Our Lady

Posted on by

The first family circular.

As a lot of you know, 1 has been a tumultuous year for the Christ family. In January, Joseph’s cries of foul play were eventually silenced by An Explanation based around frottage, and things seemed to be on the up. The lack of affordable housing continues to add to our woes but The Precocious Little Brat seems happy enough – He got his grade 8 piano in Feb! It can’t be all that bad!! March was as dull as a dodo; a simile operating on the fact that the dodo is a common bird of little interest, as is the case at this time.


Figure 1. The Little Bugger as Lamb. Raph Shirley, ink on paper, A4, 2010.

In April I felt the “wise” men had outstayed their welcome rather. Awkward! In May Gabriel was in town for a work do and tensions with Joseph flared up again but I managed to keep things calm mainly by pointing behind Joseph and saying “What’s that?” whenever Gabriel was around. By the way, Luke doesn’t know what he is talking about. If “nothing is impossible with God” then it must be possible for him to write an impossible riddle. Paradox! Q.E.D. – Luke is full of it. June was an absolute nightmare if I’m honest. We were audited because Joseph wrote “Yes please!” on the census (that was old hat in -6!), and of course a lot of the receipts were revealed as fakes. How many times did I tell him to keep the amounts realistic? (5). Forty pieces of silver for one bit of unleavened bread! July to November is probably too much to avoid this getting a little tired. check out Mathew’s blog for some great stories from those days. I feel he overuses the word begat but what do I know.

And then of course December. Has it really been a year?! I write this while watching His birthday party. Joseph got him socks and was smited. Joseph is going off on one about being Put Upon and the whole thing is a nasty scene. Unfortunately, the party is mainly a washout due to the massacre of the innocents. Anyway, I hope you are well and I wish you all the best for 2.

Yours smug,

Mary Christ.

An experimental investigation into the sleeping habits of my mother

Posted on by

Introduction
Middle aged humans are a common phenomenon that can be observed at a wide range of locales. From the wine aisle in Waitrose to that at Sainsbury they can be identified chiefly by the appearance of moderate wrinkles on their faces and bodies and by their possessing an often timid demeanour.

This study is concerned with the development of a new methodology for measuring various character traits by the control and disruption of their sleep. Specifically, we observe the fifty five year old human female Sharon Shirley (herein referred to as SS Old Bean) by means of an observation deck concealed in its bedroom.

Methodology
Recent advances in toilet design (Figure 1) allow the scientist continuous access to the bedrooms of the middle aged for the first time. We employ such a shed/toilet approach using the older Prod With Stick (PWS) method for waking my mother.


Figure 1 Experimental setup.

Results and Discussion
The most striking aspect of this work is surely the violent reactions from Mrs Shirley upon being woken (See Figure 2).


Figure 2 Swear words per sentence as a function of time of sleep disruption. The red squares show a fifteen week average. Blue squares show the night of the burglary. The green square is clearly an outlier. The ‘leisure time’ shown in yellow was occupied with basic literature, tv and reminiscing about teenage sexual exploits.

Specifically, the PWS method produced massive eruptions of swearing and violence when repeatedly applied between the hours of 03.00 and 05.00 GMT. Indeed, the author had to resort to the hose to keep his mother at bay on three occasions. The first being coincident with the burglary, which was left to take its natural course in order to avoid any possibility of artefactual data. The other two showing no coincidence with experimental conditions but both accompanied by identical protestations relating to ‘work in the morning’. Clearly, the middle aged are a strange animal with complex behaviour and oral communication systems.

Conclusions
The middle ages are some of the toughest in our lives. Here, we show how a modern approach to them can increase hostility between family members under certain conditions.

Thank you,

American Pie 37

Posted on by

Transcript:

Things have quietened down a little since Finchy passed. Oh, we still like a joke or two. I sometimes tease Stifler about his mom being a ‘DGGILTK’. That’s a Dead Great Grandmother I’d Like To Kiss. I changed the last word because we’re too old for all that nonsense now and I added the ‘To’ to the acronym because it really bothers me when people leave out those words in order to make an acronym more snappy. Of course it goes straight over Stifler’s head because he is in the advanced stages of Altziemer’s.

