Angry Dan and the Perpetual Motion Engine

Bars are a festering ground for outrageous boasts. It is a perfect place for tipsy individuals to claim they can perform tasks that in a sober state would seem ridiculous, if not outright dangerous. Money quickly exchanges hands after someone boasts: 'I'd bet a hunnert dollars I c'n kish a cobra a dozen times b'for it hazza chance to bite me!' and off everyone would trounce to the nearest zoo with the soberest of the lot having the unfortunate duty of calling the paramedics or, in extreme cases, the next of kin when things go awry. Less dangerous boasts/claims/ theories/ opinions are also rife. Who'll win the next cricket match, which coach will quit because of a sex scandal involving snorkels and 14-year old Indonesian kids with Brittle Bone disease or how long Jesus could survive on the surface of the Sun.

Of all the silly claims that I have heard in my time spent in bars (i.e. What the One True Religion is) the dumbest would surely have to be the one that Angry Dan claimed when he was drinking with some of the boys. Sadly I was not present but Dean was. This is the story Dean told me:

The lads had been drinking at a bar some place ( I'm a worse listener than I am a story teller) when Angry Dan suddenly stops drinking. He actually acted if he had been struck. Angry Dan then grabs one of the guys ( John or Dean. I can't remember and you probably don't know them) and says ' Put your drink down for a minute...I've got something I have to tell you.' John (I think) keeps drinking and replies, 'Alright, what is it?' Angry Dan is renowned for telling long-winded stories that lead nowhere. Ahem.
Angry Dan goes 'Nah. Seriously. Put your drink down this is amazing.'
John wearily puts down his drink.
Angry Dan: 'I think I've just figured out how to make a perpetual motion engine.'
Which is a pretty strange claim coming from a theoretical physicist let alone a guy who thinks lighting farts is funny. John stares at him for a long time and says 'Shut up idiot.' But Angry Dan was adamant that everyone hear his theory 'Alright, alright. You've got like a little cog here right? And say this cog has five teeth and the cog next to it has ten teeth. Are you with me so far? So, the cog after that one has more teeth...'
'Hold it. Are you trying to tell me your theory of perpetual motion is a series of cogs?'
'Yeah man. Isn't it brilliant?'

Apparently the perpetual motion thing had been a fascination of Angry Dan's for quite some time. Now, I'm no physics guy but even I know that the more cogs one has the more friction there will be and that each subsequent cog would require more energy to move but Angry Dan will listen to none of this. Apparently Dean and the boys would get random calls from Angry Dan who would be tweaking his theories. This inevitably entailed more cogs.

Unfortunately for Angry Dan the quest for perpetual motion would encroach on his romantic life. Dean and a mate were watching Angry Dan trying to pick up a couple of girls at the Elephant & Wheelbarrow the other day and Dean decided to make it interesting. 'Hey Dan, why don't you tell the girls about your perpetual motion engine?' And Angry Dan readily complied. One of the girls had just graduated university, in the field of physics coincidentally enough ,and had listened to Dan's speech trying not to laugh. She then spent the next fifteen minutes making Angry Dan's life miserable by explaining why his theory was the dumbest thing she had ever heard.

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Fatman

Leggo of My Bible!

When was the last time you read the bible? Seriously.
Now I know that we sometimes lapse and forget the
basics ( 'Thou shalt not f-rnicate with pandas') so
here is a web-based bible. Done with Lego.

This thing Here

A project by Reverend Smith, the world's tallest
midget, it follows the wacky adventures of God and His
mates. Re-live the telling of Noah getting drunk,
Samson and some broad, Cain 187-ing his bro, etc.

Legos- is there anything they can't do?
Fatman

It's Raining Idiots

Some people have no idea how wacky they look.

I was walking to lunch today and saw a bearded guy wandering down the street with an umbrella dangling from his jeans pocket. 'Is that an umbrella in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?' I scoffed in a typically non-original way. He gave me a look that seemed to say: It's an umbrella in my pocket.

