Pun Watch

BRACE YOURSELVES for another NEW FEATURE on Toasty’s Futon, which will probably never appear again, like most previous new features on Toasty’s Futon

Where should we be without dear old, smelly old Google?

Not only does it help us keep track of the global epidemic of misspelling Brandeis and Johns Hopkins (so many pages now refer to ‘Brandels University’ and ‘John Hopkins University’ that someone ought to set them up and start dishing out honorary degrees) and to locate all those debtors and biblioklepts who’ve spent twenty years slithering away from us, it enables us for the very first time in history to measure LACK OF ORIGINALITY worldwide.

This morning, when I’d wearied of grinding used chewing gum into the pavement with the heel of my kinky boot, it occurred to me to feed a number of stale, obvious puns into Google’s maw and see what came out.

Santa’s Grotty showed up well with 389 hits, while Zorba the Geek achieved a spirited 556. Close Encounters of the Turd Kind (302) was left trailing by Close Encounters of the Bird Kind (784), itself outrun by Close Encounters of the ABSURD Kind (884).

I’d expected that dismal old standby Fangs for the Memory to carry all before it, but it clocked up only 775, following Bob Hope’s failure to come back from the dead as a vampire.

Desperate Houseplants, proud owner of 1,070 hits, was easily trounced by Walk on the Wilde side with 12,700 – but the outright, runaway, pardon-me-while-I-knock-a-nail-into-my-head winner was The Write Stuff with a staggering 558,000.

No doubt they all thought they were being original.

Surprisingly, The Greatest Tory Ever Sold had only four hits to show for itself.

And there were no hits at all for Ten Gays That Shook The World. Though there’ll be one now, of course.

My own little pellet of mediocrity, donated to the web. Aaaahhh.
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(REAL) DEATHS IN MARCH 2006
3 March: Ivor Cutler, author of Many Flies Have Feathers, Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Volume 2 and A Sheet Metal Worker is Approached by Ivor Cutler, among whose recreations in later life was ‘dishing out sticky labels to deserving persons’ with slogans such as ‘Add 15 inches to your stride and save 4½ per cent of insects’; of whom Laurie Taylor said, ‘He’s been alternative so long that it is impossible to specify the reality from which he originally departed.’ 8 March: George Sassoon, piano-accordionist and investigator of extra-terrestrial phenomena, who reputedly learnt Serbo-Croat in two months and kept a consignment of heavy water in his home. 13 March: Robert Baker, inventor of the chicken nugget. 25 March: John Letts, who invented, but did nothing about, a machine for fixing telephones to flat surfaces, a gadget for stapling buttons to shirts, and a pornographic game of Monopoly. 26 March: Michael Bateman, who ‘looked like Steve McQueen and laughed like Deputy Dawg’ and was sacked from the Daily Herald for throwing bread rolls at a Lord Mayor’s banquet.
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Sad to report that Dr Alan Rankin, better known to connoisseurs of my sidebar as Alabamah and deepsix, died on 28 March, well before his time.

I think of the roar of ‘REXUS MINIMUS!’ with which he’d greet me (odd, that, as the name’s Toasty); the gift of Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic ‘because you’re the only person I know who’d appreciate it’; the glimpses of a past more colourful than most; his smiling vigour (and continued ready interest in others) when clearly in pain towards the end.

To quote our mutual buddy Kriss Robb: ‘An adventurer, a wiseman and a priest – worthy of a Viking’s send-off.’

Leith will not easily forget him, as Peter’s readers already know.