Toasty’s Futon

Dare to be a Daniel

2007-10-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

LONGTIME Toasty-watchers (easily recognised by their burnt noses and continual nervous tremor) will recall that my Futon was originally unrolled at http://toastyboy.blogspot.com but had to be deleted in November 2005 due to snow on the points at Volvograd or some such piffle. (Wasn't there a menacing email typed in human blood by Mad Frankie Fraser's sister or something? Everything's a blur after so many years of skull/breezeblock interaction therapy.)

My first plan after the fuss died down was to reinstate the blog at the same address, but pesky old Blogger wouldn't let me, which I assumed meant the URL was out of bounds to the entire human race until the end of time, like Kenneth Williams's bathroom. So I lugged my futon across to this dump and started again with only the barrel I stood up in.

But what do I find now, after a mere eighteen months' absence in Papua New Guinea or wherever the hell I've been?

My quondam bijou pied-à-terre at http://toastyboy.blogspot.com has been wrenched open and infested by a slouching, unwashed answer-to-an-iron-maiden's prayer that chooses to call itself DANIEL.

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So what do we know of this creature?

• It purports to be aged 14. Then again, so do most of us, at least when threatened with action for breach of promise or auditioning for Wanna Be A Celebrity? Then Lick This Vat Of Electrified Treacle! on BBC3, so we can't knock it for that.

• It claims to like sports. And who would be so cynical as to accuse it of being insufficiently specific? I bet it enjoys nothing better than a hearty afternoon of lacrosse, netball, hare-coursing or extreme nude bobsleigh. It's just the sort.

• It says it likes cooking. So did Typhoid Mary.

• It likes hanging with friends. So did Mussolini.

• It’s not actually very good at getting round to writing its goddam blog. In fact it's utterly useless at it. It doesn't even try. It's a complete waste of space and natural resources. It should be POKED VERY HARD WITH A POISONED STICK until it GOES AWAY and STOPS JAYWALKING ON MY BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS.

Orright?

Honestly. Can't turn my back for a moment.

Pour encourager les autres

2007-10-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

YIPPEE!

Today's Edinburgh Evening News says there's to be "a worldwide campaign…to encourage dozens of new hotels to be built in Edinburgh."

About time too.

All too often lately I've met as-yet-unbuilt new hotels that seem to me to be doing damn all except sit on their enormous bottoms drinking cheap lager and claiming double invalidity credit and disabled ex-coastguard's plastic truss allowance - paid for, don't forget, by the likes of you and me, or do I have to be a taxpayer to say that?

When you suggest they should jolly well go and get themselves built somewhere, they just chortle and make unpleasant noises with their service entrances.

But they'll be laughing on the other side of their optional (mandatory) 85% staff gratuities now, won’t they?

When these campaigning johnnies hit the streets, with all their electric prods, gas bazookas and other "encouragement" equipment, why, those idle, greedy, lead-swinging as-yet-unbuilt hotels won't know what's hit 'em.

Just think what fun it'll be to watch the brutes being built - in Edinburgh - AGAINST THEIR WILL!!

Mind you, Middlesbrough might have been even better…

So, am I back now, you ask? Too early to say, really. Let's see how it goes, eh? Thanks for dropping by (Betty)…

Pun Watch Extra

2006-05-24T04:35:00.000-07:00

IT’S exactly 160 years since Karl Marx established the Communist Correspondence Committee (and most of their letters still haven’t arrived, due to industrial action).

What better way to celebrate than by Googling on ‘You have nothing to lose but your…’?

Among the stragglers, Danes, drains, grains, Janes and sprains are all wholly pathetic, with one hit each. Rains and trains clock up two, manes three, reins four, and gains five, but this isn’t the sort of showing we expect from a crew of brawny young unfunny puns who’ve always had a good diet and a supportive home.

Stains does better with ten, canes is finding its length with eleven, veins getting into its stride with thirteen and pains going for the burn with fourteen.

