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The Story That Ends & Begins Again (no word limit)
In 1981 when Colonel Simon went to Graceland to pay tribute to the greatest leader the country had ever known, the King of America…Paul heard a voice. It was the King and he said "Don't you step on my blue suede shoes." Paul immediately began a world wide search for world's best shoes and found they were bright and white and on the feet of Ladysmith Black Mombasa who raise their feet like turtles. Six years after the group became famous by singing on Paul Simon's albums on the 10th of December 1991, founder, director, composer, and lead singer Joseph Shabalala's brother and singer Headman Shabalala, was pulled to the side of the road by a racist white man who shot and killed Headman Shabalala. The evidence was ample and irrefutable so the white man was found innocent.
Apartheid would not end until 1994. Ladysmith Black Mombasa were guests of Nelson Mendela when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and at President Mendela's inauguration where they sang.
Back when the group and Paul Simon first got together one of the first songs Ladysmith Black Mombasa completed with Simon was composed and recorded with music for instruments, African vocals and Simon's English vocals in just two hours. It was called Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.
Joseph Shabalala did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this Complaint Department message. however his representative did send out a press release stating that Joseph is not now nor has he ever been a turtle.
That's good to hear, no one would want him turned into mock-turtle soup, not even teenage mutant mock-turtle ninja soup (which comes with oodles of alphabet canoodles).Meantime, I've been learning polish. It's very hard work and makes my elbows ache.
You ought to work on your English too.
This is very true, for after all if my English was any good I wouldn't be sat here all day polishing it. Perhaps I should get Oli's sister-in-law to give it a go for me, after all, she is Polish.
I had an uncle who married a pole. He was a drinker and he just thought it was a skinny lady. She was quite rigid in her ways but was an upright citizen who did the right thing like calling Animal Control when he'd come crawling home drunk and moving on all fours. It wasn't that alone though. When he peed on her rosebushes she feared he might wag his tail and sniff her butt. It worked out well. A bar owner picked my uncle at the Animal Shelter and got a good watch dog. He wasn't protecting the bar so much as he was protecting the booze which he considered his personal property. He was a happy as puppy when he had his bowl of pretzels and a bottle of gin. And every time he was taken for a walk he peed on every pole.
There was a lonely boy driving across the vast expanse of France for the very first time. He made a slow trip from Calais to Saint Omer and then to Amiens and Beauvais, finally days later to Paris (France), where he was supposed to stay a few days with a rich Mexican student in the student's parent's mansion on Boulevard Haussmann. The footman who opened the door was apologetic, but the family had travelled down to their country home in the Dordogne for the week. Humf. The poor lonely boy was out of money, spent his last Francs on a tiny baguette to keep starvation from the door and much needed petroleum for the car.And then the French devalued even that. So the banks were all closed for days and he couldn't even draw a meagre amount of Francs out. Sad, he returned to his car in the far reaches of Saint Germain-en-Laye, a foot journey of three hours, and drove away from Paris ( France) in an easterly direction. After a long day's journey he arrived in the medieval town of Troyes. He pottered around the famous cathedral and then looked for a camp site where to park for the night and sleep in the car.
As he drew near the camping site, he saw a small restaurant advertising "Steak et Frittes" 10F,50.
He only had 4F, but reckoned that might at least buy a plate of frittes and a glass of water. SO after parking the car, he walked around to the restaurant and went in. He sat down shyly in a corner and soon up came the owner in his big French apron and asked in French what the boy wanted. Having very little French, the boy stammered that could he afford a plate of frittes for 4F.
The owner beamed and said in English, "Is that all you have? You look very hungry."
The lonely boy nodded. To that point he had only ever encountered very unfriendly Frenchmen when it came to food and drink, but this one seemed pleased to see him.
"You shall have the finest steak and chips and a fine salad with a glass of red wine," the owner declared.
"But I have only four Francs."
"But you are an Englishman, my friend, and I am a Pole, and I served with the Air Force at Northolt Aerodrome during the war. Any Englishman who enters my restaurant may eat and drink for free!"
