Here at The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan, we like to do our bit to keep the greater works of Western culture alive and well…

…we do have kind of a tight budget to stick to, though.

Hello, believers in the high ideals of amateur sport, and anyone else who’s looking for someone to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn:

   The torch has been lit, the pageantry of the opening ceremonies is over, and the air is a-tingle with the excitement of hard-fought competition. That’s the situation here in Funsville, anyway. Darned if I know what they’re doing in London. Nobody asked us whether it was a good idea for them to begin the Olympics while our biggest annual festival of sport was going on. Their loss, really.

   It’s not like we didn’t get there first, you know. Many years back, someone noticed that July 26th was the birthday of four of the seminal figures of twentieth-century culture. They are, in no particular order:

Author and visionary Aldous Huxley…

(Some doors of perception open a little too late.)

Anyway, the other three are as follows: playwright and social gadfly George Bernard Shaw…

Carl Jung, the pioneer of psychology who proposed the idea that subconscious archetypes govern our behaviour…

…and Hoyt Wilhelm, the last great knuckleball-throwing relief pitcher to grace the major leagues.

   What better way to honour these four pillars of modern civilization, thought Funsville’s Assembly of Notables, than to devise a game which incorporates them all, and hold a tournament every time the 26th day of July rolled around. Using the well-known game of “centrifugal bumblepuppy” from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (well, it’s known to those who’ve read the book, and can remember it), a special session of the Funsville Fun and Games Committee came up with:

SHAVIAN ARCHETYPAL KNUCKLEPUPPYBALL

   The rules are simplicity itself:

-Play begins once an object of play is selected. The object of play should represent a deep-seated subconscious fear common to the entire human race—for example, reptiles, unexplained revisions to your tax assessment, or being cornered by Jehovah’s Witnesses. (In one legendary game, a winner was declared before play had even started, when someone produced an object that reminded all those present of an unexplained tax assessment performed by Jehovah’s Witnesses who resembled skinks.)

-Sides are chosen by asking the players to explain, in ten seconds or less, what Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point is all about. The player who does the best job of this is immediately sent home, because nobody wants to play with a smarty-pants.

-The remaining players take turns gripping the object of play tightly in their fingertips and tossing it stiff-wristed into the air, in an attempt to impart as little spin on it as possible. If the object of play persists in spinning when tossed, players have the option of tossing one another instead.

-If anyone can remember (and utter aloud) an actually memorable witticism attributed to George Bernard Shaw or one of his characters (things like “By George, I think she’s got it” and “Eliza—where the devil are my slippers” DO NOT count) before the object of play either hits the ground or is caught, the game is declared a draw, and everybody can get on with whatever else they had planned for the day. Otherwise, it continues until the last player collapses from exhaustion.

   They’ve been at it since Thursday, with no end in sight. If the results of previous years are anything to go by, the last athlete will have vacated the Olympic village long before our bunch gives up. As always, I’ll get the results on a postcard, wherever I happen to have decided to go to get away from all of this.

Uncle Fun

Let it never be said that The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan doesn’t offer you some valuable life lessons:

Just don’t ask us to explain them.

A tardy hello to you all:

   Yesterday was too busy a day for us to keep to our appointed schedule of postings on this log of web-logginess. It is the custom for life to stop in Funsville on July 20th of every year, for a celebration that’s been taking place around these parts since the late 1960s.

   No—it has nothing to do with the moon landing. The 20th of July, for those of you who don’t already know, just happens to be…

   …wait for it…

   …(is the suspense killing you yet?)

   …Diana Rigg’s birthday. The eagle may have landed, but the arrival of Mrs. Emma Peel on the cultural horizon stirred Funsvillians into a frenzy that hadn’t been seen since the halcyon days of Franchot Tone.

   Diana Rigg is such a big deal here that Funsville never witnessed the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 landing. The Funsville Institute of Broadcasting would’ve risked starting a riot if they’d pre-empted the scheduled Avengers marathon.

   Talk about your positive role models for women and girls alike. Diana Rigg’s birthday is the one time when Our Miss Moose really gets carried away:

   Usually a few other people get carried away as well, to the emergency room of Funsville General. Fortunately, a local by-law waives prosecution for common assault committed on July 20th by ladies clad in lycra, spandex, vinyl or pleather. As a result, motels and resorts just over the Fun County line do a dynamic one-day business from husbands and boyfriends. (It’s wisest to make your booking months in advance—ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends get top priority on reservations.) Local singles bars have long since given up all hope, and simply shut down ‘til the 21st. The extra business never managed to cover the cost of damages.

   Really, though, it isn’t hard for a gentleman to get into the spirit of the occasion, if he makes the proper effort.

   Like I always say, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.

   Diana Rigg or no Diana Rigg (perish the thought!), there hasn’t been a total eclipse of lunar lore in the vicinity. My own home, The Fortress of Funitude, has a permanent exhibition of little-known facts about Neil and Buzz’s little jaunt into the near reaches of outer space. For a very reasonable entrance fee (plus surcharges to defray the upkeep of the artifacts), you can learn things that NASA still won’t share with the world at large:

   And you thought they just went back to get more rocks.

