Edinburgh 2011 summary

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The 2011 smash flop, Philosophical Investigations, has today come to an end.


Figure 1. Conventional cameras can not capture the sublime performance of Raph Shirley.

The show of which The Telegraph said nothing at all, the show nominated for under 1 awards, the five star masterpiece (five one star reviews from audience comment website edfringe.com) has finished with a faintly audible plop.


Figure 2. Raph Shirley sensitively discussing the role of Islam in the West.

Highlights

  • For me the highlight has to be an extremely angry man yelling ‘call me soft of mind again and I’ll knock your fucking head off’. If that’s not the reaction every comedian wants I don’t know what is.
  • Or perhaps the show performed to three silent octogenarians?
  • What of the various people who found it ‘deeply offensive’? Including the American lady who kindly inquired ‘Have you been doing this for long?’.

Whatever your favourite moment is, remember:

‘Any logically coherent doctrine will always be painful to current prejudices’ – Bertrand Russell.

Edinburgh 2012 is in the making and promises to be even more confusing to audiences everywhere.

Be ready,

Warning – everything below this point is written in earnest. The lack of irony and cynicism may make you want to vomit. Please proceed with caution.

Thank you very much to Peter Buckley-Hill, everyone involved with organising PBH’s Free Fringe 2011, and the kind staff at Rush Bar who helped me throughout the festival.

Cheers,

Raph Shirley, Edinburgh, August 2011.

Edinburgh preview on 13th July 2011

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Hello good people,

I am doing a preview of my Edinburgh show, Philosophical Investigations, at The Invisible Dot in Camden, London.

  • 13 July 2011
  • 8pm
  • The show is free of cost

You can email info@theinvisibledot.com to reserve a seat.

Your humble jester,

Venue details: www.theinvisibledot.com

Show details: www.raphshirley.com/shows/2011/philosophical-investigations/

The campaign

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After months of art directors and copywriters, secretaries and assistants, marketing executives and what have you (all of whom played by me) the advertisng campaign is finally here. In the end we decided to skip the TV spots and billboards and go with just flyers and word of mouth in the end.

Cheers,

A tribute to Bobby Crispy

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Bobby Crispy has a good forename, a great surname, and a better website. Yeah, it is that good. http://bobsguitarlessons.yolasite.com/ contains videos of his free guitar lessons, as well as other cool stuff like sci-fi stories. This guy really knows how to do an excellent website. I can learn a lot from him.

You might like to watch him play one of the manifold impressively difficult songs on the site. However, my personal favourite thing to do (favourite of all things including non Bobby-related things (I categorize the world into Bobby and non-Bobby related)) is to watch him play scales extremely fast because I enjoy witnessing the application of virtuosity to something utterly futile.

He knows it’s kinda informal but he’s just doing it for fun.

Bobby you are a beautiful beautiful man.

Love from,

Philosophical Investigations

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A MESSAGE FROM RAPH


Dear friends and/or enemies etc,

There is a NEWS FLASH. I am taking a show to Edinburgh. I, as in raphshirley.com live, a.k.a. Raph Shirley.

It is called Philosophical Investigations and will be on at Rush bar every day at 3pm, 6-27 August inclusive. Come.

There is also a brand new/completely-professional-looking section of The Website dedicated to it. See it.

Do take care,

D.A.D. X

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Dad And Dangerous. We are all only too familiar with the problem of problem youths being problematic. Well, DAD X couldn’t take it no more. He has therefore gone well and truly berserk.

Love from

xxx

CYBORG R.A.T. 9 Gaming Mouse

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Hardcore gamers like myself have long debated that great quandary; is there such a thing as the perfect gaming mouse? Well, I’m sorry to say to the doubters (not mentioning any names SexyPete99) this IS it:

Figure 1. The CYBORG R.A.T. 9 Gaming Mouse, £84.99. Taken from benchmarkreviews.com.

Whether committing acts of violent murder in It’s Genuinely A Crime: Las Vegas or worser [sic] travesties such as spell checking “Lady Gargar” (not mentioning any names SexyPete99) this mouse gives you all the support you need.

Oh yes,

An excerpt from World of Warcraft online voice chat system:

Me: ‘Why did you buy industrial whisky…you idiot’

SexyPete99: ‘pardon’

beat

Me: ‘I said why did you buy industrial whisky…you idiot’

Stupid nonce

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Swizzled in the swiller,
Brushelled with a buzzer,
Splish splashelled and bathed,
That’s the bloody shower over with!

And in a waze he filled his trouser,
With fleshy leggo pegs.
It took forth owls and still not done,
To be ready for the meeting.

Ten peeples peeped at powerpeep,
And of the frothy thquarters,
Superintendent Ben asked,
What is a krackerjangerang?

Jizzle jobble did bobble unbalanced,
Till tippled off it did,
Into the black, doleful void,
Oh shit.

