"In case of an emergency, the person sitting next to you may act as a food source"

Life in Six Words

Have annoyed the heck out of scribbly pals by pointing out the Daily Telegraph piece on describing your life in six words.

Outwardly scoffing, they have rushed off to meet the challenge which is of course consuming all their time.

Tell someone to write their life story in no less than 25,000 words, they will tell you they don't have the time. Offer them just six words and they will sit down and take just as long honing their mini-autobiogs.

Those fancying themselves as good on haikus are particularly prone to this one, and I'd hazard a guess that Wells sahib would try something on the sly - and be rather good at it. If Lord Sedition wasn't in purdah, and decided to toss something into the ring, he too would deliver the goods. But enough taunting the literary lions ...

So ... your life in 6 words, and they quote Hemingway's bid to win a $10 bet:

For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

On being told this was the shortest poem, Muhammad Ali is said to have come up with, "Me? Wheeee!"

I didn't really like any of the Telegraph's examples but these caught my eye:

Bad brakes discovered at high speed

Fancied self as haiku. Was clerihew

I still make coffee for two

Anyway, I thought this might irritate or amuse, and hope it doesn't distract too many folks from their magnum opus.

Speaking of which, I've remembered a Martin Amis quip that made me laugh. We were at some literary party and Martin was surveying the pack and asked me, as someone working within the book industry, wasn't I eternally bombarded with dud manuscripts? I said that, as a mere publicist, I didn't have much say on the front end editorial process, also none of my scribbling pals ever seemed to have anything to actually hand over.

Amis nodded with grim satisfaction: "Whenever anyone tells me they're working on their Novel, I reply 'Yes, neither am I'"

How about something between "Writing a novel? Neither am I" and "Working on that novel? Me neither".

Ker-chomp

Dept of Just Desserts (pun intended)

Holiday resort made to compensate for croc munching nine-year-old brat who:

Climbed fence

Fired at animals with catapults

Beat them with sticks

"One of the irritated animals caught Liu's clothes and dragged him into water, where he was eaten by a swarm of crocodiles".

Bad luck on the zoo having to fork out but bloody good on you crocs.

Bonzer munch, mate: Irwin'd be proud of you.

St Heath

I see everyone's treading with kid-glove eggshells over the hallowed halloo'd death of Heath Ledger.

No one wants to catch it in the neck for being horrid to our latest candidate for canonisation.

But what a relief! An accidental mix - that lets everyone off the hook.

Whenever I'm being my hurtful hateful self, I try to give at least one other source fuelling my nastiness, and in this case it's that:

The cause of death was acute intoxication by the combined effects of

Oxycodone

Hydrocodone

Diazepam

Temazepam

Alprazolam

Doxylamine

All you poppers in the valley of the dolls will have recognised the generic names for painkiller OxyContin, anti-anxiety drugs Valium and Xanax, sleep aids Restoril and Unisom, and painkiller Hydrocodone.

These weasel get-outs are all the same - I once had a friend who was robbed as she fumbled for her door keys, fell and did severe damage to her head. When I was trying to get some coherent sense from the police, I was told that she seemed to have been the victim of "a mugging that went badly wrong".

Exactly the sort of oily response that makes one want to grab these excuses for law enforcers and deliver a text-book mugging that goes gratifyingly right.

PORN SHUI

Brilliant brilliant concept by the tantalising Brook Busey-Hunt:

Porn Shui:
The aspect of ones desk at work.
Good porn shui allows surfing the net without being overlooked by colleagues.

I just laughted and laughed: If only this had been around when I was in service with Lord Jeffrey of Bezosia! How it would have added to merry cubicle repartee.
That is genius at Dilbertian level.
For those looking puzzled, Ms Busey-Hunt is better known as lap dancer-turned-hot screenwriter, 'Diablo Cody' whose Juno is currently wowing one and all.

She has a current MySpace blog

And another one - understandably not updated since Dec 27 - The Pussy Ranch

She's hot

The Sunday Times dubbed her a she-devil.But for me, she will live forever as inventor of 'Porn Shui'.

I like living in Greece more than you

Mooching around with not much to do, I check out the 'What's On' section in Kathimerini.

It lists the hot goings-on in Athens and always makes me feel feeble for not including even one in my weekly schedule.