Uncle Fun

The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan is a matinee performance this week:

Fortunately, this show has a bar in the lobby and a long intermission.

Hello, all you lucky people:

     …and you must be lucky—after all, you’ve found me. Or at least, what I have to say, courtesy of the nice young gentleman who runs this blog. I’m entitled to call him young, because I knew him when. In fact, I knew his mother when, too. We were both in the chorus of the original production of H.M.S. Pinafore. On off-days, we double-dated Gilbert and Sullivan.

     But never mind about my age. With my kind, it doesn’t show so much. And never mind that anyway, because I haven’t given you a proper introduction yet. If you’ve been following this blog (so, the answer to that is “no”), you’ll have heard tell of the exploits of someone called Milady M’Dear, a legendary Helen-of-Troy-like beauty with boundless supernatural powers and more curves than the detour off a side road in the Himalayas (and I’m modest, too!). So, that’s me already. Glad to know you. If you want to know more about where I fit in with dear old Uncle Fun and all the gang, just click on these fancy coloured letters. The rest of this particular story is now supposed to be tagged with the label “Sparky in TV Limbo”, but that doesn’t seem to be working, and because it’s on the internet, fixing it involves divine intervention rather than magic, so I’m afraid it’s out of my league. Struggle through to find the other chapters as best you can.

     Anyway, down to business. I guess you could call me a witch, although I prefer the term “sorceress”—it marks me out as a lady of definite refinement and accomplishments, and not one of those riff-raff poseurs who think that putting on a lot of eye liner has anything to do with the supernatural (unless it’s closing time at your local, but a lot of weird magic happens then, now doesn’t it?). Since this is the second Friday the 13th on the slate for this year, I’ve been tabbed to give all you fine folks a professional ’s word on bad luck, and what to do to rid yourself of it. My caseload always ramps up towards Friday the 13th‘s, what with people wanting jinxes taken off them, and other people wanting jinxes they can blame on Friday the 13th put on, so all I was able to come up with was a bunch of point-form notes. The editor of this blog assures me that theme-related lists are starting to become the path of least resistance in this space, so who am I to buck a trend (especially one that gets me out of a little extra work)?

     Well, here goes nothing…

«  By far the most effective way of removing the evil eye is something known as The Nice Nostril. The only hard part is that you have to be able to flare your nostrils alternately in time with a 1954 mono LP recording of Antal Doráti conducting the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in the 1812 Overture. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time—hardly anybody does.

«  If you’ve recently had a curse put on you by a gypsy (and who hasn’t—you just don’t know it yet), it can be easily remedied. Just waltz topless into the nearest branch of a bank you once had an account with, and spin counter-clockwise on your left heel, chanting “avaunt, thou evil spirit, I abjure thee.” Keep this up for thirty minutes without getting arrested, and you’re in the clear.

«  On the other hand, it’s a little harder to get rid of bad luck that’s being sent your way by someone with a voodoo doll. The only thing that works reliably is to acquire a set of antique mother-of-pearl tie tacks, and pin them onto the fronds of the palm tree on the flag flying over any Haitian embassy or consulate.

«  If you think that’s tough, warding off the kind of evil that comes from a chance encounter with a disgruntled pixie, wood sprite, will-o’-the-wisp or leprechaun is next to impossible, now that spraying forested areas with a mixture of St. John’s wort and napalm has been declared illegal in many places. Your best bet these days is to boil the UPC codes from wheat germ bought at a health food store that has recently moved to a new location in a distillate made of equal parts cider vinegar and watercress broth, and hope for the best.

«  Goblins, though, are fairly simple to deal with. They accept bribes. Payment in kind rather than negotiables is preferred; if you don’t ask for a receipt, neither of you has to declare it at tax time.

«  You also have a simple recourse if bad luck is coming your way because of an offence or slight to a deceased ancestor. All you have to do is round up an astrophysicist and a notary public. One declares that time has been both relative and cyclical since the Big Bang, while the other helps you cut your ancestor retroactively out of your will. That oughta make the old S.O.B. smarten up in a hurry.

«  Contrary to what some people may tell you, rubbing the soles of your feet with Cheez Whiz that has been left out in the sun until it separates is not a reliable method of keeping away Pennsylvania Dutch hexes. It works pretty well at keeping away everything else, though—and everyone else, too.

«  Finally—and don’t tell anybody I told you this—if you’re going through one of those stretches where it seems that everything’s conspiring against you, become a fan of the Minnesota Vikings. The fates will take pity on you for your naïve, childlike faith, and let you have at least a half-decent chance of breaking even on any given day. One thing, though—don’t bet on the Vikings to actually win, or the whole sad cycle will begin again.

 

     That’s my bit, folks…gotta run. I’ve got a rush order to make some more confusing evidence suddenly come to light in some election or other that happened in Canada last summer. If you’ll pardon the expression, wish me luck.

Milady M. M’Dear

(Potion-brewer extraordinaire and maker of discreet incantations for the gentry)

This time around, The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan celebrates the ceaseless march of commerce:

We all have to do our part to stave off the next great economic slump.

