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Special Halloween Costume Guest Post

The Imaginary Reviewer has never been trick or treating in his life, as his father forbade him from taking part, claiming that it is “a form of begging”. In order to get into the spirit of the time, he has asked his 8-year-old nephew, Graham, to review some of the newest costumes for this year’s frightfest. Take it away, Graham!

Hello I am Graham and I am 8 and a half. Uncle Reviewer asked me to write about costumes and said if I didn’t then he wouldn’t give me any Xmas pressies so here I am.

This year I am going trick or treating as a vampwolf. If a werewolf bites a vampire on a full moon he turns into a vampwolf and can fly and that’s what I am on Halloween. I will have teeth and fur and go grrr and chase everyone. Gregory Simms says that vampwolfs don’t exist but I don’t believe what he says because he says he saw a baby come out of his sister but I don’t think her mouth is big enough to eat one whole so he’s a liar. When I am a vampwolf I will bite Gregory Simms and he will fall over and die.

Lots of people in my class are going out dressed as accordions. They’ve got buttons and make noise and everything. I don’t like accordions because they make a really horrible noise that sounds like the pigeon that Malcolm Beswick’s Dad ran over and wasn’t dead yet but Malcolm Beswick’s Dad got a spade out of the back of the car and hit it and it stopped making a noise and I saw its brains. That’s why I don’t want to dress up as an accordion. They sound like death.

One boy in my class is going out for Halloween as a Pea Salesman. He will dress up in green clothes and have a big metal tray full of peas. I told him that a pea salesman is not even a real thing but he said that his Mum said they used to have pea salesmen when she was a girl but I think she didn’t want to buy a real costume. She probably found the peas on the floor because his family is poor and they can’t afford to waste peas. This is a stupid costume and I hate it.

Another popular costume this year is Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. I think this is the scariest costume of all because Milton Friedman’s wrinkled face and bald head remind me of the unstoppable march of time that will carry us all down the path of history towards the unexplained infinite blackness of death. Also I find Friedman’s economic policies to be highly flawed but Julie Blackbury says she is dressing up as Friedman because his policies were influential and beneficial. I told Julie Blackbury that tax lowering as a tool of stimulating economic growth is empirically proven to be less effective than increased government spending but she said that the Friedman-inspired Reaganomics of the 80s ultimately recovered the US from stagflation but I said that the country would have recovered anyway without Friedman’s statist and totalitarian views and that the 2007-8 economic crisis was a direct result of Friedman’s policies and then I put a worm in her hair and she ran away.

Graham’s regular entertainment column will be appearing in Now Toronto Magazine from November 3rd. The Imaginary Reviewer had to fix a lot of the spelling in this review, and so Graham will be getting a Christmas present as promised, but it will be rubbish.

The Imaginary Review Visits Another Magazine

Some of my more long-suffering readers will remember a review I wrote a while ago for a music documentary entitled Behind the Music: The F Sharp Minor Story. It was then, and remains now, I am proud to say, one of my finest reviews.

Around a year ago, excellent Toronto online magazine Feathertale asked me to expand upon it and include some other documentaries, in a feature-length review for their website. After much editorial handwashing, arguments about payment, tears, walkouts and blackmail, the full article has finally made it to print.

So here, now, finally in print, is my expanded article, in which I look at documentaries focusing on F Sharp Minor, the 8-Bar Drum Intro and the Baby/Crazy Rhyming Couplet.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Music Documentaries for a Saturated Landscape.

Pens! Pens! Pens? Pens!

As long as there are Post-It notes, there’ll be pens. The reason for this is that Post-It notes won’t go through a printer; instead, they’ll stick to the rollers and clog it up in a mass of yellow semi-adhesive inconvenience forcing office workers everywhere to snarl and curse and cry and hate their lives that little bit more. So as long as people need to pop an easily-removed note on top of a pile of documents that says “Greg, check the Montalban a/c and sign off, thanks! Debs”, there’ll be pens with which to do so.

Ian’s Marvellous Pen Company have released a brand new line of pens, and I checked out their blue pen. What a pen this is! With overtones of velvet, canard and frangipane, and a rating of approximately 18 kiloblots per square inch, this pen is quite simply a joy to use. It’s especially good when drawing circles, and by example I mean Venn diagrams, balloons or cowpats.

Don’t look now, but there’s a new ballpoint pen on the block, and it looks mean! Penny Pennington of Pennsylvania’s Pens (both the Writing Kind and the Animal Holding Kind), Inc are building a name for themselves with their take-no-prisoners writing implements. The red pen I tested was very good when it came to marking essays (performing extremely well on margin utility and spelling error underlining), but was quite deficient in marking multiple choice quizzes. The ticks and crosses were both very poorly defined, with abysmal conviction vectors; they also had a worrying taste of limpet.

A word of warning: Watney Heckbulb are advertising some new pens at excellent rates for mail-order purchasers, but don’t be taken in. Customers are actually being sent chalk, and when they receive telephone complaints, customer service representatives just repeat what you said but in a high voice, which is really annoying.