But alas, alas, we all knew how this was going to end, didn’t we? Way out in front – leaving every rival panting in the dust – protruding like the proverbial luminous sore thumb with rigor mortis – is the inevitable BRAINS.

Ha flipping pigging chiselling ha. No wonder everything’s being overrun by militant Islam.

As for such non-runners as cranes, Hussains, lanes, mains, McLeans, panes, plains, planes, refrains, reigns, skeins, Staines, strains, thanes, Twains, vanes, wains, Waynes and Zanes, I don’t know whether to be glad we don’t have to put up with them or sad that there’s so little originality left that people can’t even come up with puns that are merely halfway obvious.

Perhaps this barrel of absinthe will help me decide.
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EDINBURGH NEWSWHINGE
PLANS to develop student flats just a spliff’s throw from the popular nightclub Studio 24 have been given the go-ahead.

I think this is disgraceful.

The poor nightclub won’t be able to get a wink of sleep.

Pointing Percy at the Oubliette

2006-05-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

These fourteen months have been cruelly lonely.

It’s a sad business when you’re the only blogger on Blogger whose interests include the xylophone.

That’s what I was when I started out. And that’s what I thought I remained.

Silly me!

If instead of wallowing under this duvet with three (dead) chorus girls and a signed photograph of Freddie ‘Parrot Face’ Davies for the past year-and-a-bit I had spent my time obsessively checking the Blogger listings like the rest of you, I would have known my isolation ended after just two months, when Percy Chanel came on the scene.

Percy is a 104-year-old male Virgo (oo-er, missis) located in Babooda, Honkoo Tonkoo, Bouvet Island. Among his other interests are ‘destroying piccolos and other wind instruments’, trainspotting and counting marbles.

Why, we’re practically soulmates.

Or so I thought before reading this brutally dismissive, Rhett-Butler-like avowal:

i am EVERYTHING YOU R NOT, INCLUDING SMART, HOT AND DESIRABLE.

Well, as Larkin said, useful to get that learnt.

If we’re going to be all frank & harsh & candid, may I point out to Mister Chanel that I’ve written one hundred more postings than he has, and 700% more people have read my profile?

In fact, he’s written precisely ONE POSTING, whereas I’ve been sitting here at all hours, churning out deathless prose in industrial quantities while seldom pausing to eat, shave, or renew my subscription to the Illustrated Journal of Early Eye-Gouging Equipment.

But he must have something I haven’t, because look, Edward Gibson of Tip Top Equities has left him a 425-word comment, and he’s never posted so much as an epigram at Toasty’s Futon, despite my constantly emailing him and hanging around outside his house with boxes of chocolates and electric prods.

You must now imagine me pouting, and kicking a trash can.

Today’s Clues

2006-05-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

(3) Botulism causes Nagasaki – deprave your cladding

{€} Earls’ tricycles occlude Paganini, one might hypothecate

]‰[ Lindy whistles a chocolate Valentine, Your Honour

$$$ The bonus has now risen to nineteen saveloys!!! $$$
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(REAL) DEATHS IN APRIL 2006
12 April: The Dowager Lady Hesketh, former rugby correspondent of The Spectator, sacked by Boris Johnson in 1999. 15 April: Lord Eliot, surfer, busker and nude escapologist. 17 April: Peter Cadbury, test pilot, Nuremberg prosecutor and Rwandan gorilla owner, whose sole reason for pig-keeping was allegedly to annoy his neighbours, and who armed himself with a crossbow after burglars stole the gun he kept by his bed for shooting burglars.

Pun Watch

2006-04-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Slave To The Meme

2006-03-09T00:22:00.001-08:00

7 things I’d like to do before I die.

Escape from this giant zip-up pencil-case.

7 things I can’t do.

Inhale and exhale simultaneously.

Fly through corned beef.

Walk down the street without twitching and holding on to roadsigns.

7 things that attracted me to my partner.

Her lack of discrimination.

7 things I often say.

Don’t be concerned, it’s just a side-effect of medication.

The spiders, the spiders!

