Author Archives: Raph Shirley

About Raph Shirley

I have been creating strange material for the internet for over twenty years. A kind of failed artist yet I refuse to stop.

Sheer Power Alert

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As you almost certainly will have heard, last summer I holidayed in [Las] Vegas (baby!). Trouble is, whilst I had arranged to go with my mates, there was a catastrophic breakdown in communications and I ended up arriving a week before them, thus being forced to holiday alone in a big bad city of sleaze and high crime rates (even by American standards and this despite there being very few activities that are still illegal in the state of Nevada – babyyyyy!). Essentially when they said 13 June, they had actually meant 20 June, an easy mistake no doubt, and there is no doubt in anybody’s mind that it was a genuine mistake. No doubt whatsoever.

I have seen the photos mate, where they were reduced to consoling themselves with alcohol to the point of vomiting, due to my absence, and their lack of proper planning, I was taking a luxury helicopter ride for one over the strip/Hoover dam (the original pump priming – gives you a lot to think about) ($300 is too much, I’d recommend seeing on foot). ‘Is it just you’ said the helicopter pilot surprised. ‘I’m flying solo. Affirmative. What’s the ETA on this bad boy?’ I said, displaying an impressive knowledge of helicopter terminology. ‘Bet you don’t get to many MPGs on this baby’ – I added, further cementing my status with the fifty year old driver, a man with a saggy bag of a face hidden behind cheap aviators.

It is true that I did pass vomit due to a highly unorthodox turning manoeuvre that the old fool beside me insisted was the ‘safest way to land’, but there is no evidence that I cried and/or shat myself. None whatsoever, and I challenge anyone to produce any. I was busy telling the man that whatever the reasons for my not fighting in Afghanistan, cowardice is not one of them, when he span the iron bee on a sixpence and plopped it down on an H sign.

Anyway, all this is by the by, I haven’t said anything that we don’t already know for certain. After the first day’s thrill ride I was running out of activities faster than shit down a scared man’s leg (note to self – that’s a good simile – use in conversation at work). I sat in my motel room looking out the window at a car park with an argument going on in it. I guzzled some beer, which had the effect of jolting my mind into an important realisation and causing my mouth to emit a slight burp. Suddenly, I knew what I had to do that week, I would start working on my screenplay, and ASAP.

Ever since I saw a film I knew that I’d quite like to write one, so I went out to the shops and bought a pen. I went back out later remembering I needed paper, stocked up on beers galore and ‘potato chips’, and began. It’s called Sheer Power Alert and I plan to blog it as I write it so that I can get feedback before I send it to Spielberg et al. SexyPete99, please stop leaving comments telling me to ‘f*$% o&* it’s s*^%’. I wont publish them. It is trolls like you that ruin good forums.

Here is the first segment (segment/section/scene?).

***

Sheer Power Alert

A Screenplay by Raph Shirley

INT. DAY. A LAS VEGAS MOTEL ROOM.

The camera peeps at the rippling flesh of Ken Goodman. There is a beautiful/sexy woman lying on the bed naked except for a tattoo of a computer mainframe on her bum cheek. There is no question as to whether she wants remuneration, because she does not, and Ken is the sort of guy who knows. There is no question as to whether he has homosexual thoughts, because he categorically does not. Ken is counting the bullets left in his machine gun (Steve, should I be more specific – M16?).

KEN
Fuck, I need more ammo man.

WOMAN
Come back to bed Ken, I know you are a secret agent for the US government but can’t you take a break from trying to stop the rise of the machines for once.

KEN (raising his eyebrows)
Women! You know as well as I do that there is a terminator [will there be copyright issues here? – exterminator? abolitionist?] out to get us.

Ken is flicking through TV channels, there is genuinely nothing on.

KEN
There is genuinely nothing on. Perhaps I should get nothing on too.

WOMAN (giggling)
Yes, you are so good at jokes and… sex.

KEN
I know. So are you.

They have sex. (What can we get away with here Steve?) During lovemaking The Abolitionist smashes through the wall and opens fire with a helicopter cannon.

KEN
Fuck!

WOMAN
Fuuuuucccckkkkk!

KEN
Get down! (good time for innuendo maybe) Shhhiiiiiit.

Ken has been badly hurt but he managed to destroy The Abolitionist after the woman put a bag over its head like you would an ostrich to sedate it.

CUT TO:

EXT. NIGHT. A LAS VEGAS MOTEL CARPARK.

The woman (Sarah? Claire maybe? Claire Sarahly) is pushing Ken in a wheelchair at full speed in to a McDonalds! She grabs some tissues with which to cover Ken’s stumps. They get Happy Meals and get the ‘hell outta there’. The scene fades as Claire pushes Ken into the sunset and the desert.

***

Let me know what you think. Please send any funding offers or contracts to Flat 6D, 16 Rushworth Gardens, Blanche Road, Hemel Hempstead, HH13 6TR.

A proposal concerning a change of use for Buckingham Palace

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Due to a freedom of information request I have come into possession of this letter from government records. It seems to be a memo from George Osborne to David Cameron. I decided to risk libel action for publishing it, for ethical/heroic reasons.

To The Rt Hon David Cameron MP Prime Minister,

As you know, the Royal Family is currently enjoying a period of unparalleled public adoration, similar to, for instance, the initial popularity of Adolf Hitler. We, the people, collectively recognise that it offers significant value for money in terms of increased tourism revenue and national branding. All the proposals contained herein, stem from these facts, which I hold to be self evident truths. I hope that you will implement my recommendations in time for the forthcoming Olympics festival of sport and the crowd-pleasing Jubilee rally, so that we can profit from the unique set of current circumstances and use them to maintain our position on the global stage (that of spotlight operator).

