**************************************************************************** ### # # ### ##### ## # # # ## ## # # ### ##### ## ### ### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #### ### # # # # # # # # # ## # #### ### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ### # ## # # # ## ## ## ### # # # # # ### ____________________________________________________________________________ # # ### #### # # #### # # ### #### ##### # # ##### #### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #### ### ### ##### # # #### ##### # # ##### ### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ### ### # # # # #### # # ### # # # ##### ##### #### *****NUMBERS 176 TO 180***********BY DANIEL BOWEN (tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu)***** "Irremediable Toxic Custard" ******* ***** ** ** ******** ** ** ** * ** ** ** ** ** *** ** ***** ** ****** **** **** ** TOXIC CUSTARD WORKSHOP FILES #176 - December 5th, 1993 TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA - VOLUME 9 ICE What water becomes if you freeze it. (See "gas", "Celsius") The main uses of ice are to cool down drinks with, place down people's backs, and economical housing for Eskimos. INCOMPETENCE A politer word for stupidity. If you are accused of incompetence, just remember, it is far better to be incompetent than incontinent (see below). INCONTINENCE Now let's make it clear. Incontinence is not something to be laughed at. It is a very serious and discomforting condition. It can't be easy walking around with large amounts of urine wanting to leap into the outside world at every step. Incontinence can be fatal, too - yes, people have drowned. The most serious outbreak of incontinence occurred at the Fourth Annual International Incontinence Conference, which the organisers had unfortunately booked into an underground concrete lined conference centre with below average drainage facilities. After the stairs collapsed, all the delegates remaining in the building went to a pissy grave. INHERITANCE If you are expecting a large inheritance when your grandparents snuff it, have you considered investing it in the Custard Unit Trust? The Custard Unit Trust has the full endorsement of the author of Toxic Custard, and has a guaranteed return of 20%(*). Custard Unit Trust has many and varied investments, but specialises in putting money into many of the best alcoholic beverage corporations and gambling establishments of this country. For a copy of the prospectus entitled "Throw Your Money Our Way", lodged with the Consumer Affairs Department in August 1993, ring Freecall 1800-123456. (*) This means that you are guaranteed to get 20% of your investment back. INJECTION Medical procedure especially developed to scare the shit out of the patient, and give the doctor a feeling of power. "Just sit very still, Mr Jones, while I stick this bloody great needle in you. Now, is that new, or did I use it on that drug addict... No no, fairly sure it's a new one. Just sit still Mr Jones. You may feel unbearable pain as the spike rips through your skin. If you wish to scream so the patients in the waiting room can hear you, please do so." INSECTICIDE Insecticide is a wondrous substance used to kill poor little innocent insects, whose only fault is that they like crapping in your food, nibbling on your skin, and buzzing around. But why use conventional insecticide when you can use DDT?! From a real advert for DDT, circa 1947: "To keep your dog free of fleas and protected from ticks, dust him once a month with Taylor's Number 13 DDT Powder. Happy dog - he can't bring fleas into the house anymore!" ...because he's outside dying on the lawn, no doubt. Rover! Get up! And put your fur back on! INSTRUCTIONS 1. Take your new Toxic Custard out of the box, and check that all the parts are present. (Main heading, body, dividing hyphens, back-issues plug, signature) 2. Place the dividing hyphens at suitable places within the body, taking care to ensure that topics are kept apart. 3. Insert the main heading above the body. 4. Append the back-issues plug and signature in that order, below the body. Slot disclaimer A into signature B. PROBLEM SOLVING If you have problems reading your Toxic Custard, before calling for service, please ensure that you are not wasting everybody's time and generally being an ignorant consumer by making sure that: - all jokes contain sufficient puns - your Toxic Custard is not overrun by innuendo - no obsolete sideways messages have made their way into the text - the signature includes a (probably useless) copyright message INTERDIGIT Another one of those words that no-one of any importance ever uses. Probably devised by the same guy who thought up "recalcitrant". In fact, the sort of word that is more sensibly expressed using one or more other words that people can actually understand. ISM Any distinctive doctrine, theory or practice. ISMISM Belief in any distinctive doctrine, theory or practice. Ismism was started up in the mid-1980s by a splinter group from "Atheists For Christ". Ismism meetings gained quick popularity, and Ismism leader Ralph Snider travelled the world promoting his paper "Why I Argue A Lot". The followers of Ismism are generally agreed to be very confused people. I-SPY Simple spelling game which can get a little boring if played consistently for more than four hours at a time. So boring, in fact, that you may feel the necessity to play not "I-Spy", but "I-Hit", a game which runs more or less like this-: PERSON 1: "I hit with my little fist, something beginning with H" PERSON 2: "Erm.. head?" PERSON 1: "Correct!" PERSON 2: "*Ouch!*" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - We of The Workers' United Revolutionary Party (TWURP) hereby call for your vote in the upcoming elections, whenever the hell they may be. TWURP freely advocate and support - organised over-staffing of key jobs - the reduction and eventual abolishment of actual work in jobs - compulsory "Purdey's Theory of Productivity-Free Economics" lectures Oh dear. I do beg your pardon; I came all over right-wing then. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ TCWF back-issues. Now. Email tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Copyright (c) 1993 Daniel Bowen -- Daniel Bowen, NTC Systems------| Any opinions expressed here were Telecom Australia, Melbourne---| merely told to me by some guy in the dbowen@vcomtelc.telecom.com.au-| street, and are not necessarily TCWF stuff: tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu| those of Telecom Australia. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Jaded Toxic Custard" _ ___ .. ___ ___ T |_ \ / |__ | / / \/\/ | | | | 13th of de TCWF stuff: tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu| "The opinions expressed here blah blah" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Moxic Mustard Morkshop Miles" T O X I C C U S__T A__R D Monday, 3rd January 1994 | |__| | | W by Daniel Bowen | |__| |__| S E L I F P O H S K R O TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA - VOLUME 13 MACADAMIA I'd like to call upon the readers of TCWF to support the Freedom For Macadamia campaign. MADNESS A condition that can drive people to buy albums by a Minogue in the mistaken belief that they contain any display of talent. MALAYSIA Shhh! Nobody say "recalcitrant"! Seriously though, we shouldn't insult the Malaysians. Yes, I know it's very easy to do. But we shouldn't. Because we should be respectful, we should be honourable, we should be gracious at all times, and because they're bigger than us and we would be in very deep shit if they decided to invade. MALOUF, DAVID (1934-) Australian novelist, academic, and someone who my father bores me shitless by talking about all the time. "You've got cold you say? Well you know, Malouf said that influenza is like a bond between man and the unquestionable questions of existence..." What bollocks. [See Meaning] MAN o /|\ / \ MANIAC There are many people in our everyday society who, had they been born a few hundred years ago in an area with a feudal system of administration, would have fulfilled their inner wishes to be Genghis Kahn. You know the type of people - the ones who we instead see pushing vainly forward on the locked entrance doors to the station platform even though the train's not there. "Fuck it! Let me through - I'll walk to Sydney. It's only fuckin' 600 miles!" MARINA One of those places where lots of people in boats sail around, and little kids hang their fishing rods over the edge in the belief that they're going to catch a whopper which will feed their family that night. And where you can walk to the end of the pier and buy a Coke for $3. MARK, MARKY I don't know what it is about these people who not only have first and surnames starting with the same letters, but also have the nerve to get famous with those names. I guess their parents were all alliteration enthusiasts. The thing about people who are famous is, their names always *sound* famous too. Because they are. I'm now uncertain where this train of thought is heading. In fact, I think I'd be correct in saying that this train of thought seems to have come off the rails, is hurtling over a cliff and will shortly explode into flames. We apologise for any inconvenience. MATADOR Spaniard who kills bulls. Somewhere, probably in Bull Heaven, there's a place where Spaniards get mercilessly taunted, then knifed by a bull to the cheering of hundreds of other bulls. MATHS And now for a quick mathematics lesson. Firstly, back to the basics. If you have five Peter Andre CDs, and you smash two against the wall, burn another, stomp on one, and frisbee one more out of the window, how many do you have left? None. Which is absolutely the correct number to have. MEGABOGUE (1987-) Megabogue's music has been described as "anal sadistic", "creative lionism", and "a load of shit" by various critics of differing intellectual standards over the years. The crux of their music is a complete lack of talent or effort put into their recordings. This lack of any concern or care in their work has brought many classically bad and unpopular works into the public eye, and generally straight out of the public mouth and into the nearest bucket. They have