All the best,

Woman makes strange sound in conversation

Posted on by

A 34 year old woman today made an unusual sound in a conversation with friends. The confused onlookers refrained from querying the woman’s meaning for fear of “embarrassment”.

“It was a sort of short high pitched steam train’s toot” – Darren, 35. A number of leading sceptics have suggested it might have been a sign of incredulity or bemusement.

Despite communicating very little it did cause Darren to have a mild and short lived burst of giggles. “I really didn’t know what she meant and then I just started to consider the sound which appeared more and more absurd to me”.

According to an international speaker, sounds like this should be celebrated and we must try not to be prejudiced against them. “People will often embellish their conversations with wordless noises. Although I will admit, it can sometimes be hard to figure out exactly what they mean”.

Cheers,

Killer gran hell

Posted on by

A rollicking rampage of octogenarian revenge, torn flesh, and laser canons.

My grandmother was chopping carrots when it happened. By ‘it’ I of course mean the laser razor ray slicing though the ceiling and into her brain. Oh yes, after that things between me and gran started to get a little, how shall we say… absolute terror shock of murder violence, not to put too fine a point on it. She instantly threw the knife she was holding. It went through the right arm of my Gap t shirt and pinned me to her terrible antique screen. I could see carrot juice still wet on the blade and regretted wearing such a bad t shirt for this unexpectedly exciting scene.

Her campaign of violent retribution has begun. One by one she is out to get each of her grandchildren. Only I can stop her.

Best regards,

Eating alone

Posted on by

I love eating alone, but I hate being caught. The reversal of esteem when going from gorging on burgers at a bus stop to being joined by a waiting passenger is second in magnitude only to that associated with orgasm. Culinary onanism is a great joy, as intense as the sexual kind, but attached with equal feelings of guilt and insecurity.

If you go on holiday alone like me then you will be familiar with the troubles of eating. I once ordered fifty cheap ‘n’ dirty buffalo wings only to be caught stuffing them on the upper deck of a bus. I had to throw them away and pretend I was full. By the time I could try to relight our fire the relationship had grown cold and soggy.

I have a deep respect and admiration for someone who can eat at a restaurant alone. How can they do it? It is my greatest ambition to one day master that trick. If you can do that then you are at peace. And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son! Consider this: Pizza Express; Friday; 8pm; a man with a beer and a pizza, who is accompanied by a look on his face as simple as a labrador’s, is smartly dressed. He has actually dressed up to go to Pizza Express alone. He has desert alone. He has coffee alone. He tips moderately! Imagine slipping into a little Chanel suit, putting on a mink fur, and spending an hour applying make up, to wank.

Cheers,

Stephen Hawking: prick or dick?

Posted on by

In which I offer a considered reaction to The Grand Design, the latest publication of Prof Stephen Hawking.

“We each exist for but a short time…”

That ‘but’ along with the other words in the book’s first sentence ensure that by the end of it you already have more than a little stomach acid at the back of your throat. However, this early pretension is but a preface to the imminent whirlwind of diarrhoea-ish shit hell. He rapidly progresses to such monumental glibbery as ‘philosophy is dead’. One can’t help but draw the conclusion this man is but a drunken precocious teenager stuck in the body of a great intellectual. but.

“It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God” – Yes, my mind has been (utterly) blown, but I think this should be attributed to Michael Smith et al. (Comment on Newsround website, 2005).

His book is part GCSE revision notes, part self help bog rag, but what is Hawking the man? Cynical publishing mastermind or genuine arse? Harmless egotist or mad, bad, and deeply offensive egotist? Prick or dick?

The title of Chapter 3 is “What is Reality?”.

Cheers,

The Mona Lisa

Posted on by

The Mona Lisa is the best painting in the world. And a great improvement on the earlier pornographic version. It was done by the best painter in the world (Leonardo da Vinci) and the title was written by the best writer in the world (William Shakespeare). And it has been seen by the best people in the world. Including The Great British Public and Albert Einstein. When I do this at weddings I get a huge cheer for the former and a lone cheer for the latter from some weird guy who loves Einstein.

Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter and to do that you need the internal combustion engine and you can’t really have a helicopter without lights and nowadays the internet. He foresaw the lot.

Unfortunately, despite all that, he was a bit of a dick. He was always playing pranks on the various young artists who respected and admired him. I remember one wet Sunday afternoon, a young boy by the name of MICHELANGELO! DI LUDOVICO! BUONARROTI! SIMONI! (that’s MICHELANGELO!!! (the artist!)) came in to ask how to paint cats.1 Michelangelo, aged only five years, and young for his age, told Leonardo what a huge fan he was and asked if he might have an autograph? Leonardo told him to ‘fuck off you little shit’. Then he pulled his pants down, smacked his bottom and sent him home to his ‘mummy’.


Figure 1 A somewhat cheeky and amusing subversion of The Mona Lisa. Taken from www.freaking news.com.

No. By far the most lasting impact of Leonardo has been on the ‘prank postcard’. Since 1883, when a precocious young novelties seller first added a pipe to the sublime image, the field has seen numerous revelatory juxtapositions such as a mohican, a joint, and even, a bong. You yourself can try adding a bong to masterpieces. It’s irreverent and fun so give it a go. Bong.

Cheers,

1 The question ‘How to paint cats?’ is here distinct from the question ‘Why paint cats?’. See www.whypaintcats.com for more information.

The banana

Posted on by

The banana in its sluttish yellow overcoat eyed me from across the hall. The way it draped its slender ripe figure provocatively across that pawn of an apple. The way it affectedly brushed past the orange. Oh that banana had it coming, and don’t let no one tell you different.

I pretended I hadn’t noticed. I went on about my business. I constructed a look of busy action at the computer face. Staring into the abyss of an excel spreadsheet displaying tawdry accounting jargon such as ‘costs’ and ‘total’ when all I could really think about was that fucking banana.

Tony Blair famously said education three times. And of course, I, in my way, am painfully aware of the simplicity of the mechanisms of it. The straight forwardness of combining two objects like this sickens me even as I spew it, although I must admit that that ‘even’ is out of place given the tautology.

But at least I stopped it in the middle, even if my intention was to disregard your generous attention and to thank you for visiting by flippantly giving you nothing of worth.

Unfortunately this is not a wedding and I can’t get one of the band members to give me a late, drunken, and drummed out joke announcer.

It has all fallen to pieces. I’m not quite sure where it happened but its lost now for ever.

Do you follow?

Creation

Posted on by

One
It was morning time and I needed a shower bad. I realised that I couldn’t remember why I was dirty. Then God rudely came in my bedroom without asking and presented the most splendid tart. There were a load of weird animals like half-zebra/half-worms around. One of them came over to be stroked. Then it opened its mouth and out popped a Twix. I ate it because the sinning witch told me to with sexy looks. She looked like she was straight out of Zoo magazine except with bigger tits and vagina. It was a bit disappointing to be honest on account of the ephemeral nature of sensory pleasure.

Two
The mid morning brunch-lunch period was bloody pandemonium. At the end the woman handed me a note which said ‘I am a metaphor for sin’ which I thought was a bit sexist really and probably a simplistic interpretation. Anyway, it was all a bit of fun until about 5.30 when God came back to lecture us a bit.

Three
Come evening time I had a really bad stomach ache and very much regretted the Twix which seemed to be transforming into a bureaucratic machine made of my intestines. On top of that there were now a load of even weirder animals around playing elaborate jazz solos on things like a five piped saxophone and a one key’d piano. One of them started saying a load of totally crazy shit at me. It was really freaking me out but not as much as when I looked down and there were giant ants whose legs were dirty hospital needles and bees with senescent human faces and slugs vomiting maggots. Man this is shit, and worse than that, it went on, quite literally, for ever. I blame that stupid woman because the Twix and all the rest of it wasn’t worth this.

Yours, as ever, magniloquently,

Dance

Posted on by

To some people dancing comes naturally. To me it comes supernaturally. That’s right, fasten your seat belts because this post is about to take a nose dive directly to a more academic style of prose.

