OK...

...so obviously that "every day for a week" claim a ways back didn't pan out too well, and even "posting soon" claims are surely ringing pretty hollow by now (That's right, you heard me, just now. Stop laughing.) But rather than try and write anything properly here now, as a way of actually trying to produce anything without spending any real time on it, and in the hope that just bunging words up here will somehow make me produce them more regularly, I'm going to delve into history and try cannibalising this old post I started writing in February but never finished (one of about 5 sad-looking dusty half-finshed puppy-at-the-pound posts I've got sitting around the place now). It's not as if there aren't probably quite a few things to write about that have actually happened lately, but I decided that instead of anything relevant or timely, what you all really need instead is a bedtime story. Besides, if you're going to have a blog, you may as well use it for the purpose that God intended, which is of course to bleed words uselessly into the Internet. And so onwards...

Karen's nieces Ruby and Sofia were down in February, and during this time we did our thing that we do, whereby I lie on the ground and they come in with the tackles and the flying knee drops. Ruby prefers the full on frontal assault, where she backs ups a few metres and comes on screaming like a katana-wielding Japanese fanatic from World War II, and then at the last second launches mid-air into the double-fisted Superman take-off position, her brief but very definite flight being abruptly terminated by her usually rebounding off me in some fashion. Sophia is a lot more subtle however, and typically sneaks up behind me, wraps both hands around my neck, and hangs her entire bodyweight off it. If they were older than 6 and 3 respectively and heavy enough that I couldn't pick one of them up in each arm, this might pose problems; as it is it is rather amusing. Nevertheless, such assaults should not be tolerated lightly, and if I can manage to struggle to my feet for a few seconds, I generally get my own back by picking one or both of them up and running around the lawn, or possibly by stuffing them into a laundry basket. Unfortunately they seem to regard these activities as fun, so my merciless revenge does not have the desired effect.

Interestingly, in the period between the last time I saw them and the more recent time in February, which was some months, Ruby seemed to acquire a vast knowledge of Pokemon. I mean, I'm pretty sure I didn't know this much about anything when I was 6. She has the Gameboy game and was showing me how to play it: there seems to be a lot of fishing. Anyway, naturally she assumed I knew a lot about Pokemon, because you know, who doesn't? Er, yes. When pressed, I can name: Pikachu. I also knew Team Rocket are the bad guys. But you know, not wanting to seem square or anything, I tried to go with the flow:

Ruby: Do you know Primeape?

Me: Um, maybe. Does he look like a monkey?

Ruby: Um, kind of.
(Judge for yourself on that one:)

Ruby: Do you know Tentacool?

Ben: (picking up a theme, getting confident) Uh, yeah, does he look like an octopus?

Ruby: Yeah. Do you know Wigglytuff?

Ben: ...Wigglytuff? Hmmm, is he like, um, a...worm?

Ruby: Nooooo! Do you know...Eevee?

Ben: Don't...think...so.

Ruby: What about...Sudowoodo?

Ben: ...I got nothing. (Going for the save:) Do Team Rocket use him?

Ruby: Team Rocket 1, or Team Rocket 2?

Ben: (thinks: What the hell? Team Rocket 2?) Uh...my goodness! Is that Jacques Cousteau over there? (yoink!)

For your own enlightenment, Sudowoodo looks like this, naturally enough:

Okaaaaaaaaaaaay. So when I had a chance I did some homework on the Gameboy (you can review the 'Pokedex') so as to not seem a total idiot. There seem to be sort of naming levels. Even your poor hapless Pokemon-deprived moron is going to work out that the one called 'Krabby' looks a crab. Then they go up to stage 2 of linguistic trickiness, and for example call the one that looks like a owl 'Hoothoot'. Getting slightly more cryptic again, the one that looks like a snake is called 'Ekans' (he mutates into 'Arbok') and then at the really-hard-but maybe-still possible-to-work-out level they can get really obscure - there's one that looks like a fox (which Sophia likes to pretend to be for quite long periods at a time) called 'Vulpix' for instance (from vulpine you see...aha.) So you have a chance, but then it turns out there are 386 different Pokemon. (Not 'Pokemons', Ruby corrected me on that one). So for all the ones with names you might at least stand a chance of actually working out, there are still plenty left over to get names like 'Kabutops' and 'Heracross' and 'Gorebyss' and 'Dunsparce'. Conveniently however, these Pokemon with names don't suggest much typically don't actually look like, er, anything.

Exhibit A,'Cleffa':

Exhibit B, 'Chikorita':

Exhibit C, (my personal favourite) 'Jumpluff':
Jumpluff really is a statement by himself somehow. I really think it is worth taking a good, hard look at little Jumpluff there and reflecting on the fact that Pokemon is a multi-million, hell, probably a billion dollar phenomenon. Nintendo could probably pack Mario and everything else in and do Pokemon stuff alone and they could go right on lighting their Cuban cigars with 1000 yen bills. And yet what they have here...well, it seems to be the result of some hideous genetic engineering experiment where dandelion DNA was spliced into those happy go lucky little blackcurrant fellows from the Ribena ads...what does this, er, thing, eat? How does day-to-day life go when you have pom-poms for hands? And what is that mysterious blue lump in the front, and the two at the back? Are those like, tripod feet? One can only hope so.































