NaNoProbLemMo

I'm just checking in. I don't know who with. Myself, probably.

I've been writing. My NaNoWriMo "novel" is progressing at just about the right speed. I still don't really know what I'm writing about. Things just seem to happen and I have to go with it. I'm sure it's part of my subconscious insecurities - I feel that if I plan what I'm writing, I'll have no excuse when it doesn't work.

At the moment, I'm creating mysteries that I'll have to solve later, and am referring to interesting events that haven't been thought about. I can see it all collapsing in on itself in a couple of days.

I'm worried it will turn out like Lost, where I just pile meaningless incidents on top of each other and hope I can bluff my way out of it later.

At the moment, the story is called Neon Tiny Fires. Why? I don't know. It sounds like a bad band name.

Here's a short extract:

“It will come as no surprise to you that-YARGHHH!”

There. Remember, I'm not editing anything, I'm just writing. Quality control is not welcome here.

I've written 7224 words so far. The most fun thing about doing this has nothing to do with creativity or hard work. It's all about the statistics. You can enter your word count, and get all kinds of stats about how well you're doing, what your average word count is, and how long it will take you to finish. There's even a graph!

I don't care about writing - I only care about getting my average up. Which is the idea, I suppose.

This is probably of no interest to anyone.

So, here's Something Of Interest To Everyone:

We saw some fireworks on Saturday, and got muddy. Then we had burritos.

Thus ends this week's edition of Something Of Interest To Everyone.

***

I shouldn't be wasting my words here. What if I run out at a crucial moment? I might have to start using numbers instead.

I'll end on a joke.

What's the difference between Mitt Romney and a kettle?

One boils water, and the other one... waters... boils...

Vote.

Ups and Downs

My neck hurts.

Here's some hilarious topical material:

Sandra: Ooooooooooo!

Man Dressed As Skeleton: Oooooooooo!

Mark Clattenburg: Oooooooooooo?

Lord October: Well. Hasn't this been fun?

I have no interest in anything anyone has to say about that.

***

As I get older, I'm becoming more and more less convinced.


Oh right. I forgot I was writing this. I forgot some time after "convinced", and remembered just before "Oh right". That's how my brain works.

The best thing about getting old is that it legitimises my permanent state of fatigue. In your twenties, it is a concern. In your thirties, it's par for the course. I'm looking forward to that. All of my inadequacies will become expected. It will be brave for me to even get out of bed every morning.

So, on the frequent occasions when I don't get out of bed, I'll have no reason to chastise myself.

I'm happy to salute the flag of reduced expectations, even if it's not as big as I'd hoped and my arms are too tired to salute above waist-height.

It's nearly lunchtime. I'll eat seven hard-boiled eggs and a tea bag. By the time I'm back, I'll be in tip-top shape, and ready to tell you all about how I lost my lustre, where I found it, and why I decided I was better off without it.

***

I'm back, and boy am I.

Sorry to keep you hanging on the whole "lustre" story. To sum up: I lost it whilst queueing for a bus festival, I found it taped to the inside of my right thigh, and I decided I was better off without it because it sounds all Gallic. I'd rather have luster.

***

People like writers who resent having to write.

That's why I'm so popular.

I'm annoyed at having to do this, even though I don't have to do it. Pretty much nobody will be reading this, and anyone who is will be actively wanting me to stop.

Writers need to hate writing. They should also hate reading, if possible.

A good writer hates first, and writes second. They should also hate what they've written.

I'm a pretty skilled writer. I'm now at the stage where I can hate what I'm writing as I'm writing it. It's almost simultaneous. I also hate my formatting, but there's more of a lag with that.

I have to be finely honed when it comes to hating my writing, because it can be difficult to make out specific hatred against a background of continual negativity. It's like static: it's always there, but you can learn to tune it out.

You wouldn't want to hate the wrong thing in the confusion.

I could represent my country at Precision Hatred. I can hate a Tory mosquito from six hundred yards, even if it's during an episode of Jeremy Kyle. You can't teach that.

