The George Golding Professor of Contemporary Thought

Posted on by
Reply

Professor Harding pondered the daily problem of finding the end of the toilet roll. Every revolution of the soft pink coloured cylinder revealed nothing to the touch of his arthritic fingers. Quick to anger, he threw it at the wall; it bounced around the room and finally slam dunked its way between his wrinkled thighs and plopped in to the bog’s pool. ‘Not again!’ He removed the sodden and pooey mass using his specially crafted Pooey Mass Remover and dropped it out of the window on to an unfortunate ladybird who happened to be passing by. ‘Not again!’ thought the insect (one presumes). Considering these events he suddenly felt astounded at the remarkable fortuity of having made the grade of Professor. As he took a further unit of Andrex from the packet he felt almost ashamed at the sheer audacity of believing he deserves to spend almost twice as much money in order to use the softest, thickest, and most ornately decorated (repeating flower pattern) bog roll (he’d made a formal complaint). The supply happened to be resting on a pile of the 189 academic papers that he has written over his 40 year career. I think you’ll agree, the simile is straightforward.

Returning to his desk he bathed in the enveloping glow of post defecation (“not to be confused with Deification” – Wikipedia) satisfaction. This was typically the perfect mood in which to begin a new work. The mood yielded one word (‘Recent’) before he returned to staring out of the window. He could see the man who cleans his toilet and a mix of guilt and contempt refocused his mind to the keyboard. He forced out a second word (‘advances’). With his mouth open and all facial muscles completely relaxed he tapped his right index finger 15 times in sync with the grandfather clock to his rear (yes, his finger was over the delete key).

Four hours and no change later his eyes took nine seconds to shut and he fell rearwards in his chair landing gently on his back. ‘Well, now I’m down here’ he thought, without even opening his eyes.

Four hours and no change later he rolled off the chair and moved to a standing position using as little energy as possible. He stared at the grandfather clock for a full ten minutes until the hour hand (‘finally!’) struck five. He went home and had a lovely fish pie that his wife had made. ‘Oh you work so hard dear, you know I thought when they made you professor emeritus you would be home earlier’. ‘I think I made a breakthrough today, and anyway I still have so much teaching to do’. ‘Oh by the way there was a call from the university cleaning services saying they need to talk to you about the proper use of your window’. ‘Oh yes, the handle has been a little stiff lately, any news from the children’. ‘Oh yes, Mary is pregnant again’. ‘Oh my, oh my’.

Four months and no change later his computer screen shows an open word doc with the badly formatted title ‘The Lindon Riots 2011: a verY NINeteenth Century Phenomenon’.

No offence intended,

Stefan Graves rambles incoherently

Posted on by
Reply

Stefan looked at a picture of Ed Milliband and Ed Balls queing to buy a Cornish Pasty and forced his mind to yield to his instruction that it was an image of two men at ease in their natural environment. Despite being of a socio-economic group that traditionally consumed healthy quantities of said snack (fifth to 75th percentile), Stefan didn’t really like them. In principle though he did like them. He remembers very well the last one he had. He felt obliged to buy it from an empty bakery on holiday, which he’d spent too much time in to leave without buying something. The anger at that wasteful purchase mingled with a general sense of having had an unfortunate life and built to a shaking red faced rage.

The sight of two competent and fortunate men was then all that was required to send him on his way to a breakdown. He had decided to obey the governments suggestion to buy fuel despite realising the inevitable consequences because he wanted to have the wasted time and inconvenience as a weapon against the winner of England’s 2011 best person competition. Is was the ultimate act of self defeating passive aggression since the resulting arsenal could only be used within the confines of his own head. This is because Stefan can not talk in sentences. He prefers to utter opposites in a sort of free association heavily relying on the word posh and garbled references to his own upbringing.