Anyway, the point of all this faffing about and Pokemon education and demonstrating to you all that Nintendo had NO RIGHT to PLAY GOD, Dear God what have they DONE, THEY NEVER HAD THE RIIIIIIGHT! was to go some way to explain the perhaps atypically high Pokemon content of the upcoming bedtime story. But since in typing it out, I didn't get up to the bit in which the Pokemon actually show up, all that stuff about Pokemon will be something of a waste of time for now anyway...but then, I'm not sure anyone still here reading this can complain that they have anything better to do.

Anyway, aside from serving as combat instructor / horse / gym equipment to Ruby and Sophia when they're about, I also get called in for the occasional bedtime story. No problem - except that for the most recent one, as more or less recounted here, Ruby demanded Pokemon content - there were going to be some Pokemon in this story somewhere, or there'd be trouble. As I may have explained what I knew about Pokemon previous to my belated research was the following: Pikachu is one, Team Rocket are the bad guys. So, although the story threatened to fall down somewhat in this area, Ruby was luckily on hand to work me through it - in a very clever manner, consdiering the corner my naff set-up painted her into. So to cut a long story even longer, here's as far as I got on reproducing the story. Annotations are sort of, er, built in and are story now...yes. Ack, you'll see what I mean.

NYWAY, our story begins with Princess Karen, Ruler of the Land and owner / operator of the Kingdom's finest cake shop (and star of two previous bedtime stories) walking through the enchanted forest. After her return from her recent perilous adventure (see Princess Karen II: Princess Karen Kidnapped By Trolls and Forced to Make Horrible Worm Cakes) during which the cake shop was closed due to her reluctant absence, the business had reopened and had been immediately felt the full force of the desperate need of the people of the Kingdom for all kinds of delicious cakey commestible. Out of the shop door and around the block was a constant line of fairies demanding fairy cakes, bears demanding honey cakes, and Belgians demanding Belgian biscuits, not to mention many of the everyday folk of the Kingdom, all of whom knew that Princess Karen's establishment was the finest of many cake shops in a country where the citizens liked nothing better than to have their cake (one was kept in reserve at all times) and eat at 2, which was the time that everyone in the Kingdom put down whatever they were doing and launched into the traditional 3-hour Afternoon Cake-Munching Session.

Princess Karen was strolling through the forest pondering the mystery of the Kingdom's low GDP and taking a break from the extremely busy job of preparing the myriad of cake varieties demanded by the diverse peoples, imps, fairies, animals, leprechauns and marketing managers of the Kingdom. The trolls had been barred from the cake shop for their previous bad behaviour, and chased from the Kingdom by the army, so Princess Karen didn't have to make horrible worm cakes any more; but she instead she had to fill a daily order of 40 fly cakes for Bruce the giant spider, which she had promised to him for not eating her during her escape from the trolls, and they were pretty gross. So between that and the general hard work of the cake shop she thought she would take a walk in the forest as a bit of a break.

As she was wandering along she heard a strange noise. It was a high pitched whining noise which descended in tone, and really must be heard from the original cast recording to be properly appreciated, but nevertheless Princess Karen thought she may as well investigate this poor literary description substitute version of the noise the second time around anyway.

She ran into a clearing to see a shiny silver spaceship making a landing next to the stream. It looked almost totally unlike a Modified YT-1300 Corellian Light Freighter - it was in fact your stereotypical retro 50s flying saucer, probably coming closest in shape to that speedy bastard one that shoots over the top in Space Invaders every so often.

More noises from the original soundtrack occurred, and a door opened in the side of the spaceship, and through it came a ramp which went down like a big tongue, which the narrator had pinched from Mars Attacks! As Princess Karen watched, three little men emerged from the spaceship and tottered down the ramp towards her. Each of them was purple and had three eyes and pointy ears. They came up to Princess Karen.

"Are you..." said the first one.
"...Princess..." said the second one.
"...Karen?" finished the third one.

"Yes, I am!" Princess Karen confirmed.

"Hurray!" the three little men said.
"We are..." the first one said.
"...the..." the second one said.
"...Zorg." the third one finished.

"The Zorg?" Princess Karen said, thinking that if anyone mentioned anything about resistance being futile, someone was going to get sued, but she didn't say anything. Meanwhile the narrator had decided that the device of the Zorg being three different guys with different voices who split every sentence into thirds was going to get pretty tiring pretty fast, and so he fudged the Zorg into one single character without anyone seeming to notice too much.

"Yes, I am the Zorg" said the Zorg, "...And I have travelled across the galaxy to seek your help. We have heard of your delicious cakes even on my far away planet of Foonfoonfoon, and even more famous than your cakes are your problem-solving skills. We need your help because Foonfoonfoon is being faced with a terrible crisis and we don't know what to do about it."

