How to Make Money #1 of 10

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So then.

Given my name (Bluey) and the colour of my skin (#336699) anyone could easily assume I was making some kind of political statement. Long-time readers, back from when I was a mere agent of mischief confined to 280 pixel by 280 pixel panels, will no doubt remember that I enjoyed ripping the piss out of the neo-conservatives while they hung onto the reins of power with all the tenacity of a <INSERT STEREOTYPE HERE> in <INSERT FAVOURED HOBBY OF AFOREMENTIONED STEREOTYPE HERE> season. So naturally, seeing said reins of power snatched away from them was something I wanted to see, right? Right?

Well, this mood of jubilation may be all well and good, but you'll forgive me for not joining in the celebrations. For the moment, the power-mongering, the continual invocations of faith as justification for human rights abuses, the pointless sabre-rattling and determination to alienate America from the rest of the planet is in abeyance for a little while at least. Even the French are saying on TV how much they like you, for fuck's sake.

I'm out of a job now. You bastards. Never consider my feelings, do you? Here I am, I've blown I don't know how much money on the John McCain Wheel-o-Rage™ and the Sarah Palin Magic Eight-Ball (guaranteed useless and backward opinions on any situation) and now they're just going to gather dust along with the Michael Dukakis Charisma Container (viewable only through an electron microscope), the Howard Dean Shriek-box (200dB, wear supplied ear plugs before using) and the 10,000 John Kerry Prosthetic Chins I bulk-ordered.

Shit.

Hallowe'en Costumes #2

Today's costume is for those of you who still cling to your religion like a security blanket, and want to reclaim Hallowe'en from the grubby chocolate-stained fingers of self-indulgent children.

Devout Reclaimer of Religious Holidays

You will need:

• Sackcloth
• Ashes
• An absence of food in your belly.
• The Holy Bible and other texts, treatises and tracts.

Begin a week before Hallowe'en. Focus your mind on All Saint's Day: the day after Hallowe'en. Consult your treatises and tracts for references to all the saints commonly venerated by every Christian denomination, just to be on the safe side. You don't want to be caught following the example of St. Tadger only to find that your denomination considers his canonisation to be the heretical action of an anti-pope, one no more fit to lead a church than an agnostic milquetoast. Compile a list of these saints, a brief overview of their good works and in particular the manner in which they were martyred. With the profoundest misery in your heart, retreat to your hovel and begin fasting, whiling away the empty hours by meditating on the violent and painful manners of their demises. Think of St. Andrew and St. Peter, nailed to their respective crosses, hanging there as they waited for our Lord to end their pain and bear them away to Heaven.

Not many will be sharing this experience with you, but do not allow a glimmer of pride to burn within your breast; crave only that icy pang of loneliness and misery. The absence of food in your belly should come in handy here, giving you the right idea. If you feel insufficiently wretched by this stage, seek to heighten your physical discomfort. Daub your face with ashes and don your sackcloth. Do not waste time on tailoring; simply tear holes in the jute sack for your arms and head. That will suffice.

It is highly likely that at some point you will find yourself growing bored with your meditations on the nature of martyrdom and the mortification of your flesh. This is only natural. It is of course entirely shameful as well, so at the first sign of boredom you may wish to scourge yourself. If you have no scourge set aside for the purpose, simply immerse your hands in scalding water and in your agony take up your Bible and read through Leviticus, all the while craving forgiveness from your Creator. That'll teach you.

The day before Hallowe'en, you may wish to make some preparations, anticipating as you are the arrival of demanding, sugar-addicted sprogs. Do not disappoint them! Decorate your house according to your new style by removing all pictures, all sculptures, all caricatures and anything else that might distract the eye from the simple purity of your house. As a rule of thumb, if it is gaily coloured, then it should be hidden away, smudged with ashes, or else destroyed. After an hour of this you may feel a kind of mania overtake you: imagine yourself raving under your breath, speaking in tongues and tearing the curtains from your windows and burning them in the rusted and pitted old iron fireplace. This is nothing at all to be ashamed of: the Lord has gifted you with a state of ecstasy.

But wait! What of the children themselves? Here they come now, dressed as demons and witches and the foul undead! Should they be turned from your hovel with naught but a clip round the ear to warm them on these bitterly cold nights? Never! You are on a mission. You must win their souls, sparing them from damnation. You have a long struggle ahead of you, and the role you play is but a small one, but do not become disheartened.

"Trick or treat!" they will demand; small gifts and sweetmeats in exchange for a freedom from dog's excrement through your letterbox. "Trick or treat!" You will need to prepare some treats for them. Something to remind them of their humility, and to allow you and all right-thinking people to rally against the rampant commercialism of this festival. But how should we diminish the influence of Mammon on this eve of All Hallow's Day?

The answer, my friends, is simple: gruel. Prepare the slops in the manner prescribed by the inestimable Mr Key, and when the tinies come bounding up to your door, proffering bags, baskets and other receptacles for you to fill, do so with three generous ladles of gruel. You will feel a thrill of warmth in your heart as the insipid grins fade from their grimy faces. But wait! your good deed is not yet finished! Offer a brief prayer for each of them to turn from the path of sin. This done, you may close the door with a hearty slam. You have done your part. Now they must do theirs.

