Glasgow Urban Myths

by Ian Black

  Name withheld by request.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’m going to join

  Dear Friendly Wee Pal,

  How many times have you wanted to fill that yawning spiritual void in your life but just weren’t able to find the time or the energy? How often have you wanted to form a more personal relationship with a Higher Authority but just couldn’t get turned on by that same old tired selection of Supreme Beings? Haven’t you ever wished there was just one religion out there that understood you, Friendly Wee Pal, that indulged you, one that fitted in with your creative, dynamic lifestyle? Well, at last, thanks to the creators of Weegieism, there is. Finally, there’s a faith that works for you, Friendly Wee Pal, instead of the other way around. After all these years, and following an in-depth market research study, Weegieists Worldwide (a non-profit agency not affiliated with anyone) has come up with a religion that draws upon the best features of some of the world’s most popular denominations, but does them all far better.

  Yes, Wee Pal, that’s right! Weegieism is everything some religions are and much, much more. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure; it’s everything you always wanted in a God and less. Designed using the latest in CAR (Computer-Aided Religion) technology, here are just a few of the features Weegieism offers:

  Guaranteed Salvation. Guaranteed.

  Other religions require you to behave a certain way in the here-and-now in order to make it to the hereafter, but with Weegieism, you can do whatever you want, because your salvation is guaranteed! Weegieism realizes you’ve got enough to worry about in life without having to be nervous about where you’re headed after you die, so relax! As a Weegieist, death means never having to have said you’re sorry. Whatever heaven you want is yours, or, if you’d rather just be dead, that’s fine, too.

  Your Choice of Supreme Being.

  No more arguing about who is more all-powerful: Jesus or Mohammed, Buddha or Joe Smith. Stop fighting about whether Allah could beat the Holy Ghost in a wrestling match. End the endless bickering over whether the Supreme Deity is a He or a She. With Weegieism, you can choose. Using the patented Godolyzer, you make God in your image. Combine Jesus’ hairdo with Mother Nature’s eyes. Add the musical flair of Krishna to the sexual swagger of Zoroaster. You want a Lord who’s vengeful but also knows how to rock? No problem. Using the Godolyzer, with or without the templates provided, it’s your choice.

  Eat Whatever You Want.

  Remember fish on Friday? Or how about unleavened bread? Kosher, who needs it? As a Weegieist, you’ll never have to tongue another eucharist wafer off your palate or nurse another hangover brought on from sacramental wine again. Glut your gums however you’d like, whenever you’d like. Take all you want, just want all you take.

  More Efficient Commandments.

  Some religions take as many as ten Commandments to lay down their laws. Weegieism, using the latest in data-compression techniques, has significantly reduced the number of Commandments and has also managed to dramatically decrease their stringency. Think of them simply as a Couple of Suggestions, and if you’d rather not, hey, Wee Pal, that’s quite all right, too.

  No Sexual Taboos.

  Has anything turned more people away from the power above the heavens than the power below their waists? Weegieism doesn’t have this problem because, as a Weegieist you, Friendly Wee Pal, can stick or get stuck however you want with whom or whatever you want whenever or wherever you want. As long as no one gets hurt – or just if they want to – Weegieism says have fun. And be safe.

  More and Better Holidays.

  Even the most fun-loving religions usually have only half a dozen or so major holidays a year. And often several of these are days of atonement or fasting. Weegieism, on the other hand, features a full complement of 365 full-scale religious holidays a year! 366 for a leap year. And all include presents and feasting.

  No Stupid and Dangerous Joining Rituals.

  No hitting with sticks. No drenchings in water. No knives aimed at your privates. No bits hacked off your penis. No rolling up of your trouser leg. Need we say more?

  No Annual Fee.

  Because of low overheads (no Gothic cathedrals to keep up, no sacred texts to maintain, no Crusades to mount) Weegieism is offered to you entirely free! A letter now and again would be nice, but hey, don’t worry about it.

  100% Compatibility.

  Weegieism does not require you to change or upgrade any of your existing religious or sectarian beliefs. It is in no way mutually exclusive. You can be a Weegieist and anything else you want too, even a Tory.

  Leave at Any Time.

  No forms to fill out. No one will phone you. You can be a Weegieist one day and something else the next. Change hourly if you’d like. By the second if you’d prefer. Or, be a Weegieist forever. It’s entirely up to you. So, there you have it, Wee Pal, in a nutshell – a pistachio to be exact. With Weegieism, you get all the plusses of other religions with none of the minuses. It’s like having your cake and eating it, too. It is, in fact, like owning the whole baker’s shop. And because you, Friendly Wee Pal, are who you are, and only sometimes somebody else, you have been selected to participate in this charter membership offer. As a Weegieist, you’ll enjoy the benefits of the world’s only computer-designed faith as well as the peace of mind of knowing that if Armageddon does come, it’s not your fault!

