WinterNado!

Inundated! I've been positively inundated with people who are gleefully telling me that next month is going to herald the shutting down of the entire United Kingdom.

It won't be because some chap in the US Congress has decided that 'Oh yes, and I managed to bankrupt the World' will look good on his CV.

It won't be because Michael Gove, Secretary of State for badly planned Victorian Educational systems has decided that all exercise books should be replaced by slates and crumbly pieces of chalk and people who can't even speak English convincingly should be taught Latin.

It will be that we are gripped in 'The Worst Winter for the past ONE HUNDRED YEARS!!!!!'

What can we expect from this MegaWinter or HyperWinter or (My own personal favourite) WinterNado or whatever we're going to hype it up as?

It seems that the pesky old Jet Stream is in the wrong position you see, instead of sliding wonderfully across the Atlantic Ocean like a basking shark full of rancid helium and then hanging a left and heading towards the Scilly Isles.  It's barreling away underneath us, dipping a toe in the Channel and then hooning off over western Europe

This causes what Meteororororologists call 'A Localised Area of low Pressure' and the winds from the Arctic all get sucked in to fill the gap with their spiky teeth and icicle claws.  Lovely.

So, they're expecting it to be the worst winter since 1913 eh?  So what was so bad that happened in 1913?

Ah... Well, It seems that extensive investigation shows that in the early part of the year we had 10' snowdrifts in the grim North and virtually no snow in the South at all - What does that tell you? It tells me that it's warmer in the South than it is in the North.  Because I'm generous, I won't charge you for that wonderfully informed piece of information, it's a free gift - From me to you.

So, if we're going to suffer the worst weather 'since' then, it means that it's not going to be any worse, which means that depending where you are in the country, you will probably experience somewhere between zero and 120 inches of snow.  It will probably be colder and windier on the high ground and in the valleys there will be wetness.

Effectively, the same as there always is during a British Autumn, Winter and Spring.  Should it shut the country down as soon as office workers jump excitedly up and down as the first feathery flakes float past their windows?  No!

Will it? Yes, of course it will - The UK is not prepared for any particular weather pattern that it ever has to face.  Whether it be heat or cold, wet or dry, humid or whatever the opposite of humid is, we're singularly unready for anything except the ability to complain at a moments notice.

What if we had really strange weather? how would we cope with these things if we fall to pieces when we can't see the road-markings because of a light dusting of the white stuff?

-oOo-

There's stories of giant hailstones, as big as golf-balls occasionally falling in the UK, you know, breaking windows, scaring horses, playing the drum parts of White Stripes songs on a bit of rusty air-raid shelter - But did you know, bigger things exist, they're called Ice-Bombs - Some of these things are 9" across and fall out of the sky like bricks.

What would happen if these things came as part of WinterNado? - There would be a huge boom (if you'll pardon the expression) in the Lean-to/Conservatory repair market and people with loft conversions will be jamming the helpdesk line at Velux.

-oOo-

It's not just in the Bible that animals rain from the skies you know.  There have been several documented instances of fish, frogs and worms raining down from the heavens.  The normal explanation for this is that the precipitate (The things what are flung from the sky) are picked up by typhoons and waterspouts, carried miles through the air and deposited on normal God-fearing people who immediately think that the Rapture is starting.  There have also been reports of birds falling from the skies, zoologists investigated these reports and found that it was due to a strange avian behaviour called 'landing'

What would happen if these things came as part of WinterNado? - Knowing the luck of the average Brit, the animals that fell from above would be Snapping Turtles and Blue Whales, which, if you were to look on the bright side, would both solve our food crisis and teach children in the immediate vicinity of a 'turtle-strike' not to poke their fingers into things that they don't recognise - Which is good advice to all of us I think you'll agree.

-oOo-

Coloured rain is another popular 'Extreme' weather condition.  Well, I say extreme... I mean it's just rain, that's not clear.  You can have coloured rain in a plethora of designer colours and it's often due to contaminants or Algae in the body of water where the rain originally came from.

What would happen if these things came as part of WinterNado? - The Thrash Metal band 'Slayer' would sue anyone who used the phrase 'Raining Blood' on their Facebook feed - Presuming that the rain was red that is, if it were green then I suppose you'd be fine saying things like 'OMFG! It's, like, totally raining snot.' Which Slayer probably wouldn't care about that much, until their next album came out.

-oOo-

But all joking aside, if it does snow, take it easy out there, allow extra time for your journey, only travel when you have to and all that jazz.  But if you can get away with it, ring into work and say you can't get the car off the drive, or the train's not running, or the motorway is knee deep in freshly fallen marmosets.  Go sledging, have a snowball fight, fill a dumb person's hood with snow and then tell them that it's raining.

