Koala Bears and Other Small Creatures Indigenous to Oz

Yet again, the only thing I've written in a month has been the recycled piece from The ACREs group FourThought blog. I really must get on top of my idleness. Having said that, enjoy this bunch of nonsense.

*****

The Modern Alternative Zoological Encyclopaedia Australica (Selected Excerpts (in No Particular Order))

“A Kangaroo!”
- Exclamation of drunken Scotsman who’s fallen bodily and become impossibly entangled therein.

Koala Bears
- Enormous aquatic mammals often seen performing at SeaWorld. Beware splash zone.

Dingo
- Reclusive invitee.

Box Spider
- Thin and stringy pubic hair growth.

Stingray!
- Stingray! Duh-duh le-luh le-luh!

Steve Irwin
- Manchester United left back of the 1990s. Not a fancy player, not a scorer of goals, but a firm hand on the tiller, Irwin earned the respect of the fans for his solid performances and his long tenure at the club. That’s Denis, isn’t it?

Ned Kelly
- Prototype robot, badly designed. Not even as good as C-3PO, who is Shit.

Big Crocodiles
- Seriously big ones. DON’T FUCK WITH THEM. If you put an elastic band over their jaws they won’t be able to open them, but there’ll probably be others nearby who will croc you to death. Not to be confused with a cockodile.

Billabong
- Fairly popular clothing brand. Clothes often strangely damp. It is believed that this is due to the ghosts of angry aborigines haunting the garments with their ghostpiss.

Australian Football
- Ludicrous joke taken to extravagant extremes.

Fosters Lager
- Export only: DO NOT DRINK!  message found on Fosters cans (translated form the Australian).

Julia Gillard
- She seems good, and she is an atheist. Well done Oz.

Desert Frogs
- Eddie Guerrero’s distant relatives, who are better adapted to living in the sand than their Hispanic sibling. They show little intention of following in their kinsman’s pro-wrestling frogsteps.

The Laughing Kookaburra
- Very silly creature. Has little regard for propriety or for the feelings of those nearby. Most often seen around old folks what have done a falling over.

Duck-billed Platypus
- Feline that is frequently charged for the purchase and consumption of mallard meat served on a particular kind of tray.

Oystercatcher
- Bird. Catches oysters.

Cassowary
- Dinosaur-looking turkey-thing.

Moths
- Foul creatures.

Seadragons
- Like seahorses, but several thousand percent more awesome. Seadragons of Oz have been known to have battles on a grand scale with the Skydragons of Zeal. The SeaDs launch themselves from the water, steam coruscating as it hisses around them. They tense their long bodies to points, so as they hit the SkyDs they are utterly skewered, sending hot jets of bahlood all over the ocean. It is a cool thing to watch.

Fairy Penguin
- Benders. Ben-duuuuhs!

Great White Shark
- Evolved form of the Rubbish Beige Shark. Pants.

Sugar Glider
- Little flying squirrel/mouse-looking thing which glides through the air super cool. They are marsupials, which means they like soup from Mars. It is very expensive to ship it in, so they have signed up for Amazon Prime. This is not related to Optimus Prime, who is a Transformer, and not a megalithic online shopping source. Optimus wouldn’t involve himself in such an industry.

Bandicoot
- Popularised by Crash, who was a cartoon one of these. I liked the mask that went “ooga booga!” when you collected it. Ahhhh, those halcyon days; no worries, no concerns. Where did those days go? Now they are lost, forever and irretrievably lost. I am locked in the joyless world of adult life and I cannot escape from my responsibilities. They weigh me down like an albatross around my neck, pain me like a radio in my anus. Why must we live in a world which requires such seriousness? Can we not mess around a little more? Why not dick around? You can’t stop me from dicking around! Who do you think you are, you joyless Jerry Joyce. Heaven above and Tutankamun Almighty! I need to lie down and stop for awhile.

*****

Ezekiel 'Pebbledash' Grimfonte

This piece originally appeared on the communal blog of The ACRE, the creative-ensemble of which I am a part. That blog is here: www.theacre.blogspot.com

******

A Portrait of Ezekiel 'Pebbledash' Grimfonte.

Ezekiel Grimfonte Jr, son of a fruiterer and a maniac, achieved more than could have been expected of him. Born in the early hours of a misty Wednesday morning sometime long ago he came writhing and screaming into the world, covered in his birthing gore and as unseemly as that would imply. His father, a fruiterer, remembered that it was on a Wednesday because when the babe was finally quieted, the bin men came to pick up the bins. Ezekiel Grimfonte Sr, also known as Le Grand Zeke for his astounding rise to be the head fruiterer in all the land, was a man who put great store in the bins, specifically their removal. Unfortunately for Zeke Jr, he put far less interest into his son.