  So join today and start receiving the benefits immediately. All you have to do is whatever you want. Make no phone calls unless you feel so inclined. Write no letters unless it strikes your fancy. Send no money, unless you want to.

  Be a Weegieist or don’t be. You are still surrounded in a warm cone-shaped cocoon of love.

  Very sincerely, or perhaps not,

  Snakehips McGunnagle

  P.S. This offer never expires. Relax and breathe deeply.

  The above is obviously nonsense. I know Snakehips, and he is an atheist.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Nae Luck of Any Kind Awards, and penguins

  Following an intense forest fire that burned several hundred acres, firemen were surprised to find a diver, in full wetsuit, fins, mask and tanks, hanging dead from the charred remains of a tree. Investigators were stumped (like many of the trees) at first but eventually came up with a unique theory.

  The Scottish Fire Brigades recently began using a helicopter with a drogue that can scoop up large volumes of water from the sea or a loch, fly to the scene of a fire, dump its contents and quickly put out a fire.

  Thus the theory is that the diver was scooped up by the plane and dropped over the fire.

  A bricklayer working on a three-storey tall chimney had set up a pulley system so that his hod man could raise the bricks up to where he needed them. As he was working, his helper was complaining about how difficult it would be to get the last of the bricks up to the flat roof of the building. Just then, another contractor had some material delivered and it was placed on the roof by a forklift brought to unload it. The bricklayer asked if the driver would load his bricks up there as well, and for a fiver the driver agreed. The brickie realized that he would not need his mate any more and sent him home.

  As the bricklayer completed the chimney he noticed that he had quite a few bricks left over and that the forklift was no longer at the site. Now he had to work out how to get the spare bricks back down by himself. If you drop bricks from that height, they break, and it is dangerous. So he decided to use the pulley that he had set up to lower them down.

  First he went down to the ground and raised a large metal bucket up to the roof level using the rope and pulley. Next, he tied the rope off on to a railing, climbed back up to the roof and loaded the bricks into the bucket. Then he went back down to the ground.

  He knew that the bricks would be heavy, so he wrapped the rope around his hand a couple of times and then untied the end of the rope with his other hand. The bricks were just that wee bit heavier than he had imagined and, with the laws of physics being what they are, he was imme
diately launched upwards at a high rate of knots.

  As he was racing up towards the roof he encountered the bucket full of bricks coming down at an equally fast rate.

  He collided with the bucket and broke his nose and his shoulder. The bucket passed him by as he sped upwards. He reached the pulley just before the bucket hit the ground and broke three of his fingers as they were pulled into the pulley. When the bucket hit the ground, it tipped and the bricks spilled on to the ground.

  Close your eyes and visualise the scene. As the now light bucket sped upwards, the mason took an eye-watering dunt in the groin when one of his legs slipped into the empty bucket.

  He then tilted enough to fall out of the bucket and continued with his gravity experiment. Eventually he landed on top of the pile of bricks and broke a leg. He collapsed in pain there on the bricks, but was glad to be alive, so he let go of the rope and cried out for help. Very shortly afterwards the bucket, still obeying the laws of physics, fractured his skull.

  An acquaintance of mine who was a contractor there told me that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvellous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by aeroplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water’s edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, he says, “The pilots fly out to sea and then directly to the penguin colony and fly slowly over it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently on to their backs.”

  Then of course they have to p-p-p-p-pick themselves up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Two loads of fanny

  Subject: Internet Clean-Up Day

  THIS MESSAGE WILL BE REPEATED IN MID-FEBRUARY.

  *** Attention ***

  It’s that time again!

  As many of you know, each year the Internet in Scotland must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it and give it a wee tidy. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email and inactive FTP, www etc, means we get a better working and faster Internet.

  This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on February 27 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on February 28 (the time least likely to interfere with ongoing work). During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet search engines situated around Scotland will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.

  In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:

  1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.

  2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.

  3. Disconnect all disks and hard drives from any connections to the Internet.

  4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.

  We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.

  We thank you for your cooperation.

  The above is complete nonsense, but there have been versions of it around for years. This is the first specifically Scottish one I’ve seen. “A wee tidy”, indeed. Delete it if you get it and don’t forward it.

  A young friend of my daughter’s was due a gynae check and was a bit nervous, so she cleaned up and scooshed herself from the wee plastic bottle to make herself smell nice. When she gets to the clinic and she’s in the stirrups, the doctor comments: “Aye, very nice.” The young woman was mortified and completely embarrassed that the doctor would comment in this way, and was thinking of making a complaint.

  When she arrived home and went to the loo, she discovered that she had used glitter spray and not deodorant.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rats and scary stories

  Someone repeated this next one to me recently as happening to his sister’s boyfriend. I seem to remember that it started life as a Jim Kelman short story, years ago, or maybe Jim was just passing it on.

