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BABIES: SMALL, PINK & SMELLY!

       Yes, congrats are in order! You'll probably remember I mentioned last issue that our very own Paola Program was up the duff, yeah? Well, As much as I was hoping for a baby seal to play with, she gave birth to a human instead. A great surprise considering Pete Program is the father. Life, huh? I’ve  tried throwing him fish, just not interested. Well, they’ve called him Roberto Tommaso, and here he is. We don’t call him Roberto Tommaso though, we call him Bobby Ketchup. Little Bobbo is eight months old now (born May 7^th) and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He smiles, laughs, sits up, belches and farts. Definitely his father’s son. He struggles with calculus and trigonometry though. Looking forward to seeing what his first words will be in the months to come. The smart money is on “My dad really overdid the synth FX on ‘White Hawk Atomic’, didn’t he?”

While on the subject of unlikely parents, you'd never guess who else has recently become a dad!? It's Acidfuck's Kev Trundley! Yes, his good lady, Andrea, had a little boy of 6lb 1Ooz (in real Imperial weights, back off Brussels!), but didn’t bother giving him a name until a bit later, so I’ll have to go look for it now. Found it, they called him William. Little Billy Acidfuck, bless him. Here he is with his mummy, soon after he was born on October 2^nd. Daddy Kev sings him to sleep at night with a chorus or two of “Sex And Drugs And Acidfuck”. Call the child protection register or what!? Poor little thing, think of the amount of trouble he’ll get in when he has to answer that famous first school question; “What does your daddy do?” The mind boggles!

READ THE MAGIC INTERVIEW WITH KEV TRUNDLEY HERE...

HELP THE NICE ANIMALS!

       Look at the poor sad little goat there, all sad and forlorn coz we let him down.  Big ahh for the lovely little goat. Ya see, last ish, I put in an appeal for donations to the Hopefield Animal Sanctuary, I did. And the plan was, me and Sammi would make whatever we collected up to the next amount in the Hopefield sponsorship ladder. That starts at a mere £150 for the poor forlorn li'l goat here. BUT… for £300, you get to sponsor a great big pig and rescue him from fate as a bacon buttie! For £400, a donkey won’t have to give fat children rides on Blackpool beach all day (he can be England manager instead). For £500, a pony won’t have to race across the Wild West delivering mail. And finally, if you can reach £800, you can sponsor a great big horsey so he’ll never be made to chase foxes if the Tories get back in power!

       And the rest of the plan was that me and Sammi would take the money up to the sanctuary in Essex, hand over the cheque, and spend the day getting our hands dirty and helping out generally. I felt sure that seeing pictures of me up to me neck in mud and...er... "things"... would be a golden incentive for you to put your hands in your pockets. Or not, as it turned out. Okay, so I was poorly and we couldn't go anyway, but you weren't to know that, were you? Do you know how much we got in donations? £4.01, that's how much. Poor animals. Be ashamed, be very ashamed: Tut-tutting and finger wagging is going on here, you can count on it! And do you know how many people those donations were from? One, that's how many. So, basically, if your name isn't Richard Brock and you don't live in Shepton Mallet, shame on you! Think of all the poor baby piglets shivering in the cold and bitter Winter coz they haven't got electric blankets. They could have had electric blankets if you'd sent us some money! Think of all the cold and bored goats with no books to eat, shivering in the chill night air. They could have had a copy of “War And Peace” each if you’d sent us some money! And piggies and horseys without the strength to cry from hunger, all because you lot are SO mean.

       Have I laid it on thick enough now? Good! Right, second chance; Paula & Ernie Clark (and all their lovely helpers) do a wonderful job at the sanctuary. They provide a good home for all manner of deserted and mistreated animals, feed them, keep them warm, give them a roof over their head, macramé baskets, colour telly, magazines and a pool table. They even help the odd donkey achieve life-long ambitions, like the one who recently got to manage the England football team for a match or two. No, I’m not making this up, it was in “The Sun”, so it must be true!

       But anyway, they can't do any of this without money. So please beg and grovel, send us a contribution, however small, to keep this fine establishment running at full strength. Foreigners can send a foreign banknote or two (proper money, not bloody Zlotys! J), we'll turn it into real money for them (without any commission, promise). UK people can send us cheques or Postal Order thingies, whatever. Maybe you just wanna tack a bit extra for the animals onto your next order? No prob, just tell us how much and we'll put it in our Hopefield collection box. Come on, please make an effort, help us help the nice animals, let's surprise them with how much we can raise, okay? You never know  when England will need a new manager, after all. And if there's any other way you can help, all the contact details are below, and there's even a web address now where you can see nice pictures of the nice animals. And feel guilty for not helping them (unless you’re Richard Brock). Just think, if you lot send us a total of £500.01, I’ll have to fork out £299.99 to make it up to £800! Good motive or what? We’ll re-plan our visit for the Summer then (allegedly in July sometime, according to the calendar), hope we’ll have huge amounts of pennies to take with us! Cheers.

THE ATOM IS SPLIT… FILM AT ELEVEN!    

       Oh yes, they’ve actually split the atom. “One or two” of our readers mentioned it after I did the last M&E News on the typewriter. With Letraset, pens and a rule. And double-sided sticky tape and stuff. Some months after buying a PC. Apparently, Elvis is dead too. All shook up about that. Thanks for letting me know though, I like to keep my finger on the pulse. Not that he has one any more. And they tell me The Beatles split? OK, ENOUGH! One has now completed one’s IT course, the M&E News is done on computer now, so there! Not my fault I didn’t learn about computers at school, they’d not been invented then. So you can all stop taking the piss. Honestly, can’t think where you get it from!? ☺

YOUR ASSISTANCE WAS REQUIRED!