And so the lonely boy went on his way next morning, with a full stomach, and was so content he drove all the way across the rest of France to the Swiss Border at Basel. Unfortunately, when he reached his final destination at Murten near Bern, because he was almost a week earlier than expected, his friend he was going to visit was not happy with him. :-(
His friend said "I am not happy with you." Besides you have plot hole. If you couldn't get a single Franc (Paris) out of the bank how did he get the petrol to drive all that way? Eh? So you with your lies go away and never darken my door again. (The boy did get the door to be a darker shade of grey with his dirty hands.) He also had dirty clothes and dirty hair and well he was just dirty. He told dirty jokes and thought dirty thoughts. He got dirty job to make a Franc (Paris) and sat down on the dirty floor and thought about dirt. Let this be a lesson to you dear reader, call ahead to make certain your Mexican friend is home before you take off for Paris (France.)
Insult was added to injury on returning for the autumn term when the Mexican friend said hello, how was the vacation and why on earth didn't you come and see me in my family's giant mausoleum of a house on Haussmann? I did. You weren't there. Oh… yes, that must have been the week we went down to our other extraordinarily vast chateau in the Dordogne. You should have gotten the details off the doorman-footman and driven down. It's four hundred miles and I didn't have any money. Oh… well, touch titties then.
"touch" titties? I think we need an editor and a proofreader and a beta reader and a titular author.
Taking a leaf from your own book, Mr. Moderator, "touch" was a typo for "tough". So you are so very right: editor, proofreader, better reader and a titular author might be useful.So would a plot…
Ideas on a postcard to…
I cannot take a leaf out of my own book because I have not written any books. An editor, proofreader, beggar reader and a titular author would remove the need for a real author. No plot ideas on envelopes or elsewhere as plots tend to ruin the story. Plus if you simply write the lots of rave reviews you have no need for a book. Get the picture?
Perhaps a better idea would be to get Oliver to write all the purple prose and simply publish that.James Titular Kirk was a very fine captain of the Starship USS Enter Prize, with an authorial attitude to his crew, especially Mister Pox, of whom he was inordinately fond (to discover more on this relationship, I refer you to endless reams of fanfic slash novels to be found at various sites in the Interweb). They were for ever dashing off at warped speed around the inverse investigating temporal phenomenon which invariably led them into contact with weird blue-skinned women who invariably lived in deep caverns under the surface of the otherwise uninhabitable planet (caves being a relatively cheap form of set to construct).
Everything went pretty well until one day they met the USS Enter Prize coming back the other way, shock-horror, and the captain was non other than an ancient British thesp called Patrick Wayne Stuart… make it so!
So Shakespeare it was Directed by British thesp called Patrick Wayne Stuart whose only direction to the cast was "Make it so!" Every episode was a different sonnet read by Chekov while Uhura sang an ethereal a capella wordless vocal performance. This was actually a Hollywood satanic plot to lure all the straight men to lick the TV set drooling over Uhura while the straight women ran off to Russia to have affairs with short Russia men whose only English words were "Aye Captain". This left the rest of country composed of sexual minorities who passed the QUILTBAG Equality Act which was really unnecessary because the whole country was Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer and straight men licking television sets.
Licking an LED screen TV is relatively safe, while licking a plasma screen can be dangerous because the plasma comes off easily and can coat the tongue with glowing material deleterious to health. But licking an old-fashioed tube TV screen is positively stupid because there's a lot of static electricity there which could light the licker up like an atomic bomb.The usual symptoms are a propensity for splitting infinitives, such as "To Boldly Go", or "It's Infinity, Jim, But Not As We Know It (it cracked apart when I accidentally dropped it)."
Oh, damn it! I've just an infinitive split…
You have an affinity for infinities. Space the final frontier. That William Ryker had an unorthodox affinity for Wesley Crusher which could have landed him in the brig if Captain Picard found out. Picard was so straight he wouldn't touch men or women or alien. He was saving himself for and eternity in heaven with that green lady from the original show. What ever happened to her anyway?
"She split an infinitive while doing her sexy dance number and had to be let go since Wesley was a stickler for grammar." Yeah but where'd she go?
"She boldly went where no man had gone before."
You mean…
"Yes, the Dinah Shore Memorial Lesbian Golf Tournament."
We take a short break from the Dinah Shore Memorial Lesbian Golf Tournament for this word from our sponsor:Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
A ridiculous kitten with silky fur.
And little black Pinkle grew and grew
Till he got as big as the big Tattoo.
And all that he did he did with her.
"Two friends together," says Pinkle Purr.
"So you see, folks, Pinkle Purr tattoos are the best on the market. And remember… there's no gain without the pain!"
And now we return you to the Dinah Shore Memorial Lesbian Golf Tournament, where Tigress Woods is just lighting up an escape from a particularly nasty sand trap [[commentator makes an aside to his broadcasting colleague: "Why do they put those things in the way of the golfers…?"]]
