Ponder well, my friend

and a steak is just my brother-in-law butchered and pan-seared. i've been thru every permutation and there's just no way around it -- a smile really *IS* a frown upside down. i've tried rotating slowly, i've tried fast, i've even tried it in the dark (flashing a strobe for a quick peek), and the smile IS ALWAYS THERE. but the important thing to remember is that not everything upside down is hanging from a meathook.

which puts me in mind of the poodles. everywhere you turn somebody is running a "buy one, get a free poodle" promotion. have a boil lanced, get a poodle. plant gran in the light teak with sateen(tm) liner, get a poodle. buy a poodle, get a poodle. what the deuce to do with all the poodles.

i know, of course, but who dares speak the truth?

Poodles are yesterday. Have you ever seen a miniature Dobermann? Never grow bigger than a Jack Russell. Imagine! Imagine being agressed by something you can just kick across the room like a four-legged yelping cushion! Apparently they only cost £300. That's a price worth paying for a living version of some probably uninvented 1970s foot-based, dog-shaped toy that your granny might have knitted you. It would have caught on, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids. And Atari.

I’m sorry to say my granny did knit it for me, with horrifying consequences. These days I dare not leave the house without wearing a top-to-toe tarpaulin sheath with three eyeholes. Not that you care, you capering, painted niminy-piminy.*

* On referring to my Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1969 edition), I find ‘niminy-piminy’ is an adjective. All I can say is, it serves you bloody well right. We haven’t forgotten how you sabotaged the ‘Glories of Lancashire’ three-day steam engine rally and traditional fayre by inviting Marilyn Manson to open it. One bite of a lard-and-marzipan butty and he was never the same Methodist again.

On another topic, has anyone ever molested a manciple, or is that unexplored territory?

It's an old cornish recipe, as it happens. YOU WILL NEED
14 oz clumpie
1 quantity
6 rolls Porthcothan batter
A brace of manciples
48 gallons bechamel sauce

Line a good sized trawler with the batter (leaving one roll for the top!). Thinly smear the manciples with the clumpie whilst sneering and kick them into the trawler. Top with the quantity, set the whole lot on fire and push it into the sea off Penkenna cliffs. Drink the Bechamel sauce whilst singing folk songs of indeterminate origin interspersed with loud bouts of swearing.

DAMN!

We can't get Bechamel sauce here in Erewhon!

Damned sanctions!