Sixteen Alligators and a Trebuchet
Page 8
Unfortunately however my reasoning was more flawed than their entire stock of flat pack refrigerators...
B&Q
to: Trevor Mcinsley
Good Morning Mr McInsley,
I can confirm that you have provided your address on your original email and we have requested your £5 gift card be sent and you should receive this within the next 7-10 days.
Thank you for contacting B&Q, please do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of any further assistance.
Trevor Mcinsley
to: B&Q
That’s all well and good it’s just... the address I gave was for a caravan parked on top of Stonehenge. Surely this should have raised some suspicions?
Whilst I am rather impressed with how readily you give out gift cards... I loathe to confuse postmen... not since the incident with the dead tortoise at least.
Oh and I find McInsley aesthetically unpleasing and hence had my named changed by deed poll to Mcinsley. Yes... they were pretty confused too. Still, Microsoft Word recognises it as being spelt with a lowercase i now so that’s something. If requested I will find a way to send you my customised Word dictionary by proving this if you require it? It also recognises ‘sausagey’ and ‘Partario’ as being a word and a name, respectively.
Shall I send you my Word dictionary?
B&Q
to: Trevor Mcinsley
Good Morning Mr Mcinsley,
Firstly can I apologise for the incorrect spelling of your surname it was not intended to cause offense.
I would still like to send you the £5 gift card offered. As the original address you provided us with is not the correct one please provide the full postal address of where I should send your gift card and I will have this arranged.
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I really didn’t want to waste anymore of their time but they were pretty insistent that I be sent a £5 gift voucher for light bulbs... and given the frankly ridiculously determined and generous nature of their customer service I didn’t want to cause embarrassment or anything by explaining it was just a joke...
Trevor Mcinsley
to: B&Q
As much as I would like some delicious B&Q light bulbs I am afraid I am not able to receive post as I have no fixed address at the moment. My caravan was torched by angry villagers (again) and so at the moment I am living in the woods and relying on what I can scavenge from nature to provide food, water and email facilities. Fortunately I managed to find an old PDA in a squirrel hole and bodged up a primitive internet connection using a chain of paper clips and an old phone line. I am pretty sure these berries are poisonous though. Also the water I am drinking and bathing in tastes suspiciously like it might be the runoff from a car battery manufacturing plant...
Anyway, I am afraid I will not be able to receive your kind offer right now. Thanks though.
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Bloody hell... when I started on this tangent it was meant to just be a couple lines and now look at it... Anyway, besides from misquoting classical (though frankly startlingly repetitive) poetry and sending peculiar refund requests to DIY stores this section was actually meant to be about things which genuinely annoy me and how I attempt to set the world to rights... through the medium of email.
I can scarcely manage to read the news today without foaming at the mouth so this shouldn’t be difficult. Just the other day I stumbled upon a story on the BBC entitled ‘Arthritic Rabbit gets Hydrotherapy’. Or in other words: ‘A Rabbit Swims in Water’...
In other news ‘A Dog Walks’ and ‘Tree Grows Half an Inch’.
I genuinely found myself shouting ‘who the fuck cares?’ at my screen for at least five minutes before devolving into ‘kill it, turn it into stew, buy a new one’. Why did I get turned down for that job at the pet shop?
Sure enough, the video was just a rabbit looking very confused as to why it now appeared to have become a boat. How the hell do you find a lifejacket for a rabbit anyway?
I don’t care if it is the first time hydrotherapy has been used to treat a rabbit or if Mr Fuzzy Feet is feeling much better now... that is not newsworthy. If the rabbit had been dropped in the tank and suddenly acquired the ability to speak then I might be interested. Though it better have something worth fucking saying...
Anyway, the point is I can get angry at the news quite exceptionally easily... so when there is actually cause to, well you can imagine...
Trevor Mcinsley
to: Core Issues Trust (bus wankers)
Hello. I would just like to say that I fully support your appeal to write statements about gay people on buses. Don’t listen to all these haters who say that it is ‘wrong’ or ‘remarkably ignorant, defamatory and wildly offensive’. Jesus died so that we would not be attracted to men.
Of course homosexuality is a sin and of course it can be cured via therapy. I myself was a lesbian until I took a three month course of antibiotics last year. From time to time I still have these ‘bi-curious’ feelings but I usually just take a couple paracetamol and they go away again.
Why is it so hard for the modern world to understand that people can choose to change and are not simply ‘born that way’? What a load of nonsense! Clearly it is the devil urinating in my mouth whilst I am asleep that is causing these nightmarish delusions of homosexuality.
Therefore I am proposing that we solve the curse of gayness by forcing people to go to sleep at night with a sock in their mouth. This will prevent Satan’s slimy, sinful urine from trickling down our gullets and so stop us craving the man love. Perfectly sensible thing to suggest right? So why is it all these ‘scientists’ up in Washington merely conclude I am crazy?
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Frankly it is just a mystery why I don’t have a topical newspaper column...
Be forewarned, the following email is seven pages long. By all means feel free to skip it. I’ll even refund you the three pence you have technically paid for it (or the solitary penny of those three pence I actually get at any rate) but I felt I needed to make a genuine point of international importance.
Silly emails about sausages, spam and trebuchets are all very well and indeed seems the ultimate combination for a food fight... but they are... silly. There is a long overlooked social issue which I feel is destroying this country, consuming the world and is inexplicably leading us towards destruction.
I am not claiming to be Bob Geldof or anything... and certainly I would probably have more common sense than to write ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ about a nation which is one third Muslim but... where was I?
I am not claiming to be... actually, one sec... ‘there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas’? What about Mount Fucking Kilimanjaro and all those skiing resorts in Morocco? I am a nightmare at Christmas parties...
Sorry. I am not claiming to be Bob Geldof but I think it is about time that Trevor Mcinsley also had a cause...
Trevor Mcinsley
to: Sky
Hey there, [Jeffrey Mongot].
I am Trevor Mcinsley and your suppositions regarding why I came to this page are indeed correct... or one of them is at any rate.
‘C) You are bored and trying to get inspiration.’
Seems about right. Actually you see I have already found inspiration and thought I would share it with you.
Mere moments ago I wandered into the living room to find an 8yr old girl dressed as some manner of terrifying pink fairy thing leaping about on the TV. I caught maybe two seconds of it before backing away and averting my gaze. A few days before, a similar incident occurred in which I strayed across the threshold only to witness someone who was apparently having some manner of minor seizure on stage and had lost all control of his limbs. Initially I was concerned that fatal brain haemorrhage was obviously mere seconds away but soon his frantic flailing motions had assuaged me and filled me with inspiration...
That is, inspiration to write what is soon going to become a scathing indictment of the hideous genre of programme that is rapidly taking
over TV quicker than Hitler did Po... no, I can’t say that. Reality TV.
Back to the hideous prancing fairy thing first though if I may (as I have many other vaguely amusing things about it that I wish to force you to listen to). I genuinely did only catch mere seconds of it doing whatever the hell it was doing but that was enough to make me feel violently ill and fear for my personal safety. This is not overstatement for the purposes of comedic intent. It made me feel uncomfortable, distraught and ashamed for the entire human race...
It was scarcely more than 100 years ago that humanity discovered the power of flight and since then we have landed men on the moon and have robots exploring distant planets. This is an extraordinary accomplishment.
It wasn’t long ago that lifespans could often be measured in years rather than decades, what with the wide range of hideous microorganisms designed solely to kill us in a creative variety of unpleasant ways. Giving birth was a gamble as to whether you would even survive and something as simple as an infected paper cut was enough to kill (I understand the book binding community was conscripted largely from prisons for this reason). In a comparatively short time, considering the eons of evolution that went into these nasties, mankind has completely beaten the odds. We have immunised and eradicated and doubled our life expectancies. This is nigh on unbelievable.
The first mobile phone I owned was little more than 10 years ago. It had a backlit LCD screen barely capable of displaying even simple text and the messaging facility was unable to communicate with the phonebook so I had a post-it note stuck inside the case with a physical copy of the numbers so I could tell who was texting me (true story, rather depressingly). Now I can watch movies on my phone, pull virtually any conceivable bit of collective human knowledge out of thin air, send photographs of my penis to schoolchildren in Hong Kong and even occasionally make and receive calls. All this from a technology less than a century and a half old? I mean did anyone see that coming?
The point I am... loosely, trying to make is that humanity is capable of some truly amazing feats. Technology grows exponentially and gets ever more incredible, yet it seems that a good chunk of the world only utilise these astonishing advances to watch morons prancing about on screen and trying to justify to themselves all the painful hours wasted at dance rehearsals.
Imagine how confusing these two facts rammed right together would be for an outside observer, an intelligent race from another world for example. It would see this primitive species driving a robot around on another planet which has been put there thanks to that first powered flight and is controlled by another invention barely older than 100 years: radio. Yet some little jumped up fairy-child-monstrosity garners more public attention?
There is a somewhat paradoxical scientific theory which raises issues regarding extraterrestrial life. On the one hand planets that could potentially be habitable are seen everywhere and the beginnings of life itself can be boiled down to simple inevitable chemical reactions in the early oceans. Life it seems is certain to exist elsewhere. Yet on the other we see no signs of it. We hear no distant alien chatter on the radio and nothing has come our way, poked its head in and said ‘hello’ ...or the closest facsimile a bug-eyed, tentacled beasty with sixteen mouths can manage to ‘hello’.
Logic says that this is likely down to the vast distances and unimaginable stretches of time involved. I have another theory however. The universe is ignoring us.
Would you really want to make contact with a species capable of finding a little pink thing leaping about as if it were on fire entertaining? To their eyes it would likely be less disturbing if we had televised the fairy thing being eaten by roving packs of wild bears...
