As Johnny Depp once said:

"I'm shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I've done everything I can to avoid it."

No, really, he did... But the poor bugger still has to sit on a big pile of money $400 million high and repeatedly have sweaty, monkey sex with Amber Heard (The blonde girl off of Zombieland) 

Amber Heard

So I'm guessing that he considers his life a massive failure. What with all the fame and the money and having to spend 14 years gettin-jiggy-wid French popstrel Vanessa Paradis previous to that.

Vanessa Paradis

I mean, just look at the quality of his taste in available women, the poor little fellah.

But anyway, enough of comparing myself to this professional pirate impersonator.  Let us concentrate more on our differences...

I was going to do a table and be all scientific and stuff, but I wrote it out on paper first and... to be honest, I couldn't read what I'd written after most of the ink had been washed away by my uncontrollable tears.  But suffice it to say, I am not 'Best buds' with Tim Burton, I do not have Alice Cooper on speed-dial and I do not own a vineyard in St. Tropez.

But the main difference is that I would love to be famous.  I know it changes you. I know that there wouldn't be a portion of my life that was private anymore (<remember this bit for the big reveal later)

And I don't mean fairly famous... I'm pretty sure that I'm 'fairly famous' already - I mean, you guys have all heard of me, Michael Sheen (Yes, THAT Michael Sheen) wished me Happy Christmas last month. I also count Yvette Fielding, Dr. Karl Fielding and Rufus Hound as close, personal friends (As long as you don't tell them about it - I'm not sure that it's 100% reciprocal - I mean, they like and retweet a lot of my stuff... Well some of it... maybe a couple each, tops... I'm so alone.)

and Scott Page, the saxophonist from Pink Floyd, thinks I'm cool - No, really he does.

But I want a gold plated helicarrier with a giant naked picture of myself on the bottom, I want Vin Diesel to walk everywhere behind me just punching his left fist into his right palm every time i talk to anyone, whilst wearing the sunglasses from 'Pitch Black'. I want whistling lobsters as shoulder-pads.

Am I ever going to be that rich?

Not on my own, no... What I need are followers (No, not 'Drink the Coolaid' type followers - put that straight-jacket down) I mean, like a regular audience who can spread the word and increase the numbers of the Dandy Nation.

To that end, I have done the unthinkable... From tomorrow, 28th January, to 1st February 2016 All three of my Chimping Dandy books will be FREE to download onto your Kindle, or Kindle compatible device from Amazon.

Here are the Links:

Mumblings of an Irate Pangolin - My First book... Read the reviews if you're unsure as to whether to download it FOR FREE - All five star, all of the time

The Pangolin Yodels - My second book... All five star reviews again (except the one four star review). You don't need to have read 'Mumblings' before you read this one - But you know, there's no reason not to because you can download it FOR FREE

And finally...

Do you have children, are they of an age where they're not so easily scared and/or overawed by life on this big ball of snot that we call 'The Earth'? Do you read them bed-time stories, or throw a book at them and say "Read this until you fall asleep"? Well, if you do, then you should totally get this:

The Collected Children's Pangolin Primer - This is a collection of volumes 1 and 2 from above, but with all the drugs, sex and swearing taken out (I think it might say 'bugger' once... But it's used as an expletive, not a verb) - It has a picture of my Son on the front... It's pretty dim, it's a bit like those 'The longer you stare into the fog, the more zombies you will see' type thing, but he's definitely there. This can also be downloaded FOR FREE

So, if I want to be rich, why am I giving my books away?

Well, in all honesty, I'm trying to get you hooked, so that when my fiction books come out (And the Pangolin books contain some of the stories that they're based on if you need a sweetener) you'll dive onto them like an extra from 'Breaking Bad' dives onto anything blue and translucent.

Just think of me as your friendly neighborhood drug dealer - only hairier, and possibly fatter with a slightly less casually racist Hispanic name.

But seriously Buy... I mean, GET FOR FREE, my books, make me famous, I'l buy you a chinchilla or something when I am. Totally, you will probably have to remind me though.

Remember when I said that I wouldn't be worried that none of my life would be private? Well, if you get these books, you'll know pretty much everything there is to know about me anyway - And that's got to be worth at least nothing at all... Hasn't it?

What we have here, is a failure to communicate.

It's not very often that a frankly trashy film has a good lesson... Not a 'If you want it hard enough, it'll happen.' thing or 'It all turns out OK in the end if you're a good person.'