Fatman

After the Wedding and My Mouth Still Tastes Like Battery Acid

'Whore.' says Matt. Moorooduc Estate. It's the day after Clark and Hayley's wedding and he is shitty at Cat because she woke him up an hour before breakfast. ' You f-cking whore. You have no idea what kind of floodgates that you have opened. I am going to make a point of calling you at four o'clock every morning and tell you it's breakfast time. We'll see how you feel then. Whore.' Cat is quite comfortable ignoring Matt since she has had years of experience. She turns a page of the newspaper. My stomach acids have decided to eat the body that has abused it for so long, forever eating bad curries, pork rind, light bulbs and 747s and it is working it's way towards my mouth. There is a hungover silence on the balcony where we sit, broken only by a fearful waitress who sets down our coffees and scurries back into the kitchen. Matt stubs out a cigarette in the peacock's eating dish.

Ah yes. The cigarettes.

(Continuing from last post)
After we had waited for one of the three taxis in the Mornington Peninsula area for three quarters of an hour Cat decided, Screw it. I've only had five champagnes. I can drive down unmarked country roads in the dead of night.

If only we had turned left instead of right....

Cat had a craving for cigarettes. Matt also wanted cigarettes. The car turns right. Now, just to set the scene: We are in wine country where roads stretch ONE WAY through to the vanishing point. The convenience store (sic) is miles away and hidden. Petrol stations exist that do not actually sell any petrol, just tire checkers. Supermarkets close at a sensible time of about eight o'clock on a Saturday because, c'mon, who would want cigarettes at 11:30 at night?

About an hour into our cigarette hunt and tensions are running fairly high. There are no signposts to indicate where we are. There is just the absolute certainty that whichever direction we choose to go down, it will be the wrong one. 'Stop the car!' grumbles Matt. Cat complies. Matt flips through the Melways and speaks not for several minutes. 'Do you want me to have a look at the map Matt?' asks Cat.

Silence.

'Do you want me to have a look at the Melways?' asks Cat.
Matt flings open the door and leaves the car, Melways in hand. He cannot read the Melways because fury is causing his hands to shake too much and he has to tip over a few cows before he is calm enough to find out where the Hell we are. Cat and I chat for a while in the car, not too loudly in case it sets Matt off again and he breaks the headlights in rage.

So a ten minute drive stretched into an hour and three quarters of fruitless endeavour (we were still cigarette-less) before we arrived at Moorooduc Estate haggard and with murder in our eyes. After a few glasses of Moet (tasting less like champagne and more like the contests of my lunch) I retire to bed. The other two decide to try to find cigarettes once more. I learn in the morning that they managed to find someplace that sells them and that they only yelled at each other for half the journey.

Epilogue- Well, that was the Clark and Hayley wedding from my perspective. Two things though: Foistly, My snore has been described by some as reminiscent of a dying sea lion's death thrall combined with a weird Star Wars creatures' bleating. This horrid sound woke Cat up early in the morning so she decides to go for a quick drive. 'Hey, it turns out you weren't such a bad navigator after all,' she says to me,' we were really close the first time we drove to Moorooduc Estate but you couldn't see the entrance from where we were driving.' Knew it. And Secondly, back at Clark's Ranch we find out that one of the ladies from the night before fell through a window at her hotel. The wounds were not too deep but she did have to go home with bandaged hands.

With This Bling Bling I Thee Wed

Saturday. The weather is crap and rainy. Matt is 70km away, at Ground Zero, waiting for his speech to be faxed through. We have the speech somewhere in our car and currently on the way to Merricks North, a piece of land, possibly named after J.Merrick the Elephant man, somewhere near Mornington Peninsula, desperately looking for a place that has a fax machine. In the car: Cat, driving with only three hours of sleep, Tom, a dude who had just come back from England who I had met just ten minutes ago at St.Kilda Junction and myself. It is the day of Clark and Hayley's wedding.

A Brief Detour where I Get The Blame- Cat, Tom and I pull into Moorooduc Estate, Moorooduc, which can easily be reached by veering off right from the Moorooduc Highway down Bentons road ( where the Melways actually has DANGEROUS INTERSECTION indicated and where I was expecting a pile of mangled cars to be burning merrily) We went another way- the Fatman route. 'That,' Cat says to me as she parked the car, 'is the last time you navigate.' Cat is a self-confessed foul-mouthed, chain smoking, chatterbox who was yet to learn how lost one can get traveling country roads. By the end of the day our fifteen minute detour would seem like nothing.