I'm just going to scan what I've written so far, and check that I hate it all.

Yep.

I'm going to slam my foot in a door!

***

OK. I need to salvage something from this. It's not acceptable in its current condition.

What I'll do, right, is not post this now, but will leave it as a draft. Then, later on, when I'm in a better state of mind, I'll come back to it, finishing it off with a flourish of such beauty and pathos that we'll all become monks.

I'll see you then.

***

The rain is falling. It is always falling. By the time it rises again, it will no longer be rain. It will be something else.

It can only return to the sky as vapour - only the vaguest recollection of its previous self. What was once a proud and sturdy raindrop is now a shimmering residue. It is back, but it is not back. It is rain, but it is not rain. It is home. But it can never be home.

We are like the raindrop. We must forever fall. Our only ascent is through our memories: melancholy, intangible, familiar, inconsequential.

To remember is to turn our lives to vapour, to feel the moistness of the past on our cheek, to realise our oneness with the past and future, without ever quenching our thirst.

We are caught in an ever-fading cycle, looking to grasp the solidity of the self, but eternally destined to fall.

***

See? It's now over a day since that opening disaster.

I feel a lot better now. It's funny what ten hours of sleep will do for you. And some tea. And some sandwiches.

The rain is falling. That's where I got the idea. I got it from the sky.

I'm starting my novel tomorrow. I still haven't the foggiest (another sky idea) notion of what it will be about. Other people seem to have a clear idea. They have planned this for months.

I have no characters, no settings, no plot, no premise. But that's how I roll. Unprepared is the harvest that yields the worthiest wheat.

You see? I didn't plan that harvest thing. It just happened. And it was beautiful.

I'll just throw myself in tomorrow. Sink or swim. Fish or cut bait. Shit or get off the pot. (Of those, I'm instinctively draw towards sink, cut bait, and get off the pot, but my plans may change)

Whilst I have no idea what my novel will be about, I've decided what it won't be about. This is my via negativa. Rule out what it is not, and you will have ruled in what it is is.

The following things will not feature in my novel:

• vampires
• werewolves
• zombies
• aliens
• the FBI
• extra-marital affairs
• first-person narration
• lots of adverbs
• haunted hice
• a character who is basically me, or any other Charlie Kaufman bullshit
• the word "bullshit"
• Turks
• any deus ex machinis
• bullet-pointed lists
• self-referential lists
• a link to the various other self-referential lists I've done in the past
• Latin
• Americans
• cigars
• sex scenes
• a scene where two characters are fighting and fall into a giant vat of stew
• Star Wars

By following these guidelines, I have quite a narrow remit. That will make things easier.

By the way, I reserve the right to include any of the above if things get difficult.

I'm supposed to write 50,000 words in thirty days. It's very possible that I won't be able to do that without at least some Turkish content.

***

This has been extremely encouraging. I've already written 532 words in this blog post today. If I include that whiny stuff I did yesterday, it's over a thousand!

Word counts are easy. You can throw down words as easily as the man with a diamond allergy throws down a playing card.

I think I'll have NO TROUBLE WRITING A NOVEL WHATSOEVER.

I'm trying to double-bluff Fate. It never works. ;-)

:-(

8-O=

Hmm...

None of these emoticons are properly capturing my Fate-challenge. I need something a bit more expressive.

That's better.

Hot Right Now

It's hot. This kind of weather always reminds me of my childhood summers on Mercury.

There's a lot of pressure to make the most of the sunshine. I should be barbecuing a jet-ski or swimming through a pub garden. The trouble is that the heat makes anything beyond sitting in peas unendurable. It's a Scorch-22 (that's like a Catch-22, but related to heat).

So I've been making the least of the sunshine. I'm making the least of it right now, by writing this. I'm also making the least of my youth. And making a smaller molehill out of a molehill. I'll probably regret this when I'm older. But that's true of everything.

