Of monsters and other nonsense

In case you are wondering, I have just put to bed my director's cut version of The Monster Maintenance Manual.

It's like the original which made the CBCA Notables list in 2011, but I have added 14 new short stories. Below, I append the fourth and last freebie, to give the adult reader a sense of what is going on here: this is a children's book for groan-ups, Having signed off on the project, I am in a playful mood, before I move onto the next clean-up job.

With no intimations of mortality nipping at my heels, I am still working solidly at the task of sorting out my legacy.  Still, I need also to reduce the makers of third-rate algorithms to tears, so I have just posted this to FB, my intention being to mess furiously with their algorithms:

It being a lay day, I was checking the commonplace file for ideas, and came across this note, from a dozen years in the past:

Dragons hate chocolate. Consider this: every person I know loves chocolate, and none of them has ever been attacked by a dragon. It follows that all the chocolate haters have been eaten by dragons, which shy off at the merest hint of the cocoa bean.

Nobody alive has ever seen a dragon, because since the chocolate haters have been eliminated, there has been no food for dragons, and they have all moved to another planet.

Don't stop eating the chocolate, because if they come back, you will be dragon droppings, quicker than you can say "brown bread!"

End of note: I estimate that if I can come up with 31 other theories like this, I can have an entertaining book. If I don't think of any others, I will write a popular diet book about the central role of theobromine as an antidraconic agent.

This will reap me a fortune, because it tells people to eat something they like, but dresses the advice up in New Age gibberish. Note: the foregoing is entirely fictitious, and any similarity to any existing dietary manuals is purely coincidental.

The Freebie:

The Pudding Monster who saved a city

This is the story of Rice, a pudding monster who was born in a humble shed in the city of Shiny, and how she became Dame Ballista, the Champion of Blomp. As we will learn, Rice had her name changed to Ballista because of what she did, and Shiny was changed to Blomp for reasons that we will get to later.

Nobody much expected an army of stoats with spears, goats with leers, toads with beards and coats with sneers to rush over the plain and lay siege to the city of Shiny and nobody would have expected Rice to become so famous.

But they did, and so she did.

There was one person who expected the attack, though. Alexis Soyer was a brilliant pudding chef but he was always poor, because his apprentice, a lad named Bread, gave so many free puddings to monsters in need of a free feed, though Chef Soyer didn’t mind, because he kept an ear to the ground.

He had no choice about keeping an ear to the ground, because he was too poor to own a bed, even if he did own a future grabber.

This was like a time machine, but it grabbed bits of paper from rubbish bins in the future and brought them back. Mr. Soyer was always hoping to find a thrown-out recipe book, but he never did.

One day, the future grabber gave him a picture of himself, serving pudding at the wedding of Dame Ballista. On the same page, he read how she had saved the day at the siege of Shiny. He noticed that Dame Ballista was the poor young pudding monster who used to come around to get any leftover puddings to practise throwing.

He knew the bridegroom, too, and read the rest of the story. “That’s my apprentice, and together, they’re going to be famous,” he told himself, then he thought about this for a while, and added, “They’ll need some help, though.”

He cooked one of his special sticky date and butterscotch with mango chutney, mushy peas, olives and anchovies puddings and took it around to the palace. The Prince was always asking Soyer for one of his puddings, so he ate it all, that very night, and had a nightmare about a siege.

He dreamed about an army of stoats with spears, goats with leers, toads with beards and coats with sneers, and next morning, he sent his people out to mend the city walls, to gather food and to get ready. But he didn’t say why, so nobody expected an army of stoats with spears, goats with leers, toads with beards and coats with sneers.

When the unexpected enemy came across the plain, people shut the gates and drank a toast to their clever prince. He sat in his kitchen, licking out the last crumbs of Soyer’s pudding and worrying, because the dream hadn’t told him how to deal with a siege run by stoats, goats, toads and coats.

He was most worried about the coats with sneers, because as his second cook said “There’s something worrying about coats with sneers. I mean, how do we all just know that an empty coat is sneering—and what are you going to do about it?”

“That’s the problem”, said the Prince. He stopped when the kitchen door opened. “Hello Alexis! Thanks for the pud!”

Soyer smiled. “Gave you good dreams, did it?”