Damn' City Folk- Moorooduc Estate is a winery where out-of-towners can stay in the Gregory Burgess-designed accommodation and drink the fermented juice of grapes that have collected the sunlight and whatnot from their north facing, elevated slopes. It's the kind of place where you might trip over the peacock if you're not looking. We are greeted by Jill, the proprietor of the place. Jill looks at the two uncouth lads standing in front of her, looks at Cat and asks Cat if she would like to get dressed for the wedding in Matt's room. 'There is one problem though,' says Jill,' we still haven't cleaned up all of the smashed wine bottle from last night.' Friggin' Matt. He's been here one night and we've already been tagged as 'problematic'. In Jill's eyes we had already become 'them city folk' from some sin-infested Soddom and Gomorrah with our fancy cars ( Cat drives a '98 Mitsubishi Mirage), our complaining of their sub-standard coffees and our nightly sacrifices of goats to a weird array of Dark Gods.

...And thence to Rancho de Randerson- Everything is now going smoothly. We are dressed like people going to a wedding, Matt's speech is in his hands ( we managed to get it faxed through from a car dealership on our way from the city) and the weather is clearing up thanks to the goat sacrifice. Lovely. Good weather means less hysterical women. A short drive from Moorooduc Estate ( the Melways nowhere near the mitts of Yours Truly) and to a house painted the colour of the wedding invites ( a fact brought to everyone's attention by the father of the groom, Dave Randerson). The guests start to arrive. The bridal party drink to relax.

Two People Exchange Rings- The current resident of Hayley's belly is Yevgeny Danger Randerson, a.k.a. Dempsey Man, and would probably have enjoyed the proceedings. Matt, the best man, was running a bit late- he had hid the rings so he wouldn't lose them and was now trying to locate them. He comes out of the house triumphantly. He hands the rings to the marriage celebrant who fumbles them and has to pick it up. Clark fudges the lines a bit and also fumbles the rings. There is a screaming kid ('I WAAAAANt my Mummeee!') that sorely deserved some chloroform. But ring get exchanged, vows vowed. Ladies and Gentlemen let us present Mr. and Mrs. Danger Randerson.

Speeches- (In order)
Nori- the M.C. of the day. A Scottish guy who gets everyone on side by making fun of English people. He recounts stories of young Hayley growing up and a story of Clark getting lost down a mineshaft.
Paul- Father of the Bride. A short speech about how happy and proud he is. Ends it with ' When Hayley was a baby I had to give her a dummy to take to bed. Today I find myself doing the same thing.' Matt turns to me and makes the 'Zing!' motion, which we use anytime something is meant to be a scorcher of a joke.
Dave- Father of the Groom. David absolutely nailed his speech. It was killer. Every line was gold and had everyone hooting with applause. To top it all off it was all impromptu. ' I've known Clark for about 25 years or so,' he says, turning to Clark who had just returned from urinating behind the lemon tree, 'I was there for most of it, but I'd missed his birth. After 12 hours of waiting I'd gone home to feed the dog and out he popped. Now, to Hayley. I don't really know her that well. She just turned up one day about fourteen months ago.' Damn. I'd hate to be following that guy.
Matt- Best man. Matt has a seriously funny speech lined up and I quietly believe he is using today as a springboard for his career in comedy. He does however fudge it twice, firstly by referring to Hayley as the father of Clark's child and secondly by swearing (' I f-cking love you man!'). It's not a big deal but he mentions it a few times afterwards.
Clark & Hayley- The Newlyweds. It's pretty much Clark's show here as he spoke at length, dropping his cue cards for comic effect and staggering about. Hayley says a few brief words at the end before Clark remembers a few more announcements and grabs back the mic. He said some of the sweetest things however and I think the loveliest went along the lines of ' I love you and I know that everyday I wake up next to you everything is going to be just fine.' Or words to that effect. They then dance the wedding waltz- My Funny Valentine. Someone told me they would dance to Stand By Me, which always reminds me of four kids trying to find a corpse down a train track.

