we looked up the phone directory and there was a jean brodwin living at 15 glen close in pitlochry. we drove up in the car, its only a couple of hours and we staked out the house. we both imagined what lay inside. a coal fire, peachy skin, soft hair. nice eyes. love we thought. theres a lot of love in that crooked house. sniff. sniff. futurepauls going to be a very lucky boy.
i have written about my present parents before. they are wonderful people. and so when the most unremarkable trollop emerged from no.15 my heart sunk. the burst slippers, the greasy hair, the mechanical arm. the hunch. the polar opposite of the motherly figure i had grown up with. it was only then that my lifetime of thievery and barbarity came home to roost. i was going to reap what i had sown, not right now but soon. i hazed out and imagined the mechanical arm brushing my hair and burping me, of being piggy backed on that hunch, and when i came to i was hurtling the car toward mrs brodwin. if she was dead she couldnt be future mom and i'd get somebody else, somebody less metallic. i plowed through future mum denting the bonnet and removing the front bumper. the mechanical arm came loose from future mother and stuck through the windscreen twitching like some sort of clockwork snake. the karma consultant who we had tied up and put in the back seat was screaming like a scabby heided wean. "you crazy people, you've only made things worse for yourself. youv lowered your karma." feck. i thought. the buggers right. we got his karma predictor 3000 out and altered the questionnaire so it showed that i'd murdered my future mother. the card that it punched and spat out read like this,
martin clunkton
24 glen close
kirk douglas
pitlochry
scotland
due for borning 2018
we looked up the street. slithering out from number 24 emerged a gruesome figure. it was female. just. it looked like it had just woken up. it was eating a chicken leg and scratching itself. there was half a jam wagon wheel stuck to the side of its face. horrified i floored the accelerator and cut down future mum mark 2, denting the roof and removing the side view mirror. "stop! stop! shouted the little karma man your lowering it every time, you've got to stop." in a moment of resigned crystal clarity we jallopied off. it was clear that i had travelled so far down the reincarnation ladder that there was no hope of ever getting back up to decent levels of human reincarnation. and so we bumped off the little karma mechanic and dumped the car. we have since typed all manner of things into the karma predictor and we now keep a cute baby seal and a club in the bath and when its time to check out we will perform one last act of cruelty so as to lessen my karma and come back as a tree.
]]>Edmund Gorse has disbanded the Rachel Parsley fan club on hearing the news that Rachel has married her longterm sweetheart. Edmund will grow increasingly bitter, his house full of discarded effluvia with tenuous links to Rachel. Things like used tickets stubbs, cigarette ends, hair, chewing gum. The Rachel Parsley fan club only had one member - Edmund Gorse. Poor Edmund. He is a man without love.
Edmund has watched Rachel since he was 6 years old. Collecting objects from around Rachels house and often attaching ill informed meaning toward them. A bent kirby-grip resembling his capital letter. A discarded worn out running shoe found pointing open mouthed in the direction of his house. Countless trees are scarred with their unofficial loveheart and initials, innumerable school jotters are daubed with dripping arrow pierced hearts. While inside a childish doodle of a boy and girl on swings with initialled top hats on, another of his planned Rachel Parsley parade with 100ft high flags, ticker tape and woolly mammoth procession. another of a becaped despectacled Edmund carrying Rachel to intergalactic safety. Edmund sits glumly at his bedroom window. Poor silly Edmund.
Across the street sits Karen Kane. Watching lovesick Ed through her binoculars while he sits watching Rachel Parsley. Poor Karen Kane. Poor Edmund Gorse. If only these two stalkers could get all psycho on each other. How much happier they would be.
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