But don't, whatever you do, stick your middle finger in something that looks like a giant Pukka Pie with an evil face - You'll never be able to say goodbye to your boss ever again...

Learn to govern yourself, be gentle and patient.

I was driving home last night, through the sleepy little Hamlet of Castle Donington, famous for The Download Festival, Motor Racing and Old people shaking their skinny fists at low flying airliners shouting 'Go away great silver birds, you'll not be predating off of my expensive koi carp today!' And giving it large with a rusty blunderbuss, before being carted away to Jeremy Hunt's home for the criminally unusual and foul smelling.

It was about 18:30 (or half-six, for those of you who've never had to say 'Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes,' to a platoon of guardsmen on the dusty plains of Matabeleland) and I was listening to The Home Service on the teak and brass-bound Blohm und Voss radiogram in the Dandymobile.  When the programming was interrupted by a live report from a wonderful place called the Museum of Curiosity.

The Museum, touted as the largest virtual museum in the entire Universe (Other dimensions are available, your experience may vary) opens its doors every Monday at around that time and invites some generally odd, but in some way celebrated people to donate objects to the museum that the hoi-palloi will enjoy cooing over whilst not really understanding their relevance.

Yesterday, their venerated guests included:

• Evolutionary Anthropologist Professor Volker Sommer - Who may, or may not, condone recreational sex with chimpanzees
• Musician, Ex Living Statue, American and Artist Amanda Palmer (wife to that nice Neil Gaiman bloke, but she stands infinitely tall on her own credentials of course and often doesn't mention that in polite conversation)
• Musician and Transvestite Occult Comedian Andrew O'Neill

Here are Andrew and Amanda, I'll let you figure out who is who (Hint: Neither of them are Daleks)

All of whom were a delight to listen to, all uproariously funny in their own way, but I'm not going to critique the humour value of the broadcast itself, because as you well know, I alone do the comedy around here.

I'd like to concentrate for the moment on Mr. O'Neill, who was wearing a very fetching grey tartan dress at the time, which was splendid! I like to see people dress up for civic occasions, don't you?

The item he donated was a Third Class ticket from the London Necropolis Railway. (Which you should in no-way see as a shameless plug for his SteamPUNK band, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing's new double 'A' side single The Gin Song / Third Class Coffin - Available from all good retailers and also iTunes from yesterday - 7/10/13) And it looked like this:

The ticket was for a coffin, on a 23 mile long one-way trip from the London Necropolis Station out to the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. 

Why did the dead need their own railway? And why were there different classes of tickets? - Well, I'll tell you.  In fairness, you could just Google it like I did I suppose, but where's the fun in that?

In the 1850's London was running out of space to bury people, a lot of the 2 million residents were regularly dying of typhoid and smallpox and dropsy and the vapours.  So many in fact, that people who had just got comfortable in their graves and had barely rotted away at all, were turfed out to make way for people who were more freshly dead.  The exhumed bodies were often just left to rot in piles, or fashioned into novelty candelabras for the budding tourist industry.  

Now, I don't know if you lot compost your kitchen waste, but if you do, you'll be no stranger to that sweet smelling liquid that you find dripping out of the compost bin when it's a bit warm... Well, it's not just potato peelings that make that stuff, cadavers do it too and generally they're a lot bigger than your average King Edward (Unless it's actually the body of King Edward, then it's exactly the same size as a King Edward).  If that stuff gets into the water supply, which of course it did, you may as well just change your name to Plague Akimbo and beat yourself to death with a self-reciprocating brass edged polo mallet.

So, they thought about building a massive 94 storey high pyramid on Primrose Hill to hold 5 million rotting corpses... No, really, they did, it was going to look like this, it was going to have steam powered lifts and everything... Smashing!

Thomas Wilson's Pyramid Mausoleum - Great Plan!

But before construction began, they realised that this was a bloody stupid idea and decided that foisting their problem on the people of Woking was a much better way of dealing with it.  So they built Brookwood which was, and still is, the largest cemetery in the UK.  But then they had another problem, getting the dearly departed from the place of their demise to the place of their interment was a bit of a trek, there are (entirely ficticious) reports of pallbearers wearing their legs to stumps walking there and back fifty times a day.  So they built the above-mentioned railway.

There were a couple of platforms, one for Anglicans and one for heathens, child molesters, sellers of tuppenny potions, snake charmers, smut peddlers and general undesirables... Or Non-Anglicans, as was the parlance of the time.  And there were different levels of tickets for both types of people,  this not only impacted on how comfortable the seats were for any mourners who chose to ride the train, but it also indicated the reverence with which your remains were treated - A First-Class, £1 ticket (£79 in today's money) got you entry to the corpse equivalent of the Virgin Trains lounge at both ends, brass handles for the coffin and Kenny G style saxophone music during the journey.  If your family could only scrape together the two and six for a Third-Class ticket (about £10 today), you were stuck in an old orange crate, loaded into an open carriage with a pitchfork, the train would stop suddenly at the other end and you would go shooting off into the weeds where your earthly remains would probably be carried off by foxes.

