Och aye the noo, ye ken I used tae be in Steps?
Including LIFE-CHANGING, MILLION-POUND IDEAS that will MAKE YOU RICH!
Hello. It is January 2024. This is the thirteenth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter with over ten gargantuan laughs and as many as three idle thoughts by me, decaying husk and writer Mike Rampton. This is almost certainly set to be a thriving annus for this newsletter and all eight of its patient subscribers.
1
“The religious woman dressing as an insect around the university has been deemed mentally unsound.”
“Nun campus mantis?”
“Yes.”
2
“I spent yesterday allowed to travel freely anywhere I wished in a steel factory.”
“Run of the mill?”
“No, it was quite unusual.”
3
“I’m not going to tell you what I did to get sacked from the Heinz factory.”
“Spill the beans?”
“I’ve already said, I’m not going to tell you.”
A new calendar year is upon us. I, remarkably, have a book coming out in October, and am scheduled to have submitted at least two more by the time that happens, so might finally get something approaching ‘momentum’ in my ‘career’.
(I wondered the other day if it was available for preorder, so put my name into Amazon and discovered the first result was, literally, dogshit. Hey, that sure took the wind out of my sails!)
What I need to concentrate on, then, is finishing stuff. Like many people, I am much more excited by ideas than actual work. There are ideas I’ve allowed to percolate for years without ever getting round to actually putting any work into them. No longer! I have plenty of things to focus on, and am therefore giving these ideas away for free to anyone who wants them.
Does that make me a maverick, a renegade, an awesome radical? Perhaps. I am, after all, extremely great! But whatever it makes me (generous, attractive, excellent), I am cutting these ideas adrift, letting them go for other people to make millions of pounds with.
IDEA ONE: STREET FOOD
I was thinking for ages about setting up an Instagram account with a name to do with street food, then posting a picture every day of food that had been discarded in the road (like the doughnut below) either with in-depth reviews using fancy menu-type language to say how dusty, dirty and unpleasant it was when I ate it, or doing the same caption (“People talk about how great street food is, but this was actually very horrible”) every day. It’s one joke, but I think if it was done several hundred times it would start to get really funny. Yours if you want it!
IDEA TWO: #BEANLIFE
Possibly a book, probably more like a movement, pushing lifestyle changes using all kinds of super-positive language, in a way that that people only realised after quite a long time would make your life resemble that of beloved comedy character Mr Bean. Like, super-serious articles pushing the values of “ursine nocturnal companions” could definitely find an audience — probably quite an unpleasant, MGTOW-y one. Fitting an extra deadbolt to your car with a padlock on it could definitely appeal to that lot, as could wearing a blazer all the time. It’s a terrible, terrible idea, but there are definitely people who’d get really into it and then be very upset when they realised they’d been lured into joining a Mr Bean cult for absolutely no reason. If anyone wants to do this, go for it. Your life might become so odd!
IDEA THREE: HARD ROCKED EGGS
I have been telling people about this idea for a decade and am finally ready to let it go. It’s an app, where you tell it your favourite musical genre and how well-boiled you like your eggs, and it plays a song or playlist of exactly the right length. Like you could say, “Dippy for soldiers, late-’90s pop-punk” and have a really great time and then a really great egg. That could be its slogan: “Have a really great time… and then a really great egg!” Please, someone, make it. It’s SUCH A GOOD IDEA.
4
“We need a name for this cow.”
“Annabell?”
“No, just a name.”
5
My daughter was disappointed when I gave her her Christmas present: a weapon that fired French eggs. I was sure she’d asked for an oeuf gun.
6
Not many disgraced hip-hop DJs would want to marry Fawlty Towers actress Prunella Scales, but Tim West would.
IDEA FOUR: TAYLOR SWIFTLIES
I’ve only been thinking about these for a few days, but want to get rid of them before I get obsessed and spend hours on end trying to think them up. A Tom Swifty is an old kind of joke where you use an adverb to make a pun. One of Wikipedia’s examples is:
"I forgot what I needed at the store," Tom said listlessly.
Because I am a pioneering champion and hero to many, I have reinvented the form (what a man) into an extremely difficult and very limited version, which I’m calling a Taylor Swiftly. These use a famous person’s name that sounds like an adverb. For instance:
“I’m leaving you, Frank, just like I left The One Show,” said Christine, bleakly.
“I feel nothing, not even when dancing,” said Michael, flatly.
“Nobody can stop me discussing my guitar,” said Ace, freely.
It’s quite difficult, and not an enormous amount of fun: just how I like my jokes! I think in an ideal world, there’s enough of a clue in what they say that you could guess the speaker, meaning there’s potentially a bestselling board game in it. Like, if you picked up a card and read out these lines:
“All that acting has made me tired.”
“Now let’s do the numbers with Carol, who like me is Caucasian.”
“I was terrific in Game Of Thrones but have to admit I’m not a household name.”
The other players would have to guess the answers (which are, of course, said Keira, nightly — credit to my friend Mat for that one — said Richard, whitely and said Michelle, fairly). There’s loads of money to be made in this! The one tiny issue is that there’s not as many famous names that sound like adverbs as I’d thought there could be. I am a big fan of this one:
“Och aye the noo, ye ken I used tae be in Steps?” said Lisa, Scotly.
But am less happy with:
“As well as being in Boyzone, I’m also part of a fence!” said Stephen, gately.