That’s when I enter the Hungry Horse pub opposite the Travelodge I’m staying in as part of my national tour marketing software for solar panel manufacturers. The barman sees his chance and (genuinely) runs away. Stefan now has me in his eyes and we both know that the only way I could turn and leave would be to openly admit that I’m terryfied by what I am about to recieve, and also run.

I sit down next to him and am surprised by the instantaneous start of his barage to the point of almost (genuinely) falling off my stool. Despite aggreeing with the man it takes a huge effort on my part to appear to agree. I leave the pub full of burger and impresseed by the man in two ways. Firstly, by the scope of his discourse, which casually takes in the eastward shift of global power, a general discussion of inequality throughout human history, and science’s usurping of large swathes of meta-physics. Secondly, I’m impressed by his ability to accurately represent the bizzare and insane corners of his brain instead of taking the usual approach of distorting them into dishonest rational arguments.

D’y’ know what I mean tho’?

An unfortunate question

Posted on by
Reply

Now is the time that I must face the gruesome possibility that my undergarments are beyond repair and should be replaced.

Download a high-res version of this image here.

So many memories. You shielded me from the world, or should I say you shielded the world from me. You enabled me to wear trousers for longer and your snazzy two tone front helped me to feel fashionable and sexy. You outlived the overpriced Calvin Klines and never lost your grounding. you loved me well for sure but you let your crotch go. One starts to ask what function you serve without that area of cloth.

The truth is I don’t know how much longer I can go on knowing you don’t have the solidity you used to. I fear we’ve grown apart. The babe you held and grew has grown old and wizened now. The naive boy you loved has morphed into a horrid beast. Where is my loyalty you ask. Have I not shown just that these 14 years. Fourteen years!

All this talk is worthless when the fact is I’ve already been to George by ASDA (A Walmart Company) and bought a three pack of A-flys. I know I’ve done you wrong but I have no choice. I am going to incinerate you.

Goodbye,

On being a slightly fat man

Posted on by
Reply

Being a poem that is in no way autobiographical.

When the necessity to bathe rears its smelly head.
When the pants demand their weekly shed.
When all hope is dread,
The slightly fat man must wash and watch his disappointments unfold.

The water whets his willy’s desires,
And he is compelled to exercise his limbs asymmetrically.
His ugly scene as regularly seen as obscene,
As all his dreams gurgle down the shower’s throat.

The towel cuddles his brimming skin,
But can’t keep up his manifold chin.
Redemption lies beyond the checkout from Gateshead Travelodge.

Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

Cheers,

The economy

Posted on by
Reply

What? I’m supposed to just listen the whole time? No. No. And no. I will have my revenge. On Stephanomics et al.

Right. You should now have realised that I’m weighing in on the economy (satirically). I would first like to combine the things of being ‘in the zone’ in a sporting sense and being a member of the ‘Euro-zone’ by observing the shared sound. Further consider the Greek stereotypes that any wretch has in the ink cartridge of even his cheapest pen. Finally, watch as that pen plops the whole menagerie on to a computer screen and we must be left with a sensation of emptiness, which would be compared by a cruder man than myself to the feeling of having ‘shat out a battleship’. ‘HMS Massive Floater’.

Pause for laugh.

If a coin be reduced to the word it is then the fungibility becomes a matter of some concern no? If I must work for cash then how can I employ the techniques of contraction, allusion, and (for the love of Christ) brevity. Oh dear, I fear this is an opaque little piece that can not reach the mainstream.

Allow me the comparison of the comedian Lee Evans with Professor John Money. Both detail gender roles but, crucially, where Evans deals in spurious tendentious statements such as women like hotter baths than men, money proffers the hyper-un-amusing ‘multi-variate sequential determinism’. However, as I always say ‘John Money ain’t funny cos it’s true’. I think we can agree that this at least partly explains their divergent popularity.

Nah, but seriously, women are a pain in the arse especially given the modern fashion for use of strap on phalli in heterosexual relationships.

Pause for clap.