7 films.

Sand and Gravel Extraction

Les Parapluies de Biggleswade

Salo: 120 Days of Yes Dear, Very Nice

7 books.

How Bletchley Cracked The Green Cross Code

How to operate your Betamax Cartridge Pop-Sideways Toaster

What to do in a major chemical leakage (= turn to froth)

7 memes.

List your aunts, in descending order of tediousness.

Write a story about a pencil sharpener (minimum 3,000 words).

Only Post If You Have Something Interesting To Say.

(It’ll never catch on.)

Melodies for sick minds

2006-03-08T05:58:00.000-08:00

MAY God smite and pulverise SupertonicCDs.com for putting Beautiful Child by Eva McIntyre at the top of their ‘Pick of the Month’ list.

This is what happens when you let go of the idea of moral and aesthetic standards: people start praising a clapped-out old fishwife who couldn’t even get herself a gig at the Frontier Club, Batley.

Blimey, if we’d known this was how the world was going to end up, we wouldn’t have bothered to pour our life’s blood into initiating sub-sub-sub-committees of the General Synod to examine abstruse questions of liturgiology.

All I can say about Beautiful Child is, don’t buy it, don’t play it, don’t talk to anyone about it, lest you initiate a drip-drip-drip of corruption that leads to Barlinnie and the more debauched and abandoned corners of MY FLAT.

But I know you’re all gagging to see that picture of the old bag again, so here it is:

And look, it’s even bigger this time.

Let no one say Toasty’s Futon doesn’t maintain its traditions.

P.S. From this webpage it would appear that Eva is every bit as old as we always suspected, and indeed was working at a hospital in Nebraska at the time of the Wall Street Crash. Oho, it’s all coming out now…

NEWS FLASH! Eva celebrated Valentine’s Day by dining (on her own, no doubt) at the Ibex in Main Street, Chaddleworth, Berks. But their hospitality has been ill repaid – she’s gone and published a rave review here. Talk about the kiss of death. No right-thinking person will set foot in the place again. ‘I'm looking forward to a repeat visit!!’ she drivels. The evacuation of Chaddleworth is in progress.

Previous briefings on Eva McIntyre

All About Eva
Throw Away The Key

Super Fluous

2006-02-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

Just took that Superhero Test that every other blogger in the world seems to be doing, but I feel there must be some sort of malfunction, it hasn’t come out right, not sure what to make of it actually.

Your results: You are THE INDIGO GONAD

You are overrated, overweight, bone idle and terrified of women, especially ones with pickaxes.

The Indigo Gonad ----------------------- 98%
Velux Man ------------------------------- 86%
WonderWimp ---------------------------- 71%
The Sheathed Poltroon ----------------- 65%
Captain Retentive ----------------------- 50%
Ultra Capon ------------------------------ 32%
Vacillator --------------------------------- 28%
Halitosis Girl ----------------------------- 19%
Coelacanth -------------------------------- 16%
Wibble-o-tron ---------------------------- 7%
Beast of Batley --------------------------- 0.005%

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Click here to end it all

Knight in (possibly white) satin

2006-02-18T06:53:00.000-08:00

It seems only yesterday I was hailing the achievement of Peter and Caroline in bringing the Toasty’s Futon sidebar to the attention of the world via the Bloggies Awards.

In fact however it was Monday January 30 2006 and the world may already have forgotten, being the scatterbrained wee scamp of a planet it is.

So well done Peter for getting himself nominated in the Satin Pajama Awards in not just one category but two – Lifetime Achievement and Best Personal.

This was exactly what we needed to keep the Toasty’s Futon sidebar in the public eye. No one would ever have heard of Naked Blog if it wasn’t for Toasty’s Futon, you know.

A touch disappointing that Caroline couldn’t be bothered to get herself nominated in the Satin Pajama Awards too, but she’s a busy woman with 400 children and 8,000 pigs to support and apparently New Zealand bloggers aren’t eligible in any case though I’m sure she could have found a way round that if she’d really tried but who am I to cast aspersions, particularly as she’s bigger than I am and a mean wielder of a knuckleduster?