On paper, the new Dervish QV7 is a terrible pen. However, on other surfaces, it’s excellent. It draws exceedingly well on orange peel, bricks, sponge (both kitchen and bobsquarepants), chips (US and English), fannies (US) and bums (UK). Granted, if you ever attempt to write on a piece of paper with the QV7, it will fall apart, but as long as you remember this it should serve you well. I highly recommend it for scribbling an insult onto a potato and throwing it at a nearby Jesuit.

Finally, Shugborough-Tweedle have created a single-use disposable pen for suicidal people. Each carries enough ink for one letter, and it writes wonderfully. Sadly, though, I found that it does tend to run out quickly if you ramble on about how you thought your life would get better once you’d had the patio refitted and nobody noticed your new hairstyle even after they told you to make more of an effort if you wanted to make Janice jealous after she ran off with Marcus, although she shouldn’t blame herself because before you met her your life was a barrel of rotten pigs’ trotters and she’ll always be close to your heart.

Pens come from the shops. Other things that come from the shops include newspapers, sausages and plants. Things that you won’t find in the shops include graddical flumes, twingmar delobets and corporeal nattttttttttttttttttwhips.

I am Somewhere Else Today

Hello chaps and chappessesses! Today I have crossed the pond over to the excellent Mister London Street's blog, where he has posted a review I wrote of a holiday I didn't go on recently. Please go and check it out if you haven't already, and if you're not already following Mister LS, I recommend you do so as he is a writer of the utmost calibre. Oh, and he's British, so you know he's ace and quality and has a great accent like mine.

Seacrest out.

The Journal of the National Society of Obvious Studies

The National Society of Obvious Studies meets twice a year to engage in enquiry that is of the utmost importance to humankind. They attempt to answer questions that people ask every day, often without hearing a response. The Journal is the collected findings of this eminent group. Published annually, it is available to anyone who is on a special list.

This year, there are many important discoveries and intriguing studies. Take Professor Sturgeon Heseltine’s exceptional paper, On the Excretory Habits of Forest-Dwelling Ursine Creatures. Five years in the making, this study shows an amazing level of dedication to stating the mundane. Prof Heseltine was relentless in his quest to discover what woodland bears do with their waste products once all nutrients have been absorbed from their food. With the aid of two dozen research assistants and keen students, the good Professor travelled the world to observe the animals in their natural habitat.

With methods such as “watching the bears” and “looking for poop”, Professor Heseltine has amassed a great wealth of evidence to support his conclusions. Now the world can sleep soundly at night, safe in the knowledge that bears do indeed shit in the woods.

The studies in the NSOS Journal are not limited to zoology. Theology is also covered, with Denizen Balabroit’s paper, An Investigation Into the Religious Inclinations of High Ranking Papists.

This paper sheds exciting and much-needed light on the personal beliefs of the pope: his faith, his spirituality and his philosophy. With over a hundred pages of supporting documents, from personal letters to diaries and shopping lists, Balabroit builds a case for his findings with stunning levels of detail and rigor.

And what findings they are! From his opinions on birth control, the existence of an all-seeing and knowing sky-creator, and the transubstantiation of communion booze and biscuits into the actual blood and body of Christ, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the Pope is Catholic. Balabroit goes into far more detail in the paper, and it is well worth a read.

I don’t have enough space to discuss the other excellent papers in the journal, but another one worth reading is Diphthong et al, On the Appearance of the Visible Atmosphere with respect to the Light Spectrum, which concludes that the sky is blue. Less successful is Spengler’s piece, entitled, Is the Atomic Weight of Cobalt 58.9? I fear Dr Spengler has failed to enter the spirit of the Society with this paper. Maybe next time.

Book Review: The Logic Problem Puzzle Compendium

The Logic Problem Puzzle Compendium is the latest in a long line of popular books, though, having read through this one in the space of an afternoon, I am unable to say from where their popularity arises.

More like a series of short stories than an actual narrative, I was bemused by the events making up the book, and could not find a way to connect them. Indeed, they seem like nothing more than a disparate series of situations and comments about them! On one page I read of children doing different things in order to make money (selling lemonade, babysitting, mowing the lawn, etc), and then, when I turned the page, eager to see how the events unfolded, I was confronted with an entirely new situation, about Christmas presents being bought for family members at various locations. What happened to the children? What became of their money-making schemes? Presumably the author (un-named, I hasten to add) wishes us to guess the outcomes for ourselves!

The laziness of the author does not end there. There is no semblance of character development or literary technique in this book whatsoever. In chapter six, for example, we are told that “John did not go to the party with Mary.” Why not? What had Mary done for John to spurn her party invitation? More to the point, who are John and Mary? It continues: “Nigel (who isn’t a banker) attended the party with the Estate Agent.” What kind of scene setting is that? How are we, the readers, expected to use this sparse description to come up with any sort of interior picture of the story?

And don’t get me started on the so-called ‘illustrations’ adorning most of the pages. Almost identical childish grid-like structures appear almost everywhere within the book. Presumably this is the author’s idea of a suitable accompaniment for a publication that lacks content, narrative structure and any merit whatsoever.

A truly awful book from start to finish.