I can't afford to think too much (most of my brain energy will be diverted to the coolant systems), so here are some quick reviews of films I've seen recently.

Avengers Assemble

Excellent. Not the perfect film, maybe not even the perfect superhero film, but certainly the perfect Avengers film.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the original Swedish one)

Surprisingly dull. A sub-Lewis mystery. Nice scenery though.

A Man For All Seasons

Highly enjoyable. Paul Schofield kills it, and it's always good to see a young, weaselly John Hurt. Also, this speech:

Brief Encounter

A proper British film. Partly subversive, partly quaint, beautifully shot.

The Dirty Dozen

Too violent to be pleasant viewing. Not violent enough to be perversely entertaining.

***

The air is too thick to do this. Even spelling the word 'thick' proved to be a struggle (I initially went for "thich").

I'm going to go and lie down in a Scandinavian shadow.

But before I do, to make this worthwhile for both of us, I'll write three hilarious jokes about the weather. You'll laugh, I'll laugh, and I might get a job writing material for a pithy weatherman.

Joke 1:

Talk about hot! I just went outside to buy a bottle of water, and by the time I got home, my wife was dead!

Joke 2:

It's so hot out there, I've had to put suntan lotion on my suntan lotion!

Joke 3:

The government has banned jokes about the hosepipe ban. They feel the saliva needed to lubricate comedians' mouths is fluid that would be better used elsewhere. Like rinsing off David Cameron's disgusting butler.

A bit of satire at the end there.

Ugh. Sundays.

Can't live with 'em, can't die within 'em.

Lowering the Bar of Satire

British Waterways regulations forbid the consumption of broad beans on a narrowboat. It makes sense. It does make sense.

And the blog post has begun.

Cards on the table: Clintons has banned shelves.

It has continued.

Clintons doesn't seem to have an apostrophe. The logo doesn't, anyway. Their website is http://www.clintoncards.co.uk/

In the About Us section, the company refers to itself as 'Clintons', 'Clinton Cards' and 'Clinton's'. It's as if they DON'T WANT me to do a rubbish joke about them.

They're on Twitter, too: @ClintonCards.

I imagine the more streamlined "@Clintons" belongs to Chelsea and her clones.

Ah, yes. This looks like her.

@ClintonCards seems to be reasonably well-run, and is engaging with its customers to a sensible extent. But because I'm short on material, I'm going to be sarcastic about it, as though it's the stupidest thing on the internet.

I don't like to hide my intentions. I put it all up front, like a family whose car has a poisoned back seat.

I didn't know mums had their own version of World of Warcraft. Ahahaha! That's a joke! About hashtags and a video game! And I was sarcastic. I'm KING OF THE INTERNET!

Bollocks. This has been proven to be false.

Your mum is a sexist gold-digger.

Really? That was the best bit of advice your mum has given you? What if you play for Real Madrid? What if you're a ghost? Your mum hasn't thought this through.

And your name is Erica WHITEMAN.

If you don't wear white, people will get confused. You don't seem to be a man either, which adds to the confusion.

Here's a bit of advice: NEVER LISTEN TO MRS WHITEMAN AFTER LABOR DAY (1950).

And yet they often neglect advice on how to use apostrophes...

Mummy's should be ashamed of themselves. Those cuddles would have to be pretty special to make up for Hanna's ignorance.

I might start my own hashtag: #mummysWOW. People could share advice given to them by mummies. For example:

When emerging from a sarcophagus, groan and extend both arms.

Don't wrap your bandages too tight, or you'll increase the risk of deep vein thrombosis

Keep your terror current by referring to yourself as a "Proto-Zombie"

Destroy Abbott and Costello

That was fun. Fun for everybody.

Those screengrabs are a bit blurry. It lessens the incisiveness of my attack. It's about time that these people making reasonable comments about parental advice were taken down a peg or... maybe 0.8 pegs.

I'll be back later to analyse the Twitter account of... let's say... Superdrug.

