Thursday, February 28, 2008
Prologue to part III - Father Eduardo Conspiratorez
‘Here lies the darkest mystery known to man, enter thy crypts and be damned!’ (Father Eduardo Conspiratorez)
The Venetian monk 'Father Eduardo Conspiratorez' is a little known figure in history preferring to remain in the shadows rather then hugging the limelight. It was not Venetian merchants but Father Eduardo who first travelled eastwards in the 11th century to:
‘Those sun-baked heathen lands of the Indus plain’
Perhaps it was a heightened sense of religious duty that drew him eastwards beyond the Fertile Crescent where the sun rages fiercely and scowls on those that live under it. Who knows what it is that rages in the hearts of such men, but this much is certain: -
At some point in Father Eduardo's journey, scholars still puzzle over exactly where, but contemporary thinking suggests somewhere north-east of Mohenjodaro (the oldest city in the world), Father Eduardo found something that startled and disturbed his pious countenance. He hastily dispatched a messenger to retrace his footsteps back to Venice with this very message:
‘Here lies the darkest mystery known to man, enter thy crypts and be damned!’
The Venetian monk was never heard of again; fading into history like dust, his scoured bones lying undiscovered under a sun-baked earth. But his name lives on in the English word conspiracy.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Chapter II - The Inimitable Dr Nutterboffin
When Alexander was little he had an epiphany that would stick with him for the rest of his days. It was summertime in Bavaria. The world was shot through in a rave of whipped colours, whites and pinks and yellows and ultra-violets. Winter had finally released its ascetic grip to give way to spring and now the first signs of a bountiful summer. Compared to the joyless blues of earlier months, life was now a flourishing bonanza. The bonanza sprouted from the black earth carpeting the hilltops and dells in waves and waves of tussocky grass. The bonanza seethed below the soil toiling away with quiet industry - fortifying and recycling. It bloomed Brilliant White atop decomposing bodies and on dead tree trunks that looked like twisted wreckage. It flew through the skyways; its droning and buzzing barely audible above the swish and swash of leaves twinkling on and off like light bulbs. The wheat fronds were nodding piously towards the sun their benefactor as the wind rattled their chubby stalks and enraged the aphids that sat on them. The buttercups were out chasing the bees, and the bees in turn were gorging and stupefying themselves on the sweet nectarines; after which they'd slumber in the sun exhausted, and if they felt particularly wicked or mischievous they’d go bother some humans.
There was however one bee that was particularly troublesome. Not troublesome to humans mind you, but to his fellow worker bees. He was a pariah, an outcast and didn’t fit in. The reason for this lay inside his head – literally. Embryology had gifted him with much to be proud of. Like a shapely abdomen, fantastic yellow stripes that we’re cool and little bee-wings that we’re nifty. They were small and agile but made up for size in their whirring speed. He could use them to fly up oh high, and he did. He strayed from the regular bee routes that were choked with bee-traffic. He’d go as high as he could, beyond the forbidden cloud line (where no bee dared) just to see what it was like. Just to see what it was like.
But there was something else too, something unforeseen that embryology had given him in addition to his wings and stripy bottom. Something grotesque and unnatural - self awareness. What was wrong with him? Well, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with him it was just that, unlike the other bees who mindlessly, automatically, did what bees do; which is chase after flowers and get drunk on nectar, this bee who we can call ‘Alex’ stopped in its tracks one day and asked itself a question. Yes, a question. Which was:
‘Why?’
Now lets make it absolutely clear right away that this is something that bees don’t usually do. Bees don’t normally ask questions, especially ‘why?’ questions. But this was Alex. And he was odd.
It just so happens that at this moment of exalted lucidity, at the moment when the ‘Why?’ question popped into Alex’s brain, he was in mid-flight returning from one of his cryptic jaunts. The shock (and it was a shock) of the thought sprouting was profound. Brain power that was normally used for controlling flight muscles, making minute adjustments to pitch and tilt, basically precious brain capacity that was used to keep him up in the air was now being siphoned off and diverted – to feed existential musings.
Poor Alex tumbled out of the sky until finally squishing himself onto the lens of a binoculars, the last neuron that fired before his untimely death had one thing on its mind: ‘Why?’