"What kind of crisis?" Princess Karen asked.

"Everything on Foonfoonfoon is slowly being turned into cheese" the Zorg replied.

Princess Karen looked surprised. "That's unexpected" she said.

"Yeah, I know" said the Zorg, "It just sort of came out. But anyway, it's a very annoying problem! Everything is being turned into cheese. Our space houses, our space cars, space furniture, space letterboxes, space-sailing equipment, space military surplus, space gas appliance fittings, space model space trains, space terracotta tiling, space home entertainment systems, space foam plastics, space light manufacturing concerns, space integrated business software solutions, space things for getting stones out of horse's hooves... all cheese!"

"Really?" said Princess Karen.

"Oh yes!" said Zorg. "Cheddar, mostly, but by no means exclusively. At first you might think 'great, I love cheese!', and so did we. We thought it was all a bit of fun, perhaps a strange spell of cheese-causing weather. We took bites out of things. I had a fondue in my swimming pool. But after a while it has become really annoying - did you ever try to take a stone out of a horse's hoof when your thing for taking a stone out of a horse's hoof was made of brie?"

"No, but you might be all right with an aged Parmesan" Princess Karen said.

"I can't help but feel you're missing the point" said Zorg. "We can't find the cause, and the cheese is dangerous! A car's brakes don't work when they're made out of cheese and - well, that's actually the only example I can think of right now strangely, but surely you can imagine the difficulties...and what's worse we're never sure when we'll start turning into cheese! Can you help us?

"OK, I'll see what I can do." Princess Karen agreed.

Zorg led Proncess Karen into his spaceship, which had ceilings that were pretty low for humans, but Princess Karen sat on the floor and was comfortable enough. Pretty soon Zorg had the ship taken off and speeding through space.

"So, you have no idea what is causing these cheese transformations?" Princess Karen asked as they flew along.

"No, we haven't a clue" Zorg said, "It never happens when anyone is around to see it. People typically come back from work or wake up in the morning to find everything turned to cheese - their houses, possesions, everything."

"How horrible" said Princess Karen.

Zorg nodded. "Yes. Everyone's well sick of it, except those involved in the cracker manufacturing industry."

Before too long Princess Karen could spot a pretty blue planet through the front window. "Welcome to Foonfoonfoon" said Zorg, and took their craft in for a landing.

As they landed in a field, Princess Karen saw that Foonfoon looked quite strange, but somehow familiar. Grass was blue, and the sky was screen. Trees grew with their roots poking up into the sky. A large moon was in the sky and the sun was nowhere to be seen, yet it seemed to be day time. A group of brightly coloured but familiar looking animals sauntered past the ship, walking backwards.

"What are those? Could they be causing the cheese problem?" Princess Karen asked, ever alert to the task at hand.

"Oh, no" Zorg assured her, those are just Wocs, they're quite normal."

"Wocs?" Princess Karen asked curiously. "They look just like cows, only pink and purple."

"Oh yes, they do resemble your strange Earth 'cows'. Many things, indeed almost everything here on Foonfoonfoon is very similar to its Earthly counterpart, except backwards."

"Backwards? How strange!" Princess Karen opined.

"It is something of an evolutionary fluke" agreed Zorg.

"Wait a minute - you're not particularly backwards" Princess Karen pointed out.

"Er...true" Zorg said. "That is to say, um...." But before he could finish his sentence, a nearby woc loudly went "Oom!", which only served to remind everyone just what a crazy backwards planet
Foonfoonfoon really was.

"It's just a short trip to the capital city of Spoontroonloon - let's go" said Zorg in a bid to prevent the discovery of any further anachronisms, and he led Princess Karen towards a building on the other side.

As they strolled to through the field Princess Karen saw all manner of strange sights. Eebs zubbed around the air, as slack as eebs. She was nearly tripped up when a tac chased a god under her feet. She looked down to see Zorg was holding a small purple flower under her chin. "Hmm", he said, "it seems you don't like rettub."

After a series of such similar whimsical events, they reached Spoontroonloon, where Princess Karen was astonished to see that all the houses had a roof on the bottom, but all the more astonished to see that many of these houses appeared to be made from cheese.

"I can see your problem" Princess Karen said.

"Tell me about it!" said Zorg. "Lucky it's summer around here and the weather is so cold...otherwise we might have a serious house melting problem."

...and that was about as far as I got typing it up, because I looked at it and decided on balance it was probably a load of codswollop not actually of interest to anyone (it certainly wasn't as good as my previous bedtime story, about the evil trolls kidnapping Princess Karen and forcing her to make worm cakes) . But now, due solely to their being not enough words on this page recently, you're stuck with it, so nyah. I can remember the end; if people actually want to hear it, I suppose I can finish it off. The houses made of cheese were a little odd, I'd admit, but when the Reverse Pokemon arrived, things went really weird.

In the meantime hopefully, some of the things I have to say about things wot have been going on about the place lately will make their way to this page sooner rather than later.

We can only hope.