@jfk_4u Need to beat the Commies. Ask me what you can do. Please RT.
@jfk_4u “Beat the Commies” is a euphemism. Ask me what you can do. Please RT. (Are you hot?)

@TPaine These are the times that try men’s souls. There was danger and the city & the country came forth to meet it. Please RT. Shortay!

@richardmilhous I’m honest. This audit says so, ffs. I have proof. I’m honest. Really. PS: This kid sent me ten bucks! PS 2: I hate Russkies. See? Honest.

@JapaneseFoodSux Tweeple! Read my lips: no new taxes. Okay, so you can’t see my lips. You’ll just have to trust me.

@tehgipper @glasnostdude, want to hang? Meet me here at the gate. Tweetup at the wall!
@tehgipper @glasnostdude OMG, IT’S WORLD WAR THREE
@tehgipper @glasnostdude lol, just kidding
@glasnostdude block tehgipper

@AbeLinks Gettysburg: http://bit.ly/gettysburgurl

@jfk_4u Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.” (My interpreter translated my German! Thx!) #berlinwall
@jfk_4u “I am a donut”?! I just fired my interpreter.
@jfk_4u Though I gotta say, donuts are pretty cool.
@jfk_4u Wanna see what I can do with one?
@theActualMafia @jfk_4u Hey, I just added you to my Mafia family. You should accept my invitation!
@jfk_4u @theActualMafia Ooh, okay!

@richardmilhous Okay, okay, I’m not honest. I’ll be gone at noon tomorrow. kthxbye.

@barackobama RT @TPaine There was danger and the city & the country came forth to meet it. Shortay!

“Please, yes. Please help. My leg … my leg has come off. Help. Please. Oh God.”

“You’re on the wrong floor. Turn around, take the first left, go straight through the double doors, and take the elevator down to the lower ground floor. Then take the first right, go through the blue double doors, turn right again, follow the yellow line and report to reception. They should be able to help you there.”

* * *

“Can I help you?”

“Please, yes. Please help. My leg … my leg has come off. Help. Please. Oh God.”

“No it hasn’t.”

“It has. Look. Please help me.”

“No, it really hasn’t. You’re imagining things. Look, there are people here who are really sick. Go home and call NHS Direct if you don’t feel better in a couple of days.”

“Please, look at my leg, it’s bleeding all over your floor -”

“Yes, yes I can see that. I’m afraid there’ll be a small charge. You’ll need to fill in an eight-eleven double-one-D form. I’ll just be one moment.”

“But if you can see that, surely you can see that my leg is missing. Arterial spurts everywhere. My insides are outside. Please help me.”

“I can’t see any blood. Here, fill in this form so we can charge you for the blood.”

“Oh holy mother, the pain … Is there – is there anyone else I can talk to?”

“Certainly, madam. Please take a ticket, and we’ll be with you in due course. Why don’t you sit over there. … Madam! Oh, madam! I’m sorry, madam, I need you to pay for this blood spatter. We take Visa, Mastercard, or blood.”

* * *

“Can I help you?”

“Please, yes. Please help. My leg … my leg has come off. Help. Please. Oh God.”

“Oh, so it has.”

“Thank God. Please help me.”

“Did the nurse you spoke to previously diagnose you?”

“She said my leg hadn’t come off and that I was fine.”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Well, you see, she’s my superior. If she said your leg hasn’t come off, I’m afraid your leg hasn’t come off. Look! It’s fine. Go home and call NHS Direct if you don’t feel better in a couple of days.”

“But you just said my leg has come off! Please, help me, you just said it!”

“No I didn’t.”

“You did. You said it just then.”

“Then I made a mistake. Look, your leg is fine.”

“It’s not fine. Look at this blood, it’s coming out in pulses -”

“Yes, that’s arterial gushing. That could be a serious problem.”

“But it must be coming from somewhere -”

“It’s coming from the bottom of your foot, perhaps.”

“But where’s my leg? Look at it! Where is my leg?”

“Yes, I see your problem -”

“Oh, thank God!”