Ickle Zeke, as he came to be known by some, could have been doomed from an early age, for while his father cared not a jot for him, he was drowned in the affection of his psycho-, socio-, telepathic mother, Imelda Staunton Grimfonte, nee Miles Davis. She was a maniac, and often threw her baby boy down things: stairs, mineshafts, matter transporter tubes, straws, throats, gutters, the gaping maws of long-dead stegosauruses and the like. He was quite fortunate not to be killed, or badly grazed. Fortune smiled on young Zeke, however, for on his fourth birthday his mother was caught in the beam of a Cosmic Ray, which had asplode from the sun and she evaporated INSTANTANEOUSLY into a poof of potpourri. Ezekiel Sr was unconcerned, having long ago wearied of his wife, and quickly and pragmatically arranged for a tutor and carer for his son.

His father selected Salvador Dali for the task, and the Spaniard, his queer moustache dancing merrily in the antici…pation set about his task with aplomb. Realisation that one single plomb would not be sufficient, El Salva ordered in an entire bunch of plombs to undertake the care of his new charge. Perhaps unsurprisingly Salvador Dali's tutoring revolved mainly around art and facial hair maintenance, although he also had an unexpectedly nifty talent for shooting a man's left nut with an air rifle from any angle. He could even accomplish this with one hand restrained behind his back and with a slender lady rubbing her thumb and forefinger together in front of his face and making repeated flicking noises with her tongue. Ickle Zeke never mastered the air rifle to that extent, but he was a dab hand at the old art. Ol' Sally was proper pleased when Zeke started to flail a paintbrush, and rewarded him with unwanted sexual attention.

Zeke Sr was not a man who like art, it transpired, and he had hired Salvador Dali purposefully in order to come to hate his son. At 17, Zeke Jr broke Salvador Dali's heart by emigrating to Papua New Guinea in order to escape his father's ire. At least, that's what he told them he was doing. In reality, he was going to the moon!

He didn't have the means to do so though, so he only got as far as the top of a nearby hill, and jumping ineffectually there he lost enthusiasm and went home.

He returned to his father's manse to find Salvador Dali's emulsified corpse dangling from a balustrade. He was an odd man, even in suicide. Zeke Jr quickly left the house again, weeping thick matte tears of deepest lavender, as Salvador would have wanted.

In order to fill the gap Zeke sought out Pablo Picasso, who had eloped from his native land with a dusky Romany beauty named Masskkerrinne le Guaravadiere. He had taken to referring to himself as Portmanteau Zippedeedoodahday le Guaravadiere, and he grabbed Ickle Zeke by the ear at the mention of Dali, and forced him to run barefoot across a stony beach. It was at this point that Picasso, drunk from chasing both the dragon and the green fairy, began referring to Ickle Zeke as 'Pebbledash'.

Ezekiel Grimfonte was fucking pissed off with that, and got his revenge years later when he invented the technique of pebbledashing, and for his first public demonstration of it, decided to pebbledash Picasso. Picasso was less than pleased, but he was a bit of a dick, so fuck it.

Later, Pebbledash invented the internet, apple crumble,and quicksand, as well as winning the Boer and Vietnam wars double-handedly and then he died, of fog.

The End.

First Sketch

As you may or may not know, I am a part of a sketch troupe called The ACRE.

We are on community radio every weekend, and we edit the best bits into The ACRE Podcasts, because we are awful modern. Apart from these endeavours, we also write blogs and do live stuff when we can. We are basically creative busybodies, and hopefully we're reaching the point where our idle speculation regarding things we should do has been overtaken by actually doing those things.

Which brings me on to the point of this entry.

We spent a very sunny yesterday in the bustling township of Pontypridd, where we hauled ourselves to a pub with cameras and ideas to come up with a sketch and film it in a couple of hours. We figured the only way we'd get past the planning/potential stages of the thing would be to just go and do it, even if that means a haphazard sketch. It would be a learning curve and an experience which hopefully we could build on.

And that's what happened.

We journeyed into Ponty Park, and took to filming a sketch, the brief of which was Dafydd saying "I want to be up a tree protesting". I am surprised we managed to fill 4 minutes of nothing really.