Now all they have to discover in the universe is a particle of sense, and we’ll be getting somewhere…

Hello, all of you who seek after knowledge…and all the rest of you who are waiting for the movie version of it to come out on DVD or Blu-Ray. It’s Science Boy here, ready to stuff your craniums full of whatever it is they happen not to be full of at the moment.

     So, another bunch from the University of Slow Learners has found more evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson—the so-called “God particle” that was the driving force in turning the Universe from a great big mass of nothingness into the carnival of wonders, full of awe-inspiring splendours and the occasional broken toaster, that it is today. Well, pardon me if I don’t stand up on my chair and cheer (for one thing, I get vertigo and nosebleeds when I do things like that). Back when good old Peter Higgs still thought a boson was someone who worked on a ship, my team at the Legion of Goodness’ Department of Potentially Hazardous Experiments had already identified more sub-sub-subatomic particles than there are grains of sand in a golfer’s shoes after a bad back nine.  We were planning to hold onto our findings until Judgement Day, then spring them on an unsuspecting particle-filled God, with a triumphant cry of “thought you’d fooled us pretty good, huh?”, but now that our hand has been forced by these Higgsy-come-latelys, we have no choice but to publish them. Here’s a sample of our findings, soon to be released as a tell-all memoir in the always-attractive coffee-table book format, under the working title Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Stuff You Can’t See, Hear, Smell, or Touch, But Were Afraid to Ask If It Had Any Bearing on Your Everyday Life.

     Among the more interesting bosons, mesons, leptons, gluons, quarks, and quarkettes (these are like quarks, but are situated in more reasonably-priced neighbourhoods with better access to public transit) which we’ve discovered—every  last one of which is just as important in its own way as the “God particle”—are the following:

- The “Oh God, it’s you again” particle. The action of this particle helps to explain why people we can’t stand, or can’t face seeing—especially our exes—have a tendency to show up just when we don’t really feel like dealing with anything at all, much less with them.

- The “God is dead and so is my research grant application” particle is spontaneously generated by the clouds of negative energy surrounding graduate students’ pubs and common rooms. Those affected by it have a tendency to make feeble witticisms using quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche.

- The “If God did not exist, we would have to invent Him” particle is similar to the particle just noted, but generally affects graduate students of eighteenth-century French literature, causing them to make feeble witticisms using quotes from Voltaire. (As an example of this, those who disagree with this particle’s existence will defend to the death anybody’s right to believe in it.)

- The “What in God’s name is this?” particle creates phenomena whose constituent parts show no indication that they should ever function properly as a whole. It’s responsible for inexplicable things like the platypus, most of what’s sold at IKEA , and the European Economic Union.

- As the reference to the EuroZone suggests, the particle just mentioned can be found in overabundance in the work of people who themselves have an overabundance of the “God complex” particle. This one explains why otherwise sane and rational individuals choose to go into politics, as well as why it’s so hard to convince a politician that they might just possibly be mistaken about something—never mind horribly, irredeemably, and tragically wrong.

- More insidious is the “God only knows what you were thinking” particle. Due to fluctuations in levels of cosmic radiation, the universe is periodically bathed in waves of this one. One such occurrence of this was during the 1970s, which may explain why people wore plaid polyester suits and voted twice for Richard Nixon. There was a similar occurrence in the 1990s, which may explain why people paid to see Adam Sandler movies and thought Y2K was real—and why many of the same people who’d voted twice for Nixon and swore they’d never get fooled again by such an obvious liar also voted twice for Bill Clinton. 

-On rare occasions, the “God complex” and “God only knows what you were thinking” particles fuse to form a single entity. This is called the “My God, you’re actually NOT ashamed to admit that you’re an economist” particle. There is no known cure yet for the slow, creeping, terminal brain damage caused by exposure to this particle’s toxic emanations. All we can do is diagnose the symptoms, the most sadly pathetic of which is the inability to distinguish between pictures of deceased political hacks or reigning figurehead monarchs on pieces of coloured paper and actual living, breathing people.

- Evidence for the existence of the “Please God, make it stop” particle can be found on a nightly basis in practically every comedy club in the world. In fact, thanks to the proliferation of curiously-named “comedy channels” on cable and satellite TV, a steady stream of this particle is being beamed from Earth into the Solar System. We may yet live to see invaders from Saturn batter us into submission with a heavy bombardment of stale one-liners about airlines, relationships, and the myriad of not-altogether-amusing ways in which New York and Los Angeles differ from one other.

-Last, but certainly not least, is the “God bless us, every one” particle. Also known as the “Tiny Tim” particle, it creates a sense of boundless and largely unjustified optimism among those who have every reason to complain about the hand that life has dealt them.  So far, our research seems to indicate that, on any given day, this may be all that’s keeping things ticking over in the cosmos as a whole.

     ‘Til we meet again, vaya con Dios—or at least a particle of Dios, at any rate.

Science Boy

This week’s edition of The Funday Sunnies featuring Duncan shows why some people subscribe to a strict policy of not subscribing to anything: