Rebuttal: Cosmetic surgery on one's posterior.
SAMPLE SENTENCE: "What are you in for - facial?"
"Rebuttal. I lost my left cheek when saving a baby from a crocodile farm yesterday."
Qualming Tape: Tape of music and natural sounds (alarms, lawnmowers, etc) recorded for the purposes of instilling niggling doubts and slight anxieties in the listener.
SAMPLE SENTENCE: "Is that your car alarm?"
"Oh, no. It's just my qualming tape. Is it worrying you? Good. I'll turn it up... "
Camembert Quease: Illness-inducing dairy product much loved in rural France. Nowadays it is often eaten while listening to a Qualming Tape (see above).
Relaxative Tape: Musical tape full of farting sounds to aid constipated people, often recorded by the same company who record Qualming Tapes (see above).
Superpreposterousition: A superlative preposterousition - obviously.
Corroberry: 1) Ceremony by which a white Australian pays an Aboriginal Australian twenty dollars for an item of Aboriginal art, and then hocks it off for twenty million dollars on the international art market.
2) False ceremony constructed by Aboriginal Australians for the purposes of fleecing a white Australian Arts Administration body.
SAMPLE SENTENCE: "Oh, what a wonderful expression of your beautiful native culture this Corroberry is! How big would you like the grant to be?"
SEE ALSO: Rolf Boldrewood, "Corroberry Under Arms: My Time in the Colonial Arts Administration."
Bleer: Alcohol that skips most of the stages of drunkeness - tendency to say idiotic things, queasiness, anger, bouts of sleepiness, dizziness, incontinence, morning-after nausea, loss of memory, and the throbbing and lingering headache - and instead goes straight for the devastating sense of guilt and despair you get the evening afterwards, never being quite sure why. (Recommended only for people suffering from crippling excesses of optimism.)
Smartini: Cocktail that comes in a colour to match the socks you're wearing!
K-Martini: A cheap version of the Smartini (above) that is made in China and sold in supermarkets.
Wince: Wine that tastes really fucking awful.
I hope you're not averse to a bit of mould in your chesse.
ReplyDeleteI get that "qualming" effect with phones usually.
You may be interested to know that I am wearing my most spidery black jumper today in an effort to make my arms look more like spider's legs (and, if I'm really lucky, spinnerets).
Er, cheese, that is! I have no idea what a "chesse" might be and why it would have mould.
ReplyDeleteMy father, in an excess of enthusiasm for mouldy cheese, once cut off several slices of Home Brand Tasty that had a healthy growth of blue fur on top of it and made a meal out of it. He even went so far as to claim that it was healthy for you, citing the link between pencillin and mould. Howard Florey he ain't. At least he doesn't have a similar enthusiasm for Blue Vain Cheese, which frequently causes the eater to expire wracked in spasms of the most extreme narcisissm and egotism.
ReplyDeleteIf I didn't know better, I'd think you were conspiring to keep spiders on my mind for some reason...
Your father sounds delightfully, even dangerously, eccentric. I love cheese possibly as much as I love chocolate.
ReplyDeleteThere's no conspiracy on the spider front. Well, alright, I want you to write at least a scene for the spider musical. I've got horrible productivity block today and a mild sense of panic, so I would like to read something funny.
A musical about spiders would take slightly more than a day to come about, but in the meantime, here's a fable about some cultured yoghurt for you to enjoy (or not). It's the best I can do for the moment...
ReplyDeleteThank you, beneficent Tim. That made me smile very much.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to write the spider musical if you don't want to, I hope you know. I don't mean to be so demanding. I'm just in a foul mood because it's a chilly day here which means lots of those awful stove-fire things which means trouble for my sinuses which means a migraine/difficulty concentrating. I hate those things so much. At night the air will be thick with it. I can't imagine how terrible it must be for asthma sufferers.
Sigh! It should be much easier than this, given I'm working on Ch.5, which is the real sex, drugs and rock 'n roll part (just in case the reader is bored after making it that far).
It's a chilly day here too, and I'm sorry to hear that chilly days have that effect on you, as they make me full of vim and vigour. By jove, there's nothing like a bit of winter chill and a storm to really excite one! I don't quite know why this is, but partly its the effect of looking forward to lounging about in warm buildings while the rain falls outside, and also the invigorating feeling of being part of a great natural event.
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm very fond of a chilly day. It's people and their choice of heating devices I don't much relish- just my general misanthropsia, please don't mind it.
ReplyDeleteI think I may have mentioned my brief residence in Montreal before. I got out before the real Winter struck, but I really loved the way the chill felt on my skin when I went outside- there was lots of elation in that. Of course I found the early darkness absolutely devastating (I realised for the first time how much my moods are connected with the weather)- but then, out of all of that, there's this lovely little visitation of snow- like falling fingernails, I thought. I think we miss quite a lot- not having that pageant through the year, even though I'm the sort of person who would be in the darkest depression for at least 3 or 4 months of it.
Rain is one of my most favourite things- much vim and vigour for me in rain. It's not very mature, but I usually go outside and stand in it, at least for a moment. And I'm so disappointed because the people in the house on the corner swept up the leaves on the footpath!
(I really like to talk about the weather!).
Oh God, you've reminded me what it was like stepping out into the New York night from La Guardia airport. An entire ocean of frozen air! BLISS!
ReplyDeleteAnd when it started snowing...
You're so right about this:
ReplyDeleteI think we miss quite a lot- not having that pageant through the year...
And some bloody Australians whinge about the winter and not getting enough sun.
I don't even mind days getting darker earlier - I kind of wallow in that feeling of early-night melancholy, and maybe at evening times the best thing to do is go somewhere bright and cheerful, like a market or something like that. That time of day or night when the first lights are coming out is always special...
Even better - listen to Wagner's The Twilight of the Gods - at twilight!
ReplyDeleteNo melancholia is better than Grand Romantic German Melancholia.
It's this, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to have reminded you of such a happy memory. Your photos are lovely (Oh, and it may interest you and Alexis that my sister Kerry likes origami- my bookshelves are arrayed with things she's made for me). God, how fantastic it is to crunch through snow! I'm very fond of the odd spot of Grand Romantic Melancholia (German or otherwise)too- it's just that I'm trying to keep my moods more level so I can get more work done right now- I can be "Wagnerian" later! A friend of mine met a clairvoyant at a party the other week and he gave her my date of birth and she said some very unflattering things about me and my mood swings, which he repeated to me with some relish, asserting that it was all completely true. But I think reform is overrated, don't you? It's far richer to be a barometer of everything that's around you.
But I'm rambling- must be the elation of the cold night!
I have a whole bucket of origami animals - literally. For several years I kept the results of my folding obsession in a rusty bucket that my father used to use.
ReplyDeleteAs a correction, it was JFK, not La Guardia airport.
Pay no attention to the clairvoyant. Said clairvoyants are good at parties and wherever where people are guaranteed to give feedback, but notoriously bad in a cold-read situation where the person doesn't give anything away. Personally I find it ridiculous that such a person could be a good judge of the character of a person they haven't even met.
I like the idea of origami, but could never do it because I'm horrendously clumsy.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry- I wasn't too miffed by the clairvoyant. I don't believe in any of that anyway, which apparently proves just what she said about me! See how they get you!