It ran for almost one hundred years, from 1845 to 1941, when some Austrian chap called Adolf decided to rain fire down upon it with great vigour from the heavens.  You can still see the frontage of the the London Terminus on Westminster Bridge Road, it looks a bit like the Firestation from Ghostbusters - It's one of those hidden bits of history that the UK's famous for, you should do some research, it'll keep you busy.

-oOo-

Anywho, if you're at all interested in Steampunk music and have got bored of Abney Park (and who hasn't Am I Right?), then give The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing a listen, they have songs about Brunel and being polite and everything, and if that's not a reason to listen to their stuff, then I don't know what is.

Caution, may contain the occasional profanity - But we're all friends here.

Defying Gravity?

Well, that was a bit of a weekend!

I had Friday off work as my dear Brother, you know, the one who lives in the hollowed out volcano in the eastern Mediterranean Sea came over to the little old Baltic state of England for a visit. There was beer, and Chinese food - It was great, we watched Most Haunted and everything, it was like the good old days.

On Saturday, I went to a party. It was the Eighteenth Birthday of someone I've known for quite a while - Probably ten years or so (and no, I don't make a habit of befriending eight year old children specifically so that I can be invited to their significant birthday parties... Not... specifically...)

Anyway, it's not like it's the only eighteenth I've been to recently, there was this Fancy Dress one last year.  And it certainly wasn't the strangest party by a long way, I mean, there was the one with all those transvestites and where that chap offered his wife to me as a nutritional supplement.

But this was a bit of a first.

I'm about to go full-on middle-class, hold on to your re-enforced Burberry gussets.

Let me give you a bit of background - The Birthday Boy, let's call him George, as that's his name.  Is a great... Well, I suppose he can officially be called a 'bloke' now.  He's one of those people for whom 'over-exuberant' is a oft-used adjective (amongst others). He plays the guitar, the drums, and has been known to occasionally beat the living daylights out of any piano keyboard that's been too injured to run away from him.  Horribly, horribly talented.  And a nice guy, which makes it even worse.  You can't hate him, which tends to be my reaction to people I consider to be in any way more talented than myself, lucky there aren't many of them about.

That's George, on the stage there. (he's bigger than that normally)

He also goes to our local Performing Arts College and is a bit of a 'Thesp' in his spare time. (This is important, try to remember it.)

The party was held in a 1940's church hall, there was catering and a proper professional DJ with lights and lasers and smoke and a karaoke and songs that had been written (and I use the word 'written' incredibly loosely) in the past few years and everything.

It was a mix of family and friends... So far, so average, you might be thinking...

But, there was a large contingent of - Well I was going to say kids, but Young People is probably more politically correct, from the Performing Arts College.  If anyone in the room had happened to have a flamboyance meter with them, it would either have exploded or, at the very least, the needle would have been quite badly bent against the stop.

I know what you're thinking, especially if you read my post last week about musical theatre, yes, a lot of the male students were indeed, obviously and faaaaaaaabulously, 'Friends of Dorothy' (but no doubt great chaps) and a lot of the female students fell into the standard three young actress groups:

1. Very attractive, slim girls for whom talent will always come second to looks when being selected by a lecherous producer for roles.  These people would have to be truly, truly awful (or not willing to regularly subject themselves to the casting couch) not to succeed.
2. Plain girls who can sing and dance and could be dropped into the chorus of any show anywhere and be great, but they will have to work at it and maybe take a second job and get used to rejection.
3. Sturdy girls, or as I like to hear them described, normal sized women, who have insanely good voices but will all end up fighting for the same roles (Mama Morton in Chicago for instance).

You know that feeling when you're a little drunk at a party where there's a karaoke and someone gets up who can actually sing?  Where there's that sense of shock, then jealousy, then wonder?  Well, imagine that happening twelve times in a row.  (OK, not everyone was brilliant, and I'm fairly sure that a couple of local dogs may well have exploded purely due to harmonic resonance.) There were a couple of truly great performances, worthy of an X-Factor contestant whose entire family had been killed the previous day in a freak custard tanker accident.

We were treated to pretty much the entire soundtrack of 'Wicked' - With one notable exception (See the title of today's post) and a few things that I didn't completely recognise, with me not being a huge fan of the genre and everything.

Then we come to the dancing.  There was a wide age range there, so obviously apart from the standard jigging about party music, there was a waltz (ever seen a waltz at an 18th?  No, me neither) and there was Gangnam style and Whigfield's Saturday night and suchlike - where everyone forms up into lines and does 'the dance' with varying degrees of style and grace.

