If you think you’re pretty wicked, get this guy
THERE’S ONE BRILLIANT THING about growing older: a sharp drop in the number of Aaargh Mornings you suffer.
An Aaargh Morning is one where you INSTANTLY go from being deep in a tranquil sleep to sitting up in bed thinking: “DID I DO WHAT I THINK I DID LAST NIGHT?! AAAAARRRGGHHH!”
I know from personal experience that when one is young, one has Arrggh Mornings almost on a daily basis, but from about the 30s upwards, the number drops to one or two a week, and often consist of survivable incidents. For example,instead of remembering how you set fire to your school, you merely recall saying something very very very stupid to your boss.
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I BRING THIS UP to thank a reader (called A.L.) who sent me a new entry for my Ultimate Aaargh Mornings file, a collection I keep to comfort people who think their lives suck. “You think YOU had a bad day. Check out THIS guy.”
Here it is: A few days ago, a guy woke up from a night of drinking to be informed that he had just caused 70,000 deaths.
The gentleman, okay, the man, was named in police reports in the US state of Maryland as 21-year-old Joshua Shelton.
Observers believe he may have got drunk and then found himself in a room on a farm where he threw some switches, possibly to attempt to switch the lights off so he could sleep.
Unlucky for him, the switches powered a chicken farm. The chickens died.
He was charged with “damaging property”.
He was lucky. Had he lived in Asia, can you imagine just how many CENTURIES of bad karma or negative feng shui he would get for snuffing out 70,000 lives in a single night?
He’d be up there with other towering figures of evil, such as Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Murdoch and Bieber.
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EVER WANTED to have a tail that would wag when you were happy?
No, me neither.
But don’t tell Japanese scientists that.
They’ve spent years designing a WORKING artificial tail for humans.
It detects your pulse rate so if you get excited about something, your tail wags—just like a dog’s.
This strikes me as enormously dangerous. What if you’re walking along the road with your wife and your secretary passes by?
WIFE: “Why did your tail suddenly start wagging?”
HUSBAND: “Er, wardrobe malfunction.”
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INVISIBLE CLOUDS of laughing gas have been detected floating around in Hong Kong hospital wards. This strikes me as a very bizarre state of affairs.
DOCTOR: “I’m sorry to report that you have only two days to live, ha ha ha!”
PATIENT: “That’s terrible news, woo hoo hoo!”
NURSE: “I’ll inform the morgue, heh heh heh!”
I imagine the laughing gas must have at least cheered people up for a while.
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A NEWSPAPER in Australia listed South Korea and North Korea as “Nice Korea” and “Naughty Korea”, I heard from reader Naren Thiyagarajan.
Stuffy people have complained about the Brisbane Metro’s step, but I found it helpful.
Taiwan’s 60-year name argument over the name China could be resolved by calling them Big China and Little China, or, more creatively, Batman China and Robin China, Goliath China and David China, Big Noodle and Vermicelli, etc. Suggestions?
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HAPPINESS TIP: Eat a live toad every morning and it’s guaranteed that your day will improve from that moment onwards.
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HERE’S THE next step in publishing a book: when the thing goes off the printer, you don’t relax. You start making marketing plans – arranging book reviews, thinking about a launch party, that sort of thing.
The thing about books is that they either go into a book shop with 100,000 others, and get completely lost, and/ or they go into an ebook marketplace, with a million others, and get completely lost.
Don’t do this by yourself. Hire some experts to help. Generally speaking, I favor giving away vast numbers to raise awareness, although some disagree with this system.
DULEEKA asked whether the book would be available in Sri Lanka. That’s another thing. Book distributors are very iffy – some of them try really hard to get your book everywhere, but the chances are that there will be a zillion bookshops which don’t stock it – the world is a big place.
If you have a super-big publisher, they’ll manage to get their top list into all major bookshops around the world, but those publishers are hard to come by, and even if you have good relationships with them, they won’t make the effort for every book.
So it’s important to have multiple ways for people to buy your book. Ideally, they should have the option of picking it up from the local bookshop OR ordering from the internet with one click OR downloading it instantly by typing in a credit card number, etc.
Next week, I’ll report on how you get the world primed and ready for your masterpiece…
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