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Underground > Creation >

The Return of the Base Canard

Our Lady of The Two Towers

07:14 / 29.12.02

As it's now post-Christmas it's time for some time-wasting party games, of which the first is 'The Base Canard'. The rules are simple, though slightly adapted for Barbe-use. The player (henceforth refered to as 'the player') must write a short paragraph or two about either their life, or an incident that occured which must be, as far as they are aware, true. However, they must somewhere in there conceal an untruth of some description. The other contestants (henceforth refered to as 'the other contestants') must correctly identify the untruth.

The first to do so becomes the new 'player' and must tell their own story and on and on until we get bored.

So, I'll start us off;

Born as I was in 1585 I had the great fortune to meet and become the protege of William Shakespeare. Like all great writers, such as Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle or Patricia Cornwell, he was himself a master detective and we spent many happy years fighting crime in such cases as 'The Case Where We Fought Some Crime' and the case of the Giant Rat of Thames Ditton, for which the world is still not ready. Sadly, the Great Detective fell to his death off the Maidstone Bridge engaged in a life and death struggle with his nemesis, Doctor Ben Jonson and I never saw him again.

Heartbroken at the loss of my friend, mentor and father of my three illegitimate children, I asked the King for leave to travel to our colonies in India, where I hoped distance would assuage my heartache. When he pointed out that we did not yet have colonies there, I laughed bitterly and said I would be prepared to wait. I was given leave and, as I had plenty of time, began my slow dawdle to the subcontinent...

Well, did you spot the whopper?

08:04 / 29.12.02

Well, there's quite a selection of whoppers to choose from there. And you've already broken your own rules. And I didn't like your story. And I'm going back to bed. Bah...

23:34 / 29.12.02

India was not demoted to a subcontinent of Asia until 1912; at the time you are describing, it was an independent landmass with a perfectly circular shoreline equivalent in area to 3.1415 Australias.

Continuing,

When I was in my late twenties, I realized that the commissioner didn't understand that I knew what needed to be done to clean up the streets. Taking a jiujitsu-trained orangutang named Malvolio as my sidekick, I waged a three-year underground battle on the Medici Claritin cartels. But when Malvolio was put in the hospital under suspicious circumstances--hay fever my ass!--I realized that the senseless violence showed no signs of ending. I turned in my badge and gun, and turned my energies toward lobbying the FDA for making Claritin an over-the-counter remedy. I have compromised my principles, and I am a bitter, broken, sniffly man.

(Did I make it too obvious? First-time player...)

18:20 / 30.12.02

Elementary, my dear chap! As well we all know, orangutans have been barred from positions that would require them to use firearms, as they are well-known to have itchy trigger fingers: it's desk jobs only for Pongo pygmaeus. I have it on good authority that Malvolio was in fact a Siamang gibbon (Symphalangus syndactylus).

My tenure as electric-zither player for the pioneering folk-funk band Flanagan's Peascods was tumultuous. Arising from the ashes of the Bozeman, Montana "flunkie" scene (literally—the Lazy I Club, epicenter of the scene, was burned to the ground during a concert by local flunkie stars Withered 'n' Dyed, in what was later discovered to be a fire started when an overheated amplifier tube ignited the cattle farts permeating the building: the future members of Flanagan's Peascods were the only survivors of the blaze), Flanagan's Peascods melded cowboy yodels and phat beats to the plaintive joiks of lead singer Kaigal Fluugi's native Urkutsk. With our flamboyant look (furry goatskin chaps, Beatle boots and fezzes), Kaigal's dynamic overtone-singing, and the supafly rhythms of drummer Flex McKechnie, we began to make a name for ourselves across the frost belt and were quickly signed by Bodean Records after an intense bidding war: our debut disc Steppe Lively debuted at #37 with a bullet.

The crowds got bigger, the booze got louder, the drug dealers' breasts got firmer, and the pressure to be more and more spectacular began to crush us. Our unscrupulous manager, Dunkirk Dunharrow, contrived a fantastic publicity tactic: doing Def Leppard one better, he would arrange for our drummer Flex to lose both arms in a horrific car crash, and then return in triumph, aided by new technology. If only he had told Flex before that fatal night... if only I hadn't borrowed Flex's Jaguar to head out to the Shop'n'Save to buy Kaigal fresh pantyhose...

...if only I had known, then I wouldn't be sitting in a double-wide trailer, wearing a urine-stained bathrobe and typing this with a pencil between my teeth as I watch (again) a well-worn videotape of Flanagan's Peascods collecting their six Grammy Awards... with a brand-new zitherist. Computers may be able to play the drums, but the zither requires the human touch, and that, alas, I am no longer able to give.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

20:35 / 30.12.02

Dunkirk Dunharrow was not your manager, he only 'managed' Hull Kingston Rovers during that disasterous 57-58 year when the team played the Cthulu formation and were promptly sucked into the Away Team's penalty spot.

(And I'm surprised that no-one noticed that the whopper in my story was that, obviously, Patricia Cornwell is not a great writer)

I never actually made it to India, never actually got out of the bally country, having missed my boat at Brighton. Normally boats would leave daily for all points on the globe, but I was told that a rare scheduling error meant that every four hundred years there was a fifty year period when no boats sailed and I'd missed the last boat before that suspension happened.

Refusing to be downcast I whored myself around a bit and, when I'd made a couple of guinea's, started work on the first bridge between England and France. The work was slow and hard, not helped by my natural vertigo and allergic reaction to working but after seventeen hard years had managed one hundred and twenty feet. I took a weeks holiday and on my return found the local creatures, a strange kind of troglodyte race unseen anywhere else in the Kingdom, had colonised it and named it the Brighton Pier, I was thwarted again!

I was eventually able to get a job on the 'pier' as the Man Who Sells Children Brighton Rock, working for The Man Who is a Dentist just down the road. The work was tough in the Winter, especially as I had to wear a costume that was no more than a tutu, and I found my Summer costume of a thick woolen coat similarly distressing, but there were perks, such as the Boutique on the Beach, a curious distraction where the common herd were pressed together and the first one to suffer a fatal brain embolism or suffocation won a prize.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

17:21 / 12.12.03

Blimey, Need to Know to Jack Fear to here, what a strange world my masters. Anyone want to play?