“Dreadful dreams, actually, all about those stoats, goats, toads and coats. Dreadful but useful, I think.”

“As it was supposed to be, Your Highness. But if you want to save the city of Shiny, you need to ask a poor pudding monster called Rice to help you.”

“A pudding monster? Are you sure? How do you know?”

Alexis smiled. “Yes, I’m sure, but as to my methods, I used one of Neon’s inventions, and I think it may qualify as one of the Grey Arts, so don’t ask too much, just trust me.”

The Prince nodded. “Very well. Summon her, will you?”

“I’ve actually come to summon you to her, after I brought her in. She’s up on the battlements right now, and we need you up there to tell Colonel Blenkinsop to stop arguing and give her what she needs.”

“You’re really, really sure she’s the answer?”

“I’ve seen a future picture of her wedding, and you and I are both there, celebrating.”

The Prince put his hands over his ears. “That’s definitely Grey Arts stuff, so it’s just as well I didn’t hear a word of it—let’s go!”

They found Rice and another pudding monster arguing with Colonel Blenkinsop, who was a mess of mustachios and self-importance. “That lad’s a very poor pudding monster,” Alexis murmured, pointing to the other pudding monster. “We call him Bread.”

“You mean Bread-and-butter?” asked the Prince, who knew the etiquette of naming pudding monsters.

“No, his parents couldn’t afford the butter. He’s a nice young monster, and Rice loves him, but he’s just here to fetch and carry. Rice will do all the work.”

As they got closer, Rice was saying “Colonel, the battering rams will charge soon. Please get me some bales of hay and some garlic oil.”

The Prince nodded, the colonel nodded, and three sergeants who trusted Rice got out the hay and garlic oil they had already stacked, just behind the colonel. Bread began pouring the garlic oil on the hay, and just in time, because the whole flock of battering rams charged toward the walls. Rice began throwing the bales of hay, low and flat, just over the heads of the battering rams.

“You’re missing them!” shouted Blenkinsop. “Cease fire!” he roared.

But the Prince had seen what the colonel had missed. One by one, the battering rams were screeching to a halt, sniffing the garlic hay, then turning and running after the hay, right through the enemy camp, chasing the bales. “Keep firing,” he said. Soon there were no battering rams, and the camp was a mess.

“I’m a pacifist,” Rice said. “I don’t miss, and I send the ammunition where I do  because I don’t want to hit them. Now I need five magnetic boomerangs, ten canned puddings, 15 barrels of custard, 20 oat puddings, 25 containers of mushy peas in a cauldron, and a pot of tea.”

Off went the Second Cook, Alexis Soyer and one of the sergeants, who knew where some magnetic boomerangs had been hidden in the evidence room after they were taken from a suspected Grey Arts practitioner. They brought the boomerangs back, just as nice smells started coming from the kitchen, and as the stoats with spears and the coats with sneers began to advance.

Bread and Rice took a boomerang and gave it a small twist, then Rice threw it out over the stoats and the coats. The whirling magnet lifted the iron-tipped spears of the stoats, and then the wind of the boomerang lifted all of the coats, and carried them out across the plain. “You’ll be sorry when that boomerang comes back!” sniffed the colonel.

“That’s why we twisted it,” grinned Bread. “Now it’s a one-way boomerang. Just watch!” Below the walls, stoats without spears were no threat at all, but the sneers without coats were getting chilly. Soon the sneers were sneezes that blew away on the breezes.

Rice threw two more magnetic boomerangs to make sure there were no stoats with spears, or coats or sneers, anywhere on the plain. “Put the other boomerangs back in the store,” she told the sergeants. She looked out over the plain. “You’d better tell them to hurry with the ten canned puds and the custard!”

The oldest sergeant looked down the ladder. “Puddings and custard are coming now, Miss!” Bread picked up the tin opener.

Out on the plain, the goats with leers and toads with beards were advancing, making a terrible thumping noise as they marched behind a flag with an angry eye on it. “Just in time!” she said.

Carefully, Rice lobbed the custard just over the heads of the advancing enemy, who suddenly realised now it had passed over them that they were in range. Then she took a spare brick and threw it so it broke the stick the eye flag was on. Now they knew she was accurate as well, and they all stopped.

