Many nasty Soviet figure skating accidents were caused by workers' zeal for carrying agricultural and industrial implements with them wherever they went.

Such eagerness for labour is not shared by the fictional and non-fictional characters of bob'sbarnablog who, as of today, have formed a characters' soviet and refused to make further appearances in the blog under its current exploitative, capitalist directorship.

Furthermore, the new soviet has established a picket line at the entrance to the blog's premises. Hence, neither temporary nor blackleg characters (such as Ingrid Freiherr von Richthofen whose sexology clinic is pioneering new simultaneous sphincter-squeezing, Ancient Mariner-reciting, frozen halibut on the head-balancing methods to treat premature ejaculation - well, I never, she seems to have slipped through the picket line!) can gain access to the site. There will therefore be no new posts until further notice.
 

Of course the monotheistic cop-out clause is not binding unless their fingertips actually touch.
 

the ride

Exhausted, Lorna left the Association building and hailed a cab. A taxi pulled up and she got in. Through the smoke inside she could just about make out the driver’s silhouette and thought she could discern a huge nose and a fat belly.

"Where to?" muttered the driver, hardly opening his mouth to prevent his Unknown Soldier-brand cigarette from falling out.

"Just take me home," answered Lorna.

"Where’s home baby?" asked the driver Hollywoodly. His accent sounded foreign.

Lorna told him the address and slumped in the back seat.

On the way to Lorna’s flat the driver kept up a running mumble about other road users’ wanting driving skills and ignorance of the highway code. Lorna tried to place him but found it impossible. Eventually her curiosity got the better of her.

"Where are you from?" she asked.

The cab stopped under a streetlamp near some traffic lights and the driver turned round slightly to answer her. It was then that she caught a good glimpse of him.

"My God! You’re a Proboscis Monkey!" exclaimed Lorna.

Of course, she thought, that explained the nose. Sleeping’s accounts of his expedition to Borneo had provided detailed descriptions of Sir Reginald’s lengthy discussions on poststructuralist literary theory with the Proboscidean Elders, as well as inaccurate sketches.

"Nasalis larvatus!" she cried pointing at his huge pendulous facial organ for smelling and breathing.

"But you’re an endangered species. There can only be about 7,000 of you left in the wild!"

"That’s right! "affirmed the driver.

"What on earth are you doing here working as a taxi driver?" enquired Lorna, still surprised to be riding in a cab driven by a primate other than the Archbishop.

"Well, my Phd was a poststructualist approach to the disappearance of the ramin tree (Gonystylus spp.) in Borneo," he explained. "It was entitled 'Seven Thousand Proboscis Monkeys in search of a Habitat’ but academic folk here don’t take kindly to us Nasalis larvatus ‘coming over here and taking all their jobs’, so I got a job as a barmonkey at the Wayfarer’s Hotel, then as Cardboard Primate in the Vanguard Fashions warehouse and finally as a shelf-stacker at Pricefighter’s. Until I got my taxi license."

Lorna wondered what Sir Reginald would have made of this.

Nasalis larvatus 

The Rorschach inkblot test was developed by Freudian psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach at the beginning of the twentieth century. Takers are required to look at a blot and express the first thing that comes to mind. After this initial response they should then make a more detailed list of everything they can see in the blot.

Although the Rorschach test was extremely innovative when it appeared, it was also very controversial for several reasons. Detractors argued that:

1. Inkblots are inherently meaningless. For evaluation results to be objective, the blots should have intrinsic meaning.

2. A psychologist is required to interpret the results of the test, which is thus undermined as interpretation involves the psychologist's projection.

3. Although a large number of people with a given personality trait will see specific images in an ink blot, a person who sees those images does not necessarily share the trait of that group of people.

Now, however, the shortcomings of the Rorschach test have been overcome by the similar but new, improved bob'sbarnblog smear test, the intrinsic meaning of which makes consultation with expensive quacks unnecessary, PROVIDED THAT the test taker gets the right answer.