WTF indeed.

Valentines satire

Posted on by
Reply

Hi Sarah,

Our union is the result of a carefully orchestrated procedure to locate a male-female pair of equal ‘attractiveness’. I find your personality delightful, which is why I was willing to sacrifice some ground on the looks front.

Likewise, I’m only too aware of my own cold manner, which traditionally is frowned upon in these matters. I hope my excellent computer programming skills and above average career prospects (I earn £35,055.00 – well above the national average) will go some way to counter these failings.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Shirley.

PS I find the prospect of genital contact with you to be arousing in the extreme (sexually).

Stefan at a dinner party

Posted on by
Reply

A short internal monologue from Stefan, who is at a dinner party.

Stefan Right. Here it comes… Here it comes… Ok, get ready people …

One person stops speaking, beat, another person cuts in just before Stefan.

Stefan Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. There’s still time to make it… Is there still time to make it? Oh who am I kidding? The joke is lost. Lost somewhere in the mud of this conversation. I finally scrambled together an ok joke after 20 minutes without saying anything other than ‘I find most contemporary cinema banal’. Why did I say that? Why did that utterance happen? What purpose did it serve? It is the most stunning example, that I have seen at a contemporary dinner party, of the banal itself. What could I even have meant by that? I lump together the whole of ‘contemporary cinema’ now. What is ‘contemporary cinema’? Why even use the word cinema. Only use the word cinema to refer to anything other than a specific cinema if you are going to say something that is not utterly moronic. That is my lesson for you Stefan from this dinner party. The word cinema in a sentence when not referring to a specific cinema is to say ‘I consider myself knowledgeable about the history of cinema’. Cinema! What I really mean is DVDs. scornfully Cinema!

I’d decided that this dinner party was going to be a washout before I arrived. Essentially the same approach I take to watching films. What exactly did I want from this dinner party? How have I become someone at a dinner party? I have absolutely no control over the person I present myself to be, which more and more, is the only sensible definition of what I actually am. I am this dullard know it all who knows nothing to the extent that he uses words to imply he knows something about things which he knows nothing. I know nothing and I don’t know that I know nothing. Great! In addition to being a bore, I’m also a fool.

I really don’t know why I should have to say anything. I mean, I’ve got nothing against any of the other guests. I have absolutely no feelings whatsoever towards the other guests so why would I have anything to say to them. I happen to be in the same room that is all.

Oh no. Oh good god. Oh Jesus Christ. I need to fart. Oh great. Yeah thanks body, it’s because of you that I have to say anything and now you’re making sure that my two contributions to this social event will be that awful sentence and, now, an embarrassing sound. That is how these people will remember me and they’ll be right. What does a fart say about someone? It says they lack the necessary moral fibre to castrate their arse into silence. They lack the intellectual capacity to understand the effect that the sound will have on their status among their company. They are a worthless little man with no hope and no prospects and they must expect the ridicule that they will justly receive.

Beat.

There is a fart noise.

The End

My eye

Posted on by
Reply

I’m going to talk about my eye. For just over three years the pictures it has been showing me have degraded into a dull ache now. A soft, mild brown blur. Even things like a crying child seem to bore me. I’ve been to the doctor. He says that it is a common problem and that he can prescribe some sort of palliative drug that will intensify colours.

After a week of trying the new drug I can see in more detail but the overwhelming feeling is still one of mild displeasure. Finally the doctor suggests an investigative operation in combination with weekly video sessions in which I can be shown extreme pornography that has been developed by NHS researchers. Initially, the images are only vaguely distressing. After three weeks of this he decides that it is time to strip away the outer layers of my face, remove the eye ball and insert a new one that has been donated by a schizophrenic with the opposite problem.

The whole thing has been a complete palava. I’m fed up with it and say
– I’ll keep the old eye on the left. I’ll put the other down to experience.
– Fair enough, a lot of people find that to be a better solution, he says.