Roger used his extensive experience with the Beeb and Golf broadcasts to answer the commentator and then play resumed.
As Tony Jacklin faced off on the tee against Arnold Palmer, you could hear the commentator's teeth chattering: he kept saying "tee hee, tee hee!" And there was only one thing to do to remedy the problem, bring his a cup of tea here.The film editor turned to his assistant, who was finding appropriate sounds for the movie's soundtrack, and said, "Because I don't like Tony Jacklin, I want to make it sound like this putt of his almost didn't go in the hole clean, when actually it did."
Th assistant knew exactly the sound his editor wanted from the vast sound library of golfing noises: 1) a really long, wobbly "oggle" (onomatopoeia for the noise a golf ball makes as it drops into the hole); 2) a lukewarm spectator response, followed by a huge burst of applause for the moment Arnold Palmer stepped up to knock in his easy-peasy 3-inch putt.
THE STORY THAT ENDS AND BEGINS AGAIN
The old Russian peasant woman still had to scrub her wash by hand after the big round tub stopped working but she still had the wringer part of the wringer washer. All she had washed she put piece by piece between the dulled white cylinders and out came the laundry flat as cardboard but with not a drop of water. She carefully straightened the garments and put them on the clothesline which was run from the house to the tree out back."No! No!" they shouted. "Not that story. Tell us the story of…"
There is a very sad tale of Olde Amsterdam where a baker and his wife were famous for their gingerbread men. Amsterdammers came from every canal to buy the tasty gingerbread men (Amsterdam was at the center of the lucrative spice trade that included ginger). And then, suddenly, as the moth of December approached, the strict Reformed town council banned gingerbread men because they were idolatrous, papist food.This was a terrible shock and the baker wanted to throw himself in the Herengracht, but his enterprising wife said "Stuff and nonsense," all we'll do instead is to make gingerbread dogs and cats."
And these proved every bit as popular as the gingerbread men. When she wasn't helping her baker husband at the ovens, the wife still had to scrub her wash by hand after the big round tub stopped working but she still had the wringer part of the wringer washer. All she had washed she put piece by piece between the dulled white cylinders and out came the laundry flat as cardboard but with not a drop of water. She carefully straightened the garments and put them on the clothesline which was run from the house to the tree out back.
The the Moth of December ate all the members of the strict Reformed town council because if he couldn't eat gingerbread men he'd decide he eat men instead.Without the council there was no more ban on idolatrous, papist food so wives had to make little pancake men and toy store only sold gingerbread men halloween costumes and the bedding store only sold gingerbread men pillows and there was gingerbread men music (which sounded much like bubble gum music) and everybody got so sick of gingerbread men the elected a new town council, while papist idolators, banned gingerbread men.
The good people of Chatham had become jolly good Protestant reformers, but they had a sneaking liking for the Papa of Roma because he sent the Spanish Inquisition (somewhat unexpectedly) to Amsterdam along with an army of Conquistadors, fresh from their triumphs over the vile and horrid Aztecs in the New World, to punish the Amsterdammers.Now, I hear you ask, dear reader, why the good people of Chatham were pleased to see the Amsterdammers so heavily punished. It was in revenge for the attack made by the Dutch navy when it swept into the River Thames to wreak havoc because they were fed up with the English navy and mercantile companies raiding what the Dutch considered their possessions in the Spice Islands (like where the ginger for gingerbread men came from). The Dutch admiral sailed up river, firing the dockyards at Chatham on the way, with a broom tied to the top of his flagship's topmast.
It seemed an unlikely place to strap a broom, but the symbolism wasn't lost on the English government.
Symbolism: A new broom sweeps clean. So there was a new government committed to he principal of lower taxes and increasing services and then getting a bailout from the European Union. I was loads of fun before the EU decided Great Britain was not in Europe because it didn't touch the European mainland. Still partying away, the British government obtained a loan from Greece and used it to create a peninsula from the UK to the EU thus having land claims to be part of Europe.
Now back in the EU the UK asked the EU for a loan to repay Greece. After much grumbling and hemming and hawing they had no choice but to back the Grecian loan to put and end to this dirty damage which became a smudge on the EU's character.