Costumes for Hallowe'en

The end of October is fast approaching, boys and girls; no doubt some of you have already started carving faces into any variety of large, seedy fruit; the shops are out of pumpkins and you've worked your way down through marrows, cucumbers and God help you, you're even trying to cut a spooky face into the last tomato in the fridge. The one that's right at the back of the fridge and has patches of white mould on it.

Some of you are even less well prepared, and haven't got any costumes sorted out yet. Well, don't worry. Uncle Bluey to the rescue! I'm bursting with ideas, me. You want to embrace the world of horror for one night a year? Just follow these directions.

Costume #1: Nickolaus Pacione

Hallowe'en means horror, and what could be more horrific than a horror writer? Well, I really don't know. I couldn't find a horror writer for you to emulate, though, so instead you can try dressing as Nickypoo. You will need:

• A hooded sweatshirt, commonly described as a 'hoodie'.
• Sweatpants.
• A baseball cap.
• A pair of white sneakers.
• A bottle of correcting fluid: Tipp-Ex, White-Out, anything you like.
• Four pounds of dough.
• A pot of pale grey poster paint.
• One pound of hair, harvested from random locations.
• A pot of glue.
• A pint of urine.
• A pint of sweat.
• A balloon of helium.
• An old woman.

Begin by taking the hoodie and sweat pants, drenching them in the urine and leaving them out to dry. If possible, find a location frequented by smokers: the heavier and more frequent their nicotinal indulgences, the better. Abandoning the clothes at the back door of an office building is a good idea. The front door of a bar is even better as someone will probably empty their guts over said rags, or top up the quantities of urine in which it has been soaked.

Once the clothes are dry, or are merely damp and cloying as opposed to thoroughly soaked and dripping, take the bottle of correcting fluid and daub designs onto the legs of the sweatpants and the front of the hoodie. Feel free to express yourself as much as you like, but if you are short of ideas, try the following:

• A quote from Spectral Exile or Insect. Make sure to quote a whole paragraph. If you find you have to write small, don't be too concerned. He wasn't, so why should you be?
• The address of one of his fifteen million blogs or profiles. Make sure the address is really long so people know just how important it is.

While you're waiting for the correcting fluid to dry, you can start to attend to other details. Take a handful of dough and with cack-handed earnestness apply it to your face. Pay particular attention to the cheeks, under the chin, and the nose. After five minutes' sculpting you should have something that resembles horror's self-proclaimed bad boy. Repeat this step of the process as many times as you consider necessary.

Take the remaining dough. Stuff a small ball of it into each of your cheeks. Resist the urge to chew and swallow. What you're doing here is rather like Marlon Brando's use of dentist's cotton balls in The Godfather. The last bits of the dough can be applied to your chest and stomach to provide extra bulkiness.

Your face should now look sufficiently doughy, but you have yet to attain the unhealthy pallor as worn by everyone's favourite dark conservative. That's where the pale grey poster paint comes in. Apply generously to all bedoughed areas. If you feel the shade of paint you have chosen does not adequately reflect his skin tone, try mixing with a dab of orange or rubbing quantities of grime into the paint. A drop of glue can help you add the right level of greasy shininess. Experiment and have fun with the result.

You're nearly there now! Persevere and you'll have the whole thing down. Take your handfuls of hair. It doesn't matter where you got them: cut from the tresses of your own dear sister; your father's own short and curlies, or even scrapings from the backs of a herd of pigs. They'll all come in handy. Paint an oval of glue over your chin and upper lip and affix the hair wherever it'll fit. Before long you'll have the famous Pacione bloatee.

Give the glue time to take. Don your rancid and feculent garb, crowning yourself with your baseball cap – no gentleman should go out without his chapeau. Dab quantities of the sweat under your arms and between your legs. Allow a dribble of the secretion to slither horribly down your back and into the crack of your arse. Help yourself to a hearty swig from whatever's left in the bottle.

Before you open the door and go out into that bitterly cold late-autumn night, make sure that you have your balloon of helium and your old woman. These two pieces of kit are all that stand between your disguise and complete failure. Before speaking, take a feeble suck from the balloon so the timbre of your voice is modulated. This, combined with the putrid dough in your cheeks should ensure you are sufficiently mush-mouthed to make your impression convincing. You can hide behind the old woman if you fear that anyone may try to give you your well-earned beating.

Follow these instructions to the letter and you will be nothing less than convincing. More costume ideas later!

Tractor.

"You know what you need, Bluey?" that fat bastard at slacknhash.net asked me. He's fond of rhetorical questions like that 'cause he thinks it makes him sound clever. "What you need, old son, is a space of your own. Your own blog, out there in the blogosphere, with other blogs from bloggers who blog about bloggy things with blogs on. Then we can syndicate your RSS feed onto the home page, it'll all be very clever and give me a chance to do stuff I've not done, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…"

He may have been trying to make some kind of point about something, but that was the time I switched off. He's a nice guy, but – no, that doesn't work. He's an okay sort of person – that doesn't work either! I'm not having much luck with this, am I? One last try: there are times when his company might occasionally be tolerable, but despite that his head has a tendency to relocate itself up his arse. I know what he really had in mind, though. I know when I'm not wanted.