“- that leg is much shorter than the other one. I’m afraid we can’t do much about that, madam! You’ll need to go talk to a specialist. Follow the yellow line, turn left, go through the blue double doors, turn left again and take the elevator to the fourth floor. Go straight through the double doors, turn right and you’re there.”

“But the blood -”

“Yes, we’ll need to charge you for that.”

* * *

“Can I help you?”

“Please, yes. Please help. My leg … my leg has come off. Help. Please. Oh God.”

“You’re on the wrong floor. Turn around, take the first left, go straight through the double doors, and take the elevator down to the lower ground floor. Then take the first right, go through the blue double doors, turn right again, follow the yellow line and report to reception. They should be able to help you there.”

Anonymously inform the police that there may be the carefully hidden remains of a triple homicide in your back yard. They’ll be over in no time to dig it up and replant the whole thing!

Invite a drug-addled waning celebrity to visit, and wait for them to die.

AEG will be falling over themselves to profit from the hordes of weeping visitors in no time.

Strike used fryer oil.

It doesn’t matter that the oil well you’ve found is actually the decomposing remains of decades of heart-crushing fried food. Reclaimed grease is a commodity these days, and imagine the energy companies’ glee upon their discovery of a natural field of the stuff! All that energy without the need for a KFC bargain bucket first! Trust us, it’s a gold mine.

Convince Paul McCartney to marry it.

After all, it is semi-detached.

Luckily, there’s another way – a path that could lead to unimaginable riches. To discover if this new life is for you, answer the following questions:

1. Is nobody willing to hire you?
2. Are your skills unnecessary luxuries at a time when companies need to tighten their belts and focus on their core businesses?
3. Do you have an unnecessary sense of entitlement?
4. Is nobody willing to hire you?

If you answered “yes” to any of these, then son, you could be an ENTREPRENEUR.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Invent something to sell.

Don’t worry, you don’t actually have to be an inventor to invent something. It doesn’t even have to be new at all. Just copy something you like, call it something different, and get rid of the difficult bits that don’t make sense or will be difficult to do. Hooray! You’ve invented something!

For example:

Coca Cola is a multi billion dollar international business. It’s one of the most recognizable brands in the world. You want to have an internationally-recognized global brand! But wait: Coke’s recipe is secret and they have copyrights and patents to cover their product, as well as an international network of bottling plants, distribution mechanisms and partner companies.

Don’t worry. Simply mix some carbonated water with a little sugar and cinnamon, shove it into a recycled glass bottle, and call it Artisan Water. Find a store that’s willing to try selling it, charge $4 a bottle, et voila! Export some to a neighboring country like Wales or Canada, and you have your own multinational drinks business! You’ll be giving diabetes to children and oppressing emerging economies in no time.

2. Behave like an innovative businessperson.

The important thing to remember about ENTREPRENEURS is that they don’t need to follow the same rules as ordinary businesspeople. Please don’t worry about business plans, judicious financial strategy or creating a robust corporate infrastructure. Those things are boring and stop you from INNOVATING and TOUCHING BASE. INNOVATING and TOUCHING BASE are the main activities of the ENTREPRENEUR.

Businesspeople create pitches and strategies based on complex financial projections, which are painstaking, time consuming and ultimately useless, as they present a small subset of the possible outcomes of your activity in your chosen market. Talk about pissing into the wind!

• INNOVATING requires creating new ideas and directions. Try to be as INNOVATIVE as possible. That means creating as many new ideas and directions as you can! The more products and directions you come up with, the more INNOVATIVE your company will be!
• TOUCHING BASE means talking to people in a variety of settings about your business. You need not have any tangible outcomes or quantifiable goals – simply TOUCHING BASE is enough. Try TOUCHING BASE at the pub, over lunch, at sporting events, and at the beach!

Model yourself after: GORDON RAMSAY, ALAN SUGAR or DONALD TRUMP. Reality television is a true reflection of how to run a business. Repeat after me: “you’re fired!”

3. Profit! (From your employees, mostly.)

We both know you’re an unemployable, barely-literate chancer. Don’t worry: you need never reveal your shortcomings or foibles to the outside world. Simply hire some knowledgeable yet gullible employees and take credit for everything they do!

