Monday 2 December 2013

Sleuthwitch Franchise - NO DEAL

$9m plus for the
Sleuthwitch franchise?
Chicken feed!” says Lee.
Carlo Marx Bingo Club
Arnie Goy and The Sock Puppet at the Carlo Marx Bingo Club, Lune Press
After a three-cornered bidding war, the Sock Puppet has been informed, Lee turns down a book/TV serial deal worth $9m (six-of-large English). The sock puppet spoke to Arnold Goy (of Shiksa & Goy), who headed up the bidders' consortium.


Carlo Marx Bingo Club, London.


Waiter: What'll it be, then?


Goy: A large single malt, neat and without ice, please.


Waiter: And for the broad? I mean... for the snake?


The Sock Puppet: I'll have a DocMarten's.


Waiter: Boot or shoe?


TSP: A shoe, please.


Waiter: Black or ox-blood?


TSP: Ox-blood.


Waiter: What size?


TSP: A 9½.


Waiter: Laced or slip-on?


Goy: For pity's sake!


TSP: Laced, please.


Waiter: Left or right foot?


Goy: Just bring the bloody pair!


Waiter: With or without Odor-Eaters?


Goy: Will you clear off? Right, now I'm ready to answer your questions.


TSP: OK, you offered Lee $9m for a book he hasn't even finished? You're on the weed again, aren't you?


Goy: Clean as a whistle, Squire! 'Struth is, Lee hasn't had much free time of late, but his idea is a total smasher. A real blinder. A Bobby Dazzler. A Jammy Riddler!


TSP: Oh, aye? Who else was bidding?


Goy: Little Brown Jug was in there, as were Random Plot. On the TV side, we had interest from FocksTales and heXTV.


TSP: heXTV, the witchy porn channel?


Goy: Well, there exists some scope for kissing, cuddles and a bum smack or two in the book.


TSP: You were turning Lee's latest tome into a piece of Satan Smut?


Goy: Begging your honour's pardon, there was nothing smutty about the deal. Largely tasteful, it was, and suitable for persons of severable dispositions.


TSP: Severable, eh? I'm not surprised the author turned you down. How could he live up to himself?


Goy: Worse things have happened in space!


TSP: Lee's not a fizzled out comet, man! Not one of your flipping cheese graters, either; he'd rather leave his work on the back seat of a trolleybus than have it turned into someone's slush fund. What would he do with that kind of money anyway? Buy himself a tractor?


Goy: He could do with a new tractor, yes; and a decent pair of reading glasses.


TSP: You leave him alone. He's quite happy as he is.


Goy: Exactly how many copies of his first novel has he sold exactly?


TSP: Exactly? There's no need to be starkers!


Goy: Come on, how many is it, after eighteen months on sale?


TSP: I'd have to check the website.


Goy: I'll save you the trouble. In eighteen months he has sold a grand total of one book.


TSP: An achievement in itself! But sales have been slow with your world economic crisis. People don't like shelving out, see, rather spare their cutter for cheap sex and booze.


Goy: He's a flipping dreamer.


TSP: The man's a hartist.


Goy: You mean he's wasting the hair he breathes. He should pull over and leave some other schmuck ago.


TSP: Who's stopping them?


Goy: There should be a law against it.


Waiter: Here's your order, gentle... z.


Goy: Did I say I wanted ice?


Waiter: That's not ice, sir; those are shards of broken glass.


TSP: Well these shoes are a lovely fit, both of them! Just smell that leather! Cheers, Big Ears!



Goy: Up yours, Pussy Foot!
Socket Puppet Master
Never Sign!




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Friday 1 November 2013

The 1803

Beethoven’s Great Eastern Symphony
1803
Wreck of the 1803 ($10 Aquarium Version)
Constructed at Tranmere from 47,000 tons of wrought iron, 11 million brass rivets, 70 miles of piano wire and A-flat tyre, this sea symphony held the longest spot in the charts from November 1803 until June the following year, when it was sunk by Admiral Horatio Balmpott in mistake for a French East Indiaman.