Look at the image and write down what you see on a piece of paper. Answers forthwith: 

coincidence and family trees

Lorna Partridge’s splitting headache provided her with a good excuse to leave the Association of Dissatisfied Lawyers after she had presented her book. It had been a hard day. In the morning she had seen to the changes in Pricefighter’s will and testament to the benefit of the newly-founded Pricefighter Vulture Research Foundation. Now, the presentation.

Lorna however was not one to fail to notice coincidence or synchronicity in her life. Her new book was a biography of her great great great grandfather, world famous explorer and naturist Sir Reginald Sleeping, to whom she had not been aware she was related until she faffed about one day with a Family Tree Searcher CD-Rom that had come with a premium brand pack of breakfast cereals (superfluous information perchance?).

Several months and much research later, Lorna presented her book "Sleeping: A life that finished". It included descriptions of various episodes of Sleeping’s life such as the Borneo and New Guinea expeditions and his expulsion from the Club for wearing neither tie nor other clothes. The book also featured Lorna’s description of her ancestor’s death in 1889 when, after falling 6,000 feet in the Atlas mountains (in what is now Morocco) and breaking most of his bones, Sleeping made some painstakingly detailed notes on the behaviour of Eurasian Griffon Vultures (Gyps fulvus) as they wolfed his innards.

Milestones in the Development of Humankind

Gerard David's Dutch-looking members of the "Guild of Babylonian Master Flayers" (1498-1499) discuss comparative skinning techniques at a hands-on demo of the revolutionary Flay-o-Spray dermo-stripper at the XII EXPOFLAY fair in 522 BC.
 

The Voyage of the Basset

In some European countries the late nineteenth century was a time when the exploits of adventurers and empire builders, many of whom plundered the architectural and artistic legacies of ancient civilisations and subjected the descendants of those civilisations to a lifetime of slavery, were believed to be the acts of brave, patriotic, noble and courageous heroes.

Sir Reginald Sleeping, naturist, a naturalist, anthropologist, inventor and poet and famous for inventing the "Sleeping Bag" was, however, uninterested in hoisting the Union Jack over freshly-conquered territories, bribing "savages" into changing their objects of worship for a Christian God and thereafter persuading them to attack the bad "blue" people on the other side of the mountain. Sleeping was concerned only with his life’s passion, which was science.

On April 15 1868, Sleeping bade farewell to his wife Cynthia, ten legitimate children and Nanny, and set sail from Portsmouth to New Guinea on the Basset, the ship that was to become inseparably entwined with Sleeping’s fortunes.

After a journey of over five months and the untimely death of Sir Reginald’s sole travelling companion, scientific assistant and dogsbody, Samuel Crabtree, Sleeping, naked and alone, finally established base camp at a solitary spot in the Hunstein mountains near the upper stretches of the Sepik river in the north of the island. It was there that in the following months he was to study Ornithoptera Goliath Supremus (the world’s second largest butterfly) chrysalises, which were to prove the source of inspiration for the original "Sleeping’s Sack".

In the following poem, Sir Reginald describes how the idea came to him as he sat, nude, observing the nocturnal habits of Goliath Supremus pupae in the cold dampness of the New Guinea night.

Oh, once wriggly glutton of leaves,
Lord or Lady Goliath
(For I know not thy sexeth)
thou dost defy the cold of the night.

How still and snug you look
What peaceful Lepidopteran contentment you must feel
Inside your cosy hardened bodily secretions.

Would that I, shivering in the damp forest night,
had such an aurelia in which to warm my trembling nudity
And nurture my body while nature doth it beautify

Thereafter to escape
And from my sleeping sack,
Make whence, unfurl my wings and fly away.

.... Yet, oh pupal muse, I too a chrysalis shall build,
From broad deciduous leaves
And, like you,
Warm myself until that time
I also shall fly.

From Voyage of the Basset: Chronicles of a Naturist Naturalist (Vol. XVII)

The poem was accompanied by Sleeping’s sketches of Ornithoptera Goliath Supremus. Despite Sir Reginald’s limited artistic expertise, his drawings were later to provide inspiration for Rorschach’s inkblot tests and several items in Pricefighter’s children’s pasta shapes range.

