Torticollis Endurance Blogging

OW! I've hurt my neck and can't type for longer than thirty seconds. That's not good for blogging. Ow! Again. Sweet Jesus it hurts...

Sunglasses to hide behind

Yes. My darkened sunglasses were to blame - but I didn't realise this until a few days later when I was walking along the Trent embankment and saw a purple duck. Yup, somethin's gotta be wrong with that, I thought!

Purple Bullfinch

I'm not much of a gardener - but if I don't garden just a little the whole place turns into a jungle. I'm even less of a birdspotter. But a coupla years back I did see a massive purple bullfinch in my garden - not just a little mauve on the wing - but all over dairy milk chocolate foil purple. Big, beautiful, large as life and totally impossible. For there's no such animal. Of course, nobody believed me and I got a little flavour of what it must be like to see the sasquatch and have no one believe you. A few days later I solved the ornithological mystery of what I'd seen and how I'd come to see it...have a think about it...let me know and I'll reveal all tomorrow if I get chance.

The Penny that Gravity Forgot - a tale of low strangeness

I guess if I have one complaint, it's that my life isn't strange enough. Don't get me wrong. It's not completely mundane. But you probably couldn't turn it into a TV show. Over on their forum at the Fortean Times website there seems to be plenty of people who've seen ghosts, monsters and so forth...and so I wonder do we all (hmmm or maybe just some of us) have some overwhelming psychological urge to connect ourselves to the extraordinary - to what Fortean Times would call "High Strangeness"?

Since I can't, in all honesty, quite manage that...it set me wondering...if something weird but pretty small scale happened to me (what I shall call "Low Strangeness") would I even notice? Then I remembered what my subconscious was probably trying to tell me all along...this is the tale that I call "The Penny that Gravity Forgot."

Back in the early 1990's I was living in a small flat in Bethnal Green in the East End of London - the lounge was about the same size as the bathroom in the dilapidated mansion in which I now reside. I was working as a Law Clerk but since I'm really a writer I was sat in my lounge writing in a notebook in pencil. I made a mistake in my writing and reached for a plastic eraser (we sometimes call them 'rubbers' in England - but US readers please don't get the wrong idea). Leaning againsty the eraser at an angle of 45 degrees on the bookshelf was a penny. I removed the eraser from the shelf - rubbed out the offending error - and went to return the eraser. The penny had remained balanced at a 45 degree angle with nothing holding it up. I made a mental note to clean the shelf; there was obviously some sticky residue holding the penny in place. I carried on working for a moment but the precariously balanced penny distracted me. Finally, I pushed it down so that it was horizontal with rather more force than was probably required. I picked the penny up and also examined the shelf. Dramatic musical chord - DUN-DUN-DAAAH! There was no sticky residue nor indeed any other reason why the coin had stayed at that angle. I leaned it against the eraser several times and tried to duplicate the feat - even when doing it extremely carefully it was impossible to reproduce the effect. I had the penny that gravity forgot. I probably should've had it framed or mounted or something but I didn't. So the penny is just out there somewhere in circulation.

Tomorrow: The Mysterious Case of the Purple Bullfinch

D C Thomson Blood Debt

I suppose owe a blood debt to D C Thomson for buying my first comic story

back in 1988. I grew up reading "Bullet" comic - always my favourite. In particular, the Tales of Solomon Knight; mysterious gentleman raconteur. Here's "Black Dougal's Blood Debt" by (I think) Carlos Freixas (unless you know better - D C Thomson stories are uncredited). Naturally, the story is copyright D C Thomson. Hopefully they will put out some reprint vols and then I'll be able to tell you to buy them.

Who Nose?

Here's one of my favourite Atlas Comics - "The Two-Faced Man" by Joe Maneely. Maneely died tragically young, but had he lived I'm sure he'd have gone on to be one of Marvel's biggest artists. A Marvel Masterwork of his work will be issued shortly (featuring his work on the Black Knight). I urge you all to buy it.