With all the drivel that fills our TV screens these days it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that we are approaching the Reality TV Singularity. Douglas Adams (may he be praised) talked about the Shoe Event Horizon... the point at which the only type of store it is economically viable to build is a shoe shop. This soon sends the world into ruin.
Now I am not suggesting we are about to suddenly evolve into giant man birds or anything but I believe we are well on our way towards such an end... TV has taken such a dismal decline that in just a few years it is simply going to be impossible to make a programme about anything other than Gay Married Homeless Gypsies with Alcoholic Adopted Chinese Children and an Inexplicable Penchant for Karaoke... that title could probably do with a rethink though.
We will have well and truly crossed the ‘Terrible Television Threshold’. Just like with Doug’s shoes it will become financially unviable to make a programme that doesn’t just follow some average Joe around through their day to day life. It will start us on a downward spiral that will undoubtedly lead to everyone slowly realising they are wasting their lives watching others waste their lives before ultimately giving up on television entirely. Then the industry will collapse and the world will end... for some as yet unspecified reason.
When I was growing up, by which I mean just 10-15 years ago (and clearly with what I am about to write I’ve still got some way to go), ‘reality’ television was rare, at least as I remember it. Reality meant documentaries, chat shows and the odd, vaguely intellectually stimulating, quiz show. It did not mean a tone deaf moron butchering 80s classics whilst attempting to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of a dog to win £100...
There were no programmes following the uneducated around Essex as the world in general perplexed them. There were no train-wrecks about fat gypsies covering themselves with enough fake tan to smother a horse. No, the most ridiculous thing on TV was The Crystal Maze... and everyone who watched it admitted it was awful. To its credit (and I can’t believe I am saying this) even The Crystal Maze was nowhere near as bad as the optimistically entitled ‘game’ shows of today. It at least demonstrated some manner of team collaboration skills, problem solving and lateral thinking. Yes at times it was a little like watching a tribe of chimps attempt to open a can of pickled herring by smashing it against a tree trunk but compared with what’s on offer today it was practically of BBC documentary standards. Game shows now simply drop the pretence of challenge or purpose entirely and just have people falling over. Is this what the British public really want? Are we all such sadists? Screw it then, bring back the death penalty and have live executions broadcast at one minute past the watershed.
I suppose the other issue is the following such programmes used to garner. That is, they would basically just keep to themselves, you either watched them or you didn’t. No one was there ramming the bastards down your throat. There were pointless programmes about gardening, DIY and decoration sure... but how often did they make national news?
I get increasingly annoyed when I open up an on demand website to look for the latest documentary on some groundbreaking revelation into how humans evolved from apes... only to be offered a show filled with those who clearly never did.
Any big website you go to nowadays will have their homepage plastered with ‘news’ about reality TV ‘stars’. Seriously... I went to my internet service provider’s site the other day with the aim of complaining about my intermittent connection and couldn’t find the damn contact page for the maze of drivelling orange chimps I had to navigate through first. Does it not say something about the decline of the world when a giant corporation with its fingers in a half dozen different technology pies is more concerned with keeping you up to date with Moron Watch than actually selling you their products? Mmm, technology pie...
I’ve given up getting my news from any source other than the BBC website lately... any paper you pick up on the train or news channel you flick to will undoubtedly waste half an hour of your time without telling you anything of any actual significance. When some stick-figure of a female pop singer getting cosmetic surgery gets more coverage than a civil war in the middle east is it any wonder the western world is so hated by those not in it?
I have genuinely seen stories like this shamelessly printed side by side in the paper before. The first will say something
like ‘Dozens Die in Dreadful Dog Disaster’ and then right next to it there will be a full page article entitled ‘Samwise Sardine is Have a Baby!’ ...yeah I don’t pay much attention to newspapers. You get the point.
We are only seeing the beginning of it now and already the populace are emulating the socially inept halfwits on their screens. They are painting themselves as orange as a tango doused traffic cone and plastering on enough concealer to conceal a 50cal bullet wound. They are shelling out swathes of their earnings on enough gaudy hoop earrings and fake watches to make a pearly queen queasy.
A generation of children growing up on this rubbish is going to be a dangerous thing. I remember learning about nature and history (though mainly sharks and Nazis once Channel Five came along) through countless documentaries as a kid. Now children will only learn about alcoholism and ignorance.
Rather than the smalls growing up wanting to be an astronaut or a penguin because they saw one on TV they are going to want to grow up to be an uneducated, culturally ignorant, binge drinking, coke snorting orange moron... and thanks to programmes like that they probably will. The subjects (because ‘stars’ truly is not apt) of these baffling televised cultural experiments are not the kind of people that should be emulated, indeed many should be sectioned, others locked away and I would even recommend selective culling for the betterment of mankind in some instances. By putting these kinds of steroid infused imbeciles on TV however they are naturally going to be idealised and emulated. This is what TV does.