       Me and my stupid ideas, eh? “How about helping me translate ‘United World Underground’ into lots of different languages?” I asked. Hmmph. Seems that whereas it sounds cool as fuck in English, it sounds either pompous, naff or crap in every other tongue on the planet! C’est la vie. Just one of those phrases that doesn’t work universally (is that irony or what?), so we’ll just keep it as plain old ‘UWU’ wherever. Many thanks to all of you who took the time and trouble to tell me what it came out as in your language and how bad it sounded though! Much appreciated.

YOUR ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED!

       Me and my sensible ideas, eh? Yes, we are still very interested in cassettes of traditional and ethnic music from your nations and regions. Got a really superb collection starting to build up from all sorts of obscure places: Romania, Poland, Russia, The Philippines and Scotland (on CD! Who says Scots are mean, eh?), to name but a few. Big ta kissy kissy to all of you who have helped on the quest. For the cheap types amongst you that haven’t, what we’re after is them touristy type cassettes of traditional and ethnic music. They always have pictures of people in bizarre national costumes on the front and are called things like “Muzika Tradizionale Bulgareski”. Well, probably not if they were from the Isle Of Man, but we haven’t exactly been flooded with the traditional and ethnic sounds of the Manx folk as yet. We live in hope. So anyway, any of you willing to help, we’d love you forever, honest. Or at least till we lose to you in a World Cup qualifier or something.

CZECH-MATE!

       Having thrashed Kevyn Dymond (snigger), as you may recall me subtly mentioning once or twice (but not harping on about relentlessly), I started a new game of chess some months ago with our mate Radek “Jelly” Vicherek. Then I lost the board set up. Oops. And I was very definitely winning too. Hmmph. Funny how when I asked, he’d lost it too! Not that I’m suggesting he lost it deliberately, of course. I’m sure it’s just an unfortunate coincidence, eh?

NEW BOOK FROM STEVE ANDREWS!

       And hallelujah, it’s not poetry! Oh, happy bunnies are we! The man from Del Monte, he say yeah! No, seriously, this is a quite lovely tome from our very own Captain Weird. It comes in paperback format, that strange American size (215 x 280mm) and a nice glossy colour cover. This works through the wondrous natural highs, medicines and toxic joys Mother Earth has provided, all the way from Absinthe (which I got lost in a bottle of over Xmas… whew!) to Yaupon, but nowt beginning with ‘Z’! Steve goes into quite some detail about the plant in question, tracks its uses and abuses through the ages, and comes up with some rather interesting facts along the way. For example; did you know you can get high smoking a Catnip joint? It’ll also amuse your cat, make a nice herbal tea and cure flatulence! Have to pick some for Pete Program. Unsurprisingly, the heftiest entries are for the likes of Magic Mushrooms, Cannabis and Peyote! A fascinating and informative book all round. It really is quite astounding how much effect natural psycho-active substances have had on human history. And it certainly makes you wonder why governments still insist on trying to legislate (largely without success) against both Mother, and human, nature. Howard Marks may have done a fairly good job, but this book reminds you that the no.1 drug dealer is still God, and He does it all on a non-profit basis to boot, bless Him, eh? Now you know what the burning bush was…

A NIGHT OUT IN SURREY HEATH…

        On a related subject… so what constitutes a good night out in Surrey Heath? Easy, take the missus out for a meal at a nice restaurant, then on to see a famous drug dealer at the local arts venue! And why not?  I mean, how can  you resist the opportunity  when Howard “Mr. Nice” Marks comes to  town? He's one of those underground icons, like Timothy Leary, only still alive. Which is a miracle when you consider how much dope the guy gets through! He couldn’t even get through his act without skinning up, honestly! Um, I’m telling. Quite how he manages to put together a monthly column for Loaded is quite beyond me! Not that I would read a magazine like that, of course. Somebody must have left it in my taxi. Ahem.

       Howard isn’t a stand-up comic, what you get is a lecture. Of sorts. What does he talk about? Take a wild guess! You see, aside from being a somewhat untogether public speaker, albeit in a most amusing fashion (anyway, you try lecturing when you’re stoned), he also has a rather more serious (depending on your viewpoint?) agenda. He wants to see cannabis legalised. And, although I'm not a user myself (I wouldn't risk a drag on anything after quitting smoking for 17 months, trust me!), I agree with him completely. Once you’ve heard Howard explain how marijuana became illegal in the first place, I think even quite anti-drug types would question the sanity of the decision! God bless politicians, eh?

       Howard has a website at www.mrnice.net, which claims to be the Internet's foremost authority on matters related to cannabis. And, of course, there's nothing as satisfying as winding up the government, so more power to him, eh? Oh, and the Mr. Nice site also acts as an ISP.    

Fancy “yourname@mrnice.net”? I'm sure Howard would be happy to have you. And where are you gonna find a more cred e-mail address, huh? And for those muchly interested in Howard's cause, you might like to know there is a registered political party what is called the Legalise Cannabis Alliance. You can find them at P.O. Box 198, Norwich, NR2 2DE, UK. E-mail lca@shuggie.demon.co.uk, sorted. Oh, there’s also a website at www.lca-uk.org, okay? Go on, be a rebel, you know you want to! Oh, and thank you for not smoking.

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