Caption Competition

"CAPTION COMPETITION"

Every time there's a caption competition, no matter what the picture is, I always send the same suggestion for a caption: "CAPTION COMPETITION".

This has a couple of benefits:
1) It is appropriate.
2) If I win (or when I win), they'll have to print it. And people will assume that it's a whole new competition. They'll send in suggestions to caption the picture, even though my caption has already been chosen. In fact, I'll enter again. My suggestion will be "CAPTION COMPETITION", and the whole cycle will start anew. It will be like a piece of conceptual art. The New Yorker will probably give me a staff job.

Another good technique for caption competitions is to use dialogue spoken by characters not featured in the picture itself. For example:

"I think I might be getting a sore throat." - Old Woman (not pictured)

It doesn't relate directly to the picture, but who's to say there wasn't an old woman with a sore throat in that room somewhere? I'm certainly not to say that.

People will search for some double-meaning, but there isn't one. They might think it's some commentary on how politicians never listen to the pleas of pensioners. But it isn't that. It's just something that woman said.

A well-known "alternative" caption technique is to just state exactly what's happening in the scene. For example:

"Two people in costumes hold bubble-making items and capture the attention of two children."

I think this is a bit predictable. Something done by lesser captioners (like Nick Ward). People espousing this method tend to think they're being satirical, but they're not. I like to turn that whole thing on its head.

"Two people in costumes DON'T hold bubble-making items and DON'T capture the attention of two children."

You see? Much better. It raises doubts. That's what all great artists should do. 

Some people try to say that captioning "funny" photos isn't art. But they're wrong. It is art. It is exactly art.

Art is about labelling the world in misleading ways. I'm the captioners' Picasso. I've been called that before, by Caption, the country's leading captioning magazine. (Not this country, but still...)

Lately, I've been experimenting with autobiographical captions. These help to flesh out not just the picture in question, but the captioner's frame of mind.

"Make sure this guy can't move! Much like a friend of mine who writes captions. He can't move because he's STIFLED. Stifled by life. Stifled by the rigours of the captioning profession. Trapped in a prison of his own snappy summarising. He can step outside and objectively view everything except himself. He tries! He tries! But no man can caption himself. The only caption awaiting my friend is the one on his tombstone - carved by a bitter contemporary (like Nick Ward) - which simultaneously, bitingly, sums up and dismisses his life. The poor bastard. He'll only be happy when he's dead."

It might need a bit of fine-tuning, but I think that could grace any humorous up-market publication. People are bored of traditional captions. They want something deeper.

The world of captioning never stands still. Which is why we find it difficult to describe it. You can't caption a moving image.

That's just subtitling. 

And subtitling is not art.

Despite what Nick Ward's idiot subtitling brother Jonathan says.

"Blue"

--- EDIT 15:10 PM

I've just tried my first technique. Let's see if it works.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/14070330

Strike Three

In solidarity with those taking strike action today, I didn't go to work. Technically, I have every Wednesday off, but this time I was holding a placard.

Not a literal placard, but a placard in my heart. It has severely reduced my blood flow. For the people.

The heart may not seem like the ideal place to express industrial disquiet, but keep in mind that it has better circulation than most newspapers.

Circulation! A pun! And a satire of the dying print medium! I don't know why I don't have a job writing for Private Eye. It might be because I'm Ian Hislop's illegitimate son, and he doesn't like me bothering him at work.

I don't work in the public sector, but still felt guilty this morning, sitting in Starbucks, drinking coffee. Starbucks seems to be the modern emblem of unfettered capitalism: stores everywhere, friendly production-line individuality, everything a candidate for more merchandising and more sugar.

But I don't really know anything about their business practises. My politics leads me to have a non-specific suspicion of big corporations, even though I find a lot of them very useful. Can I justify shopping in Tesco, with their aggressive expansion? Do I have to shop in an independent retailer instead, even if it's more expensive and doesn't sell anything I like?