And the Rest of the Night- Some folks return to Melbourne but the rest spend the night a-drinkin' and a-dancin'. There is no-one to pick up. Cat was hoping to bump into Conan the Fireman who didn't turn up to the wedding. Matt and I looked around but the ladies were all already spoken for and sadly one of the cutest girls there, a total GILF, was Clark's 14-15 year old jailbait cousin which more than one guy noticed, did the maths and figured at the very least four footy seasons before they should even say hello. We decide it's time to call the cab.

Waiting is the Hardest Part- The problem with Mornington Peninsula is that there is a total of three cabs in the whole place. There are probably only five cops in the whole area too, in all likelihood part-time cabbies. We wait forty-five minutes for a bug-encrusted taxi to arrive but by the time the buses come to pick up everyone else, including the limp form of a drunk, vomiting, Scottish M.C., we decide it may be better if we drove to Moorooduc Estate instead.

The Worm Hath Fouler Lips Than Thine

Day 15- I recently learnt that the newest member of our household, Meg, has nightmares on a daily basis. This, she explained, was the reason her 'morning face' has a slightly dishevelled look to it. The nightly bombardment she receives from her own subconsciousness does not make for a fitful sleep, though it does explain the blood-curdling howl that accompanies the alarm clocks in the morning. She told me that she had a dream that the town had been taken over by cannibals and in order to survive she had to pretend that she too was a cannibal. They forced her to join them in dining on the flesh of their victims. This is good stuff. I may be able to use my housemate's misfortune to come up will cool zombie ideas. Later that day I come up with a pretty ordinary top ten list. It resembles something even David Letterman would reject, even on a Monday.

Top Ten Signs That You May Be Dating a Zombie

1) Last Christmas you gave them your heart...but only because they wrenched it out of your chest cavity.

2) They play skipping rope with their own entrails.

3) When you pull their finger it sometimes snaps off. True, you may be dating a leper or an amputee with a prosthetic hand but then I'd....um....shit. There goes my 'Gives you a hand' joke as well.

4) When you tickle them in their putrified tummy it had the tendency to burst open because it is swarming with maggots.

5) On a date, they are just as likely to eat the waiter as they are the specials of the day.

6) Whenever someone mentions a deceased relative your girlfriend can remember what their bone marrow tasted like.

7) She shows off her autopsy scars when wearing a bikini.

8) She brings a jar of mustard to murder scenes.

9) Roadkill makes her stomach grumble.

10) You find brain matter on her toothbrush.

Day 16- "Roy", the owner of the bar I work at, is going on holidays on Sunday. This is his annual escape to a tropical island where he spends about a week preoccupied with worry about his venues and comes back more stressed than ever. As Murphy's laws would have it this is the week when everything does tend to go wrong. Sinks explode, locks break, brawls happen, windows smash, the toilets get backed up, a staff member will undergo spontaneous human combustion. It's real fun trying to preempt the disaster. Before he leaves however, he wants to have a brief chat with Yours Truly as to the direction he would like to take the Amethyst Bar when he gets back i.e. what kind of food we should have, drinks prices, which staff member needs to pull their socks up, which ones are getting the sack, etc. I have learnt in my various jobs that a sure sign that you may have to start updating your resume is when the boss starts referring about you in the past tense. He has not begun to do so with me....yet. All this has absolutely nothing to do with Slow Rot Boogie.

Hello Aunt Alicia,
Fatman

I Love the Smell of Cabbage in the Morning

Day 10- Had a dream about carnival freaks last night. It probably has some correlation to the fact that the Jim Rose Circus is in Melbourne. For those who do not know who Mr.Jim Rose is, he tours the globe with his band of misfits (according to the press release he is accompanied this year with Bebe the Circus Queen, Rupert the lawnmower wielding salad maker, the world's fattest contortionist- Big Mak, Amber Pie and of course, The Amazing Mr Lifto who can lift things with his genital piercings) and performs pretty weird stuff. Carnies are in these days, Would it be too Insane Clown Posse of me to have a time-travelling bunch of carnies in my zombie novella Slow Rot Boogie? Only time will tell.

I deal with my writer's block in a calm and rational way

Day 11- Bought a computer game for my Playstation 2.

Day 12- Finished computer game for my Playstation 2.