S'boring, films have things like that in to make you feel good, after all, the movie people think, quite rightly in most cases, that once you've spent £10 on a ticket, then another £10 on drinks, popcorn, nachos (with salsa & cheese, thank you very much), a further £10 on pick 'n' mix (at £475 per kilo) You're so bloody depressed, that you need a happy ending or an uplifting message to stop you slashing your wrists.

So, you've got 'Bill & Ted' - Which had the supremely talented George Carlin telling us to 'Be Excellent to each other'.

The great Ferris Bueller imparted the wisdom that 'Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.'

And Yoda, in 'The Empire Strikes Back.' taught us that we should either 'Do, or do not. There is no try.'

But one of my favourite quotes, the one that I like to take as read and agree with wholeheartedly is from Agent Kay, played by one of my favourite actors, Tommy Lee Jones in 'Men in Black' - He says that 'A "person" is smart. "people" are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.' And he (well, technically the writer who came up with the line) is right, you get enough people together and they turn into a herd, there's no reasoning with them... Best you can do is give them two options... Get milked or get slaughtered.

Actually, thinking about it, there's another scene in Men in Black that is surprisingly insightful too.  It's where Will Smith's character is on a shooting range and shoots the cardboard cutout of poor Tiffany right between the glazzies - Then gives the following explanation:

'Well, first I was gonna pop this guy hanging from the streetlight, and I realised, y'know, he's just working out.  I mean, how would I feel if someone come runnin' in the gym and bust me in my ass while I'm on the treadmill?  Then I saw this snarling beast guy, and I noticed ha had a tissue in his hand, and I'm realising, y'know, he's not snarling, he's sneezing. Y'know, ain't no real threat there.  Then I saw little Tiffany.  I'm thinking, y'know, eight year old white girl, middle of the ghetto, bunch of monsters, this time of night with quantum physics books? She about to start some sh*t.'

It's all about the motivation... That's probably the single most important thing you can know about someone, what's their motivation? why are they doing what they're doing?  It's seldom obvious you know.

A lot of people get angry when they're scared, or embarrassed, or drunk, or confused - Anger's a pretty go-to emotion really, it's a lot of peoples' default setting - Especially those people who have limited options communication-wise, they lash out, you need to watch out for that.

Another personality trait you can get for odd reasons is unconditional agreeing, what we used to call 'Toadying', you see it a lot in the sidekicks of bad guys.  My older readers would immediately think of the many characters played by Peter Lorre, the archetypal toady (or toadie, whatevs...) The person who does this usually sees themselves as physically weaker, but cleverer than, the person they are agreeing with. Odd types usually... dangerous in a (sometimes quite literally) backstabby way.  They don't care who they're standing behind, as long as they're standing behind someone - (See the backstabby thing again) - Tends to attract the borderline schizophrenic, who think they're both not good enough and too good at the same time.

Then you get the slutty girls (Sorry ladies, that's not me being sexist, they're predominantly girls) who attach themselves to men that are currently described in modern parlance as, I believe, Douches.  Vacuously bronzed, spiky haired, skin-jobs who take any opportunity to divest themselves of their shirts and wander around the place inviting the world to stare at their oddly tiny nipples. Why are they attracted to these men?  Well, there's something of the Trophy Hunter there for some I guess, if they'd been born in the 19th century and had fewer breasts, more beards and a light sprinkling of pith helmet, they would probably have a tiger skin rug in front of the fire and a tapir head with sad, glass, eyes hanging dejectedly in the toilet.  It's also a possibility that they have crushingly low self esteem and believe that they can't do any better, they confuse 'intimate physical contact behind the bins at the local take-away' with 'Everlasting love and self-fulfillment' once every day and twice on Sundays.  Or... on the other hand, they could just come from an abusive household where sexual physicality has been reduced to a currency.

I don't know, and neither do you - It's easy to judge though isn't it? I do it all the time.

I've lost count of the number of Pikies and Druggies and Dole-Scroungers that walk past my house when I'm in the garage.  The number of Asylum seekers, terrorists, sex-trafficers and Eastern European non-carded plumbers that drive past me in rusty vans every day.  The number of once-pretty, Blonde-haired teenagers with crowds of mixed-race kids living off the Child Benefit that my Income Tax pays for in a house twice the size of the one I can't really afford to rent myself.

Then I think to myself (No, not "What a wonderful World") that actually, 99% of these people are just going about their every-day lives, trying to make ends meet, struggling just as much, if not more, than I am.

It's a commonly held belief that you only have seven or so seconds to make a first impression - and they're usually wrong, people who you pass in the street don't even get that - What chance do they have?