The end product is a lot punchier and crisper than we expected it could be when we were filming, but the magnificence of editing is that some semblance of narrative can be tricked into place even if there was none at the time of filming.

So here it is, it is full of needless swearing, because we are mature, and it is incredibly silly. We hope it makes you laugh.

www.theacre.net

@adamgilder

acrecomedy@gmail.com

Cooking Dynamo

I am betrayéd.

Having spent the most of this week floundering about watching sitcoms, listening to podcasts, reading books, playing games and gorging hideously on any foodstuff I can be arsed to put into my mouth, I, perhaps unsurprisingly, find myself in a creative slump.

I don't know whether the decadent activities listed above took place because of this slump, or whether the slump has been brought on by the activities, in all probability it is a symbiotic mix of the two. I have destroyed my eyes by staring for hours at my laptop screen, slogging my way through a gruelling and brain numbing re-design of The ACRE website, brought on by needing to incorporate the amazing new logos designed for us by Heather of HLW Design onto the site. It was fiddly work for me, as I am fairly clueless about such things, and even with the aid of iWeb (the web design equivalent of a tricycle with stabilisers) it took me many long hours. Dragging and clicking. Urgh.

But with bleeding eyes I can take solace that the website now looks far more professional, with many thanks to Heather for designing the logos and the banners, and for not complaining over the vagueness of my ideas or the tardiness of my replies. They are class.

The website is teal as well now. I fucking love teal.

So back to the betrayal.

Having been stuck in a fug, unable to force out any of the latent creativity I have sloshing around inside myself somewhere, it was there last time I looked at least, I decided to be pro-active and make myself something to eat, rather than just stare at a blank text window gurning in anxiety and frustration.

The "meal" I settled on was slapdash, a mix of unusual plate-fellows. However, I learnt everything I know from mawkish idealistic RPGs and superheroic epic tales, and I figured that a ragtag band of culinary heroes would do better than a tactically sound, well gelled team. I was wrong.

Not only was I wrong, but I was also blighted by a plague of misfortunes throughout the cooking process.

The backbone of my meal was to be a cod fillet in breadcrumbs. My meat preference is usually chicken, but given that I need to kickstart my brain, I figured some "brain-food" would be the smartest option. I slapped the fillet into a baking tray, and ferried it into the oven. No problem, I am an oven veteran. It was a flawless move.

I am a huge fan of potato, but given that chips, or some variant thereof, makes up the vast majority of my potato intake, I decided I would change tack, and go slightly exotic. Microwave mash in no way fills the bill in terms of 'exoticity', but that's what I cooked. I say 'cooked'. This pot of microwave mash is said to serve two, and though i am something of a pig, I decided I would abstain from eating the entire lot. However, cutting a patty of refrigerated mash potato in half ranks quite high up in my league of 'Pathetic Things I Did Today'. Having to move the wad of mash into a different bowl also scores highly. In a world where people still starve, I cannot find another human being willing to split mash with me.

I would have been happy with my plate of mash and fish. I decided to compliment the meal with some apple squash. As it turns out, the apple squash was the only item whose consumption went to plan. it was lovely squash.

The mash reacted badly to being microwaved in a different container. It grew a burnt crusty skin around itself, which was off-putting, to say the least. And fucking disgusting, to react dramatically. I was disgruntled, and returned to the oven to reclaim what I imagined would be the saving grace of my mealtime, a delicious piece of fish to offset the filthy mash.

But oh, no. Oh very no.

I had been tricked by my father's penchant for keeping food in non-labelled freezer bags. What I had though to be a heavenly cod in breadcrumbs was, in fact, something altogether more sinister. It is said that the devil makes work for idle hands, and I imagine that the work those idle hands undertook resulted in the invention of this satanic invention.

Chicken kiev.

My entire day lay in ruins on my plate. My tears of humiliation lubricated the crusty mash, the chicken kiev postured damply by its side, like the lewd length of moist meat that it was.

I turned to some simple bread and butter for solace. Its purity and simplicity washed away the surface torment of the freakish mash and the licentious chicken kiev, restoring some measure of dignity to my evening.

I am clean again, but I can't be certain that the scars will ever fade away.

www.theacre.net

@adamgilder

My Life in Car Journeys (Little Ones)

I got in my car, pulled out of my parking spot and I was instantly stuck behind a sheep.