I don't know. The important thing is to just make sure I feel guilty all the time. Cover the bases. Assume that you're constantly sinning, and just hope that your self-awareness makes you better than everyone else. The nobility of the neurotic is a fantastic flag to wave, even if you're worried about whether the flag pole is Fairtrade, and it's planted directly into your left ventricle.

***

Mood

Cosy. Is cosy a mood? Cosy might be a state of mind, but that doesn't account for slippers.

I'm not wearing slippers, but am cosy nonetheless. Socks'll do me fine. Socks are nature's slippers, after all.

Listening to

I'm making my weekly playlist, based on a specific theme. We do this every week. It's what I live for.

You can get a sneak preview of mine here. The theme is 'abstract concepts'. I was struggling a bit, but luckily was able to steal some ideas from my friend Sarah and googled "list of abstract nouns".

That may not be in the spirit of the playlist, but never mind.

One of the songs on my list if from an album called The Miners' Hymns by Jóhann Jóhannsson. I bought it a while ago (and may have mentioned it here before). It's the soundtrack to a film about a Northern mining town, and is all sombre atmospheric brass. Listening to this again shows my support for the strikers. Just playing to this song is better than helping out in a physical, literal way.

(I don't know why I'm talking so much about this strike, when it doesn't have much to do with me. It's useful to have a running theme going through a blog post, though. Otherwise it would just seem like INCOHERENT RAMBLING.)

Reading

I've read nothing since my last post. Not a book, not a comic, not a pamphlet, not a full-sized pamph: nothing.

I read some best-before dates on products in the supermarket. They were pretty good. The endings were quite unexpected.

Watching

Disney's The Princess and The Frog

We saw this last night, and it was very enjoyable. It was refreshingly Disney-like in tone (which is slightly different to Pixar, I think). It's also done in traditional animation.

The story was perhaps a little thin, but there were lots of great bits, spectacular set pieces (which looked great on Blu-Ray), an original dynamic, and a couple of things that made me laugh for far too long.

Playing

Whilst I haven't been playing anything, I was reminded of a 'playing'-related thing yesterday. So I'll write about it here.

I've got an old FIFA game on the Wii, which I still play. It's pretty good, and is a good way to keep my hands and eyes busy. I need to do several things at once, or I get restless. So it's either FIFA or depithifying clementines, which I definitely don't do all the time.

Anyway, the game is only from last year I think, but the players and squads are out of date. I've changed these manually, but there are still problems.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is a young footballer who used to play for Southampton (my team), but was sold to Arsenal. He had a good game against Man City yesterday. My version of FIFA still had him playing for Southampton, so I manually changed him to be an Arsenal player. So far, so good.

But because he played for us (at the time a League One team), the makers of the game didn't bother making him very good. They probably assumed any Saints player must be awful. Or maybe they just rank all lower-league players the same.

What this means is that Chamberlain, now in the Arsenal team, is awful. He's slow, has no shooting ability, is unable to perform skills, and is driving a rubbish car (this isn't mentioned in the game, but I've made this assumption).

He doesn't fit in with the world class players at Arsenal. Well, maybe not world class. Hemisphere class, perhaps.

I could just not play him, but it's the principle of the thing. He's an ex-Saint after all. So I purposely include him in the side and try to make sure he plays well. I put him in the centre-forward position so he has more chances; I pass to him, even if the player in possession is in a much better situation; I try really hard when he has the ball.

I want to convince the game that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain deserves his place in the side.

The question is this:

WHY AM I DOING THIS?

The game is not capable of learning from its understandable errors. No-one else knows what I'm doing. I'm just making the game more difficult for myself, for NO REWARD WHATSOEVER.

If a tree falls in the woods with no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Maybe.

But if a man - a grown man, mind you - tries to prove to an inanimate piece of software that a player is better than his in-game ranking would suggest, and there's no-one there to see it, does he make a sound?

Yes. The sound is a roar of pathetic futility.

Then again, it has provided some blog content. So I'm all smiles.

