I have, until recently, been on fire.
I have also discovered that you should never do the whole lighter/spoon of sugar/absinthe trick with a glass exactly the right dimensions to cause a certain section of physics to kick in… you know the bit I mean… the one that causes a two-foot high jet of flame to burn with the intensity of an ignited cow fart…
For about thirty seconds I stood, agape, waiting for it to stop making a really impressive roaring sound and watching the flame shoot back up into the bottle. After those thirty seconds I yelled the phrase “oh shitty-shitty” (yes… I’m not proud…) and tried to blow out the flames.
A hint to those whose activities in life have reduced their lung capacity to around that of a corset wearing gnat with bronchitis: Just step out of the house and wait for the ruins to stop smouldering… Don’t, for Christ’s sake, try and wheeze the flames into submission… this only leads to feeling woozy, spilling absinthe on your hand, bursting into flames, and then shouting a really, really, bad word that even the dictionary has trouble describing delicately.
I now smell of burnt hair… and I am beginning to suspect I may not be receiving the same inspirational benefit from the fancy liquor as all those short, French, dead bastards did… you know, the ones who painted those place mats you’ve got in the cupboard with the nasty, peeling, cork backing and a big coffee stain on them… Perhaps I should try adding a couple of squirts of mildew-remover to my liquor…
…A…n…y…w…a…y…
Since you’re one of four people who will be reading this it means that I know where you live… so if you ever bring up the following topic in conversation with me I know exactly which house’s letterbox to shove the angry swan through…
In other words: Let’s just get this little purging experience over with and then never mention it again… much like people should do with their enemas rather than trying to impress us with their touching stories of colonic tidiness…
Shut up, sit down, and pay attention and I’ll begin…
No, you can’t go to the bathroom…
Quit scratching there…
Three out of the four of you: Stop staring at me like that, I’m not a piece of meat you know…
The other one of you: I’m afraid I’m like Action Man and have permanent blue plastic underwear. If you ever succeed in prising them off my legs will drop off and roll under the sofa. Feel free to hide your disappointment with that pretend look of relief…
Hey… Quit hiding it quite so convincingly…
Damn it…
Things that hurt my brain so much that I have to leave it to soak overnight.
A thought has occurred to me of late and has persisted in troubling my brain to almost the same extent as the time I developed a sick determination to discover Columbo’s first name… and similarly it is a dichotomy that is just as difficult to fathom and just as unrewarding to answer…
(I admit that I can’t remember what “dichotomy” means… I might have well have just used the word “smong” instead, it’s just that the spell-checker didn’t seem complain when I typed “dichotomy” and it set off a little siren when I typed “smong”…)
Back to the subject in hand…
Oh, before I forget, I put an ungodly amount of research into finding out Columbo’s first name… possibly providing final and definitive proof that I have far too much time on my hands… I discovered that his wife’s name was Rose (or something… I forgot again), that his dog didn’t actually have a name, and he might be called Frank… so go ride those monkeys to town and smoke them.
Now I finally get to the point of this blathering…
Paddington-bastard-Bear.
Yes… the show that we all pretended to like but secretly found about as enthralling as the Country File Christmas Special (at least in the days before Michaela Strachan suddenly rekindled those memories from childhood and was a contributing factor in the break up of many marriages).
The show wasn’t funny, wasn’t exciting, wasn’t moving, it didn’t provoke the kind of spiritual glory that separates us from the monkeys… it didn’t offer anything more than a way to avoid facing up to the harsh realities of life… It was also used to whore us a load of really dull toys made from spongy toxic materials and I think we can all agree that, as well as introducing poisons into our bloodstreams every time we chewed him, Paddington was stealing a little bit of our souls every day.
There was, however, one thing that completely went over my head at the time… yes boys and girls, today we are going to examine the mind-blowing mathematical implications of a crap ten minute children’s program…
Think about what I am about to discuss for a moment and feel your brain melt away like an ice cube trapped underneath the folds of Bernard Manning’s man-breasts on a hot day.
Paddington is the only known four-dimensional being in existence.
Paddington is the simple proof that everything we take for granted in this world is actually about as correct as the answer I gave last time I had to answer a GCSE biology question on “women’s bits”…
Examine the evidence:
Paddington is rendered in three dimensions in the show and yet everyone else is rendered two-dimensionally.
You may, cynically, believe that this strange state of affairs came to be because of the laughably naive belief that it’s cheaper just to draw all the other people in crayon… and you’d be just as wrong as that time when you accused me of stealing your shoes (er… all except one of you… and that was only because I needed somewhere to put the frog while I prepared the electrodes).
The actual truth is that it would be impossible to portray Paddington’s four-dimensional form without causing our eyes to explode and our heads to melt in a similar fashion to the end bit of Raiders of the Lost
All attempts at buggering about with the laws of physics and attempts at modifying the camera (in reality this amounted to the director taping a clam to the lens and gently massaging the tripod in a manner that led to his eventual martyrdom) met with failure…
Eventually they were forced to use a complicated series of mirrors to make him appear merely three-dimensional… this, however (and as in algebra), applied to both sides of the equation and reduced the human cast to two-dimensional vulgarity… leading to both a union boycott and also to a severe migraine when the off-spring of Paddington and an unnamed researcher from the show was born… Few could bear to comprehend the complexities of the conception and even fewer managed to keep their lunch down when the geometrical monstrosity burst from her loins.
Sadly in April 1984, and before Stephen Hawking had time to trundle up and examine him, Paddington had to be inhumanely destroyed when he joined forces with Mothra and destroyed downtown
There you go folks… I think you’ll agree that all the evidence is there… now go forth and explain it all to the person on your left… they look confused.