I will now crucify myself with croquet hoops on the Wilton Park bowling green, Batley. Look, here I go!

Chess Problem

2006-02-16T15:50:00.000-08:00

At last you’ve achieved what you’ve always dreamed of: your opponent’s king is at the exact centre of the board, checkmated simultaneously by all sixteen of your pieces.

Suddenly an asteroid smashes into South America, destroying all life on earth.

How do you persuade Argos to refund the price of your chess set, which has no obvious defects?

Kindly contributed by the Batley & District Chess (and Women’s Underwear Theft) Club

Valley Of The Bats

2006-02-10T22:04:00.000-08:00

Right, then. What to say to all these moaning minnies who keep emailing me about this blog’s alleged ‘Oxford bias’? – apart from suggesting they’re probably the same dead-end dickheads who spent last year emailing me about its supposed ‘Edinburgh bias’? Never satisfied, some people.

In point of fact I don’t give a stuffed weasel about either of those poxy, overrated Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-holes.

The only place I care about is Batley, Yorkshire, and to prove it we’re going to have a special Batley Month on Toasty’s Futon, revelling in the North Country delights that swivel around me in all directions as I sit here proudly in Batley, Yorkshire, which is where I am, as I’m sure we all agree.

For example, did you know that Batley is the second biggest town in the Heavy Woollen District?

Now, be honest here: could you name the biggest town in the Heavy Woollen District?

Course not. Nor could I. Which just goes to show that Batley punches more than its weight, doesn’t it?

Were you aware that the word ‘Batley’ derives from an Anglo-Saxon name meaning either valley or homestead of bats or, alternatively, the homestead (or, presumably, valley) of a person named Batt?

Come to that, is your name Batt?

If so, then who knows, perhaps this was originally your valley (or homestead, or whatever). But for your own daft reasons you unwisely chose to naff off, so it’s mine now, and don’t come crying to me asking for it back, either.

Furthermore, it’s time you all got it into your heads that by 1870 Batley was the centre of the shoddy trade, which involved turning rags into something even more boring than that, so boring in fact that no one ever managed to stay awake long enough to find out what it was.

This was the foundation of the town’s enduring prosperity, and the only reason the government injected £37.5 million into Batley between 1993 and 1998 was that they were very silly people with more cash than sense, and NOTHING to do with Batley not having two bent ha’pennies to rub together after people found out that shoddy was a load of, well, need I go on?

These are just some of the brain-rupturingly interesting facts about Batley, Yorks, and don’t give me any of that ‘You’re not really in Batley’ stuff because look, here’s the Batley Town Centre Webcam, and there’s me, right there, just in front of the Old Town Hall, waving my invalidity card at you, only you probably can’t see me due to the ongoing riot, smog, and camera malfunction.

And here’s the website of the Batley Buggy Club, and as you can see they’re looking for someone to write their ‘New To Racing’ section (‘Fancy yourself as a bit of a writer?’) so off you go then, don’t mind me, and isn’t that a better use of your time than sending me all these emails with dead polecats attached to them, hmm?

Post Hock Ergo Proctor Hock

2006-02-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, gang, are you up for the big one?

According to today’s edition of the Oxford University Gazette, there are shortly to be Elections of Proctors, with all the heart-in-mouth suspense, all the pulse-pounding excitement, that such events invariably stir up.

And would you Adam-and-Eve it? The Master of Balliol College, Dr Andrew Graham, whose dad created Poldark (a tasteless canned meat, popular in wartime), is flinging wide the doors and pleading with us all to join in.

Yes, at 1.45 pm on Wednesday 8 March it’s come-one, come-all, to Balliol’s Old Senior Common Room – the scene of so many historic events that no one has ever heard of – and we can roll up our sleeves, spit on our hands, get stuck in and elect more Proctors than there are grains of sand in a college pudding.