Now, I am a firm believer that the road is not a suitable location for a sheep, I would argue that the mountain or, ideally, a field would be a nonpareil setting for them. But contrary to popular belief, they won't listen. Sheep are the go-to animal when attempting to characterise someone as a mindless follower through the specific use of animal comparison. This sheep was indeed an idiot, and was very slow in yielding right of way to me, daredevilishly slow when considering I had the whirring engine of my fierce Fiesta to assert my dominance with.

I think we should fit cars in rural areas with huge chomping maws with which to butcher wandering animals. I feel this will eventually breed a mistrust of cars in the beasts, and they'll stay out of my way. It would be useful to create a device which can convert lamb into power, as this will offer yet another cheaper and greener alternative to traditional fossil fuel.

More flashing light antics on the way home again, this time a police car had pulled over a large white transit van. This had helpfully played out in a stretch of road where two lanes merge into one, causing confusion and brouhaha. As I drove past my head was filled with the voices of The Trap, cacophonously shrieking "fooching ewwh, ichs thuh fooching filfth!" in grotesquely over-egged Liverpudlian accents. And I was amused.

I also came level with a learner driver at a roundabout, he/she was going straight on, whilst I was turning right. It was a short lived romance however, as I pulled assuredly and safely onto the roundabout, and he/she floundered nervously at the junction. I swelled with a bloated sense of my own road competence, but I have since come to rue the loss of a romance that could have been.

I also saw girls (ACTUAL ONES!) in long socks and short skirts on my drive home, and that really hammered home quiet how much of a lecherous oik I am/can be. I then came home and had a jam sandwich. Mmmm. On both counts.

*****

P.S. TextEdit repeatedly replaced 'oik' with 'irk', which is ironic as I was indeed irked by the end of it, and I feel that automatic correction is an oik, and incredibly detrimental to creative writing. Such as the bit where I phonetically attempted 'Fucking hell, it's the fucking filth!'.

Creative, odd and/or archaic language is hugely important to me. The ladies love archaic language as well. At least those were the particulars bequothed unto mineself.

Ambulation

More tales from the dashboard today. Once again, this comes from driving home from work.

It seems the most excitement, or at least out of the ordinary activity, in my day stems from unusual nighttime behaviour from the drivers of Wales.

There lies an 40 em pee aitch zone just out of the gates from whither I work, this is a different zone from the last entry, just so people don't think I am obsessed with zones where the speed limit is 40 miles an hour. This isn't the case. Anyone spreading such untruth about me is fabricating it and furthermore, is clearly a buffoon.

Temporary traffic lights had been set up in this zone, as They are tearing up one lane of the road for their nefarious ends, They know who They are. I'm talking to you, Local Council. I assume that's who is in charge of repairing the roads. I could be wildly naive in my understanding of road-repairing. In fact, I most certainly am wildly naive in my understanding of Government at every level. I watch The Thick of It for the dynamic camerawork.

Back to the traffic lights; temporary.

I drove towards them in my car, and they were on green, so I deduced, thanks to my knowledge and experience of UK driving rules, that it was okay for me go straight through. Moreover, it would not only be 'OK', but any other action apart from driving through would provoke aggravation from other road-users. I was most definitely in the right, is my point.

A rather sharp turn follows the traffic lights; temporary, and I crested the corner gracefully, with a steady hand, and true steering. Imagine the vibrant disquiet that took hold of me as my eyes were filled with a vision of a wayward ambulance, converging upon my bonnet like a meteor towards a Victorian gentlewoman. So reckless was the decision of the ambulanceteers to plough down a one lane road against a red light, I would describe their motion with the verb; 'to careen'. Ambulances shouldn't careen. If they were, they would be called Careenbulances. You're right, they wouldn't. Careenmobile?

So how did I avert catastrophe and make base safely enough in condition to write this missive to the world.

Well, some would say that I was driving sensibly enough that I was able to reverse at a brisk yet safe and steady pace and avoid the mass of the rampaging ambulance. Rampagebulance.

However, here is the truth of the matter.

I reacted instantly to the dreadful vision, activating the Incorporeal Mode on my Boeing SevenFordFiesta, rendering my vehicle, and myself, ethereal, passing through the charging health-unit without suffering any physical contact. As the cockpits of our two vehicles came level, I dislodged myself from the intangibility process, and once again became Incarnate. I used the momentum I had built up, and sailed just over the driver's head, performing a nimble and concise flip as I did so, allowing me to grab hold of the driver's ears and send him in a gargantuan piledriver down the length of the ambulance.

The driver landed sickeningly in a heap at the far end of the vehicle, limbs splintering out from her torso like a deformed pine cone.