However, as so happens in a universe that is enmeshed with the fibres of cause and effect, faith and destiny, the binoculars belonged to a young Alexander who had been watching the bee in mid flight all along. Watching the little thing coursing across the brilliant blue canvass, its yellow stripy bottom in the throes of turbulence, before it suddenly lost control, fell out of the sky and smashed into his binoculars - Just like that. Curiously, (and many would suggest grander forces at play here), Alexander was so moved by this, for it affected him so deeply; the whole pointlessness of it all, that he too stopped in his tracks and wiping the green splattered smudge of Alex from his lens, he too uttered the cryptic words:
‘Why?’
Unlike Alex, whose life had ended at the moment of lucid discovery, young Alexander went on to not only answer the ‘Why?’ question, but also farther to answer the ‘How?’ question and when he’d dispensed with that he moved onto the next logical question which was the most important of all ‘where?’ question - as in ‘now that I’m done with all this philosophising, where shall I go for lunch? - All this by the age of thirteen no less and still fresh in his teens. This was remarkable going.
So the young Alexander Von Nutterboffin, of Bavarian parentage had considered and surveyed all. His gaze had entered the crypts of histories great Philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, and with a petulant sniff of the nose he had dismissed them all in one insouciant breath: ‘theoretical tourists’ was his dismissive remark at the time. So he invented his own ‘Philosophies’ to rival and surpass those of the greats. These he wrote down in the form of a ‘Principia de Sum’ (principles of Existence). Which were as follows:
1) The vast majority of people are inherently stupid. There is nobody more stupid then a man who thinks that he has nothing else to learn
2) The vast majority of people are amazingly boring. That is because they are stupid and think they have nothing else to learn
3) It is rare to find a person who is not boring. If you ever meet this person you will instantly know, because you will fall in love with them
4) Love is blind
So it was that the young and brilliant Alexander Von Nutterboffin completed his transformation into an arrogant, insolent and brutish misanthrope who dismissed the company of people:
‘There tireless whinings, their stupid questions, their irksomeness…these non-entities, these so called men of Cain, these sanctimonious schmucks!’
The religious order too we’re not spared the wrath of his fiery tongue:
‘Pious busybodies, these exalted sexually oppressed old men with their lurid fantasies of bondage to the sky god, their false perdition, their false guilt’
As for women:
‘These coquettes with their profligations and their sluttings, and the besotted rabble that chase them in a paroxysm of nympholepsy…I have no time for this tediousness’
So it was that Alexander grew to wince whenever he suffered the humiliation of the company of men, the sanctimony of the church and the flirtatiousness of women. But that is not to say that he didn’t get noticed. He did. He was rather handsome, in the guise of a modern-Greek Adonis. Women flocked to him like pigeons, intrigued by his aloofness, his rebuttals, his disparagings and his rapt and brilliant mind. But he just swept them aside, like flies getting in the way of the grander stuff of life.
After his monumental Principia de Sum (which he characteristically kept to himself), Alexander moved onto his next project. He began spending inordinate amounts of time staring at things. He’d stare at the most bizarre things; objects you’d never bother looking at like rusted copper coins, or whirlpools on wall-paper, crinkles in napkins, goose-bumps, crusted faeces, peoples bottoms and he’d spend hours and hours doing it. Of course, this was not just fanciful idleness. There was a great discovery lurking, as always, behind this studious gawping.
The idea was that if you stare at something hard enough, which usually meant for long enough, than it no longer looked familiar. It morphed into something new and terrifyingly strange and alien. And then you could discover it all over again as you did for the first time as a child! But unlike a child you could now put to use an array of sophisticated mental equipment to unearth it, to snuff it out, to tinker and play with it. Just imagine discovering a bottom for the very first time! You can apply the same idea to words; look at them long enough and they start deforming and melting into unfamiliar shapes that you no longer recognise.
Alexander coined this phenomenon cognitive dissonance and then in a stroke of genius took it into a wholly new direction – the realm of the Human Condition. Look at humans long enough, stare at them long enough, marvel at them long enough, and they will unravel themselves before you. Untwine like threads. All there complexities thus reduced to a few bullet points.
And so we have the inimitable genius of Alexander Von Nutterboffin.