A snidey short cut from late classical into the mid-Atlantic, “The 1803” (as it’s derisively called by muzakologists) received its first performance at the battle of Rushworth & Drapers, 1807, when a squadron of Pomeranian Hornblowers were chased into a Masurian pond by Polish flautists of the Grande Armée Concert Party. Its tragic opening theme is repeated ad nausoleum on oboe and flageolet, tin tray & castanet. Then a counter melody of shaken coins and raspberry glissandoes intrudes; after a short fudge, the mood lightens into a pathetic bazurka. Movements two, three and four follow in much the same fashion, with various changes of tempo, flavour and venue.
1803
Dave's "Napoleon With Trout" (fishscale on canvas)
Public performances of the symphony were banned by Napoleon Bonaparte, who never forgave Ludwig for letting him down on the sandy lake shores of Pomerania, but who nevertheless called for the tune to be hummed at his deathbed. Ludwig Van received only 17 Austrian Krones for the work and later repudiated it as the product of a marinated biologist. CD available on His Monster’s Voice, LVB/Op/28.3.

In other news, the mummified penis of Beethoven’s cat, Donald, has been auctioned by Sodaboff’s, where it fetched three bob and an orange. Meanwhile, in San Diego, Beethoven’s orchestral version of the Trout Mask Replica has been unveiled as a fake. And back on The Wirral, Ludwig Van himself is to open the New Palace Motors Used Cars You Can Trust on Bromborough High Road. As a man in the street said, “I’ve had three cars. Each car has been a good car. What more can you ask?”
1803
Wirral Washout
In weather. Port Sunlight, tomorrow, the outdoor performance of Beethoven’s 6.2 Symphony “The Postural” is to be washed down with a little light Schubert and several strong breezers. 

Tuesday 1 October 2013

Droning On About...

Of all urban myths, surely Musca domestica is the elephant in the bog-house? (Pardon my Latin.)
pope swat
Awarding this beastie a classical tag, we're buying into the freakshow that it has a share in our cultural heritage. It bloody hasn't. Any member of the Cyclorrhapa clan that wanders into a family home is doomed to die there. It may enjoy a few hours of feeding, crapping and copping off while good honest folk are out in the field, but the offspring of such matches have no expectations whatsoever.

All types of fly, gnat, bluebottle and mosquito take fair warning: houses are black holes to be sucked into. There is no return for you, your children or your children's children.

In point of fact, houses are the evolutionary windscreen of the so-called house-fly. With its record of deaths on the road, one might as well call it Musa vehicula (car-fly); or in reference to its terrorist sympathies, Musa vigila (SWAT-fly).

Said to have evolved just before the fall of the dinosaur, the so-called house-fly first buzzed into the cave dwellings of anabolic reptiles and single cell rodents. Unmolested by anything without hooves or tails, it ate crap, laid its eggs in crap and also did a fair bit of crapping itself. Archaeologists back me up on this will you, having raked through the spoils of these places, would you please confirm my apotheosis on the matter?
cave swat
Thank you. As, as can be seen, early man's home was plagued with the creature's ancestor, as shown in a cave painting carbooted back to -40,000 BMC. That such paintings do not actually depict the hunting of fly, may be explained away by the taboo of Ahimsa (I am a vegetarian after all). So though no actual image of a stone age swatting exists, I can say squashed examples peel from the walls of excavations like blackened palimpsests.


Turning our backs, for the present, on the past and ignoring the cries of future conversationists, swat abolishionists and other zombies of cant & can't... the outlook is bleak for this unwelcome house guest. I've retired 37 specimens already this morning and Go-My-Hod if I hain't done yet. Don't they know it's only four months to Crimbo? Their days are numbered, so help me! Look, one on screen right now! Splat! Gotchya! Yeuch!
window swat

STOP PRESS.... STOP PRESS.... STOP PRESS.... STOP PRESS....

game set & match

'twas rich how Donald's children were Trumped
as Palmer's lion Cecil was brought down
by eco-friendly bow & arrow this week

of course all hunting folk must bow
before the majesty of Juan Carlos' elephant
shot dead in a park some years ago

the pair of which made pride in Palin's
homey caribou look positively wasted


so what humdrum safaris are left to us
brandishing our weapon of choice
the fly swat takes such low skill & much fuss