Then 'Beat It', by Michael Jackson came on.  We were treated to a pretty accurate rendition of the video (with some parts of Thriller' thrown in for good measure) as performed by people who had possibly had one too many WKD's - It was a huge hit, there were applause and everything.

Then the DJ (Who was great, by the way), knowing his audience well by this point, played the Jason Nevins remix of Run DMC's 1983 hit 'It's Like That'

So there was a dance off, obviously... I mean what else could one do? OK, so we were in a church hall in the East Midlands, not under an overpass in West Detroit, and the people taking part were not wearing baggy jeans and ironically over-large beanies - But the thought was there, they carried it off pretty well. And again, it was something I've never seen before.

Maybe this is a fairly standard party nowadays, maybe I'm just out of touch,  maybe the average 18th party now involves unicycling unicorns and hot and cold running meringues in a selection of flavours and sizes.

I certainly hope so, there should be another one coming up next year, and every year for the next ten or so years.

*Strokes Beard*

*Knods Knowingly*

[Exits Stage right to maniacal laughter and lightning effects}

The Cir-her-her-cle oooof LiIiIife!

Back in August 2004, I took a trip to that London place, you know the one, the Capital of England (And you thought that was 'E' right? LOL), that sits on the River Thames, where Kubrick filmed the battle scenes for Full Metal Jacket (The old Beckton Gasworks) and Ridley Scott filmed most of Aliens (Acton Lane Power station)

Was I visiting scenes from movie history? No, I wasn't, but in fairness it's quite difficult to wander around London and not see a location from a Richard Curtis film.  I was going to see a show, a musical, a professional terpsichorial display of the highest order. Otherwise known as 'The Lion King'.

Now I know that there are people out there who will be saying things like 'A musical? but that's how gay men spend their free time!'  Well, traditionally, perhaps they do, that and ordering multiple copies of the 'Queer as Folk' box-set from Amazon...  And, erm,a lot of casual bumming, obviously.

But, you know, in a mixed group, some of the 'West End Shows' can be really very good. I've seen a few and on the whole, if you can get a cut-price deal to go and see one, they're well worth it.

But on this occasion, we're talking about The Lion King.  There were six of us on the trip in total,  Mrs Dandy and Myself, my now-American artistic benefactor and her husband, and two more people, one male, one female, who were not at that time, nor have they ever been, before or since, involved in a relationship with each other... Just friends, OK?

As my job at the time involved moving around the country quite a lot and staying in hotels, the group trusted me to book somewhere for us all to stay.  Once I'd confirmed that everyone favoured a budget hotel, so that there would be more money left over for beer and other frivolities, I set to work, trying to find a budget hotel within walking distance of the Lyceum Theatre, in WC2, that had two double rooms and two singles.  Believe it or not, I managed it, Great looking place, All of the rooms were en-suite, Central location, easy walk to the theatre, £25 or so per room.

That should have rung alarm bells right? Yeah? - Not with me it seems.  We had a great trip down on the train, all shiny faced excitement, cans of British Rail Strongbow and talking slightly too loud,  When we arrived outside the hotel, it still looked great, it was quite a large building, that overlooked one of those nice gated private garden type things that you see sometimes on the TV.

We went inside, and frankly it was a bit dingy, the owners and staff were all natives of some unidentified Eastern European country and had raised surliness to an artform.  There was a little light confusion as to whether we'd already paid, which got everyone off on the right foot and we were all given directions to our rooms, which were spread at every possible corner of the building.  The directions involved a lot of pointing, and words like 'Go stairs two floor, turn *handsignal for left* three doors. toilet at both ends corridor'.

Now, being sharp witted, I picked up on this and said 'Aha! Excuse me, my good man, but the booking form clearly states that the rooms are en-suite!' and I waved the printout from the Internet under his bushy moustache.  He inhaled, and the paper disappeared into his nasal cavity, losing me all of my documentary evidence in one fell swoop, then he replied, 'Room have shower in, toilet at end of corridor.'

So we made a plan to unpack, then go for a beer and some lunch, said our goodbyes and went to our rooms.  We went up two flights of stairs, turned left, went down three doors and pushed.  The room was... Small, yes, that's a kind word... Small. There was a (barely) double bed and a long-dead potplant.  Most of the room was taken up by a hardboard box that stretched from floor to ceiling, that was covered in the same 'Early Mental Hospital' style wallpaper as the rest of the room and had a concertina door on it.  My curiosity finally got the better of me and I opened the door.  It was, of course, the much vaunted en-suite shower.  To say that it was a bit of a lash-up would be to despoil the good name of lash-up showers such as the ones that Colonel John Blashford-Snell made out of three bits of bamboo and a sloth, whilst trying to transport a Grand Piano up the Congo some four years previously (look it up).

