How To Scare The Pants Off Of Unsuspecting Store Clerks

   Me and Tertius went shopping to stock up on supplies for our alien invasion yesterday. Tons of fun running around Centurion with a checklist that included items like "Blue Porridge", "Decontamination Gas", and "Acid Guns".
   The blue porridge is to be fed to the POWs (party guests) once they have been kidnapped and processed, and consists of the cheapest, gloopiest looking instant oats we could find, plus blue food dye. The decontamination gas is a canister of some of the foulest smelling air-freshener I've ever had the misfortune to encounter in my life- in a blind smell-test (read: I toilet-spray bombed my dad in the face when he opened the door to my room), it was determined with one hundred percent accuracy that this shit smells like insect killer. We simply spray painted the can silver, which I'm going to go ahead and say is some meta-shit right there.
   Then there are the guns. It took some ferreting, but somehow we ended up finding exactly what we needed at Forum stationers. We knew we were looking for a bunch of el-cheapo water guns with exactly the right amount of bells and whistles so as to look sufficiently alien once spray painted with the above mentioned hard-working silver spray paint. Whilst looking for fingerprinting ink (long story), we happened across our arsenal right below the fine-tipped ink markers and just to the left of the cache of plastic crickets. I don't ask about these things. Huzzah-ing all the way, we took our stash of stuff to the counter and the poor girl whose bad fortune it was to be on shift (or whatever it is one does in a stationary shop) got an eyeful.
   "Wow. Uh. What's all this for?" she asked tentatively, her eyes darting from me to Tertius as though one of us was as liable to either eat her or break into choreographed song as we were to breath at any moment.
   "An alien invasion," I answered truthfully and matter-'o-factly. Just because the truth is strange does not require me to sugar coat it for her.
   "..."
   "2012 end of the year, and all that jazz," I added, to make sure she understood, of course.
   "This is for a party?" she asked with the most desperately hopeful tone of voice I've ever heard outside of places where 8 P.M. is called "happy hour" and comes with mandatory medication. "Or are you, like, those kinds of people, you know, who believe in all this stuff?"
   I waited maybe a little too long before I said, "Sure, a party," and gave Tertius a look that was really just tremendous and slightly inappropriate pleasure at the effectiveness of the ruse, but probably looked more worryingly like tremendous and slightly inappropriate pleasure at the effectiveness of the ruse. When we returned minutes later for a few genuinely stationarily related things we had forgotten, I wiggled my eyebrows at my Partner In Crime and whispered to him under my breath that we should speak to each other in Alien. He obliged beautifully, and the poor girl could not make eye contact with me at all while she swiped my card.
   When we left for the second time, I called back a teasing "Don't worry, no humans will be harmed!" over my shoulder as though I was going for the conspiratorial, you're-in-on-the-running-joke thing, but added a strained and badly conceived laugh- "Ha!! Ha!! Ha!!"- and I think I saw her dive for her phone and grab the other clerk by the sleeve the moment she thought we were out of eyeshot. I love the idea that somewhere out there is a Forum counter-jockey who cannot shake the niggling suspicion despite herself that two of her customers were exceptionally well disguised (and in my case, supremely well-fed) alien beings who intended to take over Centurion with neon-coloured water pistols.

    So we spray painted the guns, the decontamination gas canister ("Now In Enchanted Lily") and some of the front lawn silver. As crap of a job as I did of photographing it, I think you'll agree they look surprisingly intimidating, non? Nothing like a bit of theatre magic to make a piece of aaaabsolute shit just sparkle to life.

    I've been rewatching Angels in America. It is my absolute, 100%, most favouritest thing in the goddamn universe. It is so superbly well written, no two words in the entire play or miniseries can be taken apart and examined for its sheer mechanical genius, because there are no hinges on this thing. It's too clean; too simple to identify what makes any one of the sentences in this thing tick. I mean, observe:

   How simple. How gorgeously put. Five words, just perfectly suited to one another to express the sentiment in such a way as to give rise to question to how it could ever have been said otherwise.

   The angel breaks into Prior's apartment in the middle of the night with great pomp and splendour, making excellent use of $10 language and many hand waves of his "Shoo! You're scaring the SHIT out of me, get the FUCK out of my room!"s, and says that. Who the fuck says shit like that? Tony Kushner, that's who the fuck. I want a sex change so I can marry him. And also, Emma Thompson. I want to marry Emma Thompson.

   Single funniest thing ever. Apropos of absolutely fuckall, the angel proceeds to sort of mid-air fiery fuck the flamboyantly gay Prior with her eight (Belize mouths, "Eight?!") vaginas, and he responds more or less how I believe any rational man ought to.
   Damn damn damn I love this play. It's my happy place. Granted, I have a few happy places, but this really is the absolute top of my list of happy places. If I could meet Tony Kushner and get him to sign my copy of Angels, I think I could die happy. (*cough, cough, wink, nudge, etc.* Seriously, who's got some contacts for me? I can trade sexual favours and/or several dozen cats.)
   And as a side note, Thomas Newman just murders every other attempt anyone else has ever made to write music for the screen. His music really just is what Kushner's words are. They fit like me and sushi, or me and Benedict Cumberbatch, or me and some more sushi. Perfection.