“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.” – Friedrich Nietzsche1

Dancing is typically thought of as a light hearted and fun exercise. Exempli gratia2 “Hey, I love to dance, it just makes me feel great”. But many people forget that as recently as 1518, it could lead to mass hysteria and death3. Dancing began around 50,000 BC when early4 man first started dating early5 woman. Cinema at the time had become staid and uninspiring and young people were looking for a more exciting pastime6. The gunpowder was there, all it took was a match in the form of a primitive dance called the ‘kick’. The dance involved a simple motion of the leg upwards and forwards and that was the end of it. Teenagers gathered in their ones to take part in this and so was coined ‘teenage kicks’.

“Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.” – Mr. Miyagi7

But we arrive now at the winter of the post and still a thrust to the argument seems as unfortunately absent as an erection on your golden wedding anniversary8. You no longer dance. The leaves are falling off the trees and there is a quiet sadness in your eyes as you sit in your chairs and watch each other slowly die.

Yours disingenuously,

Footnotes

1 The internet.

2 ‘e.g.’ or ‘for example’

3 See Wikipedia article, The dancing plague of 1518.

4 As in ‘with ears’.

5 As in ‘like an earl’.

6 Cinema in the early 50,000 BCs consisted mainly in staring at a rock. Only the French avant garde was so bold as to include such complicated allegory as the smashing of two rocks against each other.

7 The Next Karate Kid, 1994

8 Simile is often the shortest path to a joke.

Is it possible…

Posted on by

… to be into politics and talk about it without being a total dick?

No. Probably not. But that’s not what I’m talking about today. Today, as you probably know, there is a waning gibbous moon. But that’s not what I’m talking about today (when it’s in a waning gibbous phase, the moon rises some hours after sunset and glows like a full moon when it’s near the horizon. But the shape of this moon is less than full).

No. What really makes today the day of all days is that today I will once and for all put to rest the issue of the meaning of life. I wont solve it, just put it to rest for a bit. Are you still here? If so you have just put up with three false starts. Either you really have very little to be getting on with or you have a misplaced hope that something mildly amusing may be on the horizon.

Nothing.

More blogging on the way soon,

2000, a great vintage

Posted on by

Vague memories of literal and metaphorical squibs.

But there are other relics of the millennium and today I will be talking, mostly, about websites. If websites were rated according to their proper metric, that is, by number of fonts used per page, then my first foray into the internet would surely be the winner1. www.raphman.20m.com was a classic 2000. The obscure, fabulous fonts. The gaudy colour schemes. A continuing astonishment at the hilarity of incongruous photo captions.

Now of course, the wine has turned to creaking electronic vinegar. I feel genuinely let down by the internet. What do we have now?

T H I S

Spare a thought for Tim Berners-Lee. He must be just a little sour in the wee hours having given it all away for nothing only for it to be farmed and savaged by The Microsoft NetworkTM, AmazonTM, et ceterarumTM.

Send in your favourite classic websites. The best post will receive a special surprise gift2.

Good luck,

1When I was at school I wrote a two page essay using only one sentence. My teacher got pissed off about that and also because I copied it out of the Dorling Kindersley Science Encyclopaedia. I shall make no efforts to improve sir.

TMTotal Meanies.

2In the event of no entries I shall spend the equivalent cost of the special surprise gift on Tesco value microwave meals for one to be eaten in the corner of my damp and desperate flat. Their already oversalted meat lasagne seasoned further by a glistening, solitary tear.

Embarrassing man makes ok point in argument

Posted on by

A deeply embarrassing man yesterday punched above his weight and made a number of insightful remarks in a conversation with friends. His long suffering buddies all commented on the unfortunate absence of people to impress when the socially awkward city worker wittily responded to comments made in an article in the Metro newspaper.

‘The article was about the average earning of Britons. I just thought some of the points made were a bit off the mark. So I criticised them.’ Shortly after telling the story to reporters he began to slip and his conversation returned to the deadening horror of a man with no purpose, no promise, no joy.

‘Usually I can’t bare to see him, but yesterday for a couple minutes he was all right’. When asked if the two shocked onlookers would consider meeting him more often the responses were less than optimistic. ‘To be honest, I think it was probably a one off’.