that murder in the kitchen's better done
before the poor kids are up & dressed



30/7/2015



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Sunday 1 September 2013

Fracking the Classics

fracking the classics
Snap!
Yesterday, a crack opened in the absolute underpants of English Letters. When past-modeliste Ivan de Squawk let off in the British Museum Reading Room, the ghost of Jacob Marley was seen to waft up from the floorboards. The Dickens, what? "A Christmas Carol" scribbled here? Surely Not! Marx wrote his "Das Kapital", followed by ten thousand lesser fractors that did scratch and fidget on green leather armchair - but never the inventor of "Oliver Twist"! Of "Martin Chuzzlewit"? Of "Bleak House"? Yet, before his very eyes, more than a hundred Korean tourists snapped Marley's ghost ventilating through authentic gaps in the Reading Room's floorboards. It seems inevitable that old Charley Boy was an incognito Reading Room arse after all - begging many bios to be rewrit. And pray, what else does de Squawks's trumpet involuntary mean for the wearers of literary belts & braces? That the Bumsbury underground contains a subconscious well of Old English Gas? That new Fraction Rights will be auctioned off - 4G style - by a cash-starved gov? Surely Dem Libs would never allow it?
fracking the classics
Click Neg!
Fear not, already Bold Moves are a-foot! The village the Brontës vicaraged has been braced for subsidence. A hosepipe ban around Jane Austen's cottage has been in force for over a century. Last weekend, in a nifty move, George Orwell's remote Scottish island of Jura was towed to safety across the Atlantic and into Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, overnight the B.Army has sealed off a ten mile exclusion zone around Stratford-upon-Avon, deploying Mark Ib tanks, armoured carts and banks of surface-to-air fiddle-Sticks. Even the boarded-up ice-cream parlour on New Brighton prom (most recently an adult shop) where John Lennon first whistled "She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!" has been awarded grade 2.1. with Hons..

>So, Prof. Quatermass, how exactly does the fraction process work?
fracking the classics
Q Pegged for Action
>Well Johnnie, it's important to tap into the correct real estate. For example, if you're after new works by Joe Orton, it's no use boffing in public lavatories built after 1967. Equip yourself with a decent Blue Plaque guide and a stout pair of walking shoes. And your flageolets, of course; swallow at least one tin of 'em before setting out.

>So what of the environmental consequences?

>Johnnie, as you know, there's still a helluva lot of work to be done in the lab, PCR results to shred into the pot and a watchamacallit, a microbiological vivisection of the genetic code. All that needn't hold us back, though. Remember, there's nothing like a good long fart for keeping out the cold on long winter nights.

>I should coco!


fracking the classics
Snap!
>No, Johnnie, you should Horlicks!


fracking the classics
Never Snap!



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Sunday 4 August 2013

The world's most least

graunaid aripotr
Not Quite Concorde
a) The world's most least airport is, of course, the Graunaid nepswaper. It isn't a conventional aripotr in the sense that winged fiends don't frig off or land on its centre folds every fifteen seconds. Nor do Bombay troubaducks spend much time nestled up between its UK and foreign travel pages. Moreover, it is not a pansweepr in the conventional sense, fot it trots not out the dead donkeys of obscure celebrities' husbands/wives. And what's more, it has no flipping page 3. Yet does it have a cracking page 2b, on which topographical errers vie with the nosegay poses of Messrs Watson & Holmes.
Queen' Own
On Her Majesty's Pleasure
b) The world's most unbendiest banana is, of course, the Queen's Own. Imported from less than one country, the sovereign's Handy Boomerang is available in Unbent, Jolly Unbent and I Don't Believe He Isn't Straight. Available from hawkers' barrows at select English football stadia, Her Majesty's Own Unbendable Banana is a member of Equestrian Equity.
Two Stinking Bears
Two Little Bears?
c) The world's Silliest Lies Show has, of course, been parked outside the Saturday morning children's slot on Channel Fork for the past month. Known in the trade as Biz's Lizzes, the show is hosted jointly by Ozzie harse painta Rodolfo de Harris and English redhead soap-groupie Rebecca Brookside. Formerly broadcast on BBC Wan, this family entertainment trundles out its trendy host of under-age spankers, e-knicker swappers and grainy spy-cam murderers. Between hopeful acts, Rodolfo leads community singing of "Two Little Baggers", "Jock the Jack with the Extra Pack" and "Stairwell to Hell". Meanwhile bored sultry Rebecca chills and cooks the old boys' socks. Love 'er!
Ronnie Aitch Corbett
Ronnie Aitch Corbett
d) Finally, it's over to the World's Least Youngest Man... who is, of course, Ronnie Aitch Corbett. Corbett, who swears he never laid 'ands on either Sooty or Sweep, has been more or less younger for more years than he dares to remember. Neither does he do impressions of his former partner, Ronnie Who's A Barking Biggsie Then? Instead, there he sits in his Emmanuelle Chair a-reminiscing of his days not at Oxford or Cambridge. Love 'im!
That Dirty Old Man
Wilfred Aitch Bramble
dd) But, of course, least most finally still, we have the silliest of all soliloquies from the least most Pan-Londoner of all...