  A young guy in a supermarket in Glasgow was sent to clean up a store room. When he got back, he was complaining that it was really filthy and that he had noticed dried mouse or rat droppings in some areas.

  A couple of days later, he started feeling that he was coming down with the flu, aching joints, headache, etc, and he started throwing up. He went to bed and never really got up. Within two days his face and eyeballs were yellow. He was rushed to emergency at the Western, where they said he was suffering from organ failure. He died shortly before midnight.

  The doctors specifically asked if he had been in a warehouse or exposed to dried rat or mouse droppings at any time. They said there is a virus that lives in dried rat and mouse droppings. A post-mortem was conducted to verify the doctors’ suspicions. This is why it is extremely important to always carefully rinse off the tops of any cans of soft drinks or foods.

  There is a whole lot more of this nonsense, and it is nonsense. Always a good idea to wash the top of a can, though.

  I know a lot of rumours have been going around about planned or possibly planned terrorist attacks. Most of these emails I read and just go on about my day. This, however, sounds serious.

  Don’t go to the toilet on October 19th. The CID reports that a major plot is planned for that day. Anyone who has a jobbie on the 19th will be bitten on the bum by a big black dog. Reports indicate that organized groups of dogs are planning to rise up into unsuspecting Glaswegians’ toilet bowls and bite them when they are going about their business.

  I usually don’t send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is going out with this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this woman whose husband buys smuggled fags from this guy who knows a shoe shop man who sells shoes to a postal worker who has a friend who’s a drug dealer who sells drugs to another man who works for the government. He apparently overheard two men talking in the toilet about big black dogs and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked.

  So it must be true.

  You know how I know it isn’t true? Men don’t talk in toilets.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Unlucky for some

  The ultimate myth and hoax email.

  The following was forwarded to me and it is absolutely true. Everyone knows that I don’t send out erroneous emails. This completely clears up all the misunderstandings concerning internet hoaxes, conspiracy theories, pranks, schemes etc. Of course, the following information has been confirmed by the CID and/or the government. So next time you are unsure if an email that you have received is true or not, please check with the following to confirm its accuracy. If you feel that any particular hoax or theory has been left out, please email it to me with the details and I will include it in future. Once again, the following is 100% true and well worth the read.

  The children’s tattoos laced with LSD that were supposed to be used for satanic ritual abuse at that nursery in Possil were mistakenly eaten by the choking Dobermann who was bitten by the snake that came out of the fur coat that was worn by the escaped homicidal maniac whose hook was found hanging from the door of the car of the teenagers who ran out of a lover’s lane when they heard that he had escaped and then went to the dope party where the girls who were supposed to be babysitting got wasted on dope and were so stoned they accidentally put the baby in the oven because the microwave was ruined by the exploding poodle that the girl with the beehive hairdo that turned out to contain beetles who had got an automatic First at college because her friend had committed suicide had put in to dry after it had got wet chasing the vanishing hitchhiker who had tried to warn the girl that her insides were cooked because sh
e had stayed too long under the sun lamp at the local skin cancer inducer while her dad won a contest at that radio channel that played rock records that contained hidden commands and subliminal messages planted by the Jews, the Muslims, international bankers, the Illuminati, multinational corporations, and the spooks at Hanger 18 of Area 51 in Dreamland who performed the autopsies on the aliens who crashed at Roswell, New Mexico while on a mission to abduct people and conduct weird sexual and reproductive experiments on them because they knew we use only ten percent of our brains and that engineers had “proved” that bumblebees can’t fly and that sugar wakes you up even if you’re an MI5 agent who has recovered memories about conspiring with criminals and anti-New Labour extremists who woke up after a one-night stand in a hotel only to find that the girl he was with was gone and had written “Welcome to the world of Aids” in lipstick on the bathroom mirror which terrified him because he knew that it is just as easy to get Aids from heterosexual intercourse as it is from homosexual sodomy with an IV drug user because when the US government created Aids to commit genocide against black people who aren’t adversely affected by the minimum wage with the aid of immigrants who don’t give anything back to the community while smoking a cigarette that has no more been proven to give you cancer than evolution has been proven to occur because it’s only a theory and there are no real fossils and it violates the second law of thermodynamics unlike creation science which is not religious and fear of irradiated food which is rational because we know the government can improve our lives by suspending the laws of supply and demand to make prices fair and deciding how many people of each race and sex should be in universities and jobs which is good, because when control of everyday life is centralized in the New Labour-controlled state the people who make the decisions are never capricious or high-handed or make decisions favouring their friends and family and people who pay them money because if only we can get the right people into positions of control it will be safe to let them run things because clever people can work out how to allocate resources and what fair prices are for goods and services and work and who should be allowed to do what much more efficiently and constructively than just letting millions of people make their own decisions about what they should eat or drink or smoke or for whom they should work for under what conditions for how much money on what schedule based on their own perceptions, concerns and plans in accordance with their best interests.