Reductio ad Absurdam

Tags

Alan Titchmarsh, Alice Cooper, Baal, Babylon, Belshazzar's Feast, blobfish, Brutal Assault Tour, Bryn Terfel, C S Lewis, cosmic laugh, Cumberbatch, Donald Duck, Eurovision Song Contest, Fanny Craddock, farmor, Harry Enfield, Hatefest, James May, Kathy Burke, L'Inviti, Leipzig, Lindt cafe, Lordi, Mammon, Marduk, Meat Loaf, Mick Jagger, mormor, Nykoping, Ozzie Osborne, Pandemonium, Paradise Lost, psychrolutes micropons, reductio ad absurdam, St Augustine, Sydney Kingsford Smith, The Inferno, Transformer, Ugg slippers, Uriel, Walton

Candia Dixon-Stuart was about to encounter Sydney Kingsford Smith.

Sounds romantic, eh?

Actually, all it meant was that I was about to touch down at the New

South Wales airport.

I’d just finished reading the Weekend supplement of an Aussie

newspaper, with its very interesting article on blobfish, when the

seat belt sign was turned off and I thought I saw one of those

psychrolutes micropons thingies trying to retrieve its amorphous

cabin luggage from the overhead locker, having a guttural exchange

with the stewardess.

At first it seemed to morph into a member of that Finnish group,

LORDI, who won The Eurovision Song Contest in 2006, but then

I listened intently and discovered that it probably spoke Swedish

and had momentarily broken out of its Transformer costume.

Maybe Security wasn’t having any of it and Passport Control had

asked it to remove its latex mask, or accept consignment to the hold.

(By the way, why do all those intent on ‘shocking’ their fellows have to

resort to blasphemy and childish usurpation of religious names and

terms?  I mean, one such band member is called Amen. Get your

own language, losers.)

Anyway, I was given a death-stare and didn’t see him again until Baggage

Claim, when I tried to discern his group’s name from his promotional t-

shirt.  Marduk.

Sounds like a kid’s cartoon character.  Love-a-duck!  Donald Duck?!

Later I Googled their current tour. So, they are a Satanic band with ‘Evil

be thou my good’ no doubt their watchword.  Yawn!

His promotional photo showed something streaming down his head as

if a seagull had perched on a municipal statue.  Or was it a merde-duck?

The thing about these ageing rockers is that they seem to be frozen

in some kind of time warp.  Ozzie Osborne and Mick Jagger are

Establishment now.  Why keep flogging a dead horse?

Alice Cooper was aeons ago.  Meat Loaf is probably past his

sell-by date. Sounds like a recipe by Fanny Craddock. Things

move on.

Even James May has had a tidy up.

And it really is poor taste to be claiming affiliation with evil when the

real stuff is being enacted all round the globe, or had been enacted in

the Lindt cafe, not so far away from the airport.  It’s not about

banging your head like a toddler having a tantrum in its cot.

Of course, it could all be an act.  Probably my subject is capable of being

as polite as the Harry Enfield character Kevin’s chum, played by Kathy

Burke, when speaking to someone else’s mother.  Life is a stage and we

all play different parts, don’t we?

Maybe the scowling rockster went on to buy his aged granny, Inge Soda-

Stream, a nice souvenir pair of Ugg slippers- often reduced, I noticed in

Sydney shops. The devil allegedly likes a bargain, so his spawn would

hardly be averse to one.  He probably made plenty Mammon at the

Melbourne gig beforehand.

I expect he did probably send his  mormor/ farmor a nice postcard of the

harbour so she could put it up on the mantelpiece of her Nykoping

nursing home and tell the carers that he is such a nice boy and that he

used to relish her meatballs.  Really?  It seems so.

Evil always looks a bit sheepish to me.  Satan had to disguise himself

as a cherub to ask directions from Uriel, in Paradise Lost.  A she-devil

wouldn’t have been so reticent.

So, Marduk refers to Baal, god of Babylon.  There’s been a lot of music

created about that deity.  Think Belshazzar’s Feast and, if you listen

to it, I am sure you’ll find it a lot more sophisticated than anything this

Scandinavian -collective term for a gang of demons??- will produce.

