Perhaps I ought to dedicate this to the memory of Amada Lear. But perhaps I won’t. The Uppity Ante’s name is Mary Lou. May her tribe live long and prosper and give all the pretentious  prats in the universe what for! The little fellow with the rope around his neck is Freddy, the hardy perennial survivor of several attempted lynchings by various autocratic factions. He wears the rope as a sign of defiance. He is one of my  representatives of all the other unsung, and clearly undeserving, victims of all the other numerous holocausts, past and current, wot are never remembered, let alone celebrated or assigned paper poppies and things. And if anybody still thinks this pic is about Versace or  Jimmy Choos, please think again.

Watching an old episode of New Tricks the other evening, I came across a name I could not resist. Almost at the same time I remembered that I’ve had had the perfect likeness to go with it in my hard drive for nearly two years. So, here is Lenny “the Lump”, the South London golem. Famous for his poetry reading soirees and his award-winning window boxes, he’s also a dab hand at scaring the local bullies, as he is 1) bigger than any of them and 2) almost completely intolerant of this particular breed. (I wonder if he could be persuaded to “have a little chat” with David Cameron…). Here we can see him hanging around Bermondsey Sq. with two of his bosom pals, Gary the Trouble Teddy and Betty “Hopping Mad” McCann, the two-legged berserker of Peckham Rye, of whom, rumor has it, even “Mad. Frankie Fraser used to be scared of. And this one makes four golems so far; three boys and one girl: Lenny, Jake, the lapsed East End golem, Blott, the Badlands golem and young Sarita. We could start a pop group and call it Perishable Clay, couldn’t we? Or proclaim a brand new tribe: the Golemim. Rabbi Loew, eat your heart out, mate!

Arrested Development. Meet Adelita, a young mother of the Bufo Truncatus, or Truncated Toad species, a variety of alien mutant amphibian that never develops beyond the last tadpole stage. The babies grow a pair of arms early in the life cycle although they remain, for many-many-many moons, very small -but by no means fragile, highly dependent on the mother, fiercely competitive for her attentions and ergo exceedingly quarrelsome. The females of this genus tend to avoid breeding like the plague and have emphatically and unequivocally declared that they intend to stick to that policy until the males of the species start taking on some of the burdens of parenthood. Quite. They also think that motherhood, irritating though it may be, at least they generally produce no more than half a dozen offspring at a time. Whereas the poor old Shub-Niggurath bread only once but got instantly stuck with a thousand Young. The abridged toadettes think that they have it comparatively easy, really. As they do, indeed

Text says: The Shoggoths and the Club Unpresentables propose. Infallible formula to cleanse the political scene in Catalunya: Decisiveness and De-Mas-ification.
This is for my darling sister Teya and my delicious bro-in-law Joan. Both still grieving and heartbroken and furious at Mr Mas’ shenanigans. It’s all very well for me to take the piss of the man, but they have to live with his folly, and the evil the ghastly clown has already wreaked all over the poor land. Here’s also a wee bit of a poem by perhaps the best poet Catalunya has ever produced. I can’t be bothered to translate, sorry.

Ja no volta l’ós.
He llegit el llibre
del Predicador.
Deso a poc a poc
dintre de la capsa
tots els meus ninots.
Ara he de callar,
que no tinc prou força
contra tant de mal.
D’un mal tan antic
aquesta veu feble
no et sabrí  guarir

Salvador Espriu. Perquí¨ un dia torni la cançó a Sinera.

It’s Roll up! Roll up! and Gather ’round time once more. Come see the latest in Outlandish Funfairs. Opening its Gates next week, three miles due east of Devil Reef and under the very noses of the Pentarchy of the Church of Father Dagon (Innsmouth, Mass.). Try your luck at the wondrous Heisenbergian Wheel of Uncertainty, several notches up from the old mundane Wheel of Fortune, and bet your life on the companion circle of the Fuzzy Pentacles of Fluke. (Health & Safety compliant.) Scrumptious fairground fare catering for all tastes, even vegetarians and vegans. Goody-bags like you’ve never seen before freely dispensed by the Perennially Dazed Glowworms: Sassy Mocking Maracas to aggravate David Cameron! Infuriating alien Espantasuegras -hand crafted by genuine lunatics in Leuret, Aragon, to drive Hilary Clinton ’round the bend! Cornucopias of Bliss and Ice Cream for the Soul to provoke the ire of the ghost of Milton Friedman! And more, much more. Admission is free, naturally, as are the various other events taking place in the fringes of the fairground, but booking is recommended owing to the massive popularity of this kind of shindigs amongst astute and discriminating folks. Gaudeamus organized by Rosie, BoomBoom and Bubbles (Shoggoths) and sponsored by the Mi-Go and the Rosa Luxemburg International Charitable Foundation, following the enormous success of Leo “BigNose” McGurk’s Polydimensional Flying Circus. We think a new trend is on the make. Hope also floats…

So the year is new, but how “new” will it be…ah, there’s the rub. Never mind. Have a happy one if you can possibly manage it. Be it only to be defiant.

And to celebrate the New Year (for what it’s likely to be worth…) we have all chipped in to give the Shub-Niggurath a break from constant child care & rearing & watching and we have volunteered to babysit her 1,000 Young for a few days. So she has taken herself to the eternally peaceful shores of Lake Hali to meditate on singlehood and brood about whether her bum looks increasingly bigger. And does it suit her? And does she give a toss if it doesn’t? Happy break girlie!