Advantages:

• Your employees feel like they’re being listened to and their input is being acted upon, because essentially you’re repackaging their ideas as your own.
• You appear to be an intelligent, INNOVATIVE ENTREPRENEUR, and people will therefore be more willing to TOUCH BASE with you.

Disadvantages:

• If those employees discover what you’re doing, you’re screwed, unless you can find new, even more gullible employees who will be grateful to be part of such an INNOVATIVE business run by a bona fide genuine ENTREPRENEUR.
• If someone asks you a question without the support of your employees, you will make barely-intelligible sentences that consist of buzzwords and key phrases arbitrarily strung together in a way that you think probably sounds impressive but in reality makes people wonder if you’re a regular ketamine user. [NB: there is a proven method to overcome this issue. Bolster your vocabulary with overcomplicated synonyms for common terms, like ACTUALIZE, LEVERAGE and ACTION, and nobody will suspect you don’t have the faintest clue what you’re talking about.]

Actualize!

Follow these simple steps – sorry, I mean action them – and you’ll be an INNOVATIVE ENTREPRENEUR. Can you make it in this tough economy? Hey, probably not. But at least you’ll have a fun couple of months TOUCHING BASE and feeling awesome about yourself.

Unfortunately, when the credits roll and E! flips to commercials, the groinal flow of Kim’s mind-detritus also ceases. But fear not, mental anguish fans – she’s on Twitter. Here’s some things we’ve learned recently from her craptivity stream:

1. Sometimes you just need a good cry.
2. Botswana is in South Africa.
3. It is possible to get a commercial spray tan at midnight.
4. Spray tan parties exist.
5. Clear duck tape does not exist.
6. One can grow one’s eyebrows out in anticipation of forehead topiary.
7. Kim Kardashian fights “against the drug wars”.
8. You shouldn’t drink bottled water when the heat has melted the bottle down.
9. It’s wise to use numbing cream if you intend to remove your hair with lasers.
10. When people buy DeBeers diamonds, it pays for HIV/AIDS centers for starving children. (As well as some other things.)

It is, unfortunately, against policy (both Diabolical and Divine) to discuss current or future events with the undead. The undead, in this case, means the living as well as zombies. I’ve been given permission to talk about things that are or have always been, but circumstances that are still unfolding are, strictly, taboo subjects.

…

Hell has always been partially frozen over, and none of the demons or other staff knows where phrases like “when Hell freezes over” and “a snowball’s chance in Hell” came from. Satan spends a great deal of time brooding on the injustices of his own situation. He does this at the very bottom of Hell, wedged halfway in the ice, far from the distracting screams and appeals of lesser mutineers, in the shape of an unspeakable beast. To keep from grinding his teeth (he’s very vain about his lovely teeth), he keeps a few heads handy. A poet took a tour through Hell in the early 14th century, happened to see the Morning Star deep in thought, and formed certain, mistaken, impressions from it.

Shaitan is no more a prisoner in Hell than God is in Heaven, and when he’s not isolating himself in the 9th Circle, he appears as the angel he was before that whole “War on God” episode. Generally, he tears himself away from his little pity-party long enough to attend to Hell’s administrative needs. These, because it’s Hell, are far more pressing than any other bureaucracy in creation. And, because it is Hell, and he is the Devil, that Belial is free to tend to those things that need tending, then assign one of the damned to do the paperwork. Of course, this soul is no good-natured secretary, but instead, someone who would sooner douse themselves with gasoline and set themselves ablaze before willingly sitting down to a desk job. On occasion, they do just that. But they still have to do the paperwork, which wouldn’t catch fire if you thrust them into the raging fire-pits of…oh. Right.

The Lord of Hell has many offspring, of many genders and dispositions. None of them, however, are very ambitious. “It’s not like dear old Dad’s going to die someday, is it?” said one. I’d give names, even if only to keep one Satan-spawn distinct from the next, but there are sounds in these names that the human mouth is not equipped to repeat (not enough teeth, you know) and the ordinary pen is physically incapable of sounding out. I asked one of the multitudes of antecedents about the Light Bringer’s plans as to our plane of existence, and she (there were some general traits among the horror of the rest of this creature that hinted at a female gender) told me that the Adversary has no plans while even a single human is alive on “that wretched rock.”