Upon his return to England, Sleeping set about perfecting the design of his new invention. Leaves decay rather quickly in many climates so Sir Reginald decided that a sturdier substance would be required if the bag was to last an acceptable amount of time.

In 1870, Sleeping therefore patented the world’s first wooden Sleeping Box. This was used on Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 expedition to find Dr David Livingstone. Despite the initial enthusiasm with which sleeping boxes were greeted, they were eventually used as containers in which to bury expedition members who died of malaria and yellow fever.

It was not until 1875 that Sir Reginald eventually overcame his dislike for textiles and presented the fabric roll-up bag (first used on Randall and Chesterfield's unsuccessful trans-Sahara expedition of 1876) to the Royal Geographical Society.

Ornithoptera Goliath Supremus 

TSA round-the-world orbit prizewinners complained that their snaps would have turned out a lot better if outsourced pilot Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen had refrained from his tiresome loop-the-loops. They were nevertheless glad to have seen the British Isles on a sunny day. 

one in a long series of wills and testaments

“.......will be sorely missed by discount shoppers”.

Henry Pricefighter wrote the final words of his own obituary. All he had to do now was reduce the six thousand or so words about himself to the one hundred and ten that would fit in www.whatagreatpersoniwas.com’s Send box. Perhaps he could cut out some of the quotes from Rod D. Steinberger, but which ones? That was the question. A great deal would be lost if he omitted the excerpts from “Empathy is for Losers”, “Getting the Most out of High-turnover, Low-cost Staff” and “Scapegoating in the New Millenium”.

www.whatagreatpersoniwas.com ensures the future publication in important publications of the obituaries of people who are not yet dead. Although the website does not boast a long list of loyal, satisfied customers, it does claim that its service allows customers’ loved ones to experience their grief fully and not concern themselves with practical matters such as obituaries.

Pricefighter’s customer profile was fairly typical. He looked at his fingers to help him enumerate his loved ones but quickly withdrew his podgy hand from sight when no one sprang to mind. Did loved ones mean ones he loved or ones that loved him? Either way, he could think of no one. Pricefighter put estrangement from ex-wives, children and former friends down to others’ envy at his success, rather than his own perfectionism and the tyrannical demands he placed on anyone with whom he came into contact.

Pricefighter could feel his anger and resentment growing. He began to scheme. He’d get his own back by leaving all his money to .... but who could he leave it to? He could imagine all the vultures feigning sorrow at his funeral yet eager to get their hands on his hard-earned cash. Vultures! Why of course!

Despite the difficulties Pricefighter had encountered in his life with people, he had always had a soft spot for vulturekind. Furthermore, he was well aware that three closely related and largely non-migratory species, the Indian white-backed (Gyps benegalensis), the long-billed (Gyps indicus) and the recently identified slender-billed vultures (Gyps tenuirostris) were all suffering from the fatal drooping neck syndrome. Researchers believed that this disease might spread to the Eurasian griffon vulture and thereafter to new areas and to more vulture species.

How appropriate. Death and vultures, the great transfigurers. Pricefighter called Lorna Partridge, his lawyer, and declared his intention to leave his estate to the Accipitridae family.

“Have you got an address for them?” asked Lorna.

A wry smile came over Pricefighter’s face. Wives, grown-up children, former friends: he couldn’t wait to see their faces when the will was read.

The picture shows one of the original bicycles used on Margaret Randall and Gerald Chesterfield's ill-fated west-east trans-Sahara expedition of 1876. They opted to use the "ordinary bicycle" as it was then known, rather than the "safety bicycle" (the two wheels of which are identical in size). The same-size wheel version was not introduced until paradigm shifts in bicycle design in the eighteen eighties, prior to which the notion of two identical size wheels providing greater stability than one huge and another tiny wheel was unthinkable.

The Randall-Chesterfield expedition, which set out from a random point on the west coast of Africa (near what is now Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania), aimed to reach Port Said in Egypt in under a year. A brisk pace was therefore envisaged. However, Randall and Chesterfield brought their venture to an abrupt and untimely end, just a few yards from its starting point on the Atlantic shoreline.