not been so much thrust into the limelight as vomited into the taupelight. To this criticism, the members of Megabogue would probably argue their case thus: "Fuck off!" MEMOIR A book written by someone who has fallen out of the limelight and is struggling to get back in. Generally hardback and costs at least $25. Generally a work of fiction by the author, claiming how great he/she was/is. The best memoirs are written sufficiently late that there's no-one else still alive to refute what the author says. MEANING When you say you're going to rip both my testicles from my groin and stuff them down my throat... what do you really mean by the word "groin"? MIDDLE The section before the end, and after the beginning. The middle can be defined as that dull bit when you've just got used to something, and you're unaware that its going to end soonish. MOUSE Computer input device, named by some scientists at Xerox when they were pissed out of their brains. They also labelled the computer's display screen a Vole, but were less successful in spreading of this term. MOUNTAIN Something which men seem to delight in being able to climb just so they can stick little flags in it at the top to show that they've climbed it, and can then apply for Fame from the Warhol Institute For Handing Out Fame. Generally a waste of time. And I can prove it. Name five mountaineers. See? MUSIC A terribly, terribly subjective thing. [Don't see Megabogue] Classicists argue that the best music moves transparently into your brain, and makes you fall asleep without even realising it(*). Which is why any piece of music whose title even mentions the words "Symphony" or "Canon" sends people to sleep. (*) Generally they only realise it when they discover themselves walking down the street naked, or inexplicably jumping from a cliff into an alligator's mouth. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TOXIC CUSTARD GOES TO SYDNEY The first thing you notice about Sydney is how all the tourist attractions are within about a ten minute walk of one another. And that with a bit of careful aiming, you can get them all into one photo. The Sydney Opera House looks from a distance like giant sails against the sky, but up close it looks even more impressive. Makes you wonder why they went to that amount of trouble just for opera. I hope they use it for something more sensible sometimes. The Harbour Bridge is pretty neat too. It's so neat you can use up a whole roll of film just trying to photograph it from all the different angles, and making sure that you get the whole of it in the picture. In fact it's so big that they've managed to squeeze a whole museum into one of the pylon thingies. Wherein you can enjoy a quite interesting documentary about how the bridge was built, followed by a very boring and over-detailed documentary about how the new Harbour Tunnel was built. *Yawn*. Sorry guys, the Harbour Tunnel is *not* an attraction. For Chrissake, you can't even see it! The Rocks area is so crawling with tourists that you can walk around and try and see how many people's home movies you can get into in ten minutes. You can spend the same amount of time searching for a simple kiosk that will sell you a simple drink, before giving up and moving on to Circular Quay. At Circular Quay, you can try to figure out the ticket machines, then take a ride on a ferry to Darling Harbour, which was built to... ummm... actually, I'm not sure, but I'm sure its better than whatever it replaced. There you can take a ride on a monorail, which mostly involves dredging up $2.50 of change from your pocket to put into a machine, only to get back another (special) coin, which you when have to put straight into another machine. I think I'm missing something. But the best thing about Sydney for me was seeing that Kings Cross really is a dump, even in daytime. A fine rival for Fitzroy Street here in Melbourne. I still can't figure out why both of them are tourist attractions. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So, you've missed out on the last four years of Toxic Custard, and you're gullible enough to want to know what you missed? Then email tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu and ask about TCWF back-issues. Please note that the previous entries for the Custarpedia are NOT yet available, but will be archived into one big file in a few weeks. (Probably when we get to Z!) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Copyright (c) 1994 Daniel Bowen -- Daniel Bowen, NTC Systems------| Telecom Australia is not responsible for the Telecom Australia, Melbourne---| opinions expressed here by me, nor for any dbowen@vcomtelc.telecom.com.au-| other opinions that I might express from TCWF stuff: tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu| time to time. Just try not to worry about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ the Toxic Custard Workshop Files by Daniel Bowen, Melbourne, Australia Copyright (c) 1993, 1994 Daniel Bowen. May be freely distributed without profit provided this notice remains intact. For subscription information, contact tcwf@gnu.ai.mit.edu