Monday, 23 July 2007

Queen Victoria’s Joke Book

Q: How did Lonie Polony spend her hard-earned day off?
A: Sick and miserable at home, looking after her sick child.

Q: Why was the baby bathed clutching two large balloons on sticks?
A: Because the sick and miserable mother could better endure a couple of eye-pokes here and there, than the inevitable tantrum.

Q: What’s the difference between a pig and a polony?
A: A pig wallows in mud, a Polony wallows in self-pity.

We are not amused.

Saturday, 21 July 2007

Lonie Polony and the Vomiting Toilet of Plot-spoilers

What kind of perverse people derive pleasure from spoiling the enjoyment of others? Who vaingloriously posts on the internet pre-release copies of long-awaited books they’ve acquired through underhand means, and then sits back, a complacent smile on their face, expecting – what, congratulations? The kudos such people seem to think is attached to knowing something before the vast majority of others do? The same kind of people as tag-happy graffitists and knuckle-dragging vandals, that’s who; people who know deep down under all their blubber-like layers of self-absorption and arrogant façades of disdainful superiority that they are such talentless and unpromising losers they are unlikely ever to achieve anything of worth. People who calculate with the meagre brainpower apportioned to them that their sole chance of making any sort of mark is to deface and despoil the work of others.

Thankfully, the day has finally arrived when I can cloister myself away from smug morons and mean-spirited ‘news’ stories from networks trying to trump their rivals. I’m safe from people who accidentally-on-purpose remark in public at three times their normal speaking volume they never saw it coming that

THE DUMBLEDORE WHO DIED IN HALF BLOOD PRINCE WAS ABERFORTH, NOT ALBUS! Or

PERCY IS DUMBLEDORE’S DEEP-COVER AGENT IN THE MINISTRY! Or

NEVILLE WAS ‘THE CHOSEN ONE’ ALL ALONG, BUT DIES FROM WOUNDS INFLICTED BY BELLATRIX AND VOLDEMORT JUST SECONDS BEFORE HIS PARENTS REGAIN THEIR WITS!

But there’s only so long I can impose a blanket media ban in our house and shun public society. Hmm…

Can’t post – reading.

Tuesday, 17 July 2007

A Growing Family Business

Lonie™ Polony is pleased to announce the imminent release of a new product currently in development.

As with all Lonie™ Polony lunchmeats, our customers can be assured of the highest standards of quality, taste and visual appeal – and of course, our famous ‘100% rectum free’ guarantee applies.

Look for the latest addition to our Lonie™ Polony range in early January 2008!

Friday, 6 July 2007

An Impostor In My Midst

I’ve been back at my job at the Department of Meat Products for just over three months now, and I think the nightly dreams about work are finally abating. The intrusion of tedious real life into the realm of fantasy was quite tiring for a while – it was difficult to feel refreshed after a night spent contemplating the ingredients of various lunchmeats, and composing media releases assuring the public that, contrary to recent scaremongering, polonium-210 is not an ingredient of polony.

It seems, however, that the mingling of the mundane and the fanciful is not a unidirectional flow, because lately I’ve noticed odd things happening in my office, as if the lovechild of Gumby and Thursday Next has been strolling around in the Harry Potter books displacing random characters and scenarios in a fit of plasticine pique.

Snape has been wandering our corridors for some time, although I’m pretty sure she’s not an embittered sadist of uncertain allegiance, with a penchant for black and an inadequate hair-care regimen. Then there’s L’Estrange, but I think he’s probably a lot more reasonable and easy to work with than a slightly unhinged, murderous fugitive. We even have a Justin Finch-Fletchley, or at least that’s how I’ve secretly thought of the poor boy ever since I discovered his name was Justin Fossington-Bligh or some such mouthful.

What’s really discombobulating is that someone seems to have cast a rather powerful Confundus Charm over my colleagues and supervisors, such that they seem to think I’m possessed of attributes that make me want to look over both shoulders before asking, “Who, me?”

“You’re a real people-person!” one supervisor enthused at a compulsory feedback session, while I tried to keep from scoffing audibly at his kind but obviously ill-informed praise. I always thought being a people-person meant you had to like people, and enjoy dealing with them on a regular basis, rather than being a solitude-loving homebody who writes vicious personal diatribes on an anonymous blog.

“You’re a very eloquent speaker,” a co-worker assured me after I confessed my nerves over upcoming talks my boss seemed (erroneously) to think I was qualified to give. This time I could not keep the scornful disbelief off my face. Had she not heard my last disastrous work address, during which the whole auditorium laughed at something I intended to be perfectly serious? Had she not witnessed me stuttering awkwardly to strangers at job-related functions, trying and failing to appear erudite by using words such as ‘panacea’, only to have them pause momentarily before gently correcting me to ‘placebo’? Of course not, or she’d never have uttered such an untruth.

Then there was this statement which issued, unfacetious and apropos of nothing, from the mouth of my befuddled boss: “You’re always so cheerful in the mornings!”

It was on hearing this that I knew with certainty something was awry in the Department of Meat Products. Seemingly the only one left clear-headed and rational, it is therefore left to me to ask:

Who am I, and what have I done with the real Lonie Polony?