This was clearly seen from the EU character's point of view (POV), which the British Government character repudiated because the author had made the EU character an "unreliable narrator" and .brit.gov character held this to be deeply unfair and a partisan telling of the story. Besides, Greece was a bad oder and never did urn what it was supposed to do.The money it loaned brit.gov.uk was borrowed from the German character, who demanded it back at 15% per month interest, which brought Greece to its proverbial knees.
As if the Greeks hadn't practiced that position for thousands of years: see Deadly Circus of Desire: Boys of Imperial Rome.
Ah, a scholarly reference to Endymion of Ephesus or Scorpus of Delos. As charioteers both young Greeks were used to bending the knee while riding their chariots around the Circus Maximus, the better to take the strains and stresses of the hard ride, a bit like the springs in a modern car. Naturally, in consequence, they found it easy to be brought to their knees.
It's true the Greeks never got what was ode to a Grecian earn at the fixed EU price for urn earnings.
The Greek pricing of:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Was sold for 7,079,293 Greek Drachmas but only received €20,833 which is proof the EU was artificially deflating Greek one-kneed passion thus Greece was actually the strongest member of the EU but caused by bureaucrats to appeared two kneed more chariots of fire.
As Scorpus announced, "They have charged us for our knees while we work on our backs."
After several years of charioteering on his back, Scorpus got fed up, and got up. His knees creaked a bit, but he had an idea. So many of his older fans wanted to look years younger so he invented a lotion they could rub into their thinning hair and in no time give it body, fullness, richness, and a lustrous dark color. This miracle hair restorer needed a name and he came up with it… He'd won 1999 races and was as famous a Greek as ever there was (apologies Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras…).So he named the lotion Grecian 2000. .google.co.uk/#q=grecian+2000
Then he renamed it Grecian Formula because he wanted to sell to the overseas market. The American version contains lead acetate which is banned in cosmetics in Canada and the European Union, but Americans don't care if their brains rot as long as they look good.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grecian_...
Which explains why so many American men look so good, while their European counterparts suffer from lank and unkempt hair. I suppose Ronald Reagan used the lead-based formula and he always looked good, even as his brain went to rot. This was proved by the way he fell in love with Margaret Thatcher.
That's why we now have Just For Men Just for Men is pre-ferred by 9 of 10 dentists who chew gum.
But John you just said you like 50 Shades of Gay: Bruised By My Billionaire Bossand now you're only using black and white film? How encoutrez!
A scorching hawt titbit by Lily Nibs (as in "his Nibs") needs a content warning ("title is designed to sound like a novel from the alliterative pen of JP Donleavy"). The tenth dentist who didn't chew gum was a Singaporean, a tiny country where chewing gum is outlawed. With his Chinese ancestry, Tony Leung didn't require either Grecian 2000, Grecian Formula with added lead, or Just For Men because his hair wouldn't turn gray until in his 90th year. And his teeth will be so white because he relies only on fellow professionals at Smile Makers Dental Clinic for his orthodontic care.Poor Tony Leung, though, wasn't popular when he visited New Jersey to find he was the only non-gum chewing dentists around.
Poor Tony Leung was desperate. He felt like a mouse trapped in a maze that had no solution. The phone rang. "Yes this is Dr. Poor Tony Leung. Who's calling? Yes! Certainly. When would be a convenient time?" Dr. Poor Tony Leung, the only aquatic dentist in Hawaii just got a call from a hammerhead shark who has a date tonight with a very special lady and he needs his teeth cleaned and polished because, unless he chickens out, he intends to propose to her.
The aquatic dentist chimed in "I also have a barracuda who is auditioning for a movie with a director who goes for the real thing, not cgi. He needs a quick tooth whitening. Business is picking up. So sorry fellows. You continue your story game but as for me I'm off to work." and he opened a door in the maze and walked out with his aquatic dentist tool bag.
One has to wonder what a Great White Shark proposal of marriage would be like:"Hey, darlin', the last time I saw such a fine a pair of fins was in a can of soup."
"I bet you use that tired old line on all the boys."
"Beautiful set of razor-sharp shiners between those puckered lips."
"If you paid Poor Dr. Tony Leung as much as I do, yours would be a bit whiter than they are… for a Great White, I mean."
At this point a distraction enters the romantic scene, accompanied by doom-laden music.
"Oh, hey beautiful, look what just thought it was safe to go back in the water. Got Spielberg written all over his beauteous butt."
"Gee, but you know how to show a date a good time… breast or leg?"