   Allow me to bail, for I am weary and sore from some unknown flu and must still do a ton of work if this invasion is going to go ahead as planned. Also, my dad mentioned something about vacuuming the house, and that scares the shit out of me, so I must mentally prepare. I'll leave you with this bit of Crazy Cat Lady pictographia:

Subterfuge.

   That is one tasty chicken and mushroom sub, but I am not interested in the least, even though I will literally climb into your mouth for a piece of unbuttered bread if given half a chance. No no, I shall simply be over here, two centimetres to the right, quietly and respectfully grooming myself until-

   GHAaaaAAAaaGh! *Mad leap with open jowls and flailing tongue, falling short of sub by about 4 feet since the human eating said sub is wise to this ploy and pulls away in leisurely time.* I'm ok. I'm fine. Meant to do that. I was just testing your reflexes.

Alien Invasion Imminent. Prepare For War.

On December 21, 2012, The world will end.

Or so say the Mayans. Fucking constantly they’re at it: on message boards, forums, Anonymous (I’m only assuming here)- I even think I saw one of them berating Jay Leno on CNBC Africa the other day insisting that the “GODDAMN APOCALYPSE WAS NIGH and that also, incidentally, that Roland Emmerich movie was a douchebag.” The whole movie; a douchebag. {Editor’s note: that last line was mine, not the angry Mayan’s. That movie really was a douchebag- with the obvious exception of John Cusack, who ever manages to be the water to douchebaggery’s oil.}

So, what to do with this information? (Besides, I mean, finding and shooting the owner of the rogue DeLorean that’s allowing all these Mayans to pervade Anonymous and shout at Poor Jay Leno?)

We party hard, people, we party hard. Or at the very least, we party theme-edly. What all that ado, pomp and lily gilding amounts to is such:

I am helping my friend Tertius- yes, that Tertius- to plan his 29^th. I sometimes- for friends or for profit- stage these adventure game parties. One I did for myself was themed as a Secret Society Initiation Party, one for Tertius-Self-Same a few years back was a Shaun Of The Dead do. It’s massive fun, and it usually involves arduous tasks, slogging from location to location, and Amazing Racing your arse all the way up and down the suburb of your choosing.

I can’t say too much here, but I will say this- this shall be the one to eclipse them all. It will be massive, epic, and when the poor, un-forewarned shell-shocked guests are dredged up from wherever they have sought shelter from the onslaught, it shall be a movie. On DVD, with special features and everything.

Glorious. You might question what the funk this would have to do with aliens, but then I would counter with the assertion that the only reason you would ask such a thing is because you do not understand epicness. Hmm, spellcheck has some issues with that. Epicosity? Epicage? Well suck it, spellcheck, you don’t even seem to recognise “spellcheck”, so I shall bow to no automaton grammar nazi. Long story short: just trust me on the aliens. They’ll make sense in context. This is all going down on the 4^th of February, at which time I shall post pics and supplementary media, and perhaps even offer a DVD as a giveaway.

Just allow me to explain for a moment how it came to pass that I am now again in the bosom of friendship alongside Mr. T. I believe I mentioned, after the Devil’s Spawn incident, that he had apologised for the events as reported.  He had had something of an epiphany or somesuch (Stephen Fry circa Saturday Night Fry: “Piffle?”) and I really do not like very many people at all, so when the ones I do like come back to me, I have a hard time keeping my stone cold cool face on. Really, I am not a people person, I am a cat person, so if I like you, you must be goddamn Russel Brand level awesome, and that’s not easy to watch walking away. Well, I’m thinking it’s probably rather nice to watch Russell in particular walk away, but I digress.

So now T and I are, I’m glad to inform, back on the yellow brick road and all that sunshine and etceteraness, but I’m afraid Baartin Botze- the instigator of the little “Get Thee Snofferol Behind Me” incident- has yet to repent. In fact, he has been getting up to even more shenanigans. Your favourite Friend Of Dorothy and mine, ladies and gents, did me and my dad a pre-2012 prank call that was rather delicious.

Me and the padre were having a nice quiet dinner around the breakfast table, as you do, when the house phone rang. My dad answered, looked gruff for a second and in his patented Leon Phone Voice said, “I Think You Have The Wrong Number,” and hung up. I quizzically raised an eyebrow at him, and he said, “it was one of those people, you know, looking for sex. One of those sex people. Said they got my name and number in the Yellow Pages.” Now since my father has never been incorporated in any format whatsoever this was rather odd, but my dad being the single most straight forward person in the world simply goes into grumble mode and brushes it off.