Coming soon...Part III – The vaults of the museum of modern-antiquities
There was however one bee that was particularly troublesome. Not troublesome to humans mind you, but to his fellow worker bees. He was a pariah, an outcast and didn’t fit in. The reason for this lay inside his head – literally. Embryology had gifted him with much to be proud of. Like a shapely abdomen, fantastic yellow stripes that we’re cool and little bee-wings that we’re nifty. They were small and agile but made up for size in their whirring speed. He could use them to fly up oh high, and he did. He strayed from the regular bee routes that were choked with bee-traffic. He’d go as high as he could, beyond the forbidden cloud line (where no bee dared) just to see what it was like. Just to see what it was like.
But there was something else too, something unforeseen that embryology had given him in addition to his wings and stripy bottom. Something grotesque and unnatural - self awareness. What was wrong with him? Well, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with him it was just that, unlike the other bees who mindlessly, automatically, did what bees do; which is chase after flowers and get drunk on nectar, this bee who we can call ‘Alex’ stopped in its tracks one day and asked itself a question. Yes, a question. Which was:
‘Why?’
Now lets make it absolutely clear right away that this is something that bees don’t usually do. Bees don’t normally ask questions, especially ‘why?’ questions. But this was Alex. And he was odd.
It just so happens that at this moment of exalted lucidity, at the moment when the ‘Why?’ question popped into Alex’s brain, he was in mid-flight returning from one of his cryptic jaunts. The shock (and it was a shock) of the thought sprouting was profound. Brain power that was normally used for controlling flight muscles, making minute adjustments to pitch and tilt, basically precious brain capacity that was used to keep him up in the air was now being siphoned off and diverted – to feed existential musings.
Poor Alex tumbled out of the sky until finally squishing himself onto the lens of a binoculars, the last neuron that fired before his untimely death had one thing on its mind: ‘Why?’
However, as so happens in a universe that is enmeshed with the fibres of cause and effect, faith and destiny, the binoculars belonged to a young Alexander who had been watching the bee in mid flight all along. Watching the little thing coursing across the brilliant blue canvass, its yellow stripy bottom in the throes of turbulence, before it suddenly lost control, fell out of the sky and smashed into his binoculars - Just like that. Curiously, (and many would suggest grander forces at play here), Alexander was so moved by this, for it affected him so deeply; the whole pointlessness of it all, that he too stopped in his tracks and wiping the green splattered smudge of Alex from his lens, he too uttered the cryptic words:
‘Why?’
Unlike Alex, whose life had ended at the moment of lucid discovery, young Alexander went on to not only answer the ‘Why?’ question, but also farther to answer the ‘How?’ question and when he’d dispensed with that he moved onto the next logical question which was the most important of all ‘where?’ question - as in ‘now that I’m done with all this philosophising, where shall I go for lunch? - All this by the age of thirteen no less and still fresh in his teens. This was remarkable going.
So the young Alexander Von Nutterboffin, of Bavarian parentage had considered and surveyed all. His gaze had entered the crypts of histories great Philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, and with a petulant sniff of the nose he had dismissed them all in one insouciant breath: ‘theoretical tourists’ was his dismissive remark at the time. So he invented his own ‘Philosophies’ to rival and surpass those of the greats. These he wrote down in the form of a ‘Principia de Sum’ (principles of Existence). Which were as follows:
1) The vast majority of people are inherently stupid. There is nobody more stupid then a man who thinks that he has nothing else to learn
2) The vast majority of people are amazingly boring. That is because they are stupid and think they have nothing else to learn
3) It is rare to find a person who is not boring. If you ever meet this person you will instantly know, because you will fall in love with them
4) Love is blind
So it was that the young and brilliant Alexander Von Nutterboffin completed his transformation into an arrogant, insolent and brutish misanthrope who dismissed the company of people:
‘There tireless whinings, their stupid questions, their irksomeness…these non-entities, these so called men of Cain, these sanctimonious schmucks!’
