Our man in the field

Topical news today:

Sidmouth is right near Branscombe, which (you might remember) is where a ship called the MSC Napoli ran aground months ago. It was notable as many vultures flooded down to grab some of the fallen cargo and lower my opinion of humankind.

You can see the boat very clearly from Sidmouth beach. Anyway, they've only recently been trying to move it, but it has been breaking up as it is unstable. This has caused some oil and other polluting shit to flow into the water.

So today, in a (short) spell of glorious weather, Lucy and I decided to go paddling in the lapping waves. The sand golden; the crests of the waves and the beach pebbles shining like gems. The cool water soothed our feat, as the hot, muggy air floated up, past the red sandstone of the cliffs, towards the cloudless sky.

We sauntered along the beach, without a care in the world. And there, lying on its back was a big, fat, dead, crab.

This is when we noticed a lot of black stuff floating in the water. It seemed to be just little specks, but as we moved further on, we saw more and more. When our feet left the water, it was clear that we had lots of bits of oil on our feet.

We had to clean them with white spirit.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside...

I'm not sure that the crab was killed by the oil, but it seems likely. What a disgusting abuse of nature. It made it taste all tarry! Yuk!

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Probably the controversial message: "pollution is bad!" That's a wonderful slice of Newsround morality. That programme only ever seemed to have stories on oil slicks and pandas (and that hot presenter Becky!). In many ways, it's just like the rest of television news, but with fewer pretensions.

***

Nerd Alert!

You know what's annoying? The fact that Superman in presented as being as fast as The Flash. I mean, speed is all The Flash has. He's not strong, he can't shoot lasers out of his urethra, he just runs quickly.

Superman can run, jump, fly, see through walls, pick up planets, juggle, punch people, sing, speak Welsh, smoke a pipe, fuck up the Coundown conundrum, and do innumerable other things. And he's as fast as The Flash.

Talk about emasculating. Poor Flash. If I was Superman (and, trust me, I'm close), I'd let Flash win a few races, just to make him feel better.

"Whew! You sure beat me, Flash! You really are the fastest man alive. I'm knackered!" and as he left, under my breath, I'd say "I'm just off to fuck Lois Lane and throw a potato into the sun, you fucking pussy..."

***

Here's a few more nonsensical nuggets from my writer's notebook:

"Posthumously, post-taramasalata-ly"

"Schindler's Listening!"

"Postman Pat must be turning in his grave"

"Hyde & Sikh"

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To give me something to say beyond "goodbye" in this last section, my above Superman rant reminded me of this very funny site. If you haven't seen it before, I recommend browsing around:

http://www.superdickery.com/galleries.html

See you in the funny pages!

Or the OBITUARIES.