The early Shirley (logical foundations of the weblog)

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Life is tough when you’re a white, male, heterosexual, old Etonian like me. My constant struggle against prejudice has, however, yielded philosophical insight. What follows is a translation (from Eton slang) of my [cod] philosophical investigations. Please do not be so intimidated as to think you might not understand this profound exposition of the truth. Remember, I am but a mere great intellectual.

Raph Shirley, Vienna, 2011

1 This statement exists.

    1.1 I just done a fart.
      1.1.1 It stinks.
    1.2 Can we say that the statement and the fart are connected? Is there a connexion?

2 I am embarrassed by the word fart.

    2.1 I am embarrassed by the fart.
      2.1.1 Remember that it stinks.
    2.2 It stinks less now.
    2.3 Has the statement dissipated with time in the same way? Does it still exist?

3 Yes.

    3.1 What was it again?
    3.2 In picturing the fart in a dance with the statement, may we come to dance too, with fart?

4 (Poo poos and bums and wee wees. Willys etc.)

5 One remembers great literature and asks: Is Raph Shirley so great a mind that his bodily functions might be comparable to, say, War and Peace?

      5.0.1 Yes?
      5.0.2 Yes.

6 I am forced to remember a dream I had when I was ten, in which I asked ‘does God exist, my massive mind?’.

    6.1 At 6am I arose, and said ‘My understanding of the situation is so far in excess of the current discourse between the morons Dawkins, Hitchens, Pope, Williams etc, that to engage them in debate would be to whore myself to them; to lower my self from on high to meet with these silly demons; to masturbate.’.

7 The TV section of a newspaper.

    7.1 An admission of inferiority.
    7.2 Like a husband permitting his wife’s infidelity; buying her the prophylactics.
    7.3 Yet our choice of paper is determined largely by their TV section layout and aesthetic preferences.
      7.3.1 Jesus shat!

Yours, ever humble and meek, yet wise and everlasting,

James Bond (asexual gay Lord and master of sexy epigrams)

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This post is dedicated to Sirs Isaac Newton and Bobby Charlton (They don’t make them like they used to).

Figure 1. Sir Bobby Charlton, “A Football Man”.

Bond had just graduated from Oxford with a massive degree, inferior in magnitude only to his perception of it. The careers office recommended the civil service but little did they know that he was not going to be civil, and even less servile was he going to be.

MI6 it was then.

One evening, while Bond was composing bizarre introductions and engineering contrary opinions regarding the correct serving of cocktails, he got his (phone) call to arms. M told him by text to go to Darlington and get the train timetable off of some guy working for Great North Eastern as a test.

Those of a nervous disposition should look away now. Even the most hardened reader, used to the frank, honest, and often uncompromising style of this weblog, may find the graphic homosexual pornography that follows too much to bear, and… hardened might also refer to the state of male genitalia during sexual arousal. I must also apologise for breaking one of my own rules of sex scene writing that one should always include a pathetic fallacy but never a pathetic phallus.

It drizzled. The antiquated Bond was obviously a huge homophobe but his first assignment was to get the train times from this fat controller by any means necessary. He was going to have to be a gay Lord.

Against my better judgement I am still amused by the phrase gay Lord.

Bond lay still, ruined. He pondered the etymology of the word gay and wondered where it might go next. A desperate mixture of blood and semen dribbled from his anus to the bed, beating a primal rhythm, syncopated with the pitter-patter of rain on the window of this northern motel. This seemed to suggest that gay might describe a new school of linguistics? A homophobic teenage boy? (e.g. look at those gays studying Nuts magazine and learning misogyny) An ecstatic metaphorical explosion?

The next joke is set in the year 2000.

Bond hated political correctness and whenever it was mentioned would say “I believe one is incorrect to take the correct approach to anything. 1+1=2! That is mathematical correctness gone mad!” in his usual nonsensical idiomatic style. He did not play by any rules, and certainly not the rules of formal logic. He was extremely proud of this personal brand of cod philosophy and, now, it led him to a choice. Should he remain a low level spy in the hope of future promotion to heterosexual humiliation in more expensive hotel rooms, or should he stop being such a Top Gear type, car fan, and arse?

Right there, right now, he decided to change his life and become a professor of language, right where our story began…

Figure 2. Professor James Bond, professor of syntax and philology at the University of Oxford.

It shows how personal decisions can impact real lives. Real people. Real lives.

Thanks in advance,

My brother – review

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Despite some flashes of interest, Raph Shirley is underwhelmed.



My brother entered the scene in late 1989 and has been wowing family-occasion-goers ever since. Unfortunately, his performance has become rather stolid of late. Now he’s a sort of lumpen drudging knock off of better brothers such as David Attenborough and Ethan Cohen.