The religious order too we’re not spared the wrath of his fiery tongue:
‘Pious busybodies, these exalted sexually oppressed old men with their lurid fantasies of bondage to the sky god, their false perdition, their false guilt’
As for women:
‘These coquettes with their profligations and their sluttings, and the besotted rabble that chase them in a paroxysm of nympholepsy…I have no time for this tediousness’
So it was that Alexander grew to wince whenever he suffered the humiliation of the company of men, the sanctimony of the church and the flirtatiousness of women. But that is not to say that he didn’t get noticed. He did. He was rather handsome, in the guise of a modern-Greek Adonis. Women flocked to him like pigeons, intrigued by his aloofness, his rebuttals, his disparagings and his rapt and brilliant mind. But he just swept them aside, like flies getting in the way of the grander stuff of life.
After his monumental Principia de Sum (which he characteristically kept to himself), Alexander moved onto his next project. He began spending inordinate amounts of time staring at things. He’d stare at the most bizarre things; objects you’d never bother looking at like rusted copper coins, or whirlpools on wall-paper, crinkles in napkins, goose-bumps, crusted faeces, peoples bottoms and he’d spend hours and hours doing it. Of course, this was not just fanciful idleness. There was a great discovery lurking, as always, behind this studious gawping.
The idea was that if you stare at something hard enough, which usually meant for long enough, than it no longer looked familiar. It morphed into something new and terrifyingly strange and alien. And then you could discover it all over again as you did for the first time as a child! But unlike a child you could now put to use an array of sophisticated mental equipment to unearth it, to snuff it out, to tinker and play with it. Just imagine discovering a bottom for the very first time! You can apply the same idea to words; look at them long enough and they start deforming and melting into unfamiliar shapes that you no longer recognise.
Alexander coined this phenomenon cognitive dissonance and then in a stroke of genius took it into a wholly new direction – the realm of the Human Condition. Look at humans long enough, stare at them long enough, marvel at them long enough, and they will unravel themselves before you. Untwine like threads. All there complexities thus reduced to a few bullet points.
And so we have the inimitable genius of Alexander Von Nutterboffin.
Coming soon...Part III – The vaults of the museum of modern-antiquities
Friday, February 22, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Homo Kashmiri...Chapter 1 - The British Museum of Modern-Antiquities
The 'British Museum of Modern-Antiquities' (an oxymoron if you ever needed one) lies on Gower Street in London's bustling tourist-land. It is mid-February and under a heavy leaden sky shredded by a squinting sun, the streets are thronged with the patter of the hordes; giggling Japanese with their digital cameras, Germans in full hiking regalia, Indians with their bored boisterous children and the students and academics from the nearby university in a variety of guises: goth, nerds, the clinically self-conscious, and the antediluvian professors; tweedy, dusty and anachronistic in a world of automobiles and cell-phones.
As you approach the museum from the Euston Road end of Gower Street, you’ll pass the new hospital building on the right; its shiny-polished surfaces covered in protective bubble wrap and its jade matt windows bragging: ‘I am a hospital’ and ‘I am brand new!’ Behind it is the old hospital building it replaces; brooding under a shadow from its bigger brother. It is encased in a latticework of red ochre and has a head that is a jumble of spires and steeples like a Gaudi inspired mausoleum. When viewed under a swirling mass of angry February sky it looks terrifyingly sepulchral - a place for the living or for the dying; you wonder.
Farther on, beyond the university gates, is the ‘Centre for Tropical Diseases’ standing in an explosion of 50’s Art Deco. Supremely designed architecture is always timeless; not seduced by fads, always ‘La Mode’, never ‘out’ always ‘in’. The centre for tropical diseases was out of date the day it was unveiled to a horrified squirming audience.
As you approach the Museum of Modern-Antiquities from the side, you’ll notice the large white limestone wash dating back to the 1600s; now faded and mossy in the cracks. The building is constructed from large rectangular granite slabs, slammed together with Pyramid like precision. The building itself when viewed from the front is square, squat, rising three storeys, and wears an aspect of smug repose. A portico with columns and marble balustrades covers the entrance. The styling is simple; neat clean lines, classically shaped windows, and healthy proportions that please the eye. It’s highly likely that there is an element of deliberate contrivance in this as the architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was known to have been a patron of the ‘Golden Ratio’ – a mathematical theory stating that beauty is found in proportions that are multiples of Pi. The golden ratio can be found hidden in many of the buildings designed by the celebrated architect.