It was whilst I was examining a particularly unusual piece of fungus, emanating from the shower drain (hole in the carpeting inside the box) that I decided that a quick trip to the conveniences was in order.  I left the room, made for the end of the corridor and gingerly pushed open a door with many panes of frosted glass in it (and one perfectly clear pane at face height, when you were sat down.) The toilet could not have been more Victorian if it had a hairy German bloke, wearing a T-Shirt that said 'I [heart] Saxe-Coburg and Gotha' and an unfeasibly large pierced penis, sat on it.  I attended to my urgent business and pulled the chain (as it had a high-level cistern, like back in the day) and nothing happened other than a faint gurgling.  I pulled a few more times, in the style of Ned Beatty trying to start an outboard motor, but finally gave up and went back to the room.

It was then that I noticed that the doors didn't have numbers on.  You know that scene in every single film set in a hotel? The one that sort of zooms in then back out again down the corridor full of doors?  Well, let me tell you, that actually happens.  I went from door to door, listening carefully to see if I could heard the sound of Mrs Dandy silently complaining about the room.  But I could not, so I chose a door at random and opened it.

It was then that I noticed the urine-soaked corpse of a tramp.

No, seriously.

He was a tramp, he stank of urine, and he was dead... Probably - If he wasn't, then he was sleeping so deeply that his chest wasn't moving at all.  Now, I've seen enough horror films to know that if you go down, alone, to the reception of a hotel run by unidentified Eastern European types to say that you've just discovered a dead body, then you often find yourself being served to your friends for breakfast the next day.  So I backed out of the room, apologised (OK, so he was dead and couldn't technically hear me, but that didn't mean that I shouldn't be polite) and closed the door.

We all met up again in the lounge, had a long pub lunch, told everyone the story of the toilet and the tramp, then went back to the hotel to get ready for the evening.

The next few hours or so passed by quickly and will remain undescribed to spare the blushes of my dear wife.  Suffice it to say that there was no bar, or indeed mini-bar, so we had to resort to the old fashioned way of passing the time with only a bed and a dead plant for company, and it was only due to one of our party knocking on the door and asking if we were ready that reminded us of the time (and it seems that answering 'give me about thirty seconds and I will be' will earn you a slap from your wife)

We went to the theatre, had a great time, then came back to the hotel and had a few drinks in one of the rooms that had a working balcony until the early hours of the morning.

Breakfast was an interesting affair, the advertised Full English Breakfast turned out to be a single sausage and a piece of bacon each, calls for beans and/or tomatoes and toast fell on deaf and slightly frightening ears and in true tabloid style, we made our excuses and left.

The trip to the railway station was fairly uneventful, apart from not being able to find the tickets, going back to the hotel to look for them and then finding them in one of the ladies handbags and having to run to get the train.  And we put the whole sorry business behind us.

Until just over nine months later... The MicroDandy was born...

Bloody Mary? Extra Worcestershire sauce please.

Teeny Tiny McBloggington today, thought I'd give you a little thing to play with over the weekend.

Spurred on by the news reports of outrage over ASDA (Walmart) selling blood stained straightjackets and rubber meat cleavers as 'Mental Patient' Halloween costumes,   I had a bit of a Samhain themed tiptoe through the bowels of the Internet, and came up with someone explaining this jewel.

Now, I don't know if any of you have ever done this, but it was in all of the 'Interesting things for Good Children to do' books that I had as a child (You'll know the ones if you are 'of an age' - They have pen illustrations of young boys wearing shorts with brylcreme'd hair and little blonde girls with gingham dresses and all the Policemen drove Morris six's and still had whistles.) - It goes a little something like this

You will need:

A darkened room: (Like, proper dark, not curtains shut and Jeremy Kyle muted, but night-time dark, curtains closed)
A dressing table or similar sized mirror: This must be solid and stable enough not to move or fall over on its own (Because if it does, halfway through this experiment, you will poop yourself)
A candle: Preferably an inch wide 'natural coloured' candle, that has a good hour of burn left in it (See spluttering out and pooping as above).

At this point many of you will be going 'Oh, right, that old chestnut, Blah Blah Blah.. Kid's stuff.' or something in that vein, but bear with me and actually give it a try, if you've done it in the past and nothing's happened, your room's probably been too light or you haven't given it long enough.

Sit, comfortably (and that's really important) directly in front of the mirror, so that your face is right in the middle and there is a space about the same width as your face between the edge of your face and the frame of the mirror, same sort of space above your head too, but that's not as important.

Light the candle and put it out of your direct eyeline, behind you so that your face is only lit from its light being reflected in the mirror.  It needs to light your face AND be bright enough to just about light the wall behind you - This is the most difficult bit, you should be just about able to see the pattern on the wallpaper, but not be able to make out what it is. (You can trim the wick to reduce the amount of light)

Stare into your own eyes and wait - Please note, at no point have I said stare without blinking like a cocaine-addled alligator swimming in espresso, it's important that you relax and have a fairly blank expression.  But keep looking.

