APPLE EXCLUSIVE: LEAKED PICTURES: NEW PRODUCT PROTOTYPE

On a recent fact-finding trip to Binh Hoa, an Export Processing Zone to the east of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, I managed to pick up two very interesting things.

The first was some kind of tropical ear fungus whose gunky black spores rendered me deaf in one ear until I had them sucked out by an Ear Nose and Throat specialist just this week.

The second, which I’m sure will be of much more interest to the world, is what looks very much like an early prototype of Apple’s new product line, tentatively called (by me) the iLight.

Before we look closer, I just want to say to those who doubt the product’s authenticity- well if it’s not real, how come I’ve got photos of it? And don’t say Photoshop, because I don’t know how to use it.

Apologies in advance for the slightly blurry nature of some of the pictures- I took them on an iPhone 4 which, let’s face it, has a rubbish camera.

And remember this is a makeyourselfuncomfortable.net worldwide exclusive.

That’s make yourself uncomfortable dot blogspot dot com with me, Ron Gridcharts, in association with blogger.com. But if this blows up like it deserves to (the post, I mean, not the Apple product), I’ll probably be upgrading to wordpress or something.

And here it is, folks- the Apple iLight:

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Ratford-Upon-Avon Urinal - circa 1995

I was young and angry in 1995.

Working on a zero hour contract in a call centre for Merit Direct (who would later become Sitel) in Stratford-Upon-Avon - because they were the town's only real employers of young people- and having been pretty much forced to return to the town post-university by an economic recession and parental pressure, what else could I do but take out my frustration on a copy of then local newspaper The Stratford Upon Avon Journal, transforming it into The Ratford Upon Avon Urinal?

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Chemist Shop Joke

© Vim Rumpy Rim 1990

The Long and Whining Road

A children's entertainer, yesterday.

It may be a little hard to believe, but I actually started out my career (as in 'careering out of control') as a children's entertainer.

It was all down to that bloody drama degree, of course. Once I had got a taste for the smell of the crowd and roar of the greasepaint, what was there to stop me? Well- reality, maybe, but that's another story.

I applied for a few acting jobs from The Stage and eventually got taken on by the West Midlands Children's Theatre Company for a four-month tour round the country performing a piece called 'Harlequin's Holiday' to appreciative audiences of three to ten year olds (if you were eleven, the whole thing kind of sucked). 

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LuLu's Festival of Britain

So, I recently visited Lulu Hypermarket in Muscat, Oman (because I live there- it wasn't some tragic tourist trap trip).

I needed to buy a really vile shirt for a murder mystery dinner character costume and, as you will see below, LuLu did not disappoint.

LuLu, for those not in the know, is an Indian supermarket chain that can be found all over the Middle East (well, the parts I have been to, in any case).

It's bedlam on a Friday evening, chockablock with migrant labourers and extended sub-continental families blocking the aisles with their shopping trollies and pretending they don't know what a queue is when it comes to getting vegetables weighed.

Midweek, however, LuLu can be quite sedate and gave me a pleasant enough time browsing through some very unpleasant garments.

What I eventually chose was truly revolting. Not even H.P. Lovecraft could adequately convey the horror of the shirt, try though he might. I won't even try. I'll just let you look at the pictures: 

It actually looks much worse than this in real life

Taken on its own, this might be considered jaunty

But as one of 7 or 8 clashing panels...

Even though I was buying it just for a laugh, I still felt deeply ashamed as I waited in line at the upstairs tills.

While waiting, however, I was intrigued by a poster advertising LuLu's festival of British foodstuffs, called "Food is Great Britain".

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This Election..

Junior Fight Club

BOB MOONEY'S

JUNIOR FIGHT CLUB

 FOR PUGILISTIC BOYS

First Rule of Bottling Up: Don’t cut your fingers on the broken glass in the sludge at the skip bottom.

Second Rule of Bottling Up: Always rotate the stock. Remove existing bottles, wipe shelf with warm cloth and place new stock at back, making sure to wipe and face each up.

Third Rule of Bottling Up: Be finished by 11am when the customers start arriving. Nobody wants to see a ten year old busy behind the bar.

It was such rules as these, not explicitly written as above, but learnt at my father’s knee and the pointing of his pipe, that shaped the weekend mornings of my childhood years.

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You just gotta

Bad Karma for Cardew Robinson

I'm currently doing some research into my maternal grandfather, Frank Cardoe.

Frank was a popular comedian in the Birmingham area from the 1920s until his retirement in the mid 60s, performing pretty much nightly.

Although he was a big enough name in his heyday to meet the likes of Neville Chamberlain, he is now a forgotten figure. This is partly because there is only one known recording of his act- a crackly old 78 record that was privately pressed and kept in a cupboard at my mother's house in Mickleton.

I have recently made a digital copy of this record which can be found here:





One thing that is interesting about Frank's act is that the sheet music to his track 'Someone Stuffed a Crumpet up me Trumpet'  was stolen from his dressing room (by an unknown person) and later sold on to the rather less obscure Cardew Robinson, who changed the lyrics, and the title to Trumpet Involuntary. 

Frank was never credited as the originator of the track, which Cardew recorded as part of his 1967 EMI release Cream of Cardew. 

Being a kind-hearted soul, my grandfather never bore him any ill will and, indeed, was a big fan.

