Big pennies, the ones they based the chocolate money on, are no more.
Two generations now have had no coin wider than a standard erect
penis. We have had the pill, gay marriage, panties in slot machines.
Coincidence?

There's a 90-95% overlap between dog people and buffoons. Cats are too postpubescent for me.

I've spent the weekend watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and the only figurative thought that struck me was that nakedness is embarrassing because you have no pockets in which to place your hands as you whistle. Nonchalant nudity is impossible for precisely and only this reason.

Green shaggy leaves draped forwards like an old Japanese woman's hair to scare children, a lime tree squats in front of me about head-high. The idea comes to me suddenly to sprint off and find a foot-pump, to return and plug it into a knothole in the slim trunk and stomp away.

I'm sure with enough effort I could inflate the tree: first, the branches, swelling along their lengths like sausage balloons; then, with four hundred individual pops, the flaccid leaves would turn instantly spherical, catapulting a mist of tiny insects into the air.

The tree would hum with internal energy as the hundreds of leaf-balls slid against each other with the noise made elsewhere by a balloon magician. I would unplug the foot-pump, sneak away, and return each week to check on the tree.

Slowly the majestic spectacle would decline: children would pick the leaves, crying as each ball hissed out its air and collapsed, a slight rag in a sweaty hand; pigeons would land on the branches and grip too hard, bursting the strength from one of the limbs of the tree. The limb then would suddenly retract into the lime tree like burdock pods do, leaving leaf-balls on the outside as grapes plucked from their stalks.

Within a month the tree would be a dead pile of saggy leaves with the trunk coiled over it like a gnarled snakeskin. I would in the meantime be working on a way to tap into a lawn and inflate every blade into billions of jostling green bubbles that would pop underfoot and release the odour of newly-cut grass. London would thank me.

Madeline Bassett

English is sometimes too poetic to be useful. A sensible question such
as 'what's the highest a fly can fly?' has the air of a mooning lover
about it. Assonance is gash.

--
from Jonathan Lowndes
lowndes@gmail.com
07786 934 679
Flat 2, Florida Studios
52 Florida Street
London E2 6AJ

Names for valets

Scudamore or Merriweather or Bastable or Loyd (with 1 L) or Bosanquet
or Stepney or Icke or any colour or Austerlitz or Snodgrass or
Methuen. In fact any UK publisher: Heinneman or Allen and Unwin
(latter gardener) or particularly Faber.

--
from Jonathan Lowndes
lowndes@gmail.com
07786 934 679
Flat 2, Florida Studios
52 Florida Street
London E2 6AJ

Copied wholesale from electricstory.com, with all due respect...just about the best story I've read in ages.

They're Made

Out of Meat

From the collection

Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”

“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”

“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”

“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”

“No brain?”

“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“So . . . what does the thinking?”

“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

“Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”

“Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”

“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”

“We’re supposed to talk to meat.”

“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anybody home?’ That sort of thing.”

“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”

“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”

“I thought you just told me they used radio.”

“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”

“Officially or unofficially?”

“Both.”

“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”

“I was hoping you would say that.”

“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”

“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”

“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”

“That’s it.”

“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”

“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”

“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”

“And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”

“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”

“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class-nine star in G445 zone was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”

“They always come around.”

“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone . . . ”

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Everywhere the Manatee

The West Indian manatee was discovered in the 1500s by Spanish explorers that hunted them for their meat, hide, and oils. It has spent almost exactly 500 years as the least-mentioned animal in world literature, behind even the narwhal. Then, suddenly and in the mid-1990s, there seems to have been an explosion of interest in manatees: not from the general public (amongst whom sharks exploded in 1975, meerkats in the late 1980s) but from writers of light fiction and television serials. Bo Selecta's fake Marilyn Manson has a West Indian manatee in the pool of his Los Angeles crib; according to South Park, the punchlines for Family Guy are selected by two manatees nudging brightly coloured balls containing pop-culture references (to e.g. Gary Coleman) into a vat. Even the New Yorker was hip enough to disparage somebody's girlfriend as pretentious for 'writing short stories about the manatee'.

My question is: why the manatee? Why the manatee now?

Source for picture: www.wikipedia.org