To be precise:

All members of Balliol College entitled under Council Regulations to vote (Council Regulations 21 of 2002, Gazette, Vol. 132, p. 1419) are hereby invited to attend.

Ignore that waffle about ‘entitled under Council Regulations’. It seems to me that the criteria of entitlement specified in Section 13 of Council Regulations 21 of 2002 are capable of more than one interpretation, especially if you don’t read them, which I certainly don’t intend to do.

As for having to be ‘members of Balliol College’, how the hell will they know who’s a member of college and who isn’t? It’s not like they have a list or anything.

From what I can gather, all Oxford tutors are off their faces on cheap white cider by half past ten in the morning. If a brigade of Nazi stormtroopers came charging in with guns blazing, they’d probably just mumble ‘Ah, nice to see you again, Smithington-Smith, isn’t it’ before slumping unconscious to the Axminster.

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Which brings me to this brilliant idea I’ve just had. Why don’t we improve this potentially dreary occasion by dressing up in surprising, unorthodox ways?

How about a Brazilian carnival costume, or a sexy French gravedigger’s outfit? Why not come as Hattie Jacques, or Pharaoh Rameses II, or a bouncy castle, or a rogue mammoth, or a giant vermilion axolotl? If there are five of you, and you’re capable of standing on each other’s shoulders making roaring noises and discharging coloured smoke, why not come as the Red Arrows?

And what’s wrong with a few streamers, party-poppers, squirty-cream canisters, aerosol cans of scarlet paint and gratuitously-discharged fire extinguishers?

A scattering of concealed amplifiers pumping out the Red Army Chorus and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir should complete an unforgettable tableau.

Shan’t be there myself, unfortunately, as I shall be detained in bed on very urgent business. But I know I can rely on you all to uphold the honour of St Futon’s.
The countdown starts now…

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(REAL) DEATHS IN JANUARY 20068 January: Lord Stratford, who tabled a parliamentary motion condemning the entire human race and looking forward to ‘the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the Earth and wipes them out, thus giving nature the opportunity to start again’. 13 January: Alistair Sampson, author of Don’t Be Disgusting. 23 January: Emilie Muse, who was buried alive for 97 hours at a marathon dance contest in Pennsylvania in 1932, and subsequently in other places. 24 January: Marion Wrottesley, whose husband-to-be, at their first meeting, locked her in the lavatory at the Bag of Nails nightclub until she agreed to marry him. 27 January: Phyllis King, who won the women’s mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1931 and was still playing tennis in her nineties.

Lurking in the shadows

2006-01-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I despair of the British public.

Have you seen what they’ve done now?

When the BBC unwisely invited them to name the Worst Briton of the Last 1,000 Years, who do you think they opted for?

Would you believe, Jack the bleedin’ Ripper?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Jack the Ripper was a cross between Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama. He’d have attracted too much attention, looking like that.

But how on earth can any reasonable, intelligent adult think Jack the Ripper was anywhere near as vile as Andrew Pickering?

_________________

What do you mean, ‘Who’s Andrew Pickering?’?

The Andrew Pickering!

The Andrew Pickering who sat next to me at primary school and was always flicking bogies and chopped-up caterpillars at me when Miss Robocop wasn’t looking; who stuck pins in me and pelted me with school tapioca pudding in the bike shed; who filled my satchel with paraffin and left me roped to a poisonous shrub after stealing my collection of Reginald Maudling non-moveable inaction figures…

The Andrew Pickering who gave me the nickname ‘Trough Of Sludge’ that I’ve never been able to shake off (the Princess Royal was using it only yesterday)…

The Andrew Pickering who went with me to Futon Vale Remedial Academy and taught the other kids to clash two dustbin lids together with my head between them; who forced me to shove giant hogweed up the headteacher’s pantaloons and then ran away; who sabotaged my science project by telling the CIA it was a secret Soviet germ warfare bunker…

Ring any bells yet?