As Bread opened the last tin, Rice started throwing nine of the puddings over their heads and the goats stopped leering, and turned. They were all sniffing at the delicious tin can puddings that were whizzing over the plain, away from Shiny.

Then the goats started chasing the puddings. Their feet got caught in the toads’ beards, and the toads were trampled or dragged into the custard. As the goats stampeded over the plain, the toads fled.

A few caravaggisti came charging in, riding chariots pulled by hippocrenes that came drumming over the plain. Without a word, the sergeants passed Rice the oat puddings. She sent them out with an effortless aim, so close to the hippocrenes that they could almost taste the puddings and read the labels.

In spite of the yells of the caravaggisti, who were all armed with socks filled with sea urchins, the hippocrenes all galloped off over the plain.

“You’re throwing away all our food in the middle of a siege!” complained the colonel.

One of the sergeants took a step back to pick up another oat pudding, and bumped into the colonel, who fell down the stairs and went head-first into the cauldron of mushy peas. He landed in the peas with a loud Blomp!!

“Oops!” said the careless sergeant, trying not to chortle.

“Give peas a chance,” Bread quipped.

Blenkinsop struggled out of the peas, crying. He ran out the gate and around the castle, following the invaders and shouting “Wait for me!”. The Prince turned to Rice.

“He must have been a traitor: can you knock him into the moat, please?”

Rice tossed the last pudding to Bread. “He’s our best spin bowler, your highness, and that’s what this shot needs…”

Bread considered the matter, murmured “Tricky, but do-able” and sent the pudding off. It was spinning so fast that it whirred, but passing the fleeing colonel’s head, the pudding stopped in the air, then jinked sideways, knocking the colonel into the moat, where a moat monster swallowed him, whiskers and all, then burped a loud Blomp!! The sergeants all cheered and high-fived each other, Rice, Bread, the Prince and Soyer.

“I thought he might be one of those Blenkinsops,” said the Prince. “Rice, there are no more enemies, so what do you want to do with the mushy peas?”

Rice took Bread’s hand. We want to get married, so could we have them for our wedding breakfast?”

“I think we can do better than mushy peas,” said the Prince. “What was the pot of tea for?”

“For drinking, your Highness. Throwing is thirsty work.”

“Well, Dame Ballista, step down into the courtyard and we’ll have some mushy peas and tea and talk about the wedding.”

“Oh, sire, I could never be a Dame when Bread’s a plain Mister!”

“My dear Dame Ballista, you could never marry young Lord High Upper Crust, here, if you were ordinary Miss Rice. You’re the saviour of Blomp!”

“Blomp, sire? Are you renaming the city?”

“Yes, to remind us of our only casualty. Oh, and Ballista, you’ll be the new colonel of the guard, if you don’t mind.”

The wedding of Colonel Dame Ballista and Lord High Upper Crust was the society event of the year. Everybody said it was completely unexpected, and as they posed for press photographs, Alexis Soyer decided that he wasn’t going to mention the future grabber. If it wasn’t a Grey Art, it was probably a Grey Area.

Notes (for groan-ups):

All words in this story were provided by the Alexis Soyer Home For Old Alphabet Soup.

No mushy peas were hurt in the falling colonel sequence, and we are not responsible for the well-being of the colonel.

The disused name of Shiny has been registered as a trade mark by the author, who will license it to suitably qualified towns.

Reference:

René Descartes, I Think, Therefore I Aim.

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* Wondering what that asterisk on the cover was for? You drill a hole to put the string through.

** Review copies available on request. You know where to find me

Purely for medicinal purposes...

 In my youth, my parents always slept in on weekends, while I was required to rise early, to fetch in the paper, I was allowed to read it, and on Sundays, I burrowed into Leon Gellert's humorous column in the Sunday Herald, and learned some unusual phrases. With Gellert, any spirituous consumption always featured (for medicinal purposes only), and I made that phrase my own, no doubt confusing a few adults, given that I did this from age six.

Right now, I am revising a history of quack medicine called Not Your Usual Treatments, and the phrase bobbed up, unbidden, as I waded into this little historical vignette:

William Hogarth, ‘Gin Lane’, showing the harm alcohol could do. Top left, a woman is pawning her possessions so she can buy gin.