Therefore/thus even the most earnest misanthropic republican will agree that it follows naturally that we should do everything in our power to promote, expand, and capitalise on this important asset. I am of course suggesting that Buckingham Palace be converted into a brothel. Up to 90% of American visitors to London, are attracted to the Theatre district and are most likely perverts driven more by the sordid honey of Soho. The Queen herself would be a highly sell-able commodity to these tourists and the prices we could charge, along with substantial gains from auctioning off the lower level staff would more than cover the losses made due to lower sales of Jubilee memorial coins by elderly people who will doubtless be against these proposals, along with everything else, as per usual. The over sixties are after all the last prim generation, and these important modernising steps will be shunned by them in the same way that they can not and will not understand the internet.


Figure 1. Possible flyer design.

Kate Middleton’s sexual attractiveness accounts for eight tenths of tabloid interest in the new couple (a canny pairing Hague! You showed a lot of foresight, mate). With her and William doing two shows an hour at one thousand pounds per ticket and an audience of three hundred, we could write off our debts, which were handed down to us by the last Labour government, in a couple of years, probably.

However, adult entertainment is not the only obvious use for the Royal Family. I suggest the bulk of the grounds be sold to Disney, who have a better record than HM government for producing trashy, cliché driven tourist attractions and aggressively engineering sinister global brands. It might also be sensible to use the smaller buildings on the palace grounds for manufacture and distribution of narcotics, again a very profitable enterprise and a valid inference from the argument from increased tourist revenue. If so, it is important to maintain the current practice (in line with Disney policy anyway) of only having one Queen visible at any point (the actors, or “Queenettes”, will be paid minimum wage).

I have one further possible suggestion, admittedly not so mild as the inevitable changes I highlight above. Working on the conservative assumption that the queen human can operate at 50% the efficiency of a queen ant (100 eggs/hour) she could share the burden of propagation and save the humiliation and cost of child rearing for a generation of young couples. The ordinary people are not capable of asexual parthenogenesis and can only produce 2 or 3 a decade at best under modern financial and social constraints. Perhaps everyone reaching thirty years of age could be sent an egg from the queen to put in a plant pot and then it turns into a baby clone of the Queen for them to cherish forever. I also recommend building a boat.

I finish with an ode to our queen that I suggest we sing at the opening of Disney BrothelTM.

The queen human lays an egg a minute
She puts her perfect genes in it
May her reign be infinite
And this metaphor hold out for two more stanzas

Her nest is as big as any other
May I make food for our mother?
Or should I say lover?
No, that’s too much

Bottle her jelly!
Ebay her welly
Sell every inch of her belly
To Network South East or First Capital Connect.

Yours sincerely,

The Dishonourable Gideon Osborne.

Thanks for watching,

.

Miss Thomas

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The clearest way to describe Claire Thomas is to say she is fat. It isn’t genetic or due to some other ‘modern BS’. It is because she frequently scoffs. She scoffs indiscriminately. Domino’s Two For Tuesdays by the two, eggs by the eight, and milkshake. She loves food like an English teacher (which she is) ‘loves words’, but she eats a lot more than she reads, and reads a lot less than she drinks, and eats and drinks to excess. That is the main fact. Anything else is conjecture. She is also lazy.


A copy of the photo by Liu Zheng. Does anyone know the copyright situation with this sort of thing?

Splayed, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say ungraciously, over her bed like a dead octopus on a chopping board, she was masturbating furiously. She could just about concentrate on her pornography for a few seconds at a time between checking the news headlines, some of which were reporting multiple fatalities, and reading an email from her school’s headmaster. After around ten minutes and without a proper resolution she gave up any pretence and relaxed, sighed, and turned the volume up on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The now muted laptop still blaring The Garden of Earthly Delights. The film was (is) unsatisfactory.

Now, Claire is watching Stefan Graves, an incompetent maths teacher, telling some children off for making light of Nazi war atrocities. She finds this most amusing and it makes her penguin biscuit doubly enjoyable. She chuckles through chocolatey lips, bubbling hot tea to a dripping foam. She imagines the warm embrace of her bed with its luxurious duvet and ready access to Terminator figurines (and lets be frank, to Terminator paraphernalia more generally). This thought inevitably leads to sexual dreams of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career making character and the thrill available to her by drawing his genitals. To do for them what Dali did for the unconscious; to render them visible. Around ten such drawings are tacked around her room as if to draw this was to own it; to see it was to experience it, and to display it was to go too far maybe. Imagining the machine’s penis is an impressive feat when all that is available to us is the barmaid’s reaction in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

There is a second thing that Claire takes an interest in: The 2011 Royal Wedding. She was lying in her overfilled bath staring at the same patch of flaking wall paper that she has seen every week for the last thirty years. She is next to the room with the bed that her mother died in, demented and miserable, and she is thinking about all the men she has slept with. Atheist, republican, and with an intense interest in Kate Middleton she was again making a show of pleasing herself knowing she would ultimately give up the ghost. She sang ‘I cain’t get no… satisfaction’ and laughed. Her phone beeps, she has an email from me informing her that it is my belief that the Terminator has only a mound, that the waitress’ response was a directorial error, and that all her theories are wrong, that her terminator fan fiction is shabby at best and that I will not allow a further Terminator/Royal Wedding tie in story to appear on the forum I manage.

Yours sincerely,

The George Golding Professor of Contemporary Thought

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

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“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.