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(Nothing But) Flowers

Last December I was driving past the former Matthew Boulton College building on Sherlock Street in Birmingham as it was being demolished. Clare was in the passenger seat, but seeing as though neither of us were former students at the place and it wasn't an old cinema it failed to elicit any kind of emotional response worth mentioning.

A few weeks later we drove past it again. All that was left of the college was a big pile of rubble, but that didn't particularly bother me, either. Civil engineering was never my strong suit, but the one thing I do know is that rubble is an inevitable byproduct of knocking down a building.

A few weeks ago Clare & I once again passed the former Matthew Boulton College on Sherlock Street in Birmingham. On the site of the erstwhile big pile of rubble was a reasonably large field. This didn't look like freshly rolled-out turf: it looked like it had been there forever. Despite the fact we were driving past it at a reasonable speed we could even see weeds.

"I remember when all this was buildings," said Clare, wistfully.

The Citroën Dali

"Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole"
- The Modern Lovers

Last Thursday evening we were driving home from Wales. Clare was sitting beside me and the kids had fallen asleep on the back seat. The two grown-ups were about to have a proper grown-up conversation when a jet black Citroën Xsara Picasso overtook us somewhat aggressively. The grown-up conversation was put on hold. "The Citroën Picasso," I snarled with mild indignation. "What do you think old Pablo would have made of that?"

"I wouldn't know," said Clare. "Why don't you tell me. I can see you're itching to."

So I did:

"I think he would have hated it. I mean, there he is: this major big-ass icon of the 20th Century, a bona fide cultural heavyweight who revolutionised art and transformed the way in which we see the world. People like that don't want to end up becoming synonymous with a safe and sensible family car. It's bad for the image. If you ask me, I think he'd be pretty damned furious that his descendants were so willing to whore his name off so indiscriminately."

"Really?" said Clare, somewhat dryly. "I bet they didn't get a penny."

"Really?" said I, somewhat dimly. "That makes it worse. At least, I think that makes it worse."

There was a moment's silence as I gathered my thoughts and watched the red tail lights of the popular MPV fade into the distance.

"It's all about design principles," I continued. "If you're going to name a car after someone like Picasso then at least try to remain faithful to your source of inspiration. A proper Citroën Picasso wouldn't look anything like that. For one thing, there'd be none of those functionally streamlined elegant curves. The real deal would be cube-like, wilfully asymmetrical and feature oblique references to the Spanish Civil War. Plus, all the wheels would be different sizes."

"It'd be a bugger to drive," said Clare. "You struggle with parallel parking at the best of times."

I was now in full-on monologue mode, so I managed to deftly side-step my partner's sarcasm: "Why stop with Picasso?" I said. "I want to see a range of family-friendly, design classic MPVs inspired by the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Just imagine a Citroën Dalí! A vulgar egg-shaped monstrosity with a massive pair of waxed windscreen wipers, a melting speedo and a Sat Nav that refers to itself in the third person."

"Or a Citroën Pollock," said Clare.

"What's that like?" I asked.

"It's like a Citroën Picasso that's been in an accident."

Nathan Fillion is the Green Lantern

Well, no, he isn't really - and he probably won't be, either - but we all know in our hearts that he should be. Here's a rather clever fan-made trailer from someone who agrees...

Why so serious?

We spent yesterday in Wales visiting my old friends Jude & Jonathan at their secluded lakeside retreat located somewhere between Llanidloes and God Knows Where (Dduw Chnotiau Ble). I introduced my old friends to my new family and, for the second time in my life, tried to water ski. It was not a dignified sight.

The journey involved us driving up some ridiculously steep inclines, negotiating some svelte-like country lanes and indulging in the kind of hairy off-road antics that my modest Citroen Saxo is not best equipped for. The Saxo might be fine as an urban runabout, but last time I checked 'driving through a field filled with sheep' wasn't one of its unique selling points.

(It's sitting outside the house now, looking slightly forlorn and covered in a generous coating of babyshit-brown mud. My neighbours must think I've taken up rally driving.)

In any case, as we approached our destination we saw a rather disturbing sight. Next to a particularly treacherous bend on a particularly skinny stretch of a particularly vertigo-inducing country lane sat the corpse of a white Vauxhall Corsa. It was smashed to smithereens and looked as though it had been sitting there for quite some time. The most disturbing thing about it, though, was that it was covered in graffiti. Scrawled all over the car in black spray paint was the following sinister message:

HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA

Maybe it was because I watched too many horror films at an impressionable age, but I couldn't help but feel ill at ease. Was this an omen of some kind? Should we turn back? Had we stumbled into some weird, Deliverance-style pocket of wrong?

As it happened, the day passed without incident. I can only assume that the white Corsa festooned in HAs was some kind of weird tribute to the late Heath Ledger.

