Symbolic Forest

“Behold!” cried the Evil Villain Scientist, his voice screeching and cracking with excitement. “My latest invention, the invention which will let me take over the WORLD! They thought I was mad! They said it couldn’t be done! They said it would break the laws of physics! But here I have it! The Marine Life Invisibility Ray!!!”

“They’ll never let you take over the world, Evil Villain,” I mumbled around my poorly-attached gag. “The Marine Life Academy just won’t allow it. You’ll never get away with your ridiculous plan.” Secretly, though, I was worried. Any evil invention worthy of that many exclamation marks was going to be tough to beat.

“They’ll never have a chance to stop me!” he chortled gleefully. “They’ll never see me coming! And you, miss, are never going to escape from here, so I may as well tell you all the details of just what this invention can do. The Marine Life Invisibility Ray can prevent anyone from seeing any sort of aquatic animal life! It becomes completely invisible to the eye. Before the week is out, I will command a whole school of invisible trained dolphins, and the Academy simply won’t be able to see what’s coming for them. In a few days, I will control the world!”

I was in a sticky situation, I could see, but if only I could keep him distracted and talking I might be able to come up with a chance to escape. “It’ll never work,” I shouted. “Your gadget is never going to handle that. It’ll burn out after one trained dolphin at most, if it even works at all.”

“You doubt me, you stupid girl?” he screamed. “My little gadget? My machine works perfectly! Let me show you!!!”

One wall of the Evil Lair was entirely of thick, smooth plate glass, a window into the Villain’s main aquarium. Every imaginable type of marine life swam peacefully across his window, one side to the other, then circling to pass back again. Octopuses scuttled along the sandy bottom, and catfish clamped themselves to rocks. The villain swung the Invisibility Ray around on its mount, twiddled knobs, and closed a large, well-polished brass knife switch with a sharp electrical crack. A quiet hum rose from bass notes to treble pitch, and I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end as every atom in the air became highly charged. A warning lamp on the gun itself started to blink, and the Villain flipped the safety catch away from the firing switch.

“What shall we show you first, you silly little spy,” he said, panning the raygun side to side. “Look! A clownfish! One button press and…” he pushed the firing switch. I felt a disconcerting leap, as if the universe had suddenly jumped a groove. “…you can’t see any clownfish now!” The hum from the device rose back from bass to treble again.

“A clownfish is one thing, Villain,” I said, “but that won’t convince the Academy.”

“You think that’s all it can do!?” he shouted. “Look! A sailfin tang!” He fired again, and the small striped fish disappeared. “A yellow wrasse!” That jolt again, and the wrasse had disappeared. “A marble batfish!” Again the strange jolt, as if I had jumped from one world to a parallel one. “It’s completely foolproof! It will have no effect, no effect at all on land life, whilst making any sea life completely unseen!”

“Any sea life at all?” I asked. “Really?”

“Really. Any. You can’t trick me!” He cackled. “You really, really can’t trick me!”

“How about…” I said, trying to sound as casual as I could, as if I was picking something at random, “…how about that there?”

“That? That seahorse? Is a seahorse marine life? Is this the Marine Life Invisibility Ray? Of course it will make it unseen!”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, trying to stay calm. “Show me. Please?”

“Why, my dear,” he said, with a wicked grin, “it would be a pleasure.” He pressed the button.

With a terrible cracking sound, the thick glass of the tank shattered into large, jagged pieces, as the foamy salt water of the tank burst from it. Through the foam, I made out a large, dark shape. A loud “NEIGHHHHHH!” filled my ears. It sounded angry and enraged, and with very good reason. Without stopping to see if the Villain survived his trampling, I fled.

Keyword noise: jokes, puns, shaggy dog, story, storytelling.

As people have been asking, here’s the cake that K’s very kindly made me for my birthday. I haven’t actually tasted it yet – as I write this it’s sitting in the fridge – but as all of K’s cooking is wonderful and delicious, I’m sure it will be fantastic.

My favourite pudding is tiramisu, so K came up with a tiramisu-flavoured cake, with a chocolate sponge sandwiched together with the marscapone-cream-egg mixture that she makes her tiramisu from, all liberally laced with Tia Maria. I am entirely responsible, though, for the suggestion of adding Cadburys Animal biscuits, thus turning it into a tiramizoo.

Keyword noise: baking, birthday, cake, food, marscapone, puns, jokes, Tia Maria, tiramisu, tiramisu cake, tiramizoo.

“My dog’s got no nose.”

“Haven’t we been through this?”

“Shush. My dog’s got no nose.”

“How does he smell?”

Well, funny you should ask that. We’ve just joined this scheme called Smelling-Nose Dogs. You know how, in America, guide dogs are called seeing-eye dogs? My dog with no nose now has his own guide dog, who goes around, sniffs things, guides him away from odorous obstacles and generally lets him in on all the latest dog-gossip.^* And it’s given him a whole new lease of life! He’s happy, and bouncy, and has a shiny coat!^** He’s always bounding around and eager for his smelling-nose dog and him to go for a walk together. Completely unlike how he used to be, always moping in his basket unable to smell anything.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes, it’s really done him the world of good.”

“Still not very funny, though.”

“Er, no.”

* You know – which dogs have urinated on which lamp-posts and that sort of thing. Which is, I’m told, very important information for dogs.