It's a bit austere so I'm delighted to see the po-faced announcement for:

PORN FESTIVAL

~ Athens until Sunday ~

The Gagarin 205 Club is hosting the Second Berlin Porn Festival in Athens.

Highlights include

• Documentary about legendary star John Holmes
• Films by
  • Todd Verow
  • Adam & Eve
  • Bruce LaBruce
  • Bondage 'bakushi' rope master, Yukimura Haruki
  • And more.
• Screenings followed by live performances
• Festival will end with a Closing Queer Party

Gagarin 205 ~ 205 Liosion ~ Tel 210.854.7600

Zoomquilt

It's probably really easy and any geek will explain how it's done - but I find this sort of thing rather cool.

MY FAVOURITE BIRTHDAY CARD ...

 

Phil Johns' "Still Life with Guitar".

to me

Strippin' Stewardess

You mean there are *still* folks out there who haven't caught up with the cheery flight attendant with the buxom embonpoint?

Don't say I don't spoil you.

(Pssst - it only looks blank. You have to scroll down. Sneaky)

LOLITA

Well, Woolworths shop girls and Ryanair travelers have certainly heard of the nymphet *now*.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the plain pig ignorance that must exist over in Blighty if my countrymen don't even have the totem name for sexual precocity.

You don't have to have read the book - I don't know anyone who has, save for Martin Amis - to know the name to pin on - er - Lolitas. And what about Humbert Humbert? How are they mocking us now, the dirty mac brigade as we peer furtively into the playground or communal swimming pool?

As for Ryanair's back-to-school advert of a hot chick in faux schoolgirl gear, the airline's hated for so many other things I'm surprised anyone's got time to chase 'em for a mediocre snap of a rather lukewarm tottie.

Mentioning Martin prompted me to look up his critique of the novel, and what a pleasure he is to read with his book learning and straight-faced prose:

"Lolita herself is such an anthology piece by now that even non-readers of the novel can close their eyes and see her on the tennis court or in the swimming pool or curled up in the car seat or the motel twin bed with her 'ridiculous' comics. We tend to forget that this blinding creation remains just that: a creation, and a creation of Humbert Humbert's. We have only Humbert's word for her. And whatever it is that is wrong with Humbert, not even his short-lived mother would claim that her son was playing with a full deck.

(Actually his personal pack may comprise the full fifty-two, but it is crammed with jokers and wild cards, pipless deuces, three-eyed queens.)

A reliable narrator in the strict sense, Humbert is not otherwise reliable; and let us remember that Nabokov was capable of writing entire fictions - Despair, The Eye, Pale Fire - in which the narrators have no idea what is going on at all.

Lolita, I believe, has been partly isolated and distorted by its celebrity. 'The greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction,' states the cover of the first Penguin, which also informs us, on the back, that Humbert is English."

Bravo said, pearly-toothed Martin.

Meanwhile, for vague acquaintance with the Lolita label and sloppiest possible use, look no further than the Torygraph's prurient slavering over a 34-year-old Italian's sexcapade with a 13-year-old girl, his sentence cut because the court sensed "real love" between them. Sapristi! They know how to do things over there.

The Ancestor

A painting I have always been fascinated by and which really should be viewed en personne to fully appreciate how Sargent has captured the 'to the manner born' aristo bearing of Lord Ribblesdale.

Presented by Lord Ribblesdale in memory of Lady Ribblesdale and his sons, Captain the Hon. Thomas Lister and Lieutenant the Hon. Charles Lister.

Lord Ribblesdale was Thomas Lister (1854-1925), 4th Baron Ribblesdale.

He was Master of the Buckhounds from 1892 to 1895, Liberal Whip of the House of Lords, Lord-in-Waiting, and a Trustee of the National Gallery, London, from 1909 until his death.

Sargent first met him at an Artists’ Benevolent Fund dinner then stayed with him at his house in the summer of 1899. This was an un-commissioned portrait and Sargent was trying to capture the archetype aristocratic and he fully succeeds.

The painting was done in Sargent's Tite Street studio and you can see the parquet floor and how Sargent had him stand up against the classical molding of his wall which adds to regal feel -- a man fully in control of himself and his environment.

"Not a factor"

I'm all too aware of my track record for missing few opportunities to score points of the cheapest. I tread at my daintiest here.