Ironically she had landed on one of the medical pallets set up in the back, although the irony was lost on all as the now-driverless ambulance sped over the lip of a sheer drop, sending the helpless crew into a fatal nosedive.

I once again became impalpable, rising gently through the roof and hovering calmly in the still evening air, high above the vehicular pogrom below, which was quickly setting the surrounding greenery into a vivid blazing torment.

Women drivers, eh?

"Borderline Surreal"

Here is a quick piece I penned (technically typed) just now, I have not read back over it or edited it in any way. I can only assume that it will be the most moving item of micro-literature you have ever encountered.

It is entitulated, The Dead Bears, and it is a poignant satire of modern life, as well as medieval life, space-age life and The Good Life by Weezer. It is none of these, actually, and yet somehow it is all of them. Here is it? It is yes.

*****

The Dead Bears

by Pretentia Penworthy III of Morose-upon-Tyne

I lined the keyboard up to the computer tower in a symmetrical fashion and reached out the index finger of my right hand in order to switch off the monitor, in order to save electricity, as I was now done with my computering for the afternoon. I swivelled myself out of my swivel chair, shouldered my shoulder bag and wristed my wristwatch. I shepherded my swivel chair underneath the desk so as to save on space and give the area a neat, minimalist look. Symmetry and judicious use of space is important to me.

As I shuffled absently along the row of computers, I ensured that each keyboard was symmetrically placed, and that each monitor was switched off in order to save electricity, now that all computering was suspended for the evening. Ensuring that the situation is such has become second nature to me, after spending many an evening in my role as The Arbiter of Respectable Behaviour In and Around The Computer Laboratory. I have seen many a horrific misdeed and happenstance during my tenure here, such as the sodden summer that followed the panda pop spillage catastrophe, but nothing could prepare me for the hideous carnage I witnessed as I was about to leave my station.

Atop the worktops, a sight so horrific it could drive a sensible man to god. Splayed along the usually glisteningly clean surface were the still warm bodies of a wild pack of bears. They were clearly dead, though strangely, there were no marks on their bodies to indicate just how they had become extinct. I quickly overcame my shock at the unexpected garish scene spread out before me, and I began to formulate theories…

Perhaps they had been brought low by a sneakily administered poison, but I quickly discounted this theory, for it was not as interesting as my next, and final theorem. WITCHCRAFT! Surely the only way to render such a large gathering of bearfolk dead would be through the use of WITCHCRAFT! I instantly began to suspect the group of witches we'd hosted earlier in the afternoon. I should have had my suspicions earlier, as we are a computer-based organisation, they would have had no interest in our services as there is nothing that witches hate more than computers, apart from warm baths, Catholicism, manufactured pop outfits, right-wing think-tanks and bears. BEARS! Of course! This outrageous situation could only have been concocted in the twisted imagination of a witch. And only brought into the realm of the real world through the twisted magic of a witch.

The carnage! I wished for nothing more than to avert my eyes from the grisly scene, but I could not for fear that I would become unstuck in reality. Some of the carcasses were already turning a fluorescent yellow in the dusk, as famously happens when bears pass away. Unusually, however, some of the empty vessels were putrefying and turning an angry red, whilst other were morphing to a festering gangrenous green colour. Never had I seen such hideous and inhumane animal cruelty. Well, not since PUTA (the people for the unethical treatment of animals (also is a naughty word in Spanish)) summoned the anthropomorphised concept of cruelty to animals and It strode amongst the cattle of Thebes culling them and half-heartedly laying waste to the surrounding fiefs so as to misdirect future investigators off the scent of what was a purely animal-hating-based culling venture.

On the verge of weep, I rested upon my knees and took the bears into my palms. They were clammy and vaguely sticky to the touch. My brow furrowed, I scowled at the bear corpses in befuddled fury. Bears are mean't to be furry! I fumed. I slashed my arm in a vicious arc, striking the bears into a nearby recycling bin, which was irresponsible but I cared nought for responsibility in my boggled state. I had been tricked by WITCHCRAFT! I had had my heartstrings yanked and noodled by a collection of discarded gelatine bears. I curled the digits of my hands into frustrated fists, my chin dropped to my chest and I scowled gloomily at the ground. With my irate visage clouded in darkness, I screamed to the underworld:

"I WILL NEVER CARE AGAIN!"

And I never did.

*****

Heartwarming/heartbreaking/heartattacking stuff I think you'll agree.

@adamgilder

www.theacre.net