I plan to write more about Frank Cardoe's life and work soon. In the meantime, his lyrics to 'Crumpet' are below:

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Fuh King Kong

Growing up in the sticks in the 1970s meant for much of the time we had to make our own entertainment. A favourite game played in the family was Hide and Seek, in which I would invariably hide under my bed. 

Although this would seem an obvious place to check, I very rarely got found. I thought this was because I was just brilliant at Hiding. Only years later was I told that this was actually because nobody was Seeking. They had merely suggested the ‘game’ as a ruse to get rid of me and my incessant “But why?” questioning.

Typical conversations between my junior self and my mother went along the lines of:

ME: Why is the sea blue?

MUM: Because the sky's blue.

ME: But why is the sky blue?

MUM: Because it just is.

ME: But why?

MUM: Because I said so, that’s why.

ME: But why?

At this point, I’d often get a smack- to which my reaction would be to go hide under my bed and sob quietly. If her patience wasn’t entirely frazzled from working a 16-hour day in the pub, she would suggest a game of Hide and Seek and I’d go hide under my bed and try not to breathe too loudly. This could go on for hours.

Under my bed seemed like it could hold all sorts of adventures and I firmly believed that some kind of helter skelter portal to another land might be revealed one day, just like in Jamie and His Magic Torch. I would switch my electric torch on and off repeatedly, hoping that this time the magic hole would appear to take me away from Mickleton. 

Only it never did.

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Nigel Lister - Chartered Accountant of the Future

FEETNOTE:

 This was my loving homage to the work of Frank Hampson, artist of Dan Dare in the Eagle, a long-running British comic for boys in the 50s and 60s. 

I slavishly copied the artwork from an old Eagle Annual that I'd bought from a jumble sale for 20 pence. This was in the winter of 1991 (hence the obscure reference to the band Nirvana), when I was on the dole and had both the time and inclination to do such a thing.

Tragically, I sold all my Eagle Annuals (I had no's 1,3,4 and 5) on ebay in the winter of 2011 when I was again on the dole and reduced to selling my precious things, one by one, just to make ends meet.

Wacky Krazyballs

Black Microdots

Some blue penguins, yesterday

My second trip was a black microdot. it looked something like this:

                                                                       .

I was a naive and impressionable Drama/English student at the time and the size of it led me to conclude it wouldn't do terribly much. So after trying and failing to cut it in half, I ate the whole dot, despite warnings it was off the scale compared to my previous dosage.
I took it with three of my housemates- Paul, who had had a bad trip on Blue Penguins the week before- was the only one who didn't drop.

Within ten minutes, I was unable to get out of my chair. I looked over at the poster on the wall, to find that I could see the shadows around it were a composite of red, green and blue. The curtains started breathing. Then the walls did.

I was aware I needed a drink of water, but couldn't get it myself.

"Paul... Paul," I croaked weakly, "Do you think you could get me a drink?"

Paul tutted and looked at me with bewilderment. I looked over at John who was locked rigid at the other end of the sofa in his own private grinning world. He slowly turned, first into a wolf then into a toad.

"All right now," he said. "All. Right. Now."

"I can't take this. John's turning into a toad," said Ollie. "I'm going upstairs."

I looked back at Paul, the roar of madness ringing in my ears. "Wa-ter..."

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" he snapped, going into the kitchen.

I took the glass off him and sipped at it gingerly.

"You can't be that fucked," he said.

"No. No, I can't be that fucked," I agreed, trying to put the glass down on the floor. The pattern of the carpet was playing up my depth of vision, however. I couldn't work out how to get the glass down.

I turned to John. "How long ago did we take this?"

"About. Fifteen. Minutes," he melted.

I wanted my mum.

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An eye for an eye is a rather disappointing Scrabble tile exchange.

They said in school you should learn from your mistakes. 

And what I learnt is that Tippex Thinners are a gateway drug.

Mickleton, near Chipping Campden, Glos (I)

I grew up in a small Cotswold village called Mickleton, a place so obscure that, to this day, letters sent to residents must include not only a postcode but the line ‘Near Chipping Campden’ or they will be ‘lost in the post’- i.e. chucked in the bin by someone at the sorting office.

Even after the introduction of postcodes, Mickleton still soldiered on with three-digit phone numbers until well into the Eighties. Ours was 285, which was exciting because Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on Saturday morning TV also had 285 in its number, but theirs being a London number, it had 6 or 7 digits, enough to make our young minds giddy. And every time they did the Swap Shop phone number jingle, my sister and I would sing along like it was actually our number and we were famous or something.

For an age, the introduction of longer phone numbers was fiercely resisted by the locals. They insisted that the traditional way of dealing with having such a small telephone exchange had worked for previous generations and would go on working so long as folks continued in their time-honoured way. This consisted of an angry local mob driving away any and all newcomers, particularly city folk. However, such outsiders couldn’t be held at bay forever. Especially when the angry local mob had had a few pints of cider and couldn’t be arsed anymore.

In a masterstroke, my parents subdued the suspicious locals by infiltrating the village as landlord and landlady of the Butchers Arms pub, thereby supplying both cider and a fruit machine to the local rabble. Much as a modern-day meth head might bitch about his dealer but keep coming back for more, begrudgingly our family became an accepted feature of village life.

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