It could take a while. could be anywhere between two and fifteen minutes, but persevere.

Did your face start to melt? Did you age or grow younger? Did you see a relative, alive or dead? An animal perhaps a cat or a pig?

Well, be glad you're an informed citizen of the 21st. century - A few hundred years ago that would have had people screaming 'Witch' before having a tuberculotic coughing fit, falling over and setting their hovel on fire with the upended candle.

It's actually all to do with the way that your brain is connected to your eyes.  You remember that bit in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill tells the annoying kid not to move because the T-Rex's vision was based on movement?  Well, ours is too, kinda, because we were built to be hunters originally and hunters need to react quickly to catch prey, and prey animals have this nasty habit of buggering off sharpish in random directions at a moments notice.

When you concentrate on something visual, a little switch gets flipped in your lizard brain that says 'Okey-Dokey, monkey brain up there is concentrating on something, switch to super-secret-movement-o-vision.'

Stare at something that doesn't move now, doesn't matter what, notice how everything around what your looking at starts to blur and fade?  Well, that's your brain saying, 'None of these things are moving or brightly lit, so they must be not that important. let's forget about them until one of them turns out to be a rabbit or a giraffe.'

Couple that with your brain's insatiable need to see faces in everything, clouds, plants and horrible French wallpaper for instance, and you have the situation where you're staring into the eyes of a dimly lit face in the mirror, your brain 'forgets about' everything except the eyes, then realises that it might well be looking at some kind of face, but it's forgotten the details so, it sort of, makes them up.

An Italian psychologist called Giovanni Caputo did a series of experiments with this a few years ago, out of his 50 subjects, 66% saw their faces melt (or similar) 18% saw one of their own parents faces, 28% saw a face that they didn't recognise and a staggering 48% saw mythical or horrific creatures.

Which just goes to show that your brain's a bit of a dick about stuff like that, quite a lot of the time.

Give it a go, if nothing else, it'll pass some time whilst you're waiting for X-Factor to finish so that you can go back to watching the TV.

-oOo-

I leave you with a not completely disassociated optical illusion.  It's called the Troxeler effect - Stare at the cross in the middle for twenty or seconds - and watch my little pink balls disappear...

There ain't no use flappin' your wings...

Charity, in and of itself is a great thing, people who 'have' give freely to those who 'have not'.

It's kind of like Robin Hood without the... Erm... Robbing, or the Hood, or the being peppered with arrows.

And you know, I, personally, have given the occasional grubby pound coin to pretty female students wandering around the town centre shaking their collecting boxes at me whilst they try to do something that their friends will consider worthwhile in their gap-year.

It was one of these ladies who introduced me to 'kitten boxing' Which sounds super-cute right? little fluffy kittens doing that thing with their paws which makes it look like they're boxing... Well, it's not that at all, it's all to do with people who go from town to town scanning the free papers for 'Free to a good home' kittens, 'adopting' a few then duct-taping them to their fists and beating the crap out of each other with them whilst videoing it on their stolen iPhones... Horrific, right?

I genuinely think so too, so can anyone explain to me why, during the entire time that she was describing it to me, I was actually putting my hand over my mouth to stop myself from bursting out into fits of laughter - Maybe I just couldn't get the cute kitten image out of my head, which mixed with her pretty graphic description, and her white-girl dreadlocks, short-circuited my brain.

Actually, it's probably because I'm a bad person.  Yeah, that's probably it, thinking about it, all things considered.

I even watch Children in Need, every year, without fail.  I mean, I turn over when someone says 'And here's a report from Lenny Henry' (Or whichever current star is thinking that their popularity might be fading slightly and has gone to Namibia to stay in a 5 star hotel on the proviso that when they're pretending to cry at a small African child covered in flies, there's an Apple Daiquiri just out of shot) just like everyone else does, and I've never actually given any money, and I don't know anyone who has.  Although I've never asked any of my friends whether they've given any money - Most of the people that I know, that do work for charity usually advertise it pretty loudly.

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing at all, if you're trying to raise money, then it makes sense to let as many people as you can know about it.  The more, quite literally, the merrier.

Which brings up that scourge of the office worker, the sinker of hearts, the chiller of bones... The sponsorship form.  Now, I don't know about you, but the first thing I think when I see one of those is 'Please Gods, let it be for your kid's school.' Mainly because, you can usually get away with saying 'What's He/She doing?' so that you sound interested, then when you find out they're walking the perimeter of their school fields twenty-five times (If Michael Gove hadn't allowed them all to be sold off) Then you can just say 'Oh, great, here's a pound, just scribble my name down as paid whether he/she makes it or not. which makes you sound like a big-shot philanthropist, like Richard Branson or Warren Buffett

I do actually say He/She to the proud parent, because some of these modern names are just so androgynous aren't they?  What sex would you say a child called 'Nevada', or 'Diamond' or 'Stuka' would be - (Obviously Stuka's a boy's name though, isn't it?)

