Bo Fowler's Blog, page 27

Employee of the Month

Bernard A. Bell had worked at Shop-A-Lot for a number of years before he took up the company's offer of having his corpus callosum (the bundle of nerve fibres that connected his left and right brain hemispheres) severed - completely free of charge.

The day after the operation Bernard A. Bell wore a Shop-A-Lot cap to hide the stitch marks and was able to man two checkouts tills simultaneously thereby increasing his productivity significantly. 

The right hemisphere of the Bernard A. Bell's brain controlled his left arm that worked checkout till 4 and was more chatty with its customers while the left hemisphere controlled Bernard A. Bells right arm that worked the checkout till 5 and was much better at facial recognition and more musically inclined.

Three months after the operation Bernard A. Bell's left brain hemisphere was named employee of the month.

The Ceremony

At an undisclosed date unidentified individuals will lay an indeterminate number of wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Toy Guns

"Play nicely with those guns or I'll take them away" said the mother on the bus next to me to her children.

Writer's Block (Part 2)

He couldn't write.

He couldn't write even in the middle of a deep still night or in the-almost-religious light of a Sunday morning. 

He couldn't write when he was happy or when he was sad or when he was both. 

He couldn't write in coffee shops or libraries or anywhere else for that matter. He couldn't write in his multi-coloured notebooks he had bought especially or even on the palm of his hand. 

He couldn't write even while on a great journey by train. 

He couldn't write even after he had intentionally made his personal life overly complex and hectic. 

Metaphors were faraway cities to him, personifications were like distant relatives that no longer came to visit.


His pen, he knew, felt nothing but silent contempt for him.



And then one day the writer gave up being a writer and immediately the words flowed and flowed...

The Philosopher

'The good news is that there is an absolute reality' he said.
'The bad news is we can never know what it is.'

On the Planet Zapoon

On the planet Zapoon people have three hands and when they are asked a tough question they sometimes reply 'On the one hand... on the other hand... and on the other, other hand...' 

Botticelli's Venus

Botticelli's Venus feels peckish. 

Botticelli's Venus takes from the folds of her divine hair a packet of cheese and onion crisps.

Botticelli's Venus eats the crisps in High Renaissance fashion.

Botticelli's Venus finishes the crisps, licks her lips, crunches up the empty packet and throws it beautifully over her perfect shoulder into her shell which closes like the lid of a bin.

 

The Exclamation Mark

One quiet sunny afternoon a giant exclamation mark appeared suddenly.

At first people laughed and took photos of it with their phones. Later the authorities were called and the exclamation mark was sealed off with police tape and passers by were told to keep back.

News channel helicopters buzzed around the mysterious symbol. 

Attempts were made to reason with the exclamation mark, to find out what it meant, but the punctuation said nothing.

The army was called in and a platoon of tanks surrounded the symbol.

The colonel in charge gave the exclamation mark one more chance but still the giant punctuation failed to explain it's meaning or context.

The colonel ordered his tanks to open fire. The shells bent the exclamation mark until it resembled a question mark.

Everyone felt a lot less worried about a question mark than they had about an exclamation mark and the colonel and his tanks were ordered back to their barracks.

Two months later the top half of the giant punctuation was taken away and used as a slide in a nearby playground. All that was left of the mysterious exclamation mark was what people took to be just a run-of-the-mill full stop which was soon covered over with weeds and completely forgotten. 

The Screenplay

The screenplay was based on a novel about a character who is writing a short story about a character who is writing a narrative poem about a character who is writing an opera about the character in the novel writing the short story. 

The Unlikely Story

One day during morning break a boy was seen wandering aimlessly in the undergrowth on the wrong side of the school fence. 

The fence was too high for him to have climbed over and the gate was securely locked. The RE teacher, who was on playground duty at the time, asked the boy how it was he had got there.  The boy said that he had absolutely no idea. One moment he was leaning against the fence in the playground with his friends and the next he was on the other side. The RE teacher examined the fence but found nothing untoward.

So the RE teacher, being a trusting soul, took the boy to see the Physics teacher and had him repeat his unlikely story.

'It sounds,' the Physics teacher said after a little thought, 'rather like quantum tunnelling, when a particle tunnels through a barrier that it classically couldn't surmount thanks to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and probability density. Normally of course that sort of thing would only happen to subatomic particles.'
'Well he is quite short' pointed out the English teacher who was passing by and who, like most English teachers, knew very little about science.   
'Anyway,' went on the Physics teacher, 'the chances of such an event occurring must be, well, at least 200 million billion to one.'

The RE teacher (whose mind contained a host of equally implausible explanations) decided to make nothing of it and the boy, who had simply arrived late to school and had made up the whole story in an attempt to avoid a detention, was free to go.