The Andrew Pickering who used to walk up and down outside my hostel all night, just to unnerve me…

The Andrew Pickering who got me sacked from every job I’ve ever had by convincing them I was fat and idle and never came to work and was always sticking my tongue out at them behind their backs, and how would he have known any of that, and why on earth did they listen to him anyway?

The Andrew Pickering who keeps ringing me up and then putting the receiver down when I answer; who makes horrible rustling noises behind the skirting boards, night after night; who tells my neighbours to empty their wheelie bins through my letterbox; who gives me food poisoning and eczema and delirium tremens; who puts banana skins and abandoned skateboards on the pavement exactly where he knows I’m going to tread…

Do you know that every night of the week he follows me home, taking great care to remain out of sight at all times?

No, sorry to be blunt, but the British public are simply WRONG. This sort of thing is far more evil than just disembowelling the odd prostitute, which anyone might find himself doing, had he happened to mistake her for Robert Kilroy-Silk.

So come on, Brits. Get a grip, eh?

_________________

LEGAL NOTE
I have been asked to make it clear that the foregoing remarks are not in any way connected with this Andrew Pickering.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

We live among gods

2006-01-30T07:22:00.000-08:00

Lurching upright from my tomb, may I warmly congratulate not one but two inmates of the Toasty’s Futon sidebar, Caroline of Trivial Pursuit and Peter of Naked Blog, who’ve been shortlisted in the 2006 Bloggies, the annual awards for weblogs?

Caroline is one of five cyber-scribblers brawling for the title of Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog, while Peter, who was blogging away merrily when most of us were merely twinkles in the plumber’s eye, should be a shoo-in for the Lifetime Achievement Award.

There’s still (just) time to add your voice to the swelling consensus that Caroline and Peter should be made Perpetual Joint Presidents Of Everything. Get yer ass down to this page here, scroll down and vote like it wuz goin’ out of fashion, and afterwards you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror and know you’re a Good Person and who cares about the Rotherhithe murders anyway, it was a long time ago.

Orange juice and soggy biscuits are now on sale in the créche, and don’t forget to look at our Floral Bazooka.

Self last

2006-01-17T22:31:00.000-08:00

Well, thank God that’s over for another year!

New readers may not know that in 1998 I was convicted of improperly consorting with a pistachio nut. A ridiculous charge that should never have come to court – I was only doing what the nut wanted, and don’t tell me I couldn’t possibly know about the desires of a nut, as this particular nut was communicating with me via special nut telepathy audible only to me, but they don’t understand that in the Crown Prosecution Service.

Any road up, I was spared jail, after a petition signed by all current inmates of British jails, pleading not to have to put up with me on top of everything else, was read to the court. Instead I got the so-called easy option: thirty weeks’ Community Service.

Easy, my pancreas. Do you realise that as a result of this ghastly business I haven’t had a proper Christmas or New Year since 1997?

You see, what I was sentenced to was thirty weeks to be served in annual three-week chunks commencing on December 25th.

The first seven days are spent in a secret lead-lined bunker beneath a gasometer in Hounslow. They give me a crate of orange juice, a sack of untoasted crumpets, a book called How To Spell, and a computer that can’t receive incoming mail.

And I then have to write all the post-Christmas journalism, thus releasing our wonderful sociopathic, space-filling, pig-ignorant hacks to spend quality time with the families who hate them.

All those belly-aching columns and ‘lighter vein’ opinion pieces about how it’s impossible to keep your festive goodwill going when your mother-in-law inadvertently spits her false teeth into the cranberry sauce while your maiden aunt’s flea-ridden mongrel shags your favourite whoopee cushion…

And isn’t it sad that the simple joys of Christmas are being howled down by an orgy of materialism and spend-spend-spend, and oh for those poor-but-happy Yuletides of yore when everyone munched on crunchy robins and all you really wanted from Santa was a period of remission in your frostbite…

And money’s tight after Xmas, isn’t it, so be first in the queue for the post-Christmas sales, except there’s nothing worth shoplifting as all the good stuff was sold in the pre-Christmas sales, and here’s how to turn turkey lungs and bowels into an Emergency Soup that lasts for ten days (because no one wants to drink it) and now’s the time to book your holiday, except the only place you can afford to go is next door’s car-port…

Haven’t you ever thought that all this stuff is utterly identical, year after year?