It's an order of magnitude or two worse when it's actually the adult that's doing something. You ask the same question, but they say 'I'm bagging the Munros on a pogo stick', or 'I'm cycling the route of the Stockton to Darlington Railway dressed as Admiral Lord Nelson' or 'I'm strapping on a rucksack and jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane that's not even on fire or anything.'  Then you look down the list of who's already pledged and notice that Brian from Accounting had done a tenner per peak, or Susie from Marketing has promised a fiver for every time they go over a man-hole cover.

I tend to say something like 'Can I give you a pound for every bin-liner they have to shovel you into if your 'chute doesn't open?' - I don't mean to, it's hardwired, like I've got sarcastic tourettes or something.

They look at you funny and reply 'It IS for Charity you know!' - Which I guess is a given really, it's about the only time that you'd get most people to just give you money, you couldn't come into the office one day and be all like:

Me: 'Will you sponsor me?'

You: 'Why, what're you doing?'

Me: 'I'm going to Antigua.'

You: 'Antigua?'

Me: 'Yes.'

You: 'What to do?'

Me: 'Nothing really, just sort of ponce about in the sun for a couple of weeks.'

You: 'You're not going to do anything difficult to sort of earn the money?'

Me: 'Erm.. Nope, although if I raise enough money I might swim with some baby stingrays, that's a bit dangerous, or climb Mount Obama or something.'

You: 'What's it all for?'

Me: [Staring meaningfully out of the window] 'I ask myself that all the time...'

You: 'No, I mean, what charity will you be donating the money to?'

Me: 'Um... No, sorry, you've lost me...'

You: 'The charity, which charity are you raising money for?'

Me: 'When?'

You: 'When you go to Antigua!'

Me: 'Don't really think I'll have time to give money to charity, what with all the stingrays and the mountain climbing.  I won't be going at all at this rate, not unless you hurry up and put your moniker on this bit of paper chop-chop.  Everyone else is giving about £100.'

You: 'So, effectively, you just want us to fund your holiday?'

Me: 'Yes, pretty much - What are you doing with that staple remover? Now, don't be hasty! ARRAGHRRGAHH!'

Could you?  It only has to work once I guess.  Is it fraud? I wouldn't actually say that I was raising money for Charity.

Probably.

If you don't like, what you're seeing, get the funk out...

I had this plan see, the Friday that has just gone was payday (I work for an American company, we get paid every four weeks, not every month, so my payday gets earlier and earlier throughout the year.) and that plan involved shouting 'stuff it' and blowing some money on something completely selfish.

You see, I don't do selfish very often, not where large sums of money are concerned at least, I mean, I'll buy myself a magazine maybe, or something from the supermarket's own 'Frighteningly Middle Class' range of sandwiches - Which are essentially the same as the normal sandwiches except they have a cranberry compote and perhaps rocket in them, and there's a greater than average chance that the Eastern European gentleman who's stuffing them into the box at the one factory that makes all of the supermarket's own-brand sandwiches will have washed his hands last time he visited the latrines.

There are usually bills to pay, or vegetables to buy, or brown envelopes with red writing inside to panic about... But last weekend I thought NO! and put my foot down with a firm hand.  I decided to drag the entire Dandy Clan to BSH Xtreme the Custom Motorcycle show at Donington Park in Leicestershire - A venue that I have mentioned many times in the past.

It was the smaller Dandies first show and I figured that the 30th Anniversary of Back Street Heroes magazine was as good a time as any to get them used to the smell of Castrol R and shredding rear tyres.

As we only live about 15 minutes from the site, I envisioned a fairly pain-free trip - It was a bit drizzly though first thing, so we took a detour via McDonalds (Other purveyors of pre-chewed, cardboard based breakfast products are available) and availed ourselves of four of their finest Double Sawdust McMuffin meals and Bathwater Coffees (TM).  Within minutes of finishing our 'meals' the sun poked its way through the clouds like a huge, four billion year old, self-sustaining thermo-nuclear reaction and we were off.

Arriving at site, we were greeted by some very friendly marshals, one of whom suggested that I should 'Aim for the chap in the Hi-Vis' but advised me not to actually hit him, as he was likely to sulk.  We parked, and joined the stream of people making their way to the gate. And for once, it seemed that we timed it just right, as the nice chap with the screwdriver had just managed to get the card-machine working, so I saved myself about £30 in cash, which I could then fritter away on baubles and gewgaws once we got inside.