** Not that that has much to do with anything. Maybe I should be a copywriter for Evil Nestlé’s dog-food arm.

Keyword noise: happy ending, jokes, silliness.

“My dog’s got no nose”

“How does he smell?”

“He doesn’t. He sits around all day getting into a deeper and deeper cycle of depression, because he can’t smell anything, in one huge cloud of nose-related ennui. He never even comes out of his basket.”

“That’s quite sad, really.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why the title says it’s a joke.”

Keyword noise: jokes, silliness, tragedy.

According to Martijn, 47% of all blog posts consist of links to other blogs.^*

Well, according to new research by the Militant Invective Laboratories, an entire 0.3% of current blog posts consist of links to blog posts about the proportion of blog posts which just consist of links to other blogs.

No, really. Honest. No, I didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. What sort of person do you think I am?^**

* well, actually, he made it up. But it could be true.

** Oh, OK, I did really. But you never know.

Keyword noise: fake statistics, jokes, Militant Invective Laboratories, statistics.

It is of course pissing down. We are loitering within tent.

Keyword noise: camping, holiday, jokes, puns, rain, travel, weather.

Special offer! Medieval torture kit, only £9.99^*

* while stocks last

Keyword noise: comedy, humour, jokes, puns.

There once was a teacher, who went by the name of Miss Swing. She was a very good teacher, popular with her children, who were all well-behaved and scored very well on all the tests they took. All the parents at parents’ evening either wanted to be her or be with her, and all her colleagues knew she was wonderful in the classroom, the best teacher the school had.

There was one small problem with Miss Swing, though. She would never agree with anyone else.

If you said something was black, she would say it was white. If you told her the weather was cold, she’d reply she thought it unseasonably warm. Anything you said to her, she would contradict if she could. The only exception was when she was on holiday, when she would be as pleasant and polite a person as you could ever meet. Apart from that, she would always disagree with everything you said.

Finally, one day, someone confronted her. “Why is it,” they said, “that when you’re on holiday you’re as charming as anyone, but when you’re in school, or even after work, you can never agree with anyone?”

“Ahh,” said Miss Swing, “I’m just a contradiction in terms.”

Keyword noise: jokes, puns, shaggy dog, story, storytelling.

This is the final part. If you need to catch up, here is part one, and part two.

The next day, crowds went to the carpenter’s workshop, as usual, to try to ask him to build and carve for them. But he was not there. They looked through the windows, but his workshop was empty. They looked through the windows of the house, but there was no sign of him.

They searched the entire village, but there was no sign of the carpenter. After a while the village constable agreed to break into the carpenter’s house, to find him. But he was nowhere to be found.

The whole county started searching for the missing carpenter, but he could not be found anywhere. He had disappeared, completely. They searched for months, but the carpenter never returned.

Some people thought that he had got so angry with being asked to paint everything he made, that he had decided to retire and move away. They could not explain, though, how he had disappeared so suddenly. Others thought that a disappointed client, who could not find a painter, had done something; or that a great lord elsewhere had kidnapped him to create beautiful furniture for the lord alone. Noone ever saw any furniture in the carpenter’s style, though, but somehow this made these people even more adamant they were right. Some thought he had been murdered for the great riches they assumed he had made from his work; but they were wrong, for he worked for the love of carpentry and had spent all his money on expensive woods from overseas.

The carpenter never returned to the village, and noone ever saw furniture like his again. Those things he had made were preserved carefully by their owners, because they knew they were irreplacable. To this day, what happened to the carpenter who refused to paint remains a mystery. As far as anyone could tell, he just varnished.

Keyword noise: carpenter, jokes, puns, shaggy dog, story, storytelling.

I’ve noticed I’ve been a bit lax updating recently – if you look on the sidebar, you’ll notice these past few months have had far fewer posts than before. Back in January I said to myself that I was going to try to update every day. As you can see, I haven’t been managing it.

“Why do you have to update if you don’t have anything to say?” someone asked recently. I feel I should, though. Previous attempts at creating diaries have always faded away due to laziness; when I started this site, the intention was to try to stick to one post per day. No more, no less, and the rhythm would stop it fading away. I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening quite yet, but I am going to try to put more effort in.

Big Dave is still up to something – he’s been up to something all week, I’m sure, but he’s not saying what it is yet. Lots of phone calls that he won’t take in front of people.

We were both up to something the other day, to be honest – we found a rather good screensaver^* that simulates, very closely, a computer that has crashed so horribly that it won’t start up. Dave, of course, couldn’t resist installing it on the PC of someone who recently played a joke on him. He waited until we knew the chap was away from his desk, installed it remotely, then sat back and waited for the phone call.

The funny thing, though, is that he also installed it on his own PC, so he could see what it does. So now, every time he comes back to his desk,^*** he has a millisecond of “Shit! Aargh!” before remembering that it’s his screensaver. Our fear of blue screens is that ingrained, he can’t help it.

* It’s from Sysinternals, a very good site if you have to be a Windows geek, with all sorts of useful semi-official system tools. It used to be independent, but was absorbed^** by Microsoft this summer.

** or maybe “adsorbed” is a better word.

*** after answering one of those mysterious phone calls he keeps getting.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, blogging, Blue Screen Of Death, BSOD, jokes, laziness, practical jokes, schedule, Sysinternals, writing.