Is your Poor Dr. Tony Leung the long lost siamese twin brother of my Dr. Poor Tony Leung separated at birth by a swordfish?I do not want to beat a horse that's dead,
but I clearly said the shark was a hammerhead.
Where you got the Great White Shark I do not know
Typically they're used for show.
Hammerheads are ugly as sin and grow very big and very dangerous yet still they are unglamorous. Why hasn't Hollywood seen what stars they are? How freaky they are?
I knew a Great White once, it was called Bruce.The tyro director Steven Spielberg let it loose.
It ate Robert Shaw until he was quite dead,
And no one saw it was really a hammerhead.
Unlike the Great White this one was pretty,
After a good meal he could be quite witty.
But Robert Shaw proved too rich and made it burp
So it auditioned to play the part of Wyatt Earp.
So Hammerhead and Great White drew guns at noon
As all in the town gazed on from Lazy Cow Saloon.
They drew, fired and Great White fell amid derision,
He'd overlooked Hammerhead's great stereo vision.
I know you said it was a hammerhead,
Damn it all, that's just what I read.
Do you think the owl and the pussycat who went to sea in a pea-green boat would be able to escape the jaws of a hammerhead?
yes,more or less.
pea boats are frail but it's a fairy tale.
nothing gory, in a happy story.
There must be a reason why they were called the Brothers Grimm, though…?
Because their mother and father's surname was Grim. It's a little name convention we have that is almost entirely universal in English speaking countries. Just like Edward and Richard Rainbow were brothers and the sons of Col. and Mrs. Rainbow. Only Edward was a killer and he murdered his mother. He failed to save his father during the dramatic moments that one and all can read in A Life Apart.
But why were they called the Rainbow brothers?
Well, not because they were both gay, since the word "homosexual" had not even been invented at that time, and "gay" still meant: bright, jolly, happy… all the things in fact associated with the meaning of gay today.According to that little-known convention you mention, they were in all likelihood named Rainbow because that was their parents' family name. It is an Olde English name from an ever oldier French name, Rainbout, derived from German meaning "counsel" + "bold"or "brave". So they gave brave counsel. In 1891 the greatest concentration of Rainbow families was in the counties of Warwickshire and Leicestershire.
On the other hand, it might be that they are just so colorful…
Yeah your right it was the colorful thing which looks so… colorful.But why was Zaki named Zaki with no last name? Why in a ≈ 145,000 word book couldn't the author come up with just one frigging more word to give him a last name? He was a Arab named Zaki Weinberg but that was problematic so the family changed the name to Sayyid.
Gregory Hilliard was actually Gregory Rabinowitz but his father changed his name to Hilliard because it was his employer's last name and it customary in England for servants to take their employers last name since their own was worthless. So he was a fake Earl which was okay because that whole snobbish business of hereditary titles is a joke because the best people to run a business aren't born into the job but those work to achieve the highest qualifications for a job. That is what these titles are: a business. Some had all their business decisions made by their children and they ended up penniless and other others let the servants who had worked the hardest to know the business make the decisions and they acquired great wealth like Gregory Hilliard née Rabinowitz and Zaki Sayyid née Weinberg.
Zaki has only one name because he was enslaved, and they—as pointed out above—take the last name of their master, and in his case it was this spaghetti western hero who snatched him up, the Man With No Name.In spite of this, Zaki set up his own business, and made loads of loot from it… (as you remember…
He was so successful people trekked in from all over to have their wooly locks teased and braided and permed and dyed all the colors of the Sudanese flag, that within a year the Zaki hair styling franchise had spread up and down the length of the Nile. He took out ads on FWBC (Fuzzy-Wuzzy Broadcasting Cooperative) and that reached right into the Khedival palace in Cairo where Khedive Moussaka demanded a hair make-over. And so Zaki, who had slipped quietly out of the capital all those years ago, arrived back in pomp and circumstance (to a piece of Elgar music), and the newspapers heralded him as MR. SNIPS.
Complaint Department
Books mentioned in this topic
Lassie Come-Home (other topics)A Life Apart (other topics)
Wrath of Seth (other topics)
Wife to Mr. Milton (other topics)
The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Zack (other topics)Roger Kean (other topics)
Oliver Frey (other topics)
James George Frazer (other topics)
Italo Calvino (other topics)
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The South Africans were so impressed Colonel Paul and his easy-sounding voice, they named Simonstown after him, and thought it was a fine place for a prison camp for captured Boers who refused to attend the multiracial concert.