Day 13- Dad's birthday. Zombie book on hold, I decide to go visit him. Luckily for me he is the easiest person to buy presents for...

Me: Happy 65th B-day Dad! Do you want anything special for a present?
Dad: Tobacco.
Me:...That's it?
Dad: Actually, screw that son. Just give me some cash so I can buy myself some tobbacky.

I decide to give him a tin of Dr.Pat's tobacco and a lazy twenty dollars.

Day 14- Back to Slow Rot Boogie.

What rhymes with 'Orange'?
Fatman

Viva La Undead

Day 8- Accomplishing anything is satisfying. It's like beating a raccoon to death with a croquet mallet. You're tired, sweaty and there's blood all over your hands but in the end there is a profound sense of accomplishment, you have done something worthwhile and, dare I say it, beautiful. When you can actually write a few pages that doesn't make you want to vomit when you re-read it, you feel a beatific sense of calm override your body. As a man I will not give birth to a child. Probably. But it is possible to finish a zombie book. I am several thousand words behind quota and the bits I have ( journeying to the airport with a suicidal taxi driver, bizarre scientific experiments, two guys sharing the same name having a duel over a restaurant booking mishap, a retirement home rife with the living dead) seem very disjointed and not heading anywhere but with a little bit of light editing I can make it seem.....less amateurish.

Day 9- Lunch with Free Beer. ' How's your zombie thing going?' he asks, popping a gnocchi into his mouth.
' Woefully. It's amateur. Pure bush league. Re-reading what I've written makes me want to vomit.' He moves his plate away from me. He suggests I might set it somewhere interesting, perhaps New Orleans? I tell him it's too soon. Thought provoking New Orleans survival stories will dominate for awhile. People may get the wrong impression and think I'm taking the piss. ' Besides I'm trudging along with it. I thought a court scene would make a cool intermission. There's an insurance debate that rages over whether the zombies are man made ( from either a disgruntled Haitian witch doctor who places a voodoo curse on everyone who takes his car spot or a crazy Nazi experiment that, surprise, surprise, goes awry) or an act of God ( meteors) and who is liable for the damages incurred.'
' You should also have an old guy in it who has lived through a previous zombie invasion.' says Free Beer.
' His name should be Lucky. He's like " Zombies huh? That reminds this old sea dog of the zombie plague of 1922. Time to bring out ' Betsy' once again."'
' Betsy is his trusty rocket launcher.'
'...or flame thrower.'

A flame-thrower toting old guy, Nazis, zombies and cowboys from the 1870's. And the only thing that could possibly bring it all together: Time travel. Brilliant. Now to get Bruckheimer on the phone and sign me a movie deal.

Kind of like Gandhi, only Fatter,
Fatman

For those who pronounce it 'Double-U Double-U Too'

Day 6-

How badly is Slow Rot Boogie going Fatman?

Nazis.

That's right, Nazi bad. The most over-worked, over-used cliched villains, topping even ninjas as the all-time most predictable baddies. The wearers of monocles with the likes of the peanut guy or Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, John Wayne-fodder, smokers of cigarettes using thumb and forefinger and the reasons many Germans switch the topic of conversation anytime you mention world history from 1939-45.

I Klink you know vat I'm talking about

Billy fell through the ventillation shaft and into the room below...and was horrified at his discovery. What was this dungeon? Could this really be the den of kindly old Hank West? Swastikas adorned the walls, war memorabillia displayed in glass cases and there was a life-sized bronze statue of der Fuhrer in the middle of the room.
'So...you have found me out Billy.' came the lizard voice of "Hank West" from the gloom.
Billy spun around. There was Hank, dressed head-to-toe in full Nazi uniform and in his hand was a well-oiled Luger 'You've been schticking your nose vere it dosn't belong Billy,' spat Hank, his Mid-Western twang falling at the seams, betraying a heavy German accent drenched in hatred that seemed almost eager to emerge, like an animal that had been caged for far too long, 'und now I am afraid zere vill be a price.'
Nazis, thought Billy, I hate Nazis.