I certainly wouldn’t want to paint the Dark One as a coward, but, if demons are to be trusted, (they generally aren’t) he has no wish to cross humans on our own territory. We are, it seems, too blatantly cruel and brutal for Mephistopheles.

…

There is no Purgatory. It is a rumor, and no one seems to know who started it. This has been vehemently agreed to by the administrations of both Heaven and Hell, and is, therefore, highly suspicious.

…

God does pretty much as He likes. He can be as pedantic and hard headed as He likes, and not even the bravest angel will ask Him if He’s maybe not being a little bitchy. God seems to be rather stubborn when it comes to fine points and matters of face, given Lucifer’s situation, a subject on which neither really seems inclined to comment.

Adolf Hitler cannot be found in Heaven. Of course, no one should be surprised at that, but the reasons may surprise you. It’s a rather fine point for which Hitler was cast out of the sight of the Almighty, and I understand that he was quite upset about it. It had to do with the Holocaust, but not as much as you think. The Jews, as they will be the first to tell you, are God’s Chosen People. They will not tell you (perhaps they don’t know) that God chose them, for whatever reason, to suffer, and was more than a little irked that someone else had decided the same thing and hadn’t checked himself before going after God’s Chosen Punching-Bag. To preserve God’s reputation, I feel obligated to tell you that almost every Jewish person ends up in Heaven. Hitler ended up in the 7th Circle of Hell, which again, is not surprising in itself. But to learn that he was punished for Violence (Wrath) against others, himself, and God is something that, to my knowledge, only schizophrenics had so far accomplished.

Jesus is doing well, if a little mystified as to why so many people try to talk to him, especially when he’s just getting into a good book. He agreed to talk to me if I promised to tell him why “the voices” keep bothering him. I really should have asked him my questions before I kept my promise. Jesus may have…well, I can’t be sure, but he may have died again. Which I think is very impressive, even if it was only his second time and not, as is popularly believed, his third.

The Holy Spirit committed suicide in 1977, after a bad drug binge; during which he thought he saw himself nabbed on a rerun of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?. I found every bit of this account extraordinary. Suicide is generally considered a mortal sin, as is well known, and is usually punished with Eternity in Hell. However, the Holy Spirit, being Holy (with a capital H) managed simply to cancel himself out, and no longer exists, in any place or dimension of which we are aware.

Interviews for a replacement are still in progress, but none of the angels are breathlessly awaiting the appointment, as it was, largely, a traditional and ceremonial position.

…

Since my grand tour of the Beyond (which was more exhausting than you could possibly imagine) my life has just not been the same. I see little shimmers out of the corners of my eyes, every day. Sure, everyone has those. But sometimes, when I turn to investigate these shimmers, I see something I recognize. And sometimes, they give me a little wave.

Well, proud-ish.

Rum and Monkey’s experts are available for consulting in a wide range of fields. Please get in touch for further information.

A Tale of Two Cities: Miami
James Patterson writing as Charles Dickens, Jr

A tale of redemption and gritty police work set against the backdrop of Florida’s drug cartels and neon-sheen nightlife. Tagline: It is a far, far better thing to kick some ass.

First Base in the Rye
JD Salinger

Watch out, girls: Holden’s going to a new school. A story of first love, teenage hijinks, and self-aware sex in the tradition of American Pie.

The Five People You Meet in Hell
Mitch Albom

Carrot Top
Richard Nixon
French Stewart
Sarah Palin
Dog the Bounty Hunter

Fear of Flying Into Space
Erica Jong

As part of a radio competition, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing wins a place on a new space station as a civilian astronaut. The ensuing string of sexual encounters pushes feminism to the final frontier.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull 2: Rock the Flock
Richard Bach

Jonathan teaches the conformist Flock to rock out, with hilarious consequences!