Hagbard Celine and the MPs' Expenses Scandal

As an antidote to the relentless cavalcade of hubris, hypocrisy and moral indignation stoked up by the cataclysmic faeces-to-fan proximity problem that's known locally as the MPs' Expenses Scandal, here's a little something from the satirist, guerrilla ontologist and former editor of Playboy, Robert Anton Wilson. Its the Third Law of Wilson's fictional gentleman anarchist Hagbard Celine, and it goes something like this:

An honest politician is a national calamity

At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all shades of opinion agree that at least on the axiom that we need more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember, however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that the Earth is flat.

Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate species, and society has always been able to endure and survive it.

An honest politician (bocca grande giganticus) is far more dangerous. He or she is sincerely committed to bettering society by political action. In practice, that means by writing and enacting more laws. Indeed, many groups of idealistic citizens publish rating sheets on politicians every year, and those who have created more laws are estimated as having higher value than those who are frequently absent when bills are voted upon. The assumption is that adding more laws to statute books is a positive achievement, like adding more money to our paychecks or more art works to a museum.

A little thought, however, shows that this assumption is not tenable. Every law creates a whole new criminal class; for instance, when marijuana was illegalized in 1937, several hundred thousand formerly law-abiding citizens became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. As more and more laws are passed, more and more citizens become criminals. The chief cause of the rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby produces as many as several million new criminals.

It is furthermore mathematically demonstrable that the more laws there are, the more restrictions there are on the freedom of the individual. If there were, say, only three laws in a given society---e.g., Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie or defraud---there would be only three restrictions on freedom, which all rational persons would accept as obviously necessary to the maintenance of order. When there are several hundred thousand restrictions on freedom, most of them are felt as extremely irksome by large segments of the populace.

In fact, it would take a brigade of lawyers several weeks, minutely examining your affairs, to determine if you are a criminal. Certainly, no ordinary citizen has the time or research facilities to discover if he or she is in violation of one out of skillions of laws currently on our statute books. In many cases, two lawyers consulted independently will give opposite opinions about whether or not a given course of action is in violation of the statutes.

And new laws are being enacted all the time. Obviously, unless there is a sudden paper shortage, the number of laws on the books will eventually reach the point satirized by T.H.White, in which "everything not prohibited is compulsory." It would then probably only take a few years or decades more for a cadre of honest politicians diligently writing even more laws to reach the complementary point where "everything not compulsory is prohibited."

At that stage the nightmare world of Orwell's 1984 will be achieved. Crooked politicians, merely interested in the normal human activity of making themselves rich and comfortable, could never create that ultimate horror; but honest and idealistic politicians bring us closer to it every day, with every new law they enact.

From Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminati Papers

Please remember: Hagbard Celine is a fictional character. The views and opinions expressed by him are fictitious and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Tom Lennon's Blog or any of its affiliates. This disclaimer, of course, does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Hagbard Celine.

Step away from the fnord.

Bocca Grande Normalis

I know that this will involve me stepping out of my made-to-measure comfort zone of pop culture, obscure literary references and knob gags, but I have to confess that this whole MPs' Expenses Scandal malarkey has left me feeling somewhat bemused. Yes, that's right, bemused. Not angry, not apoplectic with rage, not even baying for the blood of every front bencher, back bencher or side bencher in the land. It's just left me feeling somewhat bemused.

Sorry about that.

Maybe its my age. I used to get angry about stuff like this, but I'm fast approaching the tip of the tail-end of my third decade and - while I'm no expert on neurology - I strongly suspect that violent and disproportionately hysterical emotional reactions are bad for one's blood pressure. Adopting a detached and slightly bemused demeanour seems to do wonders for my endorphin levels. For one thing, I seem to get fewer veins on my forehead.

That's not to say that the steady eruption of sordid revelations gushing out of Westminster (via the Daily Telegraph) haven't managed to elicit any negative responses in me whatsoever. I try my best, but I'm only human. I've felt the occasional twinge of schadenfreude as I've watched a group of individuals who - as far as I can tell - seem habitually inclined to scapegoat other groups of individuals for all of society's ills become, well, the scapegoat for all of society's ills. I'm no expert on Eastern Mysticism, but I believe that's called Karma.

The fact that the British government have increasingly resorted to psychological scare tactics and Orwellian mind-fuckery to discourage the rest of us non-political critters from benefit cheating, TV Licence evading and miscellaneous acts of no-good shit dishonesty doesn't help. Part of me would like to see an aggressive high profile advertising campaign aimed at the nation's politicians. It should, of course, be meticulously designed so as to create an overwhelming sense of paranoia and mistrust in the target audience. Stark black and white imagery, distressed jump cuts and a final lingering shot on an expenses claim form should do the trick. Maybe throw in a catchy slogan like: "There's no second home allowance in Jail" or "What's that really worth, you patronising bastard?"

For the most part, though, I try to be bemused.