Excerpt from Slow Rot Boogie-a work in progress

Now, I love Mike Mignola's Hellboy, but every issue is about Nazis, demons and a monkey. That's great for Mike. I still buy every issue even though I could be spending money on food. I actually own a copy of The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. It still feels somewhat...wrong to use Nazis, even as a parody. I'd be jumping the shark before the third chapter, if one can actually do that with unpublished, unheard of material.

Day 7- Woke up hungover. I look through my 'dialled numbers' function of my mobile phone.

19:30:08- Free Beer: Call because I'm bored at a bar, drinking alone. He's home and doesn't want to go anywhere. Lunch is organized for Tuesday.
20:05:06- Sara: Call to catch up next week. No reply.
20:23:34- Harry: 'C'mon to the bar Harry. There's wimmen!'
21:50:03- Zoe: No Recollection.
21:50:37- Matt Sleaze: Vague Recollection. Something about catching up next week.
21:52:56- Rahu: Call to apologies for ignoring him (He came to the bar I was in for a drink or two after work. Left a half hour later) while I tried to pick up two girls from around 20:23:34 till present. I kept chatting away to these girls and didn't once attempt to include him in the conversation.
22:18:06- Dean: No Recollection.
22:20:03- Marcus: No Recollection. Haven't spoken in three months.
22:21:21- B.J.: No Recollection. Dread what conversation might have happened.
23:19:27- Moylan: Who the f....?

'I remember nuthin'!'
Me having a few quiet beers the night before. Fatman: Alcoholic or misunderstood genius?*

Depriving a Village of an Idiot,
Fatman

* Note: This isn't ACTUALLY me. Stella Artois isn't my usual cup of beer.

My Own Private Zombie

Ever wanted your very own zombie to scare the living shit out of unsuspecting house guests with? I know I do. Apparently the folks over at My Pet Zombie.com have decided to tap into the niche market of the 6" tall rubber zombie for household uses.

(Found when I was bumming around on Boing Boing)

Eat....Brains....

Day 3- Went drinking the night before. Writing is not an option.

Day 4- A plot is somehow forming despite the apparent lack of direction. Although I have written a few thousand words so far I suspect that some of these words are made up and will not count towards the end tally. Seriously, what does "gumpsumtion" mean?

In order to get the zombies to feel right, I must learn to think like a zombie. Apetite of a pothead looking for munchies, the co-ordination of someone with their shoelaces tied together, vocabulary of that vapid airhead Jessica Simpson, groaning like a migrane sufferer, puking blood like a bulimic haemophiliac and be slowly decomposing like a packet of MacDonald's french fries, preserved and dead at the same time. I must, in short, act like someone who has had a ceiling fall on their head- watch Eveyone Loves Raymond, pee my pants and buy tickets to attend Monster Trucks racing or wrestling events.

Day 5- The words are flowing out now although for what piece of writing I don't know. It's not for Slow Rot Boogie I can tell you that much. To the untrained eye it seems like the beginnings of a Western. Shouldn't have bought that Jonah Hex comic last night.

The maestro is decomposing,
Fatman

An Ugly Birth

Day 1- Progress on Slow Rot Boogie has been poor. It's high school essay writing all over again. I've basically written the title and stared at a blank page for an hour. Then I drew smiley faces in the 'o's. Another hour passes. The page is now filled with fornicating stick figures and my attempt at celebrity signatures.

There is a Raymond Chandler quote that goes "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." I'm going to apply the same principles but using zombies. With guns. How much better would some novels be with an animated corpse ripping into the flesh of the living? Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'urbervilles would have been immensely more enjoyable had Tess been chased by an army of putrid, stinking ghouls instead of being an unreadable pile of filth that teachers forced to make us read at gunpoint. Or even 20,000 Leagues under the Sea....With a Zombie Horde. Would it not somehow be more terrifying with the corpse of Pierre Arronax lunching on the crew of the Nautilus' innards and then slowly taking over the vessel?

Day 2- I'm running out of ideas. I want to kill everyone. However mum has come back from one of her ever increasing business trips to Japan with comics so I can drown out the murderous impulses from my mind with cartoony stories. A thousand words into Slow Rot Boogie and I suddenly realize that there is bugger all time to edit anything. You just plonk down the ideas and keep on writing.

Children of the Night, what sweet music they make,
Fatman