Journal Entries
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despair!
Posted Dec 9, 1999
Am I completely alone in this terrible world? Or what? I really don't give a toss, REALLY, I never do! Anyways, one of my bosombuddies, Squeaky Doors has abandoned h2g2. R.I.P.
I don't seem to be either interesting enough, or funny enough to invoke response or a plethora of interesting visits. Enough lamenting. I am contemplating action! What will be will be!
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Latest reply: Dec 9, 1999
Family
Posted Oct 2, 1999
In celebration of my newest guide entry, I'd like to describe a part of a normal Christmas, the supposed apex of all family get-togethers, in an unnamed household. There are three in the family, a Dad, a Mom, and a Boy-Child, seven years of age.
The day begins early when people are dragged out of bed to waste around the house preparing for the festivities. Odd relatives arrive, bearing troughs of gifts which no one needs or really wants and will be exchanged when the chance arises. Then these people loiter about, idly chit-chatting about the weather in a courteous manner to ensure that the Mother can’t get back to work on making a ‘Merry’ Christmas. After these bothersome people have ceased arriving, the father sets off on his annual journey to fetch the Grandmother and the Barmy Aunt, gazing with sadness in the direction of his son in the hope of stirring sympathy. His plan of course being that the Boy should decide to join him and bear the brunt of the women’s inane chatter on the long drive back home. But no such luck.
The Father returns again after an hour of complaint about the way he drives, depressed and dishevelled. He tries to cheer himself up by dipping into the sherry of the household which of course is strictly forbidden by the Mother. Her motives being that if she can’t enjoy the experience of Christmas, no one should.
Suddenly the boy is beset on all sides by a deluge of thoroughly revolting kisses, and a series of ‘By Jove, you have grown!’-s, disturbing his religious enthusiasm for the children’s material the Electronic Nurse has been kind enough to provide. As the nibble of his wobbly cheeks ceases, a courteous howling about ‘how long it has been’ commences in the kitchen, followed by some drivel about how fat the child is becoming. This of course is said in an accurate decibel of just low enough to be considered a considerate whisper, but just loud enough to be heard by the victim of this slander. The boy makes a valiant attempt at reclaiming his nirvana and turns the volume of the Box up a notch, but to no avail. A searing laughter muffles out the mantra of Binky in Toy land, and then an overshadowing of dyed hair asks him to turn it down since the furry monsters who just tried to eat him want to listen to accordion music on the radio.
We fast-forward a bit towards the Christmas meal. The Father at this point is off the wagon, and spends most of the evening making uncalled for remarks about his ‘little butter ball’, swigging expertly from his glass, which is full to the brim of mind-altering substances.
The Barmy Aunt, in a vain attempt at humour, persistently shows the Boy her food-smeared lower dentures, to his eternal horror. Just to enforce her own rank in this collection of miscreants, the Grandmother gets herself busy with staring hollow-eyed at each family members, with a ghoulish look of abandonment, all the while chewing a bit like a cow on laxatives. The Mother of course is seldom seen in the vicinity of the dinner table, since being without aid of any sorts she is still getting the finer aspects of the whole dinner experience just right.
The Father increasingly becomes more and more annoying, and with a flippant joke about thingie-shaped vegetables causes the Aunt to lose her dentures into a glass of unappreciated Château Batailley, breaking the concentration of the catatonic Granny.
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Latest reply: Oct 2, 1999
ICELAND
Posted Sep 24, 1999
Being in Iceland, I've had to answer a lot of questions about it, so here I'd like to answer at least one of them in full details.
Hey, is it true that Iceland was originally named Greenland and vice
versa, but the names were changed to confuse the Vikings?
Nope, the tourist council thought up that one. Hell, Icelanders were the vikings. We were a brawny lot, always raping, looting and pillaging, not to mention murdering the Irish, the Poms, the French, the German and almost everybody, in some cases even ourselves. We lost that advantage by becoming civilized and christian, bloody awful that!
According to the facts in one of the oldest books in existence, written by one of us civilized folk, our country was discovered by this barmy norwegian git named hrafna-floki, which basically means 'raven-tangled'. well, he discovered the country by setting loose these two ravens and following them, they of course leading him to this barren rock in the middle of the sea which I call home. He did not name it at once, just called it 'the place I'm at this current moment' basically. but he stayed for some time, and lost all his livestock, some of his men and some family memebers to the harsh winter, then left and as a curse on it named it Iceland.
We didn't get any settlers after that for quite some time, not until this fellow named Ingolfur Arnarson heard some obscure mention about a country up there in the north somewhere and decided to check it out. He of course found and named Reykjavik (smoky bay is what that little name means) and thought it a good idea to live here.
The story of Greenland however is of quite another nature. Iceland doesn't hold a candle to the inhospitable icy wastes of Greenland, but since inuits could sustain life there, the icelandic fellow that discovered that hunk of frost (his name was Eric the red) insisted that he could live there too(we were as you remember a brawny lot). The myth goes, that he, being a viking and all, tried to lure people there by calling it Greenland, and when people arrived, he slaughtered them for their goods, quite an ingenious ploy I must admit.
For an interesting extra tidbit, Eric's son Leif the lucky, went on to discover North America, but had the good taste in loosing it again(I think Oscar Wilde said this) for some italian wanker named Cullambo or something to REdiscover it at a later date.
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Latest reply: Sep 24, 1999
"a word of your choice" me!
Posted Sep 16, 1999
Well, I've made some improvements to my page. Changing my name from Screwtape to Thunderguts being the most important of these. It's looking ever more homely yet still needs a bit of work. Fixing these damn bugs in it are a priority with me at the moment.
But horror, oh, the horror! Eton has as of now completely denied ever having me in any of their classes. They even claim that I've never even visited. I am a bit helpless under these circumstances since I don't really remember all that much of my Eton years. But I do know that I've got a grammar book on greek somewhere. That is proof enough for me. But the most horrid thing about this is that if Eton and Cambridge are places I've never been to...then how the hell did I learn to read and write? Is it a social skill I've picked up while trading phone numbers with lucky tarts in pubs? I sincerely don't know.
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Latest reply: Sep 16, 1999
Bugger Me!
Posted Sep 13, 1999
Well, I've made my first attempt at personalizing my so-called homepage, failing miserably. I found this clever little contraption called a "hit-counter" and while trying to insert it into my homepage managed to put the entire HTML text into my inrtoduction. If that isn't a gross error I don't know what is. The only thing I can hope for is that no one noticed. Well, the only purpose of hoping that no one noticed is the unbearable shame of the world realizing that I am an incompetent git. I seem to be doing quite well in advertising the fact here in my journal. Oh, yes, please don't take the title of this entry literally.
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Latest reply: Sep 13, 1999
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Thunderguts
Researcher U91395
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