Maybe — maybe — it could expand to take in active verbs, like:
“Commenting on all this tennis is making my hair fall out!” said Claire, balding.
“I’ll keep writing about wizards when I get to the bottom of this slope,” said J.K., rolling.
“I wrote Bridget Jones’ Diary. Howzat!” said Helen, fielding.
I don’t know. I feel like someone only needs to write about nine hundred more of them and there’s a chunk of money to be made. GO FOR IT, I AM SIMPLY NOT GOING TO.
7
“My favourite Street Fighter character is the electric Brazilian chap. I can't remember his name, my mind's gone blank.”
“You mean Blanka.”
“That’s not very nice.”
8
“Would you be willing to share any of your thoughts on East Anglia?”
“Norfolk enchants.”
“There’s no need for that, I only asked.”
9
Why did Abraham Lincoln hate the kiosk dedicated to Robbie Williams' former flatmate?
Because it was a Jon Wilkes booth.
I am ill at the moment, with a disgusting cough that sounds like a dog being sick while beatboxing. I don’t get ill very often, and it’s really knocked the wind out of me. I woke up this morning feeling slightly better, but then my daughter was immediately sick all over my back, so I’m still not what you’d call thriving.
This has meant I have begun the year doing Dry January slightly against my will. I won’t be continuing — I’m going to a birthday party at the weekend and shall avail myself of a few yards of port — but I’m aiming to have a fairly sensible year for reasons of finance, productivity and health. I lead quite a spartan social life, so I’m not going to actively avoid anything, but I’m going to cut down on the completely unnecessary ones where I have five joyless Kronenbourgs while cleaning the kitchen. I’ve made a Google Form thing that I’m filling in every morning detailing what I did the previous day — reading, writing, exercise, drinking — in a vague bid to make more productive decisions by bullying myself via graph. We’ll see.
Usually I would include some links here to work I did last month, but it was probably all Christmassy. No idea. I did help win a contract for a series of toothpaste ads, so that’s something. (Old, probably misremembered joke: What did the Buddhist do when offered Novocaine before having his teeth drilled? Transcend dental medication.) That was 2023, though. We’re in the future!
There was a comics writer whose newsletter I used to enjoy (before he turned out to be, ahahaha, extremely unpleasant) who used to give everything he was working on cool, exotically cryptic codenames and provide updates on them. I’m going to do that, using codenames taken from food and drink in the TV show Futurama, in the hope I’ll end up trying to make all of them move forward every month:
PROJECT SLURM: My big beautiful hardback non-fiction kids’ book, There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question: 213 Weird and Wonderful Questions About the World, Expertly Answered!, written by me and illustrated by Guilherme Karsten, out in October from Nosy Crow. I’ve now seen two-thirds of the illustrations for it, which are amazing, and am in stage about two hundred of edits. So far there are ten different international editions coming out, with Bulgarian the most recent deal, so that’s all pretty exciting.
PROJECT BACHELOR CHOW: A shorter kids’ non-fiction book (as in, a shorter book, not a book for shorter kids) that I signed the contract for ages ago and need to get written. Ideally I’ll get this done by March, I just need to pull my finger out. It’ll be published by Bloomsbury, no idea when. Certainly not before I’ve written it! Ha! What a thought! Wow!
PROJECT POPPLERS: Another kids’ non-fiction title. I was offered a contract just before Christmas but could really do with it involving quite a lot more money, but everyone involved went on holiday mid-polite argument. Hopefully this’ll be sorted and signed in the next few weeks, and it’s all meticulously planned out so hopefully won’t be too painful a process.
PROJECT SOYLENT COLESLAW: I’ll find out soon whether this is happening. I pitched a few ideas for a schools-only range of picture books. You know the ones that are like 20 pages long and called Sharks and just, about sharks? Weirdly hard to pitch, because what do you say beyond, “Sharks are interesting and I think children would enjoy reading about sharks”? It would be a nice, fun, quick one if it was to happen though.
PROJECT LÖBRAU: My magnificent octopus, a disgusting work of psychogeography/whimsical body horror that will either end up incredible or terrible. I want people to laugh a lot while reading it, and then throw up. I am tens of thousands of words into it, but those tens of thousands of words don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. I have spent so, so many hours thinking about this, and need to smash what I’ve done into some kind of order and work out if it actually is anything.
PROJECT SPACE HONEY: A surreal kids’ fiction thing about a young girl who keeps accidentally nearly destroying the fabric of space-time. This is semi-planned out and I really like it, but it needs fully writing up to determine whether it’s actually… rubbish?
PROJECT GUNDERSON’S NUTS: A really unpleasant short story about running, a man and a shed, which is half-written and I don’t really want to finish because it’s horrible, and then I’ve no idea what do do with it anyway. It’s just occurred to me, writing this list, that I might be able to integrate it into Project LöBrau — an easy way to get a chapter done and make a disgusting book even disgustinger? Perhaps!
What a lot of make-no-money things I’m occasionally up to! What a complicated way to fail to make a living! Tell me I’m good! Next issue: February 2nd. HAVE A LOVELY MONTH
10
WHAT I AM CURRENTLY READING
The Tune A Lot Of Football Chants Use by Juan Tanamera
I’ve Vomited Up My Salad by Kayleigh Chunks
A Roast In Veganuary by Sawyer Substitute
A Truck Full Of Colours by Hugh Laurie
Two Different Types Of Boat Pump by Bill Jan Water