FUN PAGE 3

(originally posted on myspace here)

1. (See comments on previous post)

2. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

AND WHY IS IT SO WRONG?

image courtesy of here, this

Just a couple of things need your signature... (FUN PAGE 2)

(originally posted on myspace here)

And what's this?

And this?

Really what the hell have I written in my diary?

Does that say "Laurence"?... "Razzy that worry"?... Oh hang on I might know what it is. Great. Anyway, thanks to Tom for pointing out I'd given away the answer to Thursday's mystery picture by actually naming it. I've changed the name now. And I'm not going to tell you what it is.
Looks fun though, doesn't it? Oh maybe THAT's what I'm doing Saturday.

Also Tom thanks for directing me here following Wednesday's postscripted ID despondihuff ("I am I. D. Despondihuff. I kill ghosts.") Any of you who aren't Tom might also want to give it a look: You see tomorrow sees the second reading in Parliament of a bill allowing all manner of information and stuff to be sort of moved around a lot um badly in a way that's, uhhhh, oh, just not on. So what better opportunity to see whether or not Government policy is actually formed by people who write to their MPs (a theory I'm keen on) by writing to your MP? None, that's what better opportunity.

Except possibly this which I was forwarded the same day, concerning the compulsory fitting of INSTRUMENT-EXPLODING NOISE-CONTROL DEVICES. It's alright I don't plan on making a habit of this political activism but I mean just listen, it sounds like an end to fun: "The government wishes to consider it a legal requirement in the new tax year to introduce laws insisting anyone applying or re-applying for an entertainment license must have a noise control device fitted to the venue. This will be the final NAIL for ALL entertainment in the UK as the level at which these devices CUT you off is dreadfully low and damaging to musician's equipment. In the case of live music this isn't so much to do with volume as the ability to play a proper concert without constant interruption. Any venue that has one in use cannot have any electric music as the power is constantly being cut mid-song and even loud applause at the end of a song can cut it. This piece of legislation is being brought in to bring discos into line but will mistakenly be applied to live music venues. PLEASE DO NOT INTRODUCE THIS LAW, WE LOVE LIVE MUSIC!"

Yes we do. I heard some last night. It was very good. That's all. So, see you Wednesday then.

FUN PAGE

(originally posted on myspace here)

What's this?

(suggestions welcome - answer to follow)

Nobody's text and nobody's toys

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

While spending Christmas in France with my parents I took these photos of the Pezenas Toy Museum, not to be confused - as we did - with the plain old "Pezenas Museum" which it turns out just contains doors:

I think they provide quite a nice accompaniment to the following completely predicted texts, even if neither in isolation are that interesting. A completely predicted text is a text predicted not just from the first letters of each single word typed into your mobile, but from the first word alone. For example I type in the word "Might" then space, my phone then flashes up the next word "just" and I can either press enter or ignore this suggestion and type the next word in for myself. On this occasion, hanging around a recording studio in Hoxton on Monday morning, waiting to record a voice-over for, as it turned out, a company suddenly finding itself having to rush out an educational video to promote the structural integrity of its product following the explosion two months ago of a submarine, I decided to keep on pressing enter just to see how long my phone could keep this up. We got as far as "Might just think you say something about a cat" before the predictions dried up. Then I tried it a few more times. Not every first word produced a prediction but here are the ones that did:

All sound in the heart of 's West End

If not too late

I'm in the candle

So I haven't ...

My slaves on Thursday

(For anyone really interested in ugly toys I recommend a visit to Shunt this week: Faulty Optic's on, as well as a collection of automata from a company called Sharmanka which I caught last week leading me to ponder anew the phenomenon of "clock theatre", something that's been pretty much absent from the capital as far as I can see since the demolition of the Swiss Centre... If you do pop along to Shunt however, be warned you might need a passport now as the pissing security checks suddenly include the scanning of either a photo ID or your credit card. Something to do with the new license I heard. It's horrible. I was hoping to do "Jonah" again there next month but... hhh... it can probably wait now until I summon up more enthusiasm or else find a venue a little more removed from the ground zero of modern godawfulness... anyway there's good stuff once you're in though... but hhh...)

George W. Byeeeee!

  

Uncanny.

Or how about this?

"It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about "the veneer of civilization" hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things you have either one or the other. Not both. It seemed to me as I listened to Tibe's dull fierce speeches that what he sought to do by fear and persuasion was to force his people to change a choice they had made before their history began, the choice between those opposites." 

 (From "The Left hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I'm reading in the Dungeon as the fifth child this month glancing up at the flickering mortuary photograph of Ripper victim Annie Chapman turns excitedly to his mother and whispers "Look, it's Harry Redknapp!") 

 

 Anyway can somebody please arrest everyone involved now? Cheers! (: ?@

Iago on drums (Mac! Goo! Han!)

 

Tight-lipped and side-parted, that example to prickly iconoclasts the world over: Patrick McGoohan died yesterday aged 80. As the penny-farthing flies half-mast in Portmeirion, why not take a moment to enjoy him in Basil Dearden's Shakespeare-updating jazz curio All Night Long, as he condenses all of Othello's pivotal Act 3 Scene 3 into one blistering drum solo. In "Iago's Little Book of Calm" I gave Iago the line "I used to fish, and play the dums," and this is why:

 

Patrick, any chance you could do that again but with less intensity?

"........................ NO!!!"

 

(Sorry it's taken another death to see me return. My New Year's Resolution has been, well, to take it easy.) 

(originally posted on myspace)

 

Persona Non Grata: th'end

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

Something else to mull over as we all come to our senses: one year later, oddly, Kevin Smith also ended "Dogma" with Alanis Morissette coming down from Heaven...

But so yes, that was that... From January 1997, a brand new term. Happy New Year!

Persona Non Grata weeks 8 & 9

 First they closed Woolworths. And I said nothing, for I was not a Woolworths...

 Then they closed Zavvi. And I said nothing, for I was not a Zavvi...

 And now here are the last two strips of 1996. The first I had originally intended to be a huge Dave McKean-type production number, but couldn't get any of the objects to stay on the paper.