In a characteristic scene my brother, Ben, is reduced to limping about the kitchen moaning about unemployment and a lack of family support. A modern updating of the prodigal son it might be, but p-lease I haven’t seen melodrama this hammy since breakfast with the Aflecks.

One of the major problems are his frequent, often rambling soliloquies. Any editor worth their salt would surely take a large pair of scissors to about half of what he says. I’m still trying to forget Ben’s final speech of 2010; a rather ostentatious display of Brotherhood with a capital B, making outrageous claims about my disloyalty. Lets just say, Ben, you ain’t no Shakespeare, get back to the physical clowning.

Ben is clearly capable of amusing us, we still talk about him falling over in the paddling pool in 97, but he’s going to have to figure out what it was that we once liked, nay really liked. This brother needs to put more effort into the script and a little less into “not being such a prick all the time”. Sorry parents, but a few cuts would have gone a long way.

Lots of love,

Raph Shirley (prophet)

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I was walking down the street the other day, and I bumped into this woman (I don’t know if you’ve ever met a woman, they’re basically mad hideous monsters, like men) and she’d got into her head the misguided idea to manufacture a person. Now, if it was me I would probably do this using a computer controlled 4D special laser printer but she considered the appropriate course of action to be to grow one inside her stomach.

I remembered how my mum, Sharon Shirley, had accidentally sacrificed her own innards to the nefarious purpose of creating a mutant hybrid between herself and my old man after placing too much faith in the stress resistance of polyurethane. I relayed my experiences to the wench before me and reiterated my belief in laser printing technology. We adopted a little Chinese girl as a compromise. She was a little two dimensional grey one from my HP LaserJet P2050 Series PCL6. I added a third dimension by spraying it with Impulse Jasmine (body mist).

“I’m confused by the word ‘this’, it’s like a piece of string between the world and the sentence” I said. She said that all words were like that and asked me why I was standing on top of the gigantic whoopy cushion I’d been gradually blowing up. The noise that followed was genuinely hilarious. We all laughed and had pancakes for dinner. Except our beautiful daughter who was killed in a tragic shredding accident.

The end,

A fair system for toilet use

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My mother, Sharon Shirley, recently made the unreasonable demand that I put the seat down after using the toilet. Here is my response.

Allow me to neglect poo-poo for the purposes of a thought experiment.

Imagine there are two social groups A and B who require the toilet to be in states A and B respectively, for wee wees. There is some effort incurred in changing the state one way, EA-B, which is essentially equal to the effort incurred in changing the state the other way, EB-A.

What system of use would be fair and proper? Is it the current system, where state A is considered to be philosophically superior to state B and that group B have to change the state to their required state pre-toilet and then change it to the opposite state post-toilet to spare group A the indignity of changing the toilet state? Pompous group A pricks.


Figure 1 A hypothetical, perfectly fair toilet for which equal effort is required of all genders and creeds.

I put it to you that group A’s position is entirely bogus, and I will no longer change the toilet state for them. There will be net lower indignity if this mode of operation is adopted worldwide. Moreover, there will be equal distribution of indignity between the two groups.

And what is a lid even for? Can we please get rid of that? Also, we are out of toilet paper and duck.

Now I will consider the impact of number 2s.

Of course, groups A and B agree on the toilet state for number 2s. This complicates matters slightly because some of group B will be saved effort by other group B members changing the state for them post number 1. However, you will see that net effort is still lower if my system is adopted because only necessary state changes occur.

I apologise for discussing this delicate matter with you. I feel the situation has come to a crisis point requiring brave men like myself to come forward and speak up against prejudice and hypocrisy.

I rest my case,

p.s. mum, could you give me a lift to the pub tonight around 7.04pm? and not Chicken Tonight tonight again please. I do not feel like Chicken Tonight tonight. I might be persuaded by Sausages Tonight…

… tonight.

Made irrelevant

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Dear Mr Shirley,

I regret to inform you (yes, I am aware of the absurdity of pre-emptively regretting something I am about to do) that we are unable to offer you a position at this time/ever. Unfortunately, we give preference to applicants who do not do ‘their impressions’ at interview. Furthermore, your recreation of the voice from Disney Blu-ray adverts was not as accurate as you had promised and too esoteric.

In addition to the reason already given, which would be enough in itself, we also do not hire people who have recently been made redundant and certainly not those who have been made irrelevant by us. If I remember correctly, you were made irrelevant after repeatedly referring to our high grade fuel as ‘the black docter’, which is probably racist, definitely spelt wrong, and most importantly, utterly non-sensical. We do not tolerate that sort of shit in this organisation.

Once again, I apologise for the unfortunate incident of me having to bring you this bad news at this sad time in the current economic climate.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Voser

CEO/Head Cleaner
Shell Oil PLC

Shell Oil is an equal opportunities employer (except for morons who are given slightly reduced opportunities). Present this rejection letter at one of our many stations and receive 10% off any fuel purchase; simply quote “loser’s deal”.