Bryn Terfel was on the award-winning Walton CD  in which Yours Truly sang

the L’Inviti part.  I am sure he could have personally taken on all minor

demons of that particular region with a Welsh rugby tackle and could

have shown Marduk how one blast from his lungs would blow them all

off the concert stage into the pit- not necessarily The Inferno.

But, you take my point: the writing on the wall must surely come for these

guys, in spite of their Brutal Assault Tour, 2015.

The Devil steals all the best tunes and they are advertising their steel-

armored (sic) death choir, which they are going to ‘unleash‘.

Puh-lease!  Have they ever attended a cathedral choir rehearsal when

the solo snippets are being assigned?  They don’t know what malice is!

In that context, it is serious internecine warfare, which would reveal

any spite that Marduk would exhibit as kittenish.

They’re even going to perform a selection of what they call hymns

from their current album.  They could ask Alan Titchmarsh to present

them.

They’re going to have a Hatefest in Leipzig.  Surely, it’s not that bad a

venue?  Mind you, it is probably preferable to that out-dated love-in!

Sorry, guys, but I can’t take you seriously.  Good is the new sexy, in

case you hadn’t heard.  Everyone loves Cumberbatch et al.

As C S Lewis showed, Satan is a mere parody of God.  I think he

pinched that from St Augustine- and he was a reformed

hell-raiser.

When confronted with ranting devils in Pandemonium, God actually

laughed.  A cosmic laugh. And it did not reflect amusement, so much

as true power.

Laughter puts an end to debate.  So, I bite my thumb at you.

Blobfish etc

Tags

blobfish, Donatella Versace, Edinburgh Festival, Facebook, foreskin, International Ugly Animal Preservation Society, Jabba the Hutt, John Prescott, leftvent angler fish, Mr Blobby, Philistines, Reduced Shakespeare Co, Rollinng Stones, Samson, Tasman Sea, trout pout

(Drawing by Alan Riverstone McCulloch)

 

They come from the Tasman Sea and ichthyologists

say they are the ugliest fish in the seas.

Well, my granny used to tell me there were plenty

more of them in that particular element. But I do

wonder how they manage to attract the opposite sex and

propagate, when they look like Mr Blobby in the act of

frowning.

They have been likened to Donatella Versace, Jabba the

Hutt, John Prescott and a beardless Col. Sanders.

The male becomes a big bag of testes and that’s his sole use

in life.

Which reminds me of a joke delivered by The Reduced

Shakespeare Company, in Edinburgh, at The Festival, some

years ago.  They were producing The Bible on stage, in a rapid

series of sketches, as was their wont.

One of the actors, wearing an animal skin, rushed towards the

audience and boasted:

I took the foreskins of the Philistines!

His sidekick queried this utterance by asking:

What’s a foreskin?

It’s that useless bit of flesh that hangs on the end of a penis,

said Samson.

Oh! rejoined the stooge.  I thought that was a man!

Cue for hysterical feminist guffaws.

Anyway, why does the blobfish expand in such a manner?

Apparently it is a strategy to ensure that sex happens in a

big environment.  It is one way of being noticed.

Maybe they could sign up to Facebook, or a fishy dating agency?

Yes, blobfish are arguably uglier than the naked mole rat, which

is the mascot of the International Ugly Animal Preservation

Society.

However, they are not so desperate as the male leftvent angler

fish, which may fuse himself, along with other males, onto the

female, and, in the manner of Hamlet’s aspirations, thaw and resolve

themselves into a dew, melting the skin of their mouths and the

female flesh until they absorb blood vessels and the two, or twenty

two, become one.

Cue for further feminist reaction.

I mean, sometimes a girl just wants to go shopping without a male

being joined to her hip, monitoring her spending.

I only saw one example of an even uglier specimen on my travels

Down Under.  It was on a Rolling Stones comeback poster and I’m

not saying to which member of the band I am referring.

But think Trout Pout.