Surprisingly and perhaps curiously, there’s no signage at the front or anywhere near the building that announces to the casual viewer that this is a museum of modern antiquities. The only inkling of its importance is a vague washed-out frieze above the entrance; the ashen-faced Latin inscription severely blunted by weathering; but still legible. It reads (in English): “Here lies the darkest mysteries known to man, enter thy crypts and be damned!” The huge front door is made from tropical Rosewood. The grains and knots clearly visible and the whole thing is covered in a layer of gloss that emphasize its organic-ness and earthly provenance - so that it looks almost alive. The ornate brass fittings add to the sense of authority and permanence. A permanence at odds with the shape-shifting world outside. The world changes, people come and go; like seasons, like lovers, but amidst this transience, this bulwark door remains unflinching.
As you approach it, you feel as if you are about to leave this particular rabbit-hole and enter another rabbit-hole. Which in a way you are because inside this building lies the largest collection of modern artifacts and documents in the whole world. You wonder whether the absence of any self-promotion arises, in part, from a hyper-awareness of the Trustees to the ignominious history of the artifacts – you see many of the items kept in the museum were purloined during the Empire days when the British went on a ransack and therefore have a chequered past.
When you enter the building you’re relieved to find it is not overrun by grimy tourists or twitchy students. In-fact, to your delight and amusement, you discover that you are the sole patron. The three floors hold a sizeable collection, but that is not the reason you are here. So with haste you head for the man sitting in the reception area. He looks up at you wearily when you approach; his face slightly pudgy and dyspeptic. But he has keen eyes that hover around your face for a while searching for something before landing on one spot. You speak:
“Hello there, I was wondering whether I could see the ‘Dr Alexander Von Nutterboffin Collection’ please” and then you smile - for emphasis.
This is obviously an uncommon request and he is somewhat taken aback. You can hear the software in his brain whirring.
And you don’t let go of his eyes. The words rolling out of your tongue are precise, carefully measured with a slight weight on the ‘Co’ of collection. Your voice is smoky, rich and with texture; in short the voice of a tobacco smoking academic used to lecturing in large lecture halls. You continue staring at the man your eyes not wavering. There is a short-lived (and one might say furtive) glint of recognition in his eyes; as if he is in on the secret. He picks up the telephone and dials a buzzer. Then gesturing at the dusty leather sofa he says ‘If you would just care to take a seat sir, someone will be up to collect you shortly’.
So you sit and wait.
This is perhaps as good as any time to explain what you are doing here. Not many people know this but the collection held by the British Museum of Modern-Antiquities is divided into two sub-sections. That which is above ground, on public display for all to see, over three magnificent shiny floors. There is also that which is of much greater academic importance and therefore kept hidden away in dank underground catacombs deep within the bowels of the museum building. Some statistics: The items on display constitute 5% of the total collection held in trust by the museum. Thus 95% of what the museum holds is underground, largely unstudied and a potential goldmine. And here’s the best bit. The collection was bequeathed to the Museum in the 1800s when, the then owner, Sir Henry Waldport (a megalomaniac and empire builder) passed away. The Thatcher government in the 1980’s nationalized the Museum and the collection passed into public ownership. So, although nobody will tell you about the underground collection; for there are no signs in the lobby that point towards it, it is not mentioned in the literature or on the museum circuit tours, there is no mention of it on the museum website either, but if you ask, if you swagger into the museum and with a petulant wave of the hand ask to be shown it, the Museum has no choice but to oblige you. The ‘Dr Alexander Von Nutterboffin Collection’ is one of many veritable collections held in the underground vaults; a teeming warren of stifling chambers and tunnels deep below the London trafficscape.
But who is Dr Alexander Von Nutterboffin and why are you interested in him?
As you approach the museum from the Euston Road end of Gower Street, you’ll pass the new hospital building on the right; its shiny-polished surfaces covered in protective bubble wrap and its jade matt windows bragging: ‘I am a hospital’ and ‘I am brand new!’ Behind it is the old hospital building it replaces; brooding under a shadow from its bigger brother. It is encased in a latticework of red ochre and has a head that is a jumble of spires and steeples like a Gaudi inspired mausoleum. When viewed under a swirling mass of angry February sky it looks terrifyingly sepulchral - a place for the living or for the dying; you wonder.