Harry Pull Thy Pants Up Corbett: "You dirty, filthy, 'orrible little old man, YOU, I 'ate you, I does, you dirty old fellah; despicable, that's what you are, downright despicable!"

Old Mr Steptoe (toothless grinning:) "Aw get orf, 'Arold; do give over!" (mug wumps)
sock puppeteer
Sock it to 'em!



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Sunday 7 July 2013

Sock Puppet's Summer Fiction Wish List

beach book bitch
Not Another Beach Book Bitch?

"The Newsmonger's Niece" by Greenham Swallow (Beddly Hadd, 35p)
Greenham Swallow
Swallow This?
Set deep in the bogs of Westminster, Swallow's latest chirp follows corn merchant Deryck Luckless' search for the ideal incestual tryst. A bevvy of impotent back-benchers, a blind Police Commissioner and four generations of Thames boatpeople aside, Luckless' co-creations are all coarse-wittled, folksy folk, modelled in gnarled driftwood and daubed with yellow ocre and burnt umber. The plot, a potted palmtree Airfix would have been proud of, is sinewy, withered, ashen, cracked and shrink-wrapped in woad. The page numbering is (deliberately?) mixed-up and in several places the reader is asked to rip out perforated sheets and deposit them in an eco-friendly bag (provided). Finally one is left with a strong, mawkish feeling of Arglwydd Mawr!


"Packing It In" by Felipe Rope (Little Brown Jug, £19.95)
Felipe Rope
The Wrath of Rope
From a belated attempt at fixing (sic) crack cocaine to reminiscences of stuffing envelopes with JFK election bumf, Rope's latest novel is all of three hundred words long. Nevertheless, impatient readers should be prepared for some spectacular yawns. Each word has been meticulously cross-checked against a sub-set of Chinese ideograms, Mayan Codices and the Coney Island telephone directory. Rope, whom The New Yorker reports to be reaching the end of his namesake, has recently given several interviews longer than many of his books. However the torn and frayed doppleganger wafting in the wake of this his final publication is effectively a roaring silence.

"The Brother-In-Law of God" by Sallyman Mumbrush (Shiksa & Goy, 30 shillings)
Sallyman Mumbrush
Blasphemy or Blasted Phoney?
As the old efnic saying will have it, "The goodwife's ambulance is her husband's wheelbarrow" this is a tale told by an Iscariot, a three-times denier of holy writ, a Mammoth of Mammom of Moron. The trouble with this kind of faith-based suspension of disbelief is how you are often left with the feeling that barefaced heresy is itself an inverse form of worship. Meanwhile, to preview the plot: a goat goes missing from the family yard leading to a year long fleece-hunt during which the brother-in-law of God - for whom read, Patriarchal Kid - empties the coffers of many good shekles after bad, till bankrupcy do kick him up the turnip plot. I won't reveal exactly how Mumbrush manipulates the old deus ex-machina device into salving the Prod... except to say s/he does so with all the blots and howlers we have come to expect from his/er quill. Not to be read in public lavatories. Beach ban in operation on the Isle of Man.

"Poignard Pick-Me-Up" by Trucksie Lasse (Madman House, Free-On-Demand)
Trucksie Lasse
Linda van Rundstedt is still in bed
Loosely based on the sex-romps of pop groupie and songstress Linda van Runstedt, this quasi-autobiography of life on the road during the early 1970s is about as erotic as a museum dedicated to the Victorian chair leg. Having said that, if nifty turnings turn you on, you may well get your rocks off to Trucksie Lasse's latest horn pipe. As lacking in wholesome graphic sex scenes as "Shifty Fades to Grey", it seems doomed to become a classic. Recommended as a flagrant train-read. Also available in OO gauge.

