It Came From the Inbox...

"I am looking for a severed head for a scene and would be grateful to anyone who might have one or know where I could get one."

Egads, thought I. You'll be making quite a scene all right, waving a severed head. For this I stopped work to check my e-mail?

Weirdly enough, I was able to respond to this, as I have a friend in South Leitrim who once drove her car through the set of an amateur horror movie being filmed by her neighbours. “Well, would YOU stop the car for a man waving a severed limb?” she asked me.

CUT!

I suppose it's not so outlandish, using the bogs of South Leitrim as a gloomy-enough landscape on which to loose your zombies. If you like zombies and things Southern (if not Leitrim), you'll be glad that novelist Charles Gramlich is back home from Arkansas, as I learned reading the latest Razored Zen post, which was also in my inbox this morning.

More Southern-ness awaited me, in the form of Dover Publishing sending me free samples from their George W Bush Paper Dolls: yeeeHAA!. I went to Amazon and put it on my wish list (soon to be displayed in my right sidebar, no hints there...) mainly to remove yesterday's headlines from my thoughts.

Those headlines, you see, were also in the inbox: Bush condemns Russian invasion of Georgia which I found hilarious given the mideast situation, until I read the brief article which was dry as a bone. Oh well...perhaps the journalist's skillfully applied irony had been editorially removed on Orders-From-Somewhere, who knew? Because it MUST have been there to begin with. Who could help it?

What a world.

Fortunately, as I continued through the inbox I found more from Dover, with the reassuring news that the Obama Paper Doll is leading the McCain paper doll in popularity: no surprise there, to look at poor McCain Doll: he's hideously life-like in a way the original only tries to be.



The Dover e-mails aren't spam, by the way: I signed up for the Presidential Paper Dolls mailing list. Who could help it? And who could resist the temptation to buy the Unlikeables, if only for the fleeting pleasure of dressing them in their wives' inaugural-ball gowns? You can give them ink-pen tattoos too, of the most unflattering kind; or draw devil goatees and/or nerd glasses on them. All that fun for 5.99, you can't beat it.

Unless of course you've got giant inflatable dog poo to play with, and it runs amok in a Swiss town and breaks windows in a nearby school. The link to that news story was also in the inbox, from a member of Irish Mensa. See what your local geniuses get up to in their spare time?

I found more geniuses (genii?) in the next message, where I read that Roscommon is the Irish county to live in if you want to live longest. Some news articles point out that 'oddly enough', neighbouring county Leitrim has a dismal life expectancy for males as opposed to their neighbours. My, that IS a puzzle isn't it? And I'm sure that HAVING NO A&E IN THE WHOLE FREAKING COUNTY has nothing whatsoever to do with that.

Speaking of Irish 'health' matters, IrishHealth.com is in my inbox too, telling me that the number one killer of men in Ireland is heart disease — well, yeah, when you're facing an hour-plus drive to the 'nearest' hospital.

Then in a growly mood, I skipped past the Viagra and bigger-body-parts offers, and found something to cheer me up: I've won my Boner-Bob-and-Betty-Boobs camping set on eBay, so I can offend fellow campers far and wide on the next trip (thus keeping them away) AND embarass the kiddies in one go. It's a two-fer, WOO hoo!

And for the kiddies, I've got my eye on this one: the Jesus Nightlight, who magically opens and closes his eyes (THAT ought to keep 'em quiet at bedtime...) I can't decide whether this Jesus looks more like a human care bear, or Charlton Heston after a botched sex change. Hmmmm... I don't know, but somehow I like it.

All of it was nicely rounded off by my weekly read of This is True, in which a pizza clerk is robbed in a hold-up by her own father, police officers are told to 'consider possible allergies and panic attacks' in criminals before sending in the canines, a man calls the police to report a carjacking of the truck he'd stolen from someone else, and a man dressed in a beaver suit goes shopping for heroin in LA. “Truth is stranger than fiction,” explains the editor, “because fiction has to make sense.”

And people ask me why I live a million miles from anywhere. The outside world...it scares me.

(And I still haven't told you about the Inflatable Bandstand, an "Artist Intervention", coming to County Leitrim for ONE HOUR ONLY today...)