Farther on, beyond the university gates, is the ‘Centre for Tropical Diseases’ standing in an explosion of 50’s Art Deco. Supremely designed architecture is always timeless; not seduced by fads, always ‘La Mode’, never ‘out’ always ‘in’. The centre for tropical diseases was out of date the day it was unveiled to a horrified squirming audience.
As you approach the Museum of Modern-Antiquities from the side, you’ll notice the large white limestone wash dating back to the 1600s; now faded and mossy in the cracks. The building is constructed from large rectangular granite slabs, slammed together with Pyramid like precision. The building itself when viewed from the front is square, squat, rising three storeys, and wears an aspect of smug repose. A portico with columns and marble balustrades covers the entrance. The styling is simple; neat clean lines, classically shaped windows, and healthy proportions that please the eye. It’s highly likely that there is an element of deliberate contrivance in this as the architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was known to have been a patron of the ‘Golden Ratio’ – a mathematical theory stating that beauty is found in proportions that are multiples of Pi. The golden ratio can be found hidden in many of the buildings designed by the celebrated architect.
Surprisingly and perhaps curiously, there’s no signage at the front or anywhere near the building that announces to the casual viewer that this is a museum of modern antiquities. The only inkling of its importance is a vague washed-out frieze above the entrance; the ashen-faced Latin inscription severely blunted by weathering; but still legible. It reads (in English): “Here lies the darkest mysteries known to man, enter thy crypts and be damned!” The huge front door is made from tropical Rosewood. The grains and knots clearly visible and the whole thing is covered in a layer of gloss that emphasize its organic-ness and earthly provenance - so that it looks almost alive. The ornate brass fittings add to the sense of authority and permanence. A permanence at odds with the shape-shifting world outside. The world changes, people come and go; like seasons, like lovers, but amidst this transience, this bulwark door remains unflinching.
As you approach it, you feel as if you are about to leave this particular rabbit-hole and enter another rabbit-hole. Which in a way you are because inside this building lies the largest collection of modern artifacts and documents in the whole world. You wonder whether the absence of any self-promotion arises, in part, from a hyper-awareness of the Trustees to the ignominious history of the artifacts – you see many of the items kept in the museum were purloined during the Empire days when the British went on a ransack and therefore have a chequered past.
When you enter the building you’re relieved to find it is not overrun by grimy tourists or twitchy students. In-fact, to your delight and amusement, you discover that you are the sole patron. The three floors hold a sizeable collection, but that is not the reason you are here. So with haste you head for the man sitting in the reception area. He looks up at you wearily when you approach; his face slightly pudgy and dyspeptic. But he has keen eyes that hover around your face for a while searching for something before landing on one spot. You speak:
“Hello there, I was wondering whether I could see the ‘Dr Alexander Von Nutterboffin Collection’ please” and then you smile - for emphasis.
This is obviously an uncommon request and he is somewhat taken aback. You can hear the software in his brain whirring.
And you don’t let go of his eyes. The words rolling out of your tongue are precise, carefully measured with a slight weight on the ‘Co’ of collection. Your voice is smoky, rich and with texture; in short the voice of a tobacco smoking academic used to lecturing in large lecture halls. You continue staring at the man your eyes not wavering. There is a short-lived (and one might say furtive) glint of recognition in his eyes; as if he is in on the secret. He picks up the telephone and dials a buzzer. Then gesturing at the dusty leather sofa he says ‘If you would just care to take a seat sir, someone will be up to collect you shortly’.
So you sit and wait.
This is perhaps as good as any time to explain what you are doing here. Not many people know this but the collection held by the British Museum of Modern-Antiquities is divided into two sub-sections. That which is above ground, on public display for all to see, over three magnificent shiny floors. There is also that which is of much greater academic importance and therefore kept hidden away in dank underground catacombs deep within the bowels of the museum building. Some statistics: The items on display constitute 5% of the total collection held in trust by the museum. Thus 95% of what the museum holds is underground, largely unstudied and a potential goldmine. And here’s the best bit. The collection was bequeathed to the Museum in the 1800s when, the then owner, Sir Henry Waldport (a megalomaniac and empire builder) passed away. The Thatcher government in the 1980’s nationalized the Museum and the collection passed into public ownership. So, although nobody will tell you about the underground collection; for there are no signs in the lobby that point towards it, it is not mentioned in the literature or on the museum circuit tours, there is no mention of it on the museum website either, but if you ask, if you swagger into the museum and with a petulant wave of the hand ask to be shown it, the Museum has no choice but to oblige you. The ‘Dr Alexander Von Nutterboffin Collection’ is one of many veritable collections held in the underground vaults; a teeming warren of stifling chambers and tunnels deep below the London trafficscape.
