Stress Level Maintenance

If you have difficulty in managing your stress levels, and I expect they are normally quite high, have a go at this Tibetan stress mantra to keep your stress constant:

Imagine you are a bird gliding through the air above the beautiful countryside, cutting through the wind like an arrow, with your feathers coursing through the atmosphere, as you are peacefully approached from behind by a gently ascending Chinook.

That should keep your stress maintained.

If you know any Tibetan stress mantras we'd love to hear them down here at the clinic.

A Moment of Quiet Reflection

The Snowman.
Oh yes, you know what I'm talking about.
He's dead.

Childhood Memories

When I was younger, I had more limbs. And Curly Wurlies were bigger. But mainly I had ten legs.

I remember Sparkle ice lollies too. Licking one each in all eight of my hands. You might think that would be hard work, but I had twelve tongues.

Yeah, I am essentially just taking numerical liberties with my outer extremities. There's no punchline. My tortured childhood is not a laughing matter. The playground taunts of "Burn The Spider Child" still ring in all six of my ears.

Later on you'll wonder why they called me Spider Child when I had ten legs. But infant bullies rarely deconstruct their own logic. They prefer to spend their time tying twenty pairs of shoelaces together.

Sexual Tensions

It's hard when you're in love.

It's harder when you're in love with someone who says they don't love you.

It's hardest when you're in love with someone who says they don't love you, even though they quite clearly do.

Churchill had much the same problem with Hitler. Winston interpreted the invasion of Poland as a come on, but Adolf said he was fooling himself, and insisted vociferously that the march to Moscow was definitely NOT a sexual advance. But still the cigar begobbed premier persevered. It came to a head one drunken night when Hitler dropped his defenses and let Churchill storm his beaches. The sexual landscape of Europe has never been the same since.

Historians

I’ll tell you who I really hate … historians.

I hate them, with their stupid beards, their tweed jackets and their pointless experiments on puppies.

Some of you are thinking I mean scientists, but I don’t, I mean historians. How else do you think they found out about Nazis? That’s right, by dissecting them.

Under laboratory conditions, if you slice open a Nazi, you can count its rings and see how many Gypsies it killed.

And if you boil a fascist, well, it’s just really good fun.

But I hate historians. Thinking they know who won the First World War because it says so on their periodic table.

I don’t care what they say, just because Howard Hughes burns purple in a Bunsen burner flame, doesn’t mean Vietnam ever happened.

I was in Vietnam throughout the late sixties, and not once did the Godfather listen to Robin Williams playing classical music in a helicopter. Not once.

But no, historians come along with their teat pipettes full of dissolved Roman soldiers, drip it on to a bit of paper, see the spot go orange, and bang, that proves they invented Aqueducts.

I don’t think so.

I was forced to spend a week with historians once. A whole week in their labs. They made me do all their shitty jobs. And whilst I was visually inspecting the naval lint of a leopard they suspected had witnessed the Kennedy Assassination, they were all grouped around a work bench looking all coy.

I sneakily watched them. On the bench, they’d laid out a perfectly preserved hippy … and they were taking it turns to smash its face with a hammer. They were giggling as they did it, but when its cheeks cracked open, they soon stopped. Inside its skull, they found a scroll of papyrus, which they carefully unfurled and looked at under an electron microscope.

I knew it was something big, because they were all stroking their beards, and one of them was cupping his groin and hopping up and down. I stared at this loathsome collection of sadistic inveterates as they carefully sliced a section of papyrus, put it in a pestle and pounded it up using a mortar, then eagerly crossed the lab and threw the powder into the eyes of a puppy.

Then they went for lunch, and it was my job to sit and watch this poor dog suffering in its cage, the historic document burning its pupils. It howled in agony, the crooning wail enough to snap a man’s spine in half. Its eyeballs quadrupled in size inside its head. I measured their diameter and entered the figures into a complex computerised database.

And do you know what they had discovered?

That England has beaten Germany in two world wars and one world cup.

It’s cruelty. How many rabbits have to die to prove that Hitler was a bit grouchy?

Four.