It's like when you're a kid and there's a party to which you've invited your classmates and then you get round to the kid that smells of Dettol. The one whose parents aren't all that well-off and give him a stupid haircut. The one who's got special needs, and his special need is to spend every lunchbreak from the ages of eleven to eighteen impersonating a tractor. And you can't tell him he's not invited, as that's a bit mean. He can't help it, can he? So you tell him he's been so good that he can have a party all of his own, at his house, in his room. And he seems happy with that.

I've just received the same treatment, haven't I? Here I am, thirtysomething (probably) and I smell of Dettol. And I've been so clever, so funny, so incisive, that I get to have a blog all of my own.

brum brum brum brum brum brum beep beep beep beep brmrmrmrmrmrmmmmm...

Comics

Today I'd like to address the issue of comics. Long-time visitors to the site will be aware that the humans who claim to run this place have used it as a test-bed for a number of comic strips that have had varying lifespans. Hell, even I was one of them, but they couldn't keep me trapped in their panel borders. Oh no. By the mystical power of my third nipple I escaped, and now they'll be sorry, moo hoo ha ha.

You know, some might say that after starting and abandoning half a dozen strips, and not posting any for months, that Phil and Tab ought to just write the whole thing off as a bad job and try something else, but you know how it is, chums and pals: they just won't take my advice.

Still, while we wait for them to revive Dung Eon for the umpteenth time, here are a few comic strip ideas that never made it as far as the drawing board.

The Three-Legged Ballerina

Fourteen-year-old Margie Fountain has dreams of being a prima ballerina, but her dreams are confounded by her unfortunate physical deformity: a great big hairy supernumerary leg sprouting from her stomach. Readers will be inspired by her bravery in the face of withering criticism from Miss Scabbymouth, her evil ballet instructor.

Boy Meets Malodorous Retarded Man-Child

Bobby Greening-Wood is seventeen and out of the closet. Forced by homophobic teachers to drop out of high school, he is forced to make a living on the mean, mean streets. Looking for work and love in all the wrong places, you'll be touched by his struggles and his attempts to get a commitment from Nickolaus, his on-again, off-again mentally impaired boyfriend. Will Bobby get that GED, that job, that apartment, that malodorous retarded man-child? Will Nick ever realise his dreams of becoming a horror writer and succeed in appearing to be straight without upsetting the love of his life? You won't find out here.

Head Cold

The adventures of Walt Disney's cryonically-frozen head. Cold! More cold! Ice! Liquid nitrogen! Ice crystals! Tissue damage! Even more ice crystals! All this and less as each strip details the preservation of the cartoon maker's severed head in the unlikely event of medical science ever coming up with a cure for lung cancer, death and subsequent decapitation and freezing.

Doctor Who: the Between Monsters Years

The Daleks have yet to resurface. The Cybermen have been quiet. Ditto for the Sontarans. The Master hasn't been heard from since that business with the assassination of the Lord President of Gallifrey. The Key to Time caper has been wound up, and the Randomiser you fitted to the TARDIS never takes you anywhere fun. Romana's made it quite clear that she's not interested in taking things further, and you can't be arsed to wait for her to regenerate and change her mind. How's a Time Lord supposed to kill time? Join the Fourth Doctor as he tries and rejects a series of increasingly bizarre hobbies before, faced with 750 years' worth of pent-up sexual tension, finally fitting K-9 with a sailor's friend. Affirmative, Master!

Take whatever comfort you can from the fact that my minions have some kind of rudimentary quality control going, because it could have been far, far worse…

Originally posted to slacknhash.net on August 31, 2008

God is on your side – for the right price.

Another lengthy absence, but bear with me, chums and pals: I have a very good reason for it. (I know, I know, you've heard that one before.) You see, during my holiday I found God. In fact, I found lots of gods. The one true god; secret and ineffable demiurges; strange nameless deities who are only knowable as effigies of wood and stone; and dozens of pantheons whose powers extend over the mortal sphere and the implacable elemental forces. And having found them, I want to share them with you.

Today marks the grand opening of Bluey's Imprecatory Prayer Service. Have you ever wondered what it'd be like to have God on your side? Well, wonder no more, boys and girls! No longer will you have to attend services, offer sacrifices, or even say your prayers. What I offer is the single greatest leap forward in labour-saving divine intervention technology since… since… well, since ever.

Oh yes indeedy do! For a modest fee, we here at BIPS will handle your religion for you. Do you want prayers offered to Saint Fiacre to cure your piles? An appeal to Allah, who is just and merciful, for a clear head in these trying times? A hecatomb offered to Ares for victory over the Athenians in battle? The nipple-tweaking ritual of Hok Pok Gaar to ensure your enemies die of terminal nose-bleeds? Just send your request to Bluey's Imprecatory Prayer Service and we'll work out a reasonable price to cover time, materials and deities invoked. Satisfaction guaranteed!

Originally posted to slacknhash.net on August 30, 2008.