But who is Dr Alexander Von Nutterboffin and why are you interested in him?
Monday, February 11, 2008
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Birthday Boy
Yes, it's that glorious time of year again I celebrate my slow ignominious crawl towards senility, dementia, dentures, the dreaded winter fuel bill and the grave.
But I for one won't be celebrating.
(I hear sighs of disbelief)
Well, why should I celebrate another milestone towards certain death?
An anal, toad-picking, moany-pants bore.
Oh, go on then:
'Happy B'day to Me
Happy B'day to Me
Happy B'day to Meee
Happy B'day tooooo Me'
(clapping and whooping)
All right, that's quite enough of that.
P.S: Horse and Hound ale house tonight if anybody would like to join us.
But I for one won't be celebrating.
(I hear sighs of disbelief)
Well, why should I celebrate another milestone towards certain death?
An anal, toad-picking, moany-pants bore.
Oh, go on then:
'Happy B'day to Me
Happy B'day to Me
Happy B'day to Meee
Happy B'day tooooo Me'
(clapping and whooping)
All right, that's quite enough of that.
P.S: Horse and Hound ale house tonight if anybody would like to join us.
Monday, February 04, 2008
The Vagabond Photo Agency
The vagabond photo agency is a not for profit wedding photography organization (charity Reg No: 11345) service that charges absolutely no fees. Yes no fees. It especially caters for hard-up, poor and poverty stricken chartered accountants from the Cayman Islands who have minimum disposable income; a symptom rife in tax free offshore locations.
The charity organization is run by one sole individual; head strong, tough, a hopeless romantic, soft at heart, and inspirational person who instills fears in the hearts of the competition – who have no chance of competing with not only a free wedding photographer but a fucking world-class one at that.
It is a lonely world; the world of the free wedding photographer. A dying breed. Not many of us around now-a-days. Most perished in starvation states in the 80’s. Those that survived the “starvation’ we’re killed off during the Nikon – Canon War of the 90’s. And the few rugged hardy types that weathered that storm finally perished with the onset of the camera mobile phone. Now any twat on the street can take a picture and call it art.
But the wedding photographer (especially the free one) is an obstinate breed. He can make friends easily, he can win praise, he can win plaudits, but he can never afford a good decent meal. For his pockets are lined not with the welcome sound of jangling cash but with bread crumbs stolen from the local bakery. It is a world not for weaklings. It’s tough out there. Dog eat dog. Man eat man eat dog. Man eat man eat dog eat rat eat KFC McChicken
Yes, I had rat last night actually. Braised on a smokey pyre of burning tyres from the ghetto kids. But that’s another story all together.
Photographypaysfuckall.com
The charity organization is run by one sole individual; head strong, tough, a hopeless romantic, soft at heart, and inspirational person who instills fears in the hearts of the competition – who have no chance of competing with not only a free wedding photographer but a fucking world-class one at that.
It is a lonely world; the world of the free wedding photographer. A dying breed. Not many of us around now-a-days. Most perished in starvation states in the 80’s. Those that survived the “starvation’ we’re killed off during the Nikon – Canon War of the 90’s. And the few rugged hardy types that weathered that storm finally perished with the onset of the camera mobile phone. Now any twat on the street can take a picture and call it art.
But the wedding photographer (especially the free one) is an obstinate breed. He can make friends easily, he can win praise, he can win plaudits, but he can never afford a good decent meal. For his pockets are lined not with the welcome sound of jangling cash but with bread crumbs stolen from the local bakery. It is a world not for weaklings. It’s tough out there. Dog eat dog. Man eat man eat dog. Man eat man eat dog eat rat eat KFC McChicken
Yes, I had rat last night actually. Braised on a smokey pyre of burning tyres from the ghetto kids. But that’s another story all together.
Photographypaysfuckall.com
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Saturday, February 02, 2008
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