Eating

I just had a duck wrap. It was tasty, but I feel guilty. I like ducks. I don't like ducks to be killed, no matter how delicious they are. Poor duck. Poor, poor duck.

I don't feel guilty about the hoisin. Unless they make it from squirrels or something.

Drinking

Nothing. I'm thirsty.

***

Today's blog post has come to a close. All it needs is a callback to something I said earlier.

I'd better go now, because my dad (Ian Hislop) needs me to help him out of his own arse.

Ahahaha.

I love being me all day long with no break.

Go in peace.

Professional

Consider this:

A colon. Did you like it?

Two dots, one on top of the other. An underrated bit of punctuation. It's not flashy, but it is dependable. And so much more solid that flibbertigibbet the semi-colon. No-one know how to use her, and only feel compelled to do so out of politeness.

How about some amusing things? Don't worry, it will come from people more dependable than me!

***

Putting Simpsons clips on here is probably redundant, as everyone has seen them all. I might as well passionately advocate the banana.

But I saw this again recently, and was struck by the strangeness of it. I believe it's the work of George Meyer, who I've written about before. Anyway, here it is:



***

Another very funny video that people have probably seen is this clever and expertly executed Mr Show sketch. Still, I'll put it here anyway.



***

There. I've posted two good things. That really takes the pressure off me.

I could do anything now.

I'M INVINCIBLE!

So, the other day I was...

No. Not that day. The other day.

Yes. No. Yes, you're right. The day you're talking about technically is the other day. But I'm talking about the other other day.

Yes. No. No, that's not it.

No, that was the other night.

If I'd meant the other night, I would have said...

No. I consider 9pm to be night. No, it's not evening.

I don't care how light it was outside! 9pm is night! That's the rule!

Look, we're getting distracted.

Will you let me finish?


...

OK, good.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. Let's call him "Fictional". Anyway, he was all like "........................."

(He couldn't say anything because he was a figment of my imagination)

Then there was an explosion.

Good story, huh?

I bet you're glad you held back the interruptions.

***

I'm thirsty.

There's something about typing that makes me dehydrated. I wonder if water is needed to lubricate the finger joints. There are no watery deposits on the keys, but that might be because they're made of sponge for all I know.

Maybe specifically blog-related thoughts require more body-juice than other kinds. It might be needed as a coolant for all the neuron atom smashers and lobe vibration. (But then again, I'm no neuronomer).

Or it could be that I'm thirsty all the time, and I only notice it when I'm writing because I'm so bored.

That seems plausible.

***

I think posting the videos has made me complacent. I'm starting to have serious doubts about my competence.

I'll have to come up with three really funny jokes to prove my worth. Like Hercules did.

And these will be blog exclusives! They won't go on Twitter.

I'm writing all this without even having considered what the jokes might be, so I could be making a rod for my own back, attaching the rod to a huge metal weight, and throwing the whole thing into a shark-infested sea of acid.

But I like to challenge myself, as we've established. The moment I stop pushing myself will be the moment I become... less... uh. You know... less good.

(I still haven't thought of anything yet - three might have been too ambitious. Maybe I should look at the news and come up with some topical gags. It might get me a job working for Have I Got News For You. My first move will be to add a question mark to the show title. I've always thought it should be Have I Got News F?or You.)


Really Funny Joke Number 1:

Malta has voted yes in a referendum on whether to legalise divorce. A spokesman for the "Yes" movement has said: "My wife is going to kill me".


Really Funny Joke Number 2:

The perfume Chanel No 5 is celebrating its ninetieth birthday. As is Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (who sadly died in 1991). Both helped shape the course of the twentieth century, and both now smell remarkably similar.

Really Funny Joke Number 3:

Mohamed Bin Hammam of Qatar has pulled out of the race to head FIFA, after being accused of accepting bribes.

Mr Bin Hammam has made a statement denying the allegations from inside a diamond-encrusted 24-carat football-mobile, emblazoned with the slogan "DO THE RIGHT THING".

