Socialler and Socialler

I guess we are all just a barrell of lonely monkeys. I have been challenged by Lady B to write seven things about myself in a post "shorter than the Paleozoic era" (the Lady is a fond student of all things between a rock an a hard place). Assuming the Paleozoic era, like the parsec, is a unit of length rather than time as might be conjectured, I for one will not stand in the way of such contests of dispensing the excretory fluid. Setting the tattered manifest charter of impersonality aside for a second time (those scarred will remember the horrid lapse of standards of February this year) I will boldly endeavour to oblige the gaggle of coquettes in their thirst for brass tax.

1.

I could be compared to a summer's day

Though I am more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Some too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And oft is his gold complection dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But my eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair I oweth;

Nor shall Death brag I wander'th in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time I groweth:

So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,

So  long lives this and this gives life to me

2. Most Terry Gilliam films presents a fairly accurate description of my mindscape.

Terry G

3. I invented the Spanish question mark and the royalties afforded me anually are partly to blame for the current economic turmoil in Spain.

The other one is copyright infringement

4. I am fascinated by the apparent humanity behind much of the lofty cultural expressions of history. Consider this: although civilisation has gradually become more advanced through the ages our perception of the value of cultural remnants of history has described an oppositely declining trajectory, as has our understanding of the basic functions of humanity behind those remnants. Therefore, discovering the lewdness of Hamlet, the greatest emo of all times, the fact that the English Enlightenment poet Stephen Duck died by ducking in 1756 or that Virgil got his name for not sleeping with ladies (because he was secretly otherwise inclined) delights me to no end.
 

 
5. My latest purchase is La Pucelle d'Orléans by Voltaire. A dirty sexist satire over the life of Joan of Arc, the book was found too licentious by the 18th century French! Since it was outlawed, banned and burned throughout France Voltaire brought it to London whose printers published in great excess and delight. I have found one of these copies from 1774 in a Viennese antiquarian bookstore and it is in the mail as this post is being written. Now all that remains is to learn French and I should be able to look forward to many a hearty, bawdy guffaw.


Juicy Joan,
too frivolous for the French

6. My hobbies are golf, masturbation and strangling animals. Simultaneously.



7. I get the creeps by the following: open drawers, clingfilm, thick ropes, dentists' drills, pictures of VD and jutting my jaw forwards so my lower front teeth get on the outside of my upper front teeth. On the other hand, I have been cut, shot (by myself), bitten by lots of different animals, had surgery in my stomach without anasthetic, cut the inside of my eyelid on rusty barbed wire, climbed a switched on electric fence and bled quite substantial amounts of blood on a wall. However, I am genetically conditioned to cry when animals in distress are rescued or when those two Italians sing and play for Lady and the Tramp in the original movie.

You've read it!

You can't un-read it!

Stay tuned for more verisimilitude!

Look it up.

Sources: pic1, pic3, pic5