I: Franz

There was a composer named Liszt
Whose music no-one could resiszt
When he swept the keyboard
Nobody could beyboard
And now that he's gone he is miszt.

II: Guy

But these are the same people who use 'hajj' or 'hajji' as a convenient know-nothing term for Iraqi -- the local version of a Vietnamese 'gook'. They seemingly got it from a comicbook character called Haji, who wears a turban.

The irony is that it literally means 'one who has been on pilgrimage to Mecca'. Imagine a bunch of non-American-speaking foreign soldiers with big guns, running amok in Chicago, Detroit, and Orange County, killing people at random -- and shouting stuff like "I'll kill you, your mother@#@#ing excellency!" and "Eff you, your reverence".

It doesn't really scan, does it?

Back in the 1970s, the "Ireland? How can you live with all those bombs and bullets?" response was common among people in the rest of the world. It was always too hard to explain that the 'violence' was sporadic, confined to a few streets in a couple of cities I'd never been to ... and the first place I ever saw a real gun was in Germany.

And once I was asked: "I've seen that Northern Ireland on TV. Terrible, innit? Um ... is Northern Ireland the top bit or the bottom bit?"

Nice knowing those of you that I've known, and the rest didn't miss much.

*click*

There, it's done. But I won't actually be able to be funny for a while yet. Something or other has to harden, or whatever. It's still an experimental operation and it can very easily go ... gloop sartorial klipspringer shot cummings fnarr fnarr tmesis emetic in the pawnograph ...

Oh dear.

One, two, twenty-three, eleventy-one and a quarter.

All seems in order. But the funnybone still hasn't set properly, so we'll have to get by with a trivia quiz for now.

Who wrote the following (?):

(1) "I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what twenty years sitting on your ass does to your face."

(2) "When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not."

(3) "In the City Market is the Meet Cafe. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmaline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players ... "

(4) "Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath/ and after many a summer dies the swan".

(5) "Mr Postbox finds the resident ex-CIA gerontocracy oppressive, and desires to retire further south, away from them".

(6) "Is old age a disease?"

I suppose if you were scrunched up in a corner, dropping eaves and taking notes, covertly filming the excesses while half-hidden by the obese enormity of some pillar of society ...

One hears the strangest things on the radio. A few minutes ago I heard an American 'gasoline analyst' say "Any Pavlovian dog will tell you he's been conditioned" ... Arf, arf.

And now a spokesperson for a sexual violence crisis centre said that politicians and other critics should be more constructive, or shut up. "They need to butt out", she added.

Good for you. In his hands, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstrated ‘not the great public concern about the international scene but the great public indifference to it’; New Wave cinema ‘felt tired and old hat’ as early as 1963; Bob Dylan seemingly never wrote anything; the Angry Young Men were soon ‘looking distinctly middle aged’ (how tiresome); the satire boom had 'quite simply, run its course' before 1965; and worryingly, the connection made in the popular imagination between homosexuality and ‘Marxist treachery’ was ‘not entirely without good reason.’ He's a Tory scumbag, but one with an unfortunately broad appeal - a bit like Boris Johnson, in fact. God I'm going to be down come 1st May.

<Sigh>

She wrote to me, y'know, the pseudo-Buffy. I hadn't the (lack of) heart to reply. She probably still imagines that it was her accent which offended me.

Possibly the legendary moment where presbyopia (age-related long-sightedness) and myopia (common or garden short-sightedness) cross paths and momentarily cancel out.

Either way, the myopia is well back on top by now.

<I collect accents recreationally.> My favorite kind involves hypercorrection: the ones who try to sound posh, and miss. The variant Norn'Iron form, where the speaker tries to sound more 'British' but fails horribly, is the default mode on Ulster Television.

- "Rather chully tonight, eh? And nee-oo-oi on yeuwe-tay-vay, we have...

They never seem to understand that it's better to sound like a posh person attempting demotic -- Chazza Windsor goes rap, for instance, is acceptable in any company.

As the oft-cited JP Donleavy said: "When your accent slips have a better one on underneath."

He's still alive, but I have no intention of doing anything so offensive as thanking him. A bit like Sir Henry and the frozen chicken:

- Hello now, I'm yer noo neighbor.

- Seems a decent enough sort of chap. At least he didn't have the impertinence to announce himself at the front door.

[btw, d'you know which Rawlinson recordings are available, if any, in which media, and where? I've seen the text of Rawlinson End out there somewhere on the NitWeb ... and I imagine it exists on CD, while CDs still exist. But is there other stuff?

There's a coastal rock near here with the oldest known footprints anywhere embedded in it ... supposedly the first amphibian (therapsid?) emerging from the sea and deciding to stay.

While Iceland, geologically, is volcanic and about ten minutes old. A suitable resting place for the inventor of the time increment.

My favorite geologic 'moment', btw, is India tearing away from Gondwanaland, pausing to drop off Madagascar, then ploughing majestically northwards until it slams into Asia, causing various slight bulges like the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush.

I like to imagine *somebody* standing on the seashore in Afghanistan, looking out to sea and saying: "What's that?" [long pause] "I think it's coming closer" [longer pause] "Big, isn't it?" [longest pause yet] "Big? It's a bleedin' subcontinent, is what it is! D'you think we should run?"

- That depends.

"on what?"

- On whether we have time to evolve legs before it hits.

Until then it was a priest-ridden theocracy, where 110% of the population attended daily mass and gave up shagging for Lent. Procreation was confined to married couples and could only be carried out in the dark, through holes cut in a brown paper bag. Bishops, however, were celibate, and all the cocaine in the country was kept in the basement of the British embassy. When people weren't actually praying they engaged in traditional sports such as stick-ball, bog-ball, and emigration.

Which, oddly, isn't how I remember it at all. And I even got a printer to print a pic of the pope's bum -- one of the more puerile contributions to Zilch - and survive. Among many other crimes, such as importing banned books by William Burroughs and watching illegal films like 'The Sound of Throat' and 'Deep Music' ...

And sexual intercourse began in 1963.
There is, one must admit, a certain residual consistency in these views. In the USA, thanks to 'freedom of speech' (without which Mr Dylan "might be in the swamp") he would of course be entitled to his opinions.

Over here, mercifully, we have an extra millennium or so of repression, propaganda, class war, crypto-fascism and Tory bastardy to give us greater flexibility. And yes, the rotter should be debagged first and strung up from something later.

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, would make a great puppet on kids' TV, ideally with somebody's hand up his bottom. A blond Zig or Zag, a tory Podge or Rodge ... the mind boggles, even though the latter pair are sexist, racist old brutes as it is.

"Felt tired and old hat", eh? I thought old hats were *made* of felt. Maybe he's really that German artist shot down in WW2 and wrapped in felt and fat as an offering to pagan gods / by a friendly tribe of Siberian reindeer-piss fiends / to avoid hypothermia.

"The last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled/ was a planeload of Nazis with their potatoes peeled..."