***

I can now see why I'm not a professional comedy writer.

Sorry, I wrote that wrong.

I CAN'T now see why I'm not a professional comedy writer.

If you work for any panel shows, talk shows, newspapers, big-name comedians or dullards in need of banter, please contact me at the below address:

Paul "DiamondBadger" Fung
Tear Trough 7
Failureville
Disappointment City
Cumbria

To be fair to me, I am sort-of watching the League One play-off final. So my attention has been split.

I'm not Superman.

I'm not Superman.

Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?

An Idiot Flaps Odyssey - Part 6

Yes, this is still happening.

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

***

Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat


Just a short one this time.

I haven't got much to say about this one, except that it has pretty much freaked me up. I shouldn't have been reading this late on a Sunday night. It has made me not particularly hinged.

This is another book I read years ago for my Novella course, though I hadn't remembered much about it. I can't really describe it without giving it away, but it's very compelling and odd and funny. I don't know much about Spark, but this makes me want to find out more.

I will say that the protagonist is a bit crazy, which makes the whole reading experience a bit unsettling. Often, when I'm reading a book, I begin to think in the style of the narrator.

Especially if it's a book I've written.

But when the main voice of a story is unpredictable, volatile and illogical, it starts to make me question my own sanity.

Especially if it's a book I've written.

But I didn't write this one. Muriel Spark did. And she's not me.

I don't think.

She sadly died in 2006, which almost guarantees that I'm not her, as I'm alive (to the best of my knowledge) and it's 2010.

Also, we don't look similar.

Not really.

Also, her book is very good. And my book is not only not good, it also doesn't exist. Which is even worse.

A book that exists is almost always better than one that does exist.

Unless the book that exists is by Dan Brown.

AHAHAHA. Satire of Brown! I'm clever enough to recognise a bad writer! And post about it on the Internet! Even though I've never read any of his writing! I'M HIGH BROW.

I might try to find some Sparkesque glasses. My look has been missing something (as has my vision, which is almost the same thing).

Yes, so why not read The Driver's Seat? You might well enjoy it. Probably more so than my non-existent book.

Although my book does contain more cyborgs and a long monologue about a rabbit hutch. At least, it will.

Unless Muriel objects, which she could easily do, as she's not me and I'm not her, and she is dead, and I'm not.

At least, not at the time of writing.

By the time you read this, something awful might have happened. (Even if it's just you having had your time wasted by this AWESOME BOOK REVIEW.)

A Racist Whoopee Cushion Filled with Pus

I'm afraid my posts might be a bit sparse this month, due to various hijinks and hijinks-related shenanigans.

My head has been filled with almost nothing but politics for the past week or so, to the extent that the names and faces of politicians started to blur into meaningless blobs, and has meant David Dimbleby becoming the face of God, narrating my breakfasts and throwing over to Jeremy Paxman interviewing my subconscious.

I'm sure everyone knows what I think about the whole thing, so I won't go on about it.

But there hasn't been much room for anything else inside my brain, so I'm not sure what I have to talk about. Important things siphon off nuance. Instead of my hilarious sideways look at modern life (which my blog has been described as, by me, just now), I've spent all my mental energies thinking of ways to describe David Cameron's face.

And I don't want this blog to become dominated by the Idiot Flaps Odyssey, the entries for which I feel are a bit rushed, and should maybe be put somewhere else (such as a locked cupboard in a goldmine).

There's been too much gloom and confusion lately, so I might try to write something to leaven the mood.

Birdsong is a pleasant sound.

Soup is hearty and nutritious.

Spurious lists are a good way to fill a blog post.

That'll do.

***

Well, I've run out of things to praise, so why don't I go back on my word and tackle some politics. I'll write an amazing piece of satire! Here is a dialogue between Nick Clegg and a goblin.

Clegg: Hey.

Goblin: Y'awright?

Clegg: You know. Not bad. Can't complain!

Goblin: I hear ya.

Clegg: ...