Historians usually put the expedition's failure down to the problems experienced by the cyclists in the sandy conditions. In her diaries however, Randall, anxious to prove the superiority of western technology over all forms of local camel and donkey transport, tells a different story:

"The intense heat of the Sahara during the day made Chesterfield and I opt to ride in the biting cold of the desert night. We thus sought protection from the icy temperatures by donning the sleeping sacks that Royal Geographical Society member Sir Reginald Sleeping had designed especially for the venture. Such was the restriction of movement produced by the sacks that pedalling proved impossible".
 

TSA Airways and Lieutenant Pricefighter are offering a FREE 2 a.m. Monday morning flight from Glasgow Prestwick Airport to Duisburg Airport (Germany) to the first person to send in a correct answer to the following question*:

If a hole were drilled at the point of the Okavango Delta, which bodily function/s would be most affected?

*Prize valid until 16.00 on 11 July 2005. 

Elsa rests for a moment and wonders how she will finish assembling her new IKEA pen without the correct Allen key.
 

Demon of the Month

Cultures with monotheistic religions have often steamrollered supposedly economically and technologically less developed polytheistic, animist or atheist cultures into accepting "Only one God and no other God than the Big Cheese".

Nevertheless, the deities of some cults have been assimilated into Big Cheese models and given the rank of Angels (Flight Lieutenant) or demons (Oberleutnant of the underworld boiler stoking department). In Christian demonology the mission of demons is to induce humans to abandon the faith, commit heresy or apostasy, become pagan, venerate idols or to promote non-Big Cheese models of interpreting the universe. One such demon was Beelzebub or Ba‘al Zebûb, who was F6 a deity worshipped in the Philistine city of Ekron.

The sixteenth century saw the appearance of the belief that each demon had a specific month of the year in which he/she/it had more strength to accomplish its mission.

And who should July’s "Demon of the Month" be but Beelzebub?

According to Binsfeld's Classification of Demons (1589), Beelzebub was top dog in the gluttony department, although in 1613 Sebastian Michaelis assigned him/her/it to the job of executive pride manager, a position with far greater responsibility.

The Oedipal urges of Alonso Cano (1601, Granada, d. 1667, Granada) are manifest in his "Vision of Saint Bernard" (1650). Saint Bernard, who arrived at the altar on the point of starvation, is miraculously and remotely breastfed by the Virgin while Bernard's (Cano's) father looks on in humiliation and pleads them to stop.

Bernard of Clairvaux was not one to look an equine present-giver in an external opening in the head, through which most animals admit food and emit communicative sounds. Clairvaux's "feminamulgence" machine, which preceded the Murchland and Thistle milkers by nearly a thousand years, was to make both Saint Bernard and his Vatican investors a small fortune by the time of Bernard's death in 1153. 

erithacus' saga: the discount store

I had nearly reached the checkout and was waiting for my turn to pay. Mary’s 8-year old son Gandalf was with me, tugging impatiently at the sleeve of my shirt and asking when we were going to the park to kick the pink fluorescent blow-about-all-over-the-place-in-the-wind ball about.

"Lieutenant Pricefighter", discount supermarket par excellence, was named after the chain’s owner whose surname really was Pricefighter. Flight Lieutenant Pricefighter of the RAF had decided to drop the "Flight" on the grounds that it was insufficiently snappy for a retail consumer goods outfit.

Eventually, our turn came.

"You’re new here" I said to the young woman at the checkout.

Staff turnover was high and the "employee of the month" incentive scheme had long been abandoned because employees hardly ever lasted a month and those that did would never have won such an award.

"Giveaway prices don’t spring from thin air. Slashed prices have to come from somewhere", self-made and -satisfied tycoon Henry Pricefighter had once stated in a trade newspaper interview when accused of exploitation and mistreatment of staff.

"Although it is true that one of the many areas where sacrifices are made is in the remuneration of personnel, consumers do also benefit from accurately calculated sell-by-date policies that respond to the needs of customers whose principal requirements are price benefits..."

"...rather than quality" he mumbled as an afterthought.

