Category: The Dark Side

Lost and found

Where did you get it? I won it. I picked it up. I came across it. Answers that might denote its less-than-conventional origin. Personally I avoid any event resembling a flea market but millions of people love ’em. It’s the thrill of the chase and the improbable but tempting idea that treasure might be there for the picking.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be shocked to read that someone found an elegantly packaged glass bottle, presumed it was perfume, presented it to his lady-love……….and poisoned her with a deadly nerve-agent. But I am. Yes, it’s the antidote to serendipity. Someone will probably calculate the odds against the man’s ill-fortune. But I doubt it will spell the end of garage sales or expeditions with metal-detectors – or the temptation simply to snag things lying around the town.

There is nothing like a Dane

I came across a Grauniad leader this morning – and had to read it twice. Is this about Denmark, with the happiest people in the world?

I suppose the biggest difference a non-Dane notices over there is that most of the folk in the shopping centres (except perhaps in the few cities) are discernibly descended from Scandinavian stock. Compare that to most British towns. But there is another major difference. Since WWII we have grown used to seeing and living cheek-by-jowl with incomers of all races and persuasions; they are part of our landscape. I hate the word ‘integration’ but I would say they play a part in our society which most of us recognise and no longer resist, as we did at first. But the Danes are still where we stood after WWII! Hence the existence across that small country of 56 ‘ghettoes’, as described in the article, linked below.

After my second reading, I have had visions of PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen playing our favourite Viking, King Canute (never mind the spelling), as portrayed in fake news as a megalomaniac resisting the waves. I hope I’m wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/08/the-guardian-view-on-forcible-integration-in-denmark-this-cannot-end-well

 

You need hands

I was heel-clicked incarnate. Honestly, the cliché police, if they existed, would have thrown the book at me or locked me up and thrown away the key. Nothing could stop me in this mood. I was on top of the world, soaring like a cold blister and full of beans that could make a new forest. As I walked down the street I was the shiniest on show by a city mile (not in the country and anyway, a mile’s a mile for all that). I couldn’t resist singing my favourite Scorpions song “Here I am, Rock you like a Harry Kane.”

Then Destiny called. “Hello, you,” she said.

A driver had lost control of his Ford F650 pick up truck and had driven it onto the pavement. Careering at speed it was almost upon a young boy who was walking in front of me. I had a split second to make a decision.  Continue reading “You need hands”

You’ll See Us

From the reviews.

“This is like an immortal dog. It is unputdownable.”  (London Review of Books)

“You’ll See Us outjoyces Joyce, checkmates Chekov, Guy Fawkesy du Maupassant and shakes the Speare.” (Times Literary supplement)

“To read this you can’t be in your right mind. For wrong-minded readers only.” (Glaswegian Gallus Gazette)

Occasionally, they let me out. Having been a good boy and jested less than usual the asylum gave me a free day pass, yet told me I could only stay out for one. Doesn’t add up. Continue reading “You’ll See Us”

Slimeball’s book

Missed. Missed. Missed.

It was a catalogue of misses. No wonder Scotland are tripe at football when youngsters are messing about with a football throwing it at a basketball net. Missed. And from an easy distance, no one would shoot from downtown. Missed again. Just don’t get American sports at all. Too many “Hail Mary’s” in them for my liking.

The problem, as I could see it, was that the boys were not statuesque or Sipuesque. They were too short to be stormhoopers. They needed to be the size of the mountainous, non-basketball playing, ex-FBI chief, James Comey. I wanted to shout “Chief, just jump up, and put it in the basket.”

American politics aren’t my bag of tricks either. Nonetheless, the repercussions from the firing of the FBI boss by Donald Trump is still reverberating around DC so I bought the Comey book (half price at WH…a bargain) and found it an easy read. The big guy has been promoting it stateside. I watched his performance on the BBC’s America This Week last week. Refreshingly, he answered a lot of questions the way I answer them. “I don’t know” cropped up frequently.

There is one funny incident in the early part of his biography where he describes spilling gallons of milk while working in a grocery. Apart from this Fools and Horses moment the book is rather drab. The details of the Clinton E-mail investigation and Trump Russia connections are  sketchy and unfulfilling. His one on one joust with the President of the USA is an ongoing game. Which one will, ultimately, put it in the basket?

These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for

Unlike, say, Exorcists, hypnotists are for real. There’s no way the charlatan mesmeriser can put so many pre-planned plants on the stage. Like the bodysnatchers of old they’d run out of bodies. Ergo(es my reason for living), hypnotism must be a genuine article. That being the suitcase, this means we can all be mind benders, if we put our mind to it.

Corrupt hypnotists

All walks. It has to be said that if there was an upsurge in the hypnotist community a roguish element would take foot and mouth and hand and Adam’s apple. These non-Marquess of Queensbury rules hypnotists would indulge in all manner of crimes: robbery, humiliation, blog post manipulation. The world would be their Facebook. Luckily, the gift of hypnotism is limited to a less few humanoids.

Instant Kaa ma 

I’ve tried and tried to hypnotise without success. My human hypnotees, in pity, shake their heads at me as I fail to make them recite a Loony Limerick. In desperation, I turn to inanimate objects and will the clock (i.e. hypnotise the clock, not the clock is called Will) to go an hour forward. I stare at the face of the time machine. Look me in the eyes. Right in the eyes. Come closer. Closer still..

They’ll meet. But where?

Don and Kim’s unprecedented head-to-belly calls for some creative thought. Geneva won’t do – because the boy went to school nearby. Singapore is too, well, Asian. So for me, that leaves Cuba, which has all the requisites for a world title fight. History, communism, cigars, Gitmo (the honey-pot destination for serial-killers) – and proximity to Florida for the inevitable round of golf. Don claims to play off nine; no doubt matched by Kim’s as-yet-unpublished handicap. Cuba will also enable Don to show off his perhaps limited Spanish vocabulary, upstaging the (allegedly) polyglot Korean. Covfefe, por favor, barista. And Ladies and Gentlemen, your Master of Ceremonies for this headline bout is none other than the darling of the media, winner of the Nobel Prize and everybody’s best friend, Barack Obama! Enjoy!