We had just got into the compound when I heard a bellow from behind me, A resounding 'Aren't you a bit old to be wearing New-Rocks?' - It was my great friend and professional Chorlton from Chorlton and the Wheelies impersonator, Brother Lee. (He's not religious, I just happened to meet him when the Kenny Everett Television Show was popular...)

(Spot the difference if you can)

He's right of course, at 45 I am definitely too old to wear New-Rocks, but Meh!, because: also old enough not to give a toss too.

Wandering around the hall, looking at some frankly amazing bikes and trikes took a good couple of hours.  There were an awful lot of bikes that I would have happily stuck in my pocket and taken home on show (There was also a fair old selection of vehicles made by people who had altogether too much talent and/or money for my liking - but that's obviously just petty jealousy on my part because I have very meager amounts of both) Some of my favourites included:

An inspired, 70's style Harley Panhead - Encapsulates everything that was great about that time.  Springers, pawn tail-lights, king & queen seat, fat back wheel and skinny front... Admittedly, I'd probably put apes on it, rather than the pullbacks that it has here, for the full flying starfish experience, but that's just me I guess.

I spied this from a hundred yards or so away and thought 'Indian Four... Nice.' Then I got a bit closer, and had a squint and thought 'Errmm...?' And then Mrs Dandy said 'It's a Reliant' And then I saw the gearbox under the seat, and had to agree - What a brilliant bit of kit.  I'd be on this like a tramp on chips should the opportunity arise.

Now this, this is getting on for perfect, black springers, fat front wheel, ribbed primary cover, tattoo inspired paintwork... Everything that the right-thinking gentleman motorcyclist could wish for.  To the owner:  The suspect marks on your seat are slobber, nothing more... Honest...

I was with The Mini Dandy when I saw this, and I went off on one about Bantam Chops and the good old days and jumpers for goalposts and all that kind of stuff.  She suffered this for a while with that 'Arms crossed, head on one side.' look that you get from blonde teenage cheerleaders who think they know it all and said, 'Dad, it's a Harley.'  I said, 'Don't be silly, Harley's are huge V-Twins, look, THAT's a Harley.' And pointed to a 1340 Harley Evo that was 'over there' somewhere.  She then grabbed me by the earlobe and pointed at the spec-sheet that was on the floor next to it... Turns out that it's a 125 Harley - And she wants one just like it.

And last, but by no means least, there's this here motorcycle, it's a performance V-Twin (The chap who owns it did say exactly what, but in fairness I can't remember what he said) But you could probably get away with calling it a Harley if you didn't mind the great and the good tutting at you and shaking their heads.  It belongs to a guy I know from what I regularly insist on calling the 'Good Old Days' - His name's Speed and he's a member of the National Chopper Club - A group renowned for turning out some seriously A1 - Top Class machinery.  This is no exception, it's cracking, and also for sale - If you find yourself with £16,000 burning a hole in your leather chaps, then feel free to get in touch, operators are waiting for your call.

Other highpoints involved an in-depth discussion with the guys from Rebellion Jewellery - (Who you should all buy lots of things from right now) about 'image' and what your jewellery says about you.  And the look of unashamed glee on the face of Mrs Dandy when I introduced her to legendary motorcycle artist, BSH regular and generally nice sort, Louise Limb.  Who very kindly autographed a print for her - (Which she is now still having trouble finding an impressive enough frame for) She also hasn't let it out of her sight since, but the dog is a bit of a 'chewer' so we should let her off.

We went outside and watched a chap doing his best to break the laws of physics and stiction by riding his motorcycle way too fast at some very improbable angles.  The smaller Dandies were introduced to two new smells here: Cooked front brake pads and fear, as the gentleman concerned lost his stopping power momentarily and the the young chap in front of me thought he was coming through the barrier - Thank heaven for leather jeans that tuck into your boots, that's what I say.

Anywho? I suppose I can't just go on about the good things... The bad points were very few and far between - Really just niggles, and probably a lot more to do with the management of venue itself rather that the guys at BSH (although I'm guessing, I'll be the first person to admit that I don't really know) - The one thing that I heard most of the day visitors complain about was the lack of greasy burger vans, people like their greasy burgers (and hot dogs, and Schwarma) but all I, and a number of other people, saw was a single donut wagon that charged £4 for five small donuts... lotta people a bit grumpy about that.  I heard a few people being confused about entrance prices (you had to pay for getting into the show, and pay about the same again if you wanted to camp in the other compound with the beer tent etc.) - But I put that down to not reading the literature closely enough.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a few hours on a sunny Saturday.  I will definitely be attending again if it becomes a regular event, and I suggest that you should too.

As ever, I leave you with a quote that sums up the day, this was from the Micro Dandy, when I asked him if he'd enjoyed the day... 'Yeah Dad, McDonalds was great!'