Now you know why.

_________________

My second week of misery is spent hobbling around Salisbury Plain and Sherwood Forest on all fours in a black jumpsuit, trying to breathe another year’s life into those ‘mysterious big cat’ stories.

But it’s the third week that really does my head in.

Under a cloak of secrecy I’m hovercrafted into Dublin, kitted out in ancient rags and dragged down to the catacombs beneath the Basilica of Saint Shellailleaggghhhh of the Polypins.

As you probably know, in these catacombs the miraculously uncorrupt (but still pretty knackered-looking) body of Saint Shellailleaggghhhh is preserved on top of his tomb, and goggle-eyed pilgrims gape by candlelight at the withered, waxy, scarcely human features of the old twit – except between the 8th and the 15th of January every year when it isn’t Saint Shellailleaggghhhh at all, it’s me – the supposed ‘lookalike’.

What, you ask, is Saint Shellailleaggghhhh up to all this while? Kitted out in skin-tight lycra, with his new blond highlights gleaming in the sun, he’s riding the surf in some tropical hideaway, or hurling himself into a frenzy of body-popping in the nighthawks’ fleshpots of NYC. Nauseating, really, a man of his age. But, as he rightly croaks, it’s only once a year.

Once too often for me, mate. You’ve no idea what those rats can do to a body that still has some juice in it. And as for pilgrims, you can catch things off them.

Anything’s gotta be better than that.

Even writing Toasty’s Futon again…

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(REAL) DEATHS IN DECEMBER 2005

19 December: Dr Julio Iglesias Puga, who fathered a child at the age of 87 and suffered a fatal heart attack, aged 90, days after the announcement that his wife was pregnant by him again. 27 December: Captain Peter Moore, ‘military adviser’ to Salvador Dali (Dali thought that every banana republic had a military adviser and, being much more important than a banana republic, he should have one too).

Are you a FLOBB?

2005-12-24T04:26:00.000-08:00

If so, we may be related!

My real name is Denzil Patric Nigeletta Flobb born 13th February 1951 in a marsh in Chiselhurst Kent while my parents were on the run from the Triads.

My father Adolf Felicity Flobb died shortly after midnight on 14 February 1951 from natural causes related to a hail of bullets. He lies in an unmarked grave in this Tupperware box.

My mother Hysteria Djanogly Flobb was originally a Chevenix-Trench but when they ran out of Chevenix she retrained as an industrial canal. She had siblings Gussie (died 1920) Linthropp (died 1921) Ebenezer (moved to San Francisco, changed name to Chip Shaft, died 1976 of terminal Magnum-type-moustache-itis) Euphemia (died of being called Euphemia, possibly in 1981 but no one was taking much notice) and Janice (now Perpetual President of the Multi-Global Greed Corporation, hi there Auntie you don’t look a day over 28 and I’ve always respected your values). My mother now lives under this stone.

Since my recent serious illness (having unwisely attempted to read The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall) I have become very interested in family history and also genealogy and moreover would like to compile a family tree of everyone who is in any way related to my family or even not.

So if you’re a Flobb – on whichever side of the blanket – why don’t you get in touch with me giving as much detail as possible of how we’re related and how many gold bars you’re going to leave me in the event of your sudden and unforeseen demise?

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(REAL) DEATHS IN NOVEMBER 2005

16 November: Ralph Edwards, who persuaded the town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, to change its name to ‘Truth or Consequences’. 17 November: Sam, awarded the title of World’s Ugliest Dog for three consecutive years, 2003-5. 28 November: Professor D R Shackleton Bailey, whose ten-volume edition of Cicero’s letters was dedicated to a cat.
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One extra death that’s rather too real for comfort: Marty Stoetzle, better known as Zen Clown, that most assiduous and dedicated of contributors to Ask A Drunk and Mindless Prattle, passed away on December 20th. He was 59.