Blue Socks

I went shopping for socks. It’s not the most romantic use of my time I know, but I needed some socks, so I thought the best way to procure some socks would be to go to an establishment that traded socks in exchange for monetary recompense. The way I saw it, my feet were cold, and the best way to combat this decline in pedal temperature, would be to own some kind of tight fitting cotton sheath, shaped like my foot. After some research, I discovered that such things did exist. These things are called socks.

Now, this posed me a dilemma that I could not readily rectify. My feet were cold, it was cold outside, going outside would make my feet more cold, but to stop my feet being cold I had to go out into the cold with my cold feet. If only I had some socks.

In desperation, I turned out my drawers in search of socks, and to my chagrin, all I could find was a matching pair of tubular shaped blue cotton material with a kind of dog leg in them. At one end of these odd floppy devices was an elasticated band, at the other end, they were sealed into what can only be described as a toe-like finale.

This being the best I could do, I began wrapping these things around and round my cold feet, and to my surprise, their coiled cotton contours did provide me with some kind of warm respite. The only trouble now was, I couldn’t actually get my feet into my shoes.

Thus I faced a second dilemma that I could not readily rectify. My feet were warm, but the ground outside would hurt my warm feet without some kind of rubber soled protection. If only I had bigger shoes.

But in order to get bigger shoes, I would have to go outside. And in order to go outside, I would need to remove the warm material protecting my cold feet from the cold outside. It seemed to me that what I needed was a more snug fitting cotton coating, contoured to the shape of my feet. If only I had some socks.

I made a rash decision. I tore the blue coiled material from my now warm feet, and pushed my naked podiatry into the confines of my normal sized shoes. That’s when I realised the foolhardiness of this action. The edge of my normal sized shoes was chaffing my ankle. What I needed was some kind of soft cushioned protection tightly bound to the shape of my ankle to prevent said ankle from being rubbed raw. If only I had some socks.

A moment of inspiration hit me hard in the teeth. I took the strange blue material I had rescued from my drawers, and jammed them down the side of my shoes, thus providing some padding against the skin incendiary chaffing. This did have the effect of rendering the shoes a little too tight to make walking comfortable. If only I had bigger shoes.

I stepped out into the cold and could feel the chill freezing my under-protected toes. An extra layer around my feet at this moment would have been enough to thwart this frosting. If only I had some socks.

I found myself wandering aimlessly through the commercial district of my town, thinking forlornly if I would ever find what I needed. And suddenly, there it was.

The … Sock … Shop.

Elated and breathless I staggered awkwardly across the threshold of the boutique, my senses bombarded with hundreds upon hundreds of what can only be described … as socks.

Aimlessly grabbing armfuls of the bounteous booty, I lunged at the counter and tendered my purchase. It seemed an eternity as the bored cashier rang them through the scanner, each beep a mocking reminder of my sock free feet. Finally, she looked up and informed me of the cost. If only I had some money.

I’d left all my cash back home, tucked inside a sock.

9/11

On September 11th, did the Statue of Liberty duck?

3 Little Known Facts

When you see the phrase "Little Known Fact" DO NOT read the file under any circumstances. There could be a large number of you doing this simultaniously which would immediately alter the effectiveness of the title - essentially turning it into fiction, rendering both the title as a lie, and therefore the content.

Fact.

By reading this far you have become one of those people who bend the truth from time to time, or to define further, a bare faced liar.

Fact.

You just don't get it do you? - You're still reading, and sinking deeper into the pit of wrongfulness, progressing to the next stage beyond bare faced liar, to what? I can hardly imagine. Perhaps you steal candy from small children, or cast your eyes upon the exam paper of your neighbour, gaining extra marks and maybe even passing the test based on their hard work and hours of revision - which could only be described as fraudulent, or even have dark fantasies about "doing it" with small animals. Of course, I wouldn't expect you to admit it.

But don't sit back comfortably with that smug grin on your face - you'll make a mistake one day, get caught out and get punished! Listen... is that someone outside? They're onto you.
You thieving pervy scum of the earth.

Fact.