"You’re new here" I repeated.

"Yes" she replied and we got into conversation. While passing the merchandise over the infrared beam, Sandra told me about her last job in which she had folded and plastic-bagged Lycra leotards for Disney on Ice dwarves in performances of Snow White. Dwarves with skating skills are extremely employable these days and demand for their size and abilities far outstrips supply in one of the western world’s fastest growing employment sectors.

Unfortunately Sandra had been priced out of her job by black-leg grannies who did the same work to boost their meagre pensions. As a legally-contracted temporary employee, Sandra was far too expensive. She had therefore been forced out of work by senior citizens whose retirement supplement she threatened. Luckily, she had been presented the opportunity of alternative employment as a player on the Lieutenant Pricefighter checkout team.

In Sandra’s role as a discount store chain stakeholder she informed me that the supermarket didn’t take cards. I had only enough spare cash to pay for the 99.9% sugar-content chocolate football stars Gandalf had pestered me into buying. The other articles in the trolley therefore were left stranded in the narrow slit between this and the next unstaffed checkout.

Other shoppers in the lengthy queue began to grumble. I paid for the sugary chocolate and summoned Gandalf to accompany me out of the shop.

We didn’t go to the park. I had a severe headache so I took Gandalf home and returned to home sweet shed. The pain in my head may have been a recurring bout of malaria or a perhaps migraine brought on by one of the supermarket’s many persistently flickering fluorescent tubes. Shoppers often complained about the lighting. However, a spokesperson for the chain claimed that non-replacement of light bulbs was simply a manifestation of Lieutenant Pricefighter’s firm commitment to the environment.

Shoppers' Newsflash: The Lieutenant Pricefighter discount chain and TSA Airways join forces to give customers unbelievable value!!

Users of low-cost, no-frills TSA (Temptation of Saint Anthony) Airways can now enjoy bumper discounts on flights to Europe's leading dormitory towns upon presentation at the supermarket checkout of 20 coupons cut from 500-kg Lieutenant Pricefighter own-brand packs of hamster bedding!!

Super added-value deals at giveaway prices! Now passengers may opt either to fly the aircraft themselves or back-seat pilot it wearing the fetching 2005-2006 season TSA Airways hostess' wimple (see figure).
 

Such was the shortage of women models in seventeenth-century Naples, that Jose (Jusepe) de Ribera hid the true identity of his Madonna (his brother-in-law) and claimed that her abundant facial hair was the result of testosterone synthesis by the theca cells of the ovaries, the zona reticulosa of the adrenal cortex and the placenta. 

the great escape

But...... Hercules, David and Venus soon make friends and come up with an escape plan.

Hercules easily breaks down the wagon door. The three former statues escape, scampering along the dark tunnel and urging each other to be silent by putting their fingers to pursed lips and uttering loud "Shhhhh" sounds. They shuffle past the hut where the Thinker is explaining the principles of extortion to his henchmen.

As the three friends make their way along the tunnel, the darkness grows gradually less intense. They enter the main tunnel and come to the station. Hercules leads the other two ex-statues up onto the platform of the crowded Urquinaona station, where commuters stare at them in disbelief.

David: Why are they all looking at us like that?

Venus: Cos’ we’re stark naked, aren’t we?

Hercules: You two wait here! I’m going to find some clothes.

Venus of Milo: Where? We can’t just stand here with all these people gawping at us!

Hercules: Over there! He points to a recess behind a vending machine. Venus crouches behind it, closely followed by David.

Hercules leaps up the escalators, barging shoppers, tourists and office workers out of the way, and emerges in Plaça Urquinaona, where he takes his bearings. He’s in luck. Just past Pans & Company sandwich bar is El Corte Inglés department store. He’ll be able to get hold of some garments there. Luckily, Hercules is a classical superhero. He bounds down the road at breakneck speed and enters the store.

He stops for a moment to look at the store floorplan. Menswear: 2nd floor.

El Corte Inglés is famous for snooty assistants who scan potential customers from head to foot before attending them. But this doesn’t put Hercules off. He grabs a few oversize shirts and snazzy top-brand suits from the shelves before the astonished assistant can say Juanito Hijo de Petirrojo.