A Hindu poem he often used to include in his emails:

Sometimes naked, sometimes mad.
Now the scholar, now the fool.
Thus they appear on Earth:
The free men.

Too right. Rest in peace my dear sir.

P.S. (3 Jan 06) In memory of happier times, here’s the thread on which Zen Clown resigned from Mindless Prattle in January last year.

Colin the Chameleon

2005-12-06T08:21:00.000-08:00

Everyone’s aware – and we’ve just been over to Mongolia and quizzed four hundred nomadic tribespeople and yes, we do mean ‘everyone’ – that Colin Dexter pops up somewhere in every episode of Inspector Morse.

But can you always spot him?

Here’s Toasty’s Futon’s exclusive (i.e., nobody else wanted to publish it) guide to every single glimpse we get of Colin Dexter, Man of a Thousand Faces.

Episode 1, ‘The Botley Stiffs’: Old man with white beard eating butterscotch in Duke Humfrey’s Library.

Episode 2, ‘The Tell-Tale Empties’: Special constable with axe embedded in lung.

Episode 3, ‘Nor Ever Chaste, Except You Ravish Me’: Distinguished-looking man at High Table in Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Episode 4, ‘Death Just Outside Kidlington’: Chaplain of Saint Diddumses (in Hamburg nightclub sequence).

Episode 5, ‘Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough, Sir?’: Afro-haired musician playing Sousaphone in Radcliffe Camera.

Episode 6, ‘Return, Alphéus, The Dread Voice Is Past’: Elderly nun who spits at Morse in street.

Episode 7, ‘The Marble Palaces of Blackbird Leys’: Obese man in jetpack, wearing Motorhead tee-shirt.

Episode 8, ‘Oh Christ, My Head’: Goth shooting up in multi-storey car park.

Episode 9, ‘If Snow Be White, Why Then Her Breasts Are Dun’: Dolly Parton Impersonator at Ashmolean Colloquium.

Episode 10, ‘The Berinsfield Astrolabe’: Small boy smashing Town Hall windows with baseball bat.

Episode 11, ‘That’s Not A Liver, It’s A Cry For Help’: Nude Rastafarian bodybuilder (look closely behind the Vice-Chancellor).

Episode 12, ‘Sphere-Borne Harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Verse’: Leader of Klingon raiding party (this one was rather badly edited).

Episode 13, ‘The Palimpsests of Cowley Marsh’: Heap of pineapples in Covered Market.

Episode 14, ‘My Name’s Endeavour M., And I’m An Alcoholic’: Third pink elephant.

Episode 15, ‘So Rudely Forc’d. Tereu’: Thirty-foot-tall evil robot, running amok in Norrington Room in Blackwell’s.

Episode 16, ‘A Corpse In Can-Anyone-Think-Of-Another-Suburb?’: All members of the Tactical Firearms Unit.

Episode 17, ‘Got Any Spare Change, Superintendent?’: Bela Lugosi lookalike blowing iridescent bubbles whilst riding unicycle, who gets served before Morse in the White Horse and then makes disagreeable noises.

Episode 18, ‘Kicking The Bucket To The Sound Of Trumpets’: Fat lady. (Singing. With evident relief.)

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You may be wondering what’s happened to the five previous postings.

Annoyingly, technical problems have forced us to delete the blog and reinstate it, in the process losing everything posted before today.

The good news is that The Toasty’s Futon Archive is now complete and contains not only all postings from late March to early November this year, but the newly deleted five as well:

Throw Away The Key (1 December)
Today’s Query (29 November)
Eight things I wish I’d known at sixteen (28 November)
Toasty Lundqvist’s Guide to Britain, Part One (27 November)
Streets of fear (26 November)
The Toasty’s Futon Archive shall eternally remain the topmost link on our sidebar.

In other news, it’s a warm welcome back to Jamie4U after six months’ imprisonment and silence…