I have seen that face out east where I was raised, hardy old colonials out to pasture and nowhere but the club to head for. Mottled, brutal in its mapping of every tantrum and tincture. I see it here today in my new home where Ionian zephyrs make it all too easy for leisured ex-pats to be persuaded into "just the one" before the goat track home.

As I sit here, no one to monitor me, a mansion stacked with every type of booze, I want to drink. I want a cigarette.

I have music to play, loud as I want, and witty emails to compose. I have a blog in which to primp and preen and weave self-serving tales.

Don't hold me to self-discipline - who would know? Give me that Icarus draught and throat-tickling dopamine.

This is the most extroadinary report I have read in a long while and I have walked round the garden after the first reading and talked to Sam and asked him to bite my goblet hand to the bone if he so much as glimpses me eyeing the drinks cabinet. To sink his canines deep into my wedding tackle if he scents even a whiff of that sweet Karelia 'baccy.

A bloke keels over close to death and a close pal comments,

"He was at the pub when he collapsed. I was not there - I have a number of other businesses."

Excuse me? Of what relevance is it that you have "other businesses"? We all have other calls on our time that save us from frequenting boozers 24/7. No. You have one business, to lead a healthy life. Your responsibility is not to be at your compadre's side to push or validate a dram too far. "I was not there." Period. Say no more, chief.

The tippler collapsed "after spending a week drinking whisky following the breakdown of his marriage."

Save me the marriage bit - a week drinking whisky? A week? A marriage doesn't disintegrate on hot chocolate every night and then you decide, 'Soddez cela pour une alouette, I'm trying the hard stuff.'

Not alcohol-related. Exhaustion from "six weeks' work at his restaurant in Thailand".

Everyone knew he 'liked a drink' (weasel euphemism). Favourite tipple, Scotch.

But hold - despite that, it's never been a problem ... doubts are firmly expressed that it was ever "a factor in his collapse."

Further down the news report we find the poor wretch was "banned from driving for 32 months after being involved in a car crash ... three and a half times over the legal drink-drive limit when breath-tested."

Not a factor? To quote my favourite Kris, "Oh puleez."

It gets worse. The sort of tasteless tragedy Tom Lehrer could have latched on to for a cruelly hilarious anthem for AA:

The poor blighter is "believed to have been staying at the pub to help launch a newly-refurbished bar."

Believed? A celebrity of this standing, undoubtedly wired and celled for 24-hr contact, and the newshounds can only guess?

And is 'flamboyant' Fleet Street's current euphemism for someone who enjoys a noggin? Inclined to end up 'tired and emotional'? Or did the journo know they were going with the rubicund Falstaffian visage and slip in a pun on flambé'd?

Oopah! I've helped 'launch' umpteen booze-oukia and the only one I effectively bade bon voyage to was myself, on an ocean of Mine generous Host's gratis mead.

This posting sounds like the most vicious gratuitous attack on a decent hard-working man who managed to put it back *and* head a serious department. His pals will be on me and I will bite the dust and retract until the nails on my guitar-picking fingers are down to useless pads.

It is not a comment. God knows I'm the last to cast the first ice cube, and I will do penance this evening when I read this out to the local Al-Anon.

What a sad revealing exposé this news item is - laid out for all to see.

And me? Just trying to pick a sensitive way thru unblaming vocab has banished thoughts of bottle or baccy.

Miles Kington RIP

My good pal Miles Kington is dead. At 66, which bodes no boot for my turning 62 on Monday.

I met him when we worked together on a miniaturist-painting book (he'd've approved of that defining hyphen) for which he'd contributed the dry captions and background.

More famous than the author, he got a bit fed up with me phoning to set up another interview to sell a book for which he got no royalties.

He had a splendid technique for keeping correspondence down: from wherever I wrote to keep him up to date or hoping to hear, he would reply promptly, "No one could possibly live in a place called Baguio. I demand further proof ... no one could possibly live in 'Wanchai' ... on Bainbridge Island ..."

As long as I venture into 'Company', I shall remember his observation on Smiles:

"There are so many kinds, especially at parties:

There's the kind that says: 'I remember your name, but I bet you don't remember mine.'

There's the kind that says: 'Excuse me, I want to squeeze past you, but I don't want to talk to you.'

Or 'I have a much funnier story than yours, which I will tell you as soon as you've finished'."