A recipe for curing swetty feet. One ounce of salts desolved in a pint of boyling water, then add the quantity of gin, for to make it pleasant to drink, then drink a wine glass full when required.

According to my notes, that advice came from the notebook of Police Constable Lewis Jones, who was stationed at Gorseinon, near Swansea in Wales in 1859. Personally, I would have left out the salts, and saved time by not diluting the gin. Some medical experts felt that alcohol was bad, others swore by it.

Frederic Skey (1798–1872) was a proud surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1867, he published some lectures to students in which he urged the use of alcohol, in moderation, though his idea of moderation would probably take his patients to a point where they would not be legally allowed to drive in most jurisdictions.

… I am of opinion that for the purposes of health three or four glasses of wine is the maximum quantity that, taken at any one time, can be serviceable. All beyond this, answers the purpose of luxury and nothing more, and is more or less injurious.”*

A couple of pages later, he expressed his pleasure at the fourfold increase in the consumption of wine and brandy in the London Hospitals over the previous forty years. He told how, in 1848, the treasurer at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital commented on the quantity of wine Skey ordered for his patients. It was too great an expense, the treasurer complained, adding that they bought three pipes of wine each year.

Skey reacted as only an old-style alpha male God-surgeon would. He replied sternly that he hoped to raise the level to 13 pipes a year, and in 1867 he reported with some glee that a new treasurer had recently confirmed that they had reached that level. Skey then offered a case study and an example.

A man with hydrothorax had a pulse of 130 after having six pints (about 3 litres) of fluid drained from his chest. Skey prescribed one ounce of brandy in the same amount of water, every three hours, and the following day, the man’s pulse was 90. He concluded triumphantly that “If this treatment was not sound, it ought to have proved fatal.”

He cited a former colleague, the late Mr Jones of Jersey, who had cut off 25 diseased joints without losing a single patient. Jones always gave each patient on whom he operated at least a pint of port wine on each of the two days following the operation, a practice he adopted after seeing Skey’s success with similar treatments.

It is not a coincidence that many of Australia’s earliest vineyards were established by doctors, Dr Hardy, Dr Lindeman and Dr Penfold among them. Mind you, plenty of people argued that used the right way, water could achieve useful cures as well.

Most doctors favoured alcoholic drinks as solvents and “vehicles”, a word we have already seen used by Robert Boyle to mean something which carries the dose. One example is chalybeate wine, which a 1747 recipe says is made by adding four ounces of iron filings, a half ounce each of cinnamon and mace to two quarts of Rhenish wine. This was left to stand for a month and used as appropriate.

Colin Mackenzie suggested that a pregnant patient suffering hysteria or fainting should be placed in a horizontal position in the open air, and when she recovers a little, be given a glass of wine in a little cold water.

One big alcohol problem in the 19th and 20th centuries was that “tonics” were on sale, mainly to women, and these were quite alcoholic. More importantly, they carried no warnings about the alcohol content, nor indeed, was there anything about any other drugs that might be in the bottle.

In 1913, a British doctor was reported as saying that a number of “… cases of inebriety owed their origin to indulgence in some form or other of medicated or tonic wine.” Here is an example from Women's Weekly, of an advertisement for an Australian tonic, which was on sale at least into the 1960s: depending on the source you consult, Wincarnis contained somewhere between 14% and 17% alcohol.

“Will my appetite never return?” Women whose daily housework takes heavy toll of their energy should eat well and should enjoy their food. Only in this way can vital good health be maintained — health to complete the hardest day’s work without tiring, health to enjoy leisure hours. By enriching the blood and renewing tissues you will fully regain your appetite. No more pleasant or more effective way to “tone” up your system, to induce sleep and to make work a pleasure than by relying on the curative properties of Wincarnis. Get a bottle from your chemist today. Prices: 4/3 pints, 7/3 quarts. Over 20,000 Recommendations from Medical men. WINCARNIS must do you good! **

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*    “… I am of opinion that for the purposes of health three or four glasses…”, F. C. Skey, FRS, Hysteria: remote causes of disease in general treatment by tonic agency, 1867, 15.

**    “Women whose daily housework takes heavy toll of their energy should eat well…”, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 18 May 1935, 46S, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/51757935