"Funny Bone Cholera" by Millicent Handle (Lunatic Press, £9.95)
Millicent Handle
Live Dead!
A history novel or a novel history? Tower of force or tour de farce? Simultaneously set in three different locations of the time-space continuum, this book needs to be nibbled at by the reader like a triple decker jam sandwich garnished with raw onion, horseradish and mandrake root. And having shaken the hand that holds it, the novel then emits a dense cloud of purple smoke which engulfs the wings of the deepest armchair. Whence, as if history itself were become history, it then asks us to believe a new strain of cholera bacillus is the reincarnation of a twelfth century coptic monk come to revenge his people on a uncaring god. Ms Handle's antidisestablishmentarianism is renowned. No doubt this latest book will have many tacky prizes renamed in her honour.
sock puppeteer
Sock it to ya!

Wednesday 12 June 2013

The Complete Pancake

Complete Pancake
Dangerous as a pancake


In Four Synonyms & A Syllogism

Complete Pancake
Blind as a pancake

Serving #1: Driving like a pancake!

Pull over, puddin'ead! This lane is for grown-ups with licences. Got an engine in that box, have we? Strewth, I've seen car bombers with more Highway Code.


Complete Pancake
Right as a pancake

Serving #2: As fat as a pancake!

Q: I say, I say, I say... did you know sugar contains as much as 90% water?
A: No, mate, your knickers are over your head there. Sugar contains 100% sugar.

Complete Pancake
Hot as a pancake

Serving #3: Room to toss a flipping pancake!

Talk about the low ceilings in Hobbiton, have you seen the chandeliers in the Brighton Pavvy? Dripping with them!

Complete Pancake
Daft as a pancake

Serving #4: A pancake by any other name...

…would taste as bland, pass the honey, Lemon!

Complete Pancake
Bent as a pancake

Serving #5: All good pancakes come to an end.

Ah, this one is over! So what good will come of it?

High as a Pancake!

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Sunday 19 May 2013

How-To-Write... a Cheque

...or: cheque this art...

Americans will flinch at the "que" on the tail of this old literary curio. Notwithstanding "diner’s checks” scribbled on napkin by aspiring waiters, or those national-stereotype “Czechs” whose Lightness of Being is Unbearably Not Slovakian, the grand Olde English Promissorie Note has lost much of its currency - and not a few of its currants.
How To Write a Cheque
Biro on Bog Roll
A flashed wad of cheques is a rare sight indeed these days of Stephen Fry-by-night, elf-publishing and other stabs of pen. Whether copper-plated on mock vellum or crudely tattooed across the arse of water-buffalo, the original cheque is nothing less than a literary means of conveying value between parties. Except on bank holidays, it may be seen hovering over pools of stagnant syntax, or drowning in the phlegm of newspaper touts.
How To Write a Cheque
Echo! Echo!
Letraset on tin foil, Biroed on bog roll, Chinese woodblock printed, iced in cochineal on retirement cake or scratched with blue-black ink from the dregs of Bob Cratchit’s well, all that really matters is latex plays no part in its manufacture. Beware the crossed words “Acc. Payee Only”, which deal a severe blow to a cheque’s social mobility; as do frankings of less than fifty smackeroos by your Flexible Friend. A truly great cheque will have digits running into seven figures proclaiming, for Pity’s sake, the latest Lottoman Empress. In addition to its face value, such a cheque, cleared by the banks, may be framed and flogged off at Sodabuy’s in aid of the smiling polio victim.
How To Write a Cheque
Letraset on Tin Foil
Even a cheque contaminated with derivatives of hevea brasiliensis (rubber tree) may have intrinsic value; when, for example, its dodgy payer is a household name. Again, any bone-fed auction house may be contacted to assess the potential. Other examples of unkind payment: shiploads of rotten spuds delivered our way under the Marshall Plan, Confederate Dollars, fake chocolate money, misspelt innuendoes (“earos” for “euros”, “ponce” for “pence” & etc.) and the absolute vanishing of inks.
How To Write a Cheque
Tattoo on Buffalo 
Let us leave, buy the bye, the How-To-Writes of "cheque's-in-the-post", "Travellers' Cheques" and "chequebook journalism" for other, more fastidious correspondents to sign off on.
How To Write A Cheque
Chinese Wood-Blocked
And proceed, not before meantime, to the "post-dated cheque" so beloved of impoverished students and the absolute bane of slum landlords. Do be careful when passing these delicate notes, if Referred to Drawer they may easily turn to Cack-in-the-Attic.
How To Write a Cheque
Never Sign!
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