Chill out m8,

The remarkable achievements attained in the field of neuroscience

Posted on by
Reply

The current state of the art is described and critiqued. Avenues for further work are set forth and discussed. A prediction is made.

Using only one single five million dollar functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, Professor Veronica Smith produces a picture of my brain. Over coffee she talks me through the picture and explains her latest results, which suggests that thinking is not done in the brain, as commonly thought, but rather is done by the kidneys. In turn she believes that the main function of the brain is to ‘clean the blood’ and ‘frazzle the bejazzle out of snazzle-pops’. I’m visiting the Department of Cognitive Science at University College Hospital along with a handful of other journalists drawn by the seemingly rash claims of the group.


Early primitive attempt to render character visible, alongside a more accurate modern version (of gubbins).

Professor Smith has managed to impose a complete use of the passive voice upon all her employees in order to develop what she calls a ‘pure science’. By speaking entirely in this rudimentary language composed of subject predicate object triangle sentences she claims to have removed any possibility of error or evil. We are drinking some liquid brain fuel when the Professor presents me with a peculiar triangle sentence suggesting that our bodies might be too strange. Instead she suggests she may be able to ‘blend’ us into a sphere, or at the very least some sort of cuboid.

I’m given permission to speak to a number of other members of the group, each of whom reveal startling facts about the nature of research taking place in the building. There seems to be a complex ecosystem of men and women forming a large super-hierarchy. Money is dripping in to the mouth of Professor Smith and is trickling down over a champagne glass tower of employment. At ground level a base layer of humanoid foundations holds the entire structure. Using the triangle forms to bind the humanoids, Smith has crafted a congealed mass of brain organs supported by super brains and sub brains, with snacks fetched by the body brains.

“It is now possible to measure which, if any, regions of the brain are alive during a quiz while showing the subject photographs of a kitten in peril” – Dr Smurthwaite.

As each flesh unit morphs to spheroid the pyramid smothers into shape. The sides become slides to ejections and incepts leaving flaming gasses oozing from the cracks. It is a sight to behold and goes some way to explaining the remarkable achievements that have been made here. The future of Neuroscience is in safe hands!

Yours in truth,

Presentation to GreenLight

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a little light relief before we get into the blog proper:

One of the great things about being a programmer for one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the south east is you get to do a lot of travelling. This week, I was going to Newcastle to give a talk on account management systems to GreenLight; a fellow green power company.

I arrived at the Newcastle travelodge around 6pm. I’d had a tough train journey and fancied a litre or two of strong lager, or as I say ‘I’ll have a lagerita, neither shaken nor stirred’ before explaining exactly what I mean by that. I walk in to town and go the local Wetherspoons (I know!). It was actually, a lovely little place. An old university lecture theatre with a number of interesting pictures on the wall.

By closing time I’m drunk as a carefree business guru and head back to my temp pad. I’m singing like a bloomin’ mad man mate! I stumble through the streets filled with those few of years and fewer of clothing (two years blogging for Two Hour Blogger equips one to turn a pretty sweet phrase, often inside of half an hour), but exercise enough restraint not to shout and merely fall over six times. But wait! I’ve noticed something. Something beautiful! A small entrance in the wall leads to a multicoloured rainbow escalator (not in a gay way (not in a homophobic way (regret nested parentheses))). I climb on and ascend into the antechamber of a shopping centre. Lo, I’m greeted at the top by a gigantic Christmas tree. It is a great hollow cone of tinsel that you can walk under and look inside.

I go underneath it. I look into the eye of the Christmas tree… and I pass out.

I woke up at 9am on the floor of the shopping centre. The Christmas tree hanging above me is like a big sick inducing finger down my throat now (again, I think yule agree my extensive blogging experience shows). Shit! 9am! Shit! I have to be at the presentation. I get there and I decide to come clean and tell them the above ;-) I can tell by their feigned embarrassment that they are deeply impressed. It is clear these guys need to be taught a thing or two about partying! And taught/party hard!