I guess what I'm saying is, don't Judge, it's really not nice - Unless you catch them trying to nick your bike out of the garage, feel free to judge them with extreme prejudice (and a bat... either / or)

But going back to where we started, I think the one film quote that epitomises the entire sentiment that I've talked about, the final explanation to the massive question of the ongoing bleakness of the human condition, the proof to Einstein's Grand Unified Field Theorem and the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything are the solemn words of one amnesiac female Royal Tang, who once opined: 'I shall call him Squishy, and he shall be mine.  He shall be my Squishy, come here Squishy!'

A lesson for us all there, I think you'll agree.

Take me to your Lederhosen

I'm feeling self-referential this morning, so I'm going back to a subject that's close to my gizzard.

Alien Abduction...

People who know me and/or have visited Dandy Towers will appreciate that the first floor library is mainly comprised of Science Fiction books, a smattering of Horror, many, many 'Fo' dummies' books and an English to Dutch phrasebook. I like a getaway from reality to be a getaway and how much further can you getaway than to the thirteenth bifurcated throne-room of Emperor Fun'dun'kmant'ine the Socially Inept who happens to command a fleet of ten thousand gravity-powered, cloakable, Star-Killerons and is father to the shrew-gratingly beautiful F'nurk'ma'chewb'utfutnut, whose attributes are both talked about in and visible from, low orbit.

I'm not biased, I like everything from the high space opera stuff as described above to the 'It was Earth all along' shock twist in the tail, OMG I'm so original, genres. I've been reading this sort of stuff for the best part of forty years and I've read pretty much all the basic stories, and some of the not so basic ones, there can be some stuff you really have to think about, like;

Boy meets girl, girl turns out to be thousand year old alien and runs away. Girl meets other boy, boy dies bravely in intergalactic war, boy revived by enemy soldier. Spaceship turns out to be the killer, girl turns out to be the spaceship. Boy turns out to have imagined the whole thing, Both boys are the same person. Girl is one of the boys' Grandmother, but not the other's.

You see, with my training and experience, I understand all that - I mean, it helps that I wrote it, but still... You'd think I'd be immune to all the associated Sci-Fi tomfoolery. But the whole Alien Abduction stuff does tend to put the wind up me a bit - I can read about it, no problem - I've got many books full of accounts from people who claim they've been abducted, taken aboard your actual spaceship, by your actual aliens and either been viciously subjected to vicious experimentation or given a bit of a tour and had a lovely chat about the threat of impending thermonuclear war and dropped off with only an itchy sub-dermal implant to remember them by.

I think I might just be a bit gay about the idea of being being anally probed - Hang on, that might not be right, I mean I'm really not a fan of the whole idea.

You know how in the horror films, you've got the soon to be victim, running through the forest in the middle of the night, being pursued by (If it's a decent director) a half-glimpsed monster, when she comes across a rickety woodshed, forces her way inside and slams the door. She immediately feels safe, even though we've previously seen it tear a train apart using only its nipples and eyebrows. Well, you don't get that respite from alien abduction, most abductees are asleep when they're 'taken'. You might get a bright light and a wooooo-wooooo-wooooo noise if'n you're lucky, but that's about your lot until you wake up in a white room full of the little grey dudes with the big black eyes giving it the old 'This might sting a bit' routine as they plunder your nether-regions with a nuclear powered eggwhisk.

And that's the other thing... If you'd asked a bunch of kids in the '60's to draw you an alien, you'd have got a mix of wild and wonderful pictures from two-headed parrots to octopus footed centipedes and everything in between. Do that now and the chances are you'll mostly get the picture that most of you just thought of (OK, apart from you people who misread 'AN' alien as 'THE' Alien) - You know, the little dudes with the pear shaped heads, massive black eyes and no visible genitals, known by one and all as Apple Store Employees... Erm... I mean Greys.

It's something I've been thinking about for a while, is this image being drummed into us? Are we being made ready for a big 'reveal' by a conglomeration of Western Governments? So that when the curtain is pulled aside and it turns out that we've had Zarp and Plurb from Zeta Reticulii coaching the direction of mankind's development since the Roswell crash we all just go 'Ah, right you are then'?

I read recently that according to a recent study even young babies recognise pictures of Greys as being a 'thing' rather than just an abstract shape. This brings up another two questions;

1 - Why are they able to do that?

2 - Why would anyone be doing that research?

I think we should all be desperately worried - Either that there's an alien invasion going on by stealth - Or I'm as mad as a donkey wearing lederhosen on a tightrope.

Either way, no-one's sticking anything up my butt, without at least buying me dinner first.