SAUSAGE Life 340

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which is like Joan of Arc and Russell Brand rolled into one

READER: Are you following the Winter Olympics?
MYSELF: No
READER: No? You’ll be watching The Superbowl though….
MYSELF: The Super Bowel? No
READER: What then?
MYSELF: These days I just watch the shopping channels. At least you don’t get bombarded with adverts. I mean where else could you find a Mickey Mouse grandfather clock in a Plutonium case with three-fingered hands and a swastika engraved pendulum?  Where would you go if you wanted ovenproof trews, golf loons, pinstripe deerstalkers with sewn-in sandbags, gopher pants, luminous bellbottoms, flapdoodles, parachute pants with absorbent arses, croquet knickers, French ham trousers (100% ham), judge’s breeches (with rear wig pocket) or saxophone overalls with an extra fly?READER: Where, Where!!??
MYSELF: www.houseoftrousers.com

EASTER GIFT IDEAS
After the Christmas clear-out, all retail gloves are off. Cash permitting, we’ll all be peeking eagerly into our resurrection stockings desperate to see what the Easter Bunny has brought us, and looking forward to a traditional family reincarnation lunch with all the trimmings. And speaking of pants, here’s a sparkling gift idea well worth maxxing out your credit card for:
PANTS PINATA
Make your children’s Easter parties the envy of the neighbourhood with the Geoff Koons Mandy Mandleson Pants Piñata. This enormous installation will require a larger-than-average garden area as each pair has a 45 ft circumference waistband and an extra wide reinforced crotch. When thrashed vigorously, the giant Y-Fronts burst open and out pours a golden shower of hollow Cockapoos cast in exquisitely perfumed Istanbul Turkish Delight. Each Cockapoo contains a small novelty and a very long joke with no punchline, emphasizing the notional juxtaposition of poverty and vast, empty wealth. (Available at all branches of the Guggenheim Museum Gift Shop, 5th Ave, NY. £95,000.99 per box of one (excluding cockapoos, plus delivery and VAT).

WENDY WRITES
Unqualified advice for the lovelorn, the lonely-hearted and the terminally stupid
Since an enormous pot pourri of postal puerility appears to have piled up on my desk this past fortnight, I decided, as an experiment in haphazard synchronicity, to sprinkle them with grated cuttlefish and have my budgerigar Wensleydale peck out some letters at random:

Dear Wendy,
although I am aware that you are not, in the strictest sense (no pun intended) a sex therapist, I was wondering if you could offer me some advice. My husband Ralph is the supervisor on the manufacturing floor of an elastic band factory in Upper Dicker (no pun intended). The nature of his position means that he is frequently called upon to test the elasticity of the rubber bands as they come off (no pun intended), the production line and I worry that the pressure is getting to him. He is often the worse for wear when he returns home on a Friday evening after a stressful week of rubber-testing (no pun intended), when his only recourse is to the gin bottle.
My question is this; is it acceptable for a man in his forties to wear tartan socks with a three-piece pinstriped double breasted evening suit, or am I just being terribly old fashioned?
Ophelia Payne, Dungeness (no pun intended). 

Dear Ophelia,
Men! What are they like? Your husband’s claim to be stressed out due to testing elastic bands (!!) is, in my Humble O’Pinion, a typically male, typically pathetic attempt to divert your valuable attention (no pun intended) from you to himself. Mother’s Ruin, (see W.Hogarth), will be his undoing. Weaning him off the gin and on to something relatively harmless like fortified wine or gooseberry liqueur should help to alleviate his psychosomatic elastic band angst; at which point, God willing, you may attempt to gently dissuade him from his tragic tartan sock delusions.
Wendy
SUCK OR BLOW 
In a long, rambling, sometimes angry letter, Dr. A.A. Troon, head of implied psychology at the University of Pevensey Bay, declares that xenophobes “ought to be be beaten with sticks”. I replied thus:
Dear Dr.Troon,
I have no idea where you are getting your information about xenophobes from, but this is what Wikipedia has to say about them: 
Requiring neither sticks or beaters, the xenophobe is played by expelling air into the leather bag until sufficient pressure has built up to cause the flaps A & B to vibrate. As you squeeze the bag, you should hear a steady tone, midway between a tenor persiphone and an Eb bass mimosis. This can then be modulated by pinching the flaps with the thumb and forefinger and gently shaking the bag. 
I hope this helps,
Wendy

NOSTALGIA
Finally, Brigadier Augustus Rambunk of Burglar’s Pump encloses a photograph which he thinks may depict horseless carriages traversing The High Street, Upper Dicker c1905. Sorry to disappoint you Brigadier, but my researchers inform me that this hand-tinted photograph was taken in Rangapanga, India c.1837, during the August Monsoon. The cars at the front are camouflaged horse-drawn rickshaws, which were used to smuggle untaxed tea leaves concealed in bundles of raw opium.

DICTIONARY CORNER
PC World (n) Parallel universe featured in the graphic novels of Ruud van Smoot where no-one understands how computers work.
Twerk (n) Where fully employed Yorkshiremen go every morning
Vasectomy (n) The removal of flowers from a hospital bedside

AI WARS
We were intrigued to learn that Hasting’s resident boffin Professor Gordon Thinktank had been asked to donate one of his lifelike automatons to an upcoming virtual exhibit at Dublin’s Museum of Artificial Intelligence. Intrigued, we telephoned the professor at his laboratory where we were informed that he was busy anaesthetising an orangutang and would we mind holding. Halfway through the 25th chorus of Tina Turner’s Simply The Best, the famous inventor’s rich baritone voice interrupted:  “Never trust a robot” he shouted cryptically before revealing that what he planned to donate to the museum was an updated version of Bojangles, his ballroom dancing robot which notoriously sailed undetected through the first three audition rounds of Strictly Come Dancing.
The Automatic Dancing Partner as it was originally dubbed, flunked the show’s final audition on a mere footwork technicality. The Super Cyborg later married  Strictly partner Natalie Bridgework, with whom it fathered four virtual children.  
Bojangles was eventually exposed as a robot when its lithium-ion batteries exploded causing it to run amok during an electrical thunderstorm outside Charing Cross Station in 2019.

 
Sausage Life!