I told him that I believed the call to have been more "prank" than "earnest quest to sell sex to a very tall man named Leon picked at random from the yellow pages", and told him if they called back  to let me talk. They did, and I simply played along to the voice of a young man doing a very bad camp gay Afrikaans accent (“I think he was Chinese!” my dad said), figuring I’m only wasting his airtime and getting half a laugh out of it in the process. This guy was clearly not a seasoned crank caller. His improv skills were nil, and the whole premise- that he was a gay hooker, (Luke, I think? Something biblical.) who had found my dad in the Yellow Pages and wanted to offer him some steamin’ hot man love at a discount- was thin at best. And changed constantly. The moment I first started to smell a rat was when the initial story changed from Yellow pages to “got your number from a friend of yours.” Aaah, I see. Which friend would this be? Morne, apparently. Morne is a friend of mine who recently also decided to throw all his toys out of the cot without explanation and then simply ignored all my attempts at communication, so my first thought, of course, was that it was the very man himself instigating the phone call.

We spoke a little longer, Luke trying to hold on to the now shattered premise that he was a stranger unto us, but failing so badly I just wanted to give him a hug. He let so many little things slip it was embarrassing, but as the call wore on, I had to admit the particular knowledge he had and was having a hard time keeping to himself was not born of Mr. Morne. No indeed, it was all starting to shade rather vigorously in Baartin Botze’s favour for this little adventure. The death knell was when Luke the drag queen phone hooker mentioned this very blog, which Morne never read, but M- I mean, Baartin, definitely had. He started asking things about Baartin, saying that they were old friends also, and “why do you hate {him} so much?” etc.

It was all starting to lose its appeal, so I decided to hang up. Luke threatened to simply keep calling and calling if I did that, so my dad (this having been on speaker phone) announced: “Well, We Know Where Baartin Lives Now, Don’t We? {Keys Jingle} We’ll Just Come Pay You A Visit.” Very quickly phone hooker Luke hangs up, and I’m laughing so hard at my dad’s ownage. (I think it’s the fitting term here.) But he looks at me like I've just grown a second head and says, “Why are you laughing? Get out of your PJ’s and put on some clothes. We’re going.”

Hot damn, you don’t need to tell me twice.

As it turns out, we were fucking lying, and we only knew the street he lives on, but this was the straw that broke my 6’10” father’s back. It was an almighty crack, let me tell you. He had just had enough of all of the bull. shit. that we had put up with from Maart-Baartin in the last few years, and the fact that the little shit just can not leave things alone and go on with his life. So we went Baartin Hunting.

We knew the street, and since frequents to the same Spar we do, we knew his car. That was all my dad needed. He wanted a word with the little man, and he was willing to drive the whole suburb flat to get it. We drove up and down that street, but that car was nowhere. Now, it wasn’t his voice on the phone, he had someone calling for him, so I guess he could have been anywhere. I, however, choose to believe that he ran and hid, just hoping Goliath would calm the fuck down and go home eventually, his sphincter tightening ever more each time he saw us drive past from his darkened living room window. It gives me great joy and pleasure, and I’m not hurting anyone, OK?

And just as a little PS, he appears to have started a blog. It’s a blog where he apparently posts little sermons, the first of which (yes of course I read it, I was dearly hoping to be told off in it) advises you cover fucking everything in olive oil and tacks on a little bit at the end where he decries not only different cultures’ mythologies to be wrong, wrong, wrong, but also dreamcatchers, a couple of actual random hieroglyphs in addition to the listed Egyptian gods, and porn. Now I don’t know about you, but I am deeply devoted to my love of pornography and the carpal tunnel that comes with it. I would nigh give up my right to dubious up skirt shots of Alyssa Milano on horribly spammy triple x websites for love nor money! 

He has named it after himself; it’s essentially Baartin Botze Ministry and it’s hosted at blogspot. I shan’t link to it, as that would be unfair on a few different levels, but I’ve provided more than enough information for the truly curious to find it.

  Just please, if you do read it, picture him thusly in your mind when you do:

Side note of great import:

As I sit here writing this, I am munching away on some popcorn I made and/or burnt on the stove. Stove-Popcorn. Nomnomnom. Tesla, baby cat the younger, snow beast and all-round fuzzball, is sitting on the floor next to me, staring up at me with those big Frank Sinatra eyes like she’s begging me to hand her something out of this bowl that will magically turn out to be raw steak. I hand her a piece of popcorn, just to see how she’ll take to it, and lo and behold!

 

Freak!Cat. The flash did something to her eyes in that picture, she looks fucking demented. Bat outta hell for some Stove-Popcorn.

Nomnomnom.

And then, as you’ll be dying to know, I must promptly inform you as to how I’ve been filling up the time left by the absence of Merlin in my life. All the pretty that Colin Morgan and Bradley James took with them until such time as the BBC decides to grace us with season 5 needs to be supplemented, and whilst I haven chosen substitute pretty that rivals both fiercely and might even almost outweigh the duo, I’ve chosen it in a container that goes away after merely three episodes. Two of those episodes are already in the past. But look, cheekbones!

 Sigh. Benedict Cumberbatch, plus some Martin Freeman for good measure, but mainly Benedict Cumberbatch. His Sherlock > Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock, and that is saying something. 

I'll leave you with some wise words from the man himself, when challenged that he looks taller in his photographs:

"I take the precaution of a good coat and a short friend."