Afterwards, I’m informed by email that they will not be offering us the contract. In hindsight it was a mistake to tell them I was drunk presenting. I craft a perfectly worded email to me’ boss painting them as a backward company who don’t understand how powerful the internet is. I mean, that is basics! I add a little joke about me giving them a business 101. I’m confident I won’t be fired and at most will receive a harsh telling off. Nothing that my rearrangement of the secret Santa and purchase of a hilarious card for my boss, which makes a cheeky accusation of infidelity at his wife (hinging around a Christmas based demi-pun), can’t solve.

Book on sale now!

Posted on by
Reply

“Thanks to the vulgar extravagances of our times it is now possible for anybody to publish a zero quality book without the hassle of having to make any effort into making it good.”

– Raph Shirley, in previous blog post.

All for the great price of just 14.99!

Remember – buy 25 and get a 28% discount! That’s 25 copies for just £147.25! Buy 100 and get 29% off!!!

Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

P.S.

Web log entry 100

Posted on by
Reply

Welcome to web log post number one hundred! Can you believe it?!

1) First off, a little scene from my week

2) The main body of text

The bulk of this one is a script about Socrates and Rachel of Friends fame. It is partly a sideswipe at the Socratic method and partly a send up of compilation shows.

Rachel
Do you remember that time when Raph first started blogging?

Socrates
Yeah, he came in and went ‘Hi’. and then…

Wavy lines then fade to screen shots of the first blog. The style is not yet fully formed.

Socrates
But what about the time he did that cartoon do you remember?

Rachel
Yeah, I do.

A snazzy lick on a bass guitar as we fade to a picture of Raph’s first cartoon; a satire on the humorist Ian Hislop.

Rachel
… but so much has changed since then. His web log has come on in leaps and bounds.

Socrates
Yeah, but I still don’t get it and it’s still shit.

Rachel
YEAH!

They both laugh to an emotional music outro.

3) The exciting finale

The most exciting thing has got to be that I’m now in a position to announce that there will be a book released of the blog! Thanks to the vulgar extravagances of our times it is now possible for anybody to publish a zero quality book without the hassle of having to make any effort into making it good. It will be out in time for your Christmas stockings!!!

cu,

A PROOF THAT THE EXTERMINATION OF OUR SUN

Posted on by
Reply

May, in Absence of Further Evidence, be a Necessary Evil Since it Self-Evidenty Embodies a Most Egregious and Offensive Arrogance.

Written in the Year 2011

DON’T THINK I DON’T CONSIDER THE DANGER in speaking against the commonly held adoration for it. Trust that I have considered all consequences and yet continue to hold my beliefs. I ask you to bring to the fore of your headmatter remembrances of any of your beermates that might endeaver to swing the earthe bout themselves with an invisible gravitether. I propose that you know no such vagamate. I further submit that no other of the manifold stars in our sky does demand so much attention as our nuisance own, which considers no harm in dictating our each and every day and of creating a sometimes rather hot sensation ‘pon the coverskin.

Further consider the centuries in which it mocked our lack of understanding of nuclear power. Excreting its vulgar rays into our servile faces as if to decree ‘u don’t understand me silly devilbeasts’. Like a hideous flabby father of forty year, rinsing its weakling son at the chess board.

And what more that it planted the seed of vaingodly stuff that form the core of our Christfan and Moslem brothers’ astrolgies. That it incited worship at it and mocked our glorious moon, our melancholic friend in the sky; her with more dignity that it not warm the face or inflate the plant. And it is she that offer to plop her icy spear into the heart of that yellow spherijerk and annihilate its flame to let us bath in the starry night on straight path through eternity.

Let the ice spear eclipse the hot death o’ hell in perpetuity o’er the five day week.

Largely a plagiary of Swift.

Cheers,