Hercules tries them on and chooses the biggest of the suits for himself and another, more urbane cut for David. He grabs a couple of silk ties and runs down the escalator to Ladieswear on the first floor.
Hercules snatches some colourful garments ("Venus will look nice in that!" he thinks). His own underwearless crotch is itching a little and this guides him to the lingerie section where he stops and purrs. Some posh-looking customers are giving Hercules funny looks so, not wanting to draw further attention to himself, he lowers his gaze and stuffs a few women’s undergarments into the suit pocket.

Of course the security tags are still on so when Hercules scurries out through the door of the store, the whole alarm system starts to wail. Hercules, however, is a much handier all-in-wrestler (given his experience of slaying monsters and grappling with Marathonian Bull-type beasts) than the 40-a-day store detective, who is soon lying on the floor gasping for breath.

Unluckily for Hercules, the security guard has drunk the better of a bottle of red wine at lunchtime and is armed. He fumbles with the catch on the holster, draws the gun and doesn’t bother much to take aim.

"Bang!"

The guard misses but the bullet pierces the shopping trolley of an elderly woman who has just come up from El Corte Inglés upmarket basement foodstore. The shot punctures a can of superior quality Italian plum tomatoes and the lady is rightly furious. She harangues the guard and insists that he either replaces the can or gives her an instant refund. Hercules meanwhile slinks away.

Venus of Milo: You don’t expect me to wear that? She holds up a minuscule thong.

Hercules winks at her and passes her some loose-cut calf-length trousers, a tank top and some pink flip flops. He hands David a suit similar to his own and another woman’s thong. David raises an eyebrow and flicks the thong as if it were a sling.

mind over matter

The story so far

The Thinker (Dante) had pondered to such an extent he had overcome his inanimation and thought life into himself. He thereupon set about devising a way to escape from the dull surroundings of the Musée Rodin and make up for what had seemed like eternal imprisonment in cast bronze. The time had come for some serious fun and mischief.

After several weeks of petty thieving and playing cat and mouse with the police, the Thinker crossed the border into Spain and made his way to Barcelona. There, he set up his headquarters in one of the city’s disused underground railway tunnels, very close to Urquinaona station in the centre of town.

The Thinker soon set his charisma and criminal talent to work. It was not long before his advertisements in El Periódico ("Se buscan dos matones para realizar trabajos no legales") for a couple of henchmen was answered. He then engaged the services of two local hoodlums, whom he packed off to Florence in a van, the sides of which were wallpapered to hide the identity and thus the origin of the hire company.

The gangsters were instructed to filch Michelangelo’s David from the Galleria dell'Accademia and to bag any other statue of value while they were at it. What they eventually purloined from the Piazza della Signoria was Baccio Bandinelli’s statue of Hercules grappling with Cacus. This was later to give the Thinker some serious headaches as it forced him to think Hercules to life while keeping Cacus in statue format - animated fire-breathing giants were not part of the Thinker’s plans.

"Numbskulls!" he cursed his uncultured henchmen.

Thereafter the hoodlums were to pop up to Paris and snatch the Venus of Milo from the Louvre and return her, with David and Hercules, to Barcelona. The Thinker would then free his new companions, whose boundless gratitude he would be able to exploit to hatch his criminal master plan. So simple it was perfect.
It had occurred to the Thinker, on more than one occasion, to think the world’s twenty or so other casts of himself into life but, aware of his own often difficult and stubborn nature, he decided to keep any competition for top dog spot off the agenda.

"Oooh. I’ve got my arms back!" exclaimed the Venus of Milo joyously. Hercules stretched and David fingered his (own) willy.

However, the statues’ new-found freedom was short-lived. The Thinker soon made it clear who the boss was. He explained his plans to Venus, Hercules and David, flattered them and told them they were to play key roles and to be the stakeholders in and the main beneficiaries of his schemes. However, they all refused to participate and the Thinker therefore locked them in a disused passenger wagon in a siding.