Posts by Philip Challinor
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Huh. Nobody died in our Tube strike either, but I'm happy and proud to say that we didn't face it with such nauseating equanimity.
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it was rather terrifying to land in London and see all those chimney pots, precariously poised like certain death over the heads of the unconcerned citizens wandering the streets in happy ignorance of the impending Blitz overhead
Then again, there's always the possibility of someone making eye contact on the Tube. Until you've feared that, you don't know what fear is.
Glad to see everyone reasonably undamaged.
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I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned Michael Lehmann's Meet the Applegates, which is harder to get hold of than his other masterpiece, Heathers, but well worth the trouble. A family of sizeable Amazon bugs whose homes are in danger thanks to deforestation pose as human beings in order to sabotage a nuclear power plant, but run into trouble when they start going native. It has superbly deadpan performances, particularly by Dabney Coleman as the moustachio'd guerrilla fighter and hive boss Aunt Bea, and includes one of the cinema's very worst puns.
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My darling is sexy and scary:
Her eyes rather bulgey and starey;
Her abdomen's curve
Makes me shudder with lurve;
A pity her legs are so hairy.She puts out her feelers with force;
Her thorax is waspish, of course.
As her worshipful drone,
I simper and moan
When she smiles with her lateral jaws. -
On issues so foggy and fudgy,
I hate it when pants get all judgy.
They leave me so wriggly
And squirmy and giggly,
With nowhere to smuggle my budgie. -
In our class he skulks at the rear,
And munches his digits with fear.
His rectum is weak;
He can't say but a squeak -
The fellow's a born engineer. -
As the volume of jabbering leapt,
Scarlet-faced from the party he crept,
For most of the patrons
Were bosomy matrons
Whose pressings had outed his ept. -
Novel-writing is pants, isn't it? Where's my deadline? I'm just stuck in the middle of this huge smooshy unbounded thing
My own novel-writing experiences have been so traumatic that I've stuck to shorter forms for the past dozen years or so. There is an upside, however - the relief when you finally finish the bastard makes it all seem very nearly worthwhile, for a bit.
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There's a bulgy young female downstairs who bangs on my door every few months to accuse me, at sufficient length and volume for a thoroughly unmoderated Australian comments facility, of failing to flush the communal lavatory. The reason for her suspicion, I once heard her bellowing to her lucky next-door neighbour (I am two flights up), is that she banged on my door a couple of times before and I didn't answer. The last time I was indiscreet enough to open the door to her she was a bit more conciliatory, but seemed to think that even if I wasn't the lavatorial culprit, I ought to find out who was. Not being a private detective or nice, I shut the door while she was still giving orders.
Most of the time I enjoy living here on the top floor, but she's the sort of neighbour whose mortal remains I'd quite like to have seeping through my ceiling.
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I'd have thought you'd be most upset about the cunning and villainous way you were forced to read it against your will.
I wasn't forced. Like all censorious persons, I subjected myself to the ordeal in a voluntary spirit of principled self-sacrifice.