Christmas gift ideas
Posted on Tuesday, August 29, 2006Well, doesn’t time fly? Here we are and the Christmas season is upon us again, with the shops playing lovely Christian carols like Jingle Bells, and Chipmunk Christmas and Working for the Clampdown. My personal favourites were Nuts for You and Dirty Boulevard. Well do I remember, in days gone by, my uncle Johnny leaning against the piano with his old pipe in one hand and the other hand tucked into his waistcoat pocket as we all sat around drinking mulled wine. Give us another song there, Johnny, my father used to say, and Uncle Johnny, God rest him, would let on he didn’t want to and we’d all shout out More, More, More. So Uncle Johnny would set down his pipe, and he’d say with a chuckle, well maybe just one more then. Here’s something by the Velvet Underground. And my father would say, fuck that Johnny, give us Lou Reed on his own, or else something by Captain Beefheart!
Ah great days they were, right enough. Great days.
God, it doesn’t seem so long since last Christmas ended, but there you are: as you get older time just seems to conflate in a hyper-relativistic meta-vortex. At least, that’s what the old people used to say, long ago.
Bigod, they used to say, isn’t there an awful shrinkin’ in the Universe, altogether, faith, in a uniform region without discontinuities or singularities? It must be a chrono-synclastic infundibulum at work.
No. someone else would say, ’tis only because the ducks are in the nettles, but sure isn’t that a terrible sign in self? ‘Tis, faith.
That’s what the old people used to say, anyhow. Simpler times.
But back to today. I had an idea to ease the stress people are certainly feeling as the pressure mounts to buy all the presents for their children. I’m going to invent a few toys and have them made at an affordable price in one of my factories, and furthermore, I’m going to have an occasional series here, explaining to you the background to my creations.
This week, I’m working on something called Power Tinkers. These are little plastic figures that represent various tinker heroes, and they all have special powers.
For example, Francie has the power to strip the insulation off any sized coil of wire by setting fire to it. Winnie has ten times the ability of a normal human to trip over a crack in the footpath, and Dannyboy can fit forty caravans through a tiny gap between boulders and onto a new bypass without being seen. Ginger has the power to convince a checkpoint of Guards that he’s fully taxed and insured. The evil Small Minority has the power to give all tinkers a bad name. But the most powerful of all is Davy Crockett, a millionaire Power Tinker who can make the Council build him a free caravan park for his holidays.
We’ve been working on a hero who has the power to clean up after him, but there are still some technical issues to be ironed out.
I’m hoping to get these into the shops by the first week in October and if they prove a success, I’ll develop them further. I was thinking of maybe a science fiction spin-off series: Pavee Trek, about intergalactic knackers. I was also considering a Matrix-type movie about cyber-tinkers who camp on the side of the information super-highway, as their ancestors have traditionally done for generations. It could be a big hit in the gaming world, I’m telling you.
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July 26th, 2007
[…] just for this weekend, Wrinkly Joe and myself become honorary Pavees and as we speak, Joe is out collecting electric cable to set fire to when we set up camp. Now all we […]