Goblin: You watching the football tonight? Should be good. Hodgson, eh?

Clegg: Uh, don't take this the wrong way, but...

Goblin: But what?

Clegg: Do I know you?

Goblin: Well, no. I mean - we haven't met before.

Clegg: Because you look familiar.

Goblin: Could be my brother. He used to work for your dad.

Clegg: Right.

Goblin: What are you getting up to nowadays? Still in politics.

Clegg: Yes.

Goblin: Cool, cool. Anyway, I'd better be getting on.

Leprechaun: ARE YOU COMIN' OR WHAT?!

Goblin: Yeah, yeah! Keep your hat on!

The Goblin gets in the Leprechaun's car, and they drive away.

Clegg: Wait! Wait! [beginning to sob] I think my wife might be an astronaut!

***

Yep, that's the pay-off.

BYYEEE!!

Party Time

I spent last night at a work party. There was a disco, but I don't dance. So I spent the evening dressed in a suit, watching the dancers, fingering the neck of my bottle of beer like a jaded travelling businessman at a disappointing strip-club.

***

I've decided to condense some of my entries into a single paragraph, so I don't get bored of them.

***

I was accused of murder, my alibi fell through, but luckily I avoided conviction by using hypnosis and a rope ladder. I'm currently in Paraguay, off my face on barbiturates.

***

Good writing is good editing. (By which I mean good writing, rather than being the actual positive act of writing itself - writing words, I mean - is reliant not so much on the actual generating of output - again: words - but rather in the examination of any writing produced, and the identification of any words, phrases, ideas etc that could be excised to make the writing (words) more snappy. What you don't want is waffle. Not actual waffles, but extraneous writing, that might obfuscate your meaning by overloading the point you're trying to make with lots of extra information, unnecessary exposition, or cumbersome sentences, which may prove difficult to read, and could, in fact, mean that people end up not reading what you write through sheer annoyance at your longwindedness. So editing is really the key - perhaps the most important element, of producing effective writing.

I hope I've made myself clear (comprehensible and easy to understand).

***

I missed the big leadership debate yesterday because of the aforementioned party.

I think I would have found it difficult to sit through anyway. I find live television embarrassing at the best of times, but three desperate men trying to act normal would make me cringe myself into a red ball of wince.

In an ideal world, there would be a better way to judge prospective candidates. The quality of someone's performance in a snappy, public-speaking contest isn't necessarily the best indicator of their ability to govern. But the truest measure would probably be a trawl through the minutiae of their past records and a mountain of paperwork.

And that may not appeal to the usual ITV audience.

I might watch the next one though. Then I can provide a breakdown of their every facial tick.

Really, the make-up people should have removed all ticks (and other parasites) from the faces of the candidates before broadcast. Unfortunately, the pesticide they use would have obliterated David Cameron.

Ha! Because he's an insect! Satire! SATIRE!

I could be on Radio 4, satirising everyone, making cutting remarks about their appearance, and parroting commonly held beliefs about the candidates!

Satire is the noblest art in the world. Cynicism, personal attacks and awful puns wrapped in a smug bundle of twat. That's me all over.

Part of me wonders if the satirists, the liberal journalists, and the sensitive comedians are secretly happy with the prospect of a Conservative government. They must me quite excited about being able to unleash all their bile at the party in charge. They can be rebels again; underdogs, the pygmies blowing darts at the dominant elephant (to steal a Bill Hickseanism).

Because even though everyone hated Labour, there must have been something in the back of their mind tempering the full force of their satirical weaponry, knowing that the Tories were loving every minute of it.

But once Cameron gets in, the gloves are off. We can return to the golden days of Ben Elton (and oh how we miss those), and all us left-leaning creative types can be defined by pure venomous opposition to the ruling party.

It's almost worth a lot of poor people getting poorer, and minority groups being discriminated against, just so Hugh Dennis and Rory Bremner can feel totally righteous in their scathing attacks on George Osborne's stupid face.