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Back issues and Irregular goodies can be found at http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/li/

THE IRREGULAR ARCHIVE PROJECT

Here at Lamont Towers we are in the process of scanning all the print issues of The Lamont Times, The Lamont Times: The Next Publication and The Irregular for inclusion on a CD-ROM of the complete archive (together with various other files), and you might be able to help! Although archaeological excavation work in the junk room(s) is ongoing, we are still missing a few issues. If you have any of the following and would be able to lend them to us, we would be very grateful:

• The Lamont Times: #5
• Lamont's Irregular (AKA The Irregular): #12

For the latest news on the project, including the raytraced interface and updates to the wanted list, check the progress page at

http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/wip/archive/index.htm

 

TFIr ONLINE

You can also read TFIr in its enhanced online version, with links and graphics where appropriate. The latest online version will always be available at http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/li/tfir/latest.htm - part of the Irregular site at http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/li/

Who is the Editor? So far as we know there's no Malkovichian portal into his brain, but there is the recently-revised FAQ and the UndeadCam:.

FAQ: http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/scblbiog/scblfaq.htm
Cam: http://www.gizmo1.demon.co.uk/undead

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 28 September		-		Brigitte Bardot born, 1934
Saturday 29 September		-		Munich Agreement signed by Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler & Mussolini, 1938
Sunday 30 September		-		Pinewood Studios opened, 1935
Monday 1 October		-		William Beckford, novelist, born, Fonthill, Wiltshire, 1760
Tuesday 2 October		-		Charles Darwin returned to England aboard the HMS Beagle, 1836
Wednesday 3 October		-		Germany reunited, 1990
Thursday 4 October		-		Pier 39 opened, San Francisco, 1977

I get insomnia worrying that I'm not going to get enough sleep.

FILM QUIZ

A festive mixed bag this week. Answers next issue or from the usual address.

• They can't evict you on Christmas! Then you'd be ho-ho-homeless!
• It ain't cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving.
• My birthday is April 10, 2017. How long do I live?
• That's right, Mr. Martini. There is an Easter Bunny.
• I'm so disappointed in us. I mean, all our lives we've been saying how great it would be if we went to parties, right? And now it's our party and we're in the john. We're in the john!

Last issue's quotations were:

• It's very hard to get lost in America these days, and even harder to stay lost.
  -- The Blair Witch Project
• My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15 year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.
  -- Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
• But this is going to be the best movie ever! It's a foreign film from Canada.
  -- South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
• This is a dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who we were told, 2 hours ago, totally ravaged Ashman's Sporting Goods.
  -- Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
• Am I fast, or is Sweden just a small place?
  -- The Quick and the Dead

WEIRD WORLD NEWS

Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...

Appealing for a cut to his 20-month Hong Kong jail sentence for stealing, Law Kwok-hing, 32, told the court that he was having difficulty adjusting to life in jail because he was from Hunan province and prison food did not match the spiciness of Hunan dishes. Law, who has had five convictions in Hong Kong since 1990 had his appeal thrown out.

When a witness saw a blindfolded woman being dragged into a forest in Denmark she alerted the police. Six patrol cars and a motorcycle arrived, only to find the couple enjoying themselves behind some bushes - they explained that they had been playing out a fantasy sex game where the woman was "surprised" by the man in the forest.

After neighbours complained about the bad smell, cockroaches and rats emanating from a Bucharest flat authorities removed a tonne of rubbish from the dwelling before evacuating the building for disinfecting. It is believed that the occupant - reported to be a painter, and who has not been seen since the clean-up - had accumulated household rubbish for five years.

Lucson Aladin, 32, of Stamford, Connecticut, has been charged with reckless burning after setting fire to a teddy bear in his back yard as part of a voodoo ritual. Aladin told police he was burning the bear to rid it of an evil spirit that had possessed the stuffed toy.

Arriva North West recently purchased 70 single-decker DAF buses for routes across Merseyside, but when a driver tried to take one of the new buses on a route through the Mersey Tunnel he found that it - and the 69 others - were too wide to fit through the toll booths - by just one and a half inches. A spokesman for Arriva told reporters that the bus had only been used on that route because an older one had broken down, and that "We've plenty of buses narrow enough to get through." Dave Griffith, from Heswall, a passenger on the bus which was forced to make an eight-mile detour, said "The driver was very apologetic but we were very late."

 

WEBSITE OF THE WEEK

Once upon a time one of the primary requisites for computers was not memory, storage or whether it would run the latest first-person shoot-em-up, but how many little flashing lights it had on the front of the casing. This week's site salutes little flashing LEDs everywhere.

http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/

THE AMAZING NOT-QUITE-RANDOM LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

Madame Jennifer, our in-house psychic predicts the following numbers will be lucky:

9, 17, 18, 24, 30, 41

THE LAVATORY OF OTRANTO

Chapter 13 - Probably

Jennifer King was having a bad day. She had forgotten to reset her alarm clock the night before and had overslept, spilt coffee on her only clean blouse during a rushed breakfast, missed the bus and eventually arrived at work in the only taxi in town whose driver had never heard of either the Munro Building or Kingsway Road on which it stood.

Old Bob Jones was wrapping up the meeting when she hurried in, dripping in sweat from racing up eight flights of stairs all the time grumbling wildly that of course this was the morning that the elevators were being serviced. "Glad you could join us, Jennifer," he said, as everyone else turned to stare at the perspiring, coffee-stained assistant project manager. Melissa Leoni, the marketing manager stifled a giggle. Jennifer regained her composure and straightened her jacket. "I'm sorry I've missed the meeting, Bob, could you have June send me the minutes?" she breezed before sailing out of the room and heading for her office. She knew some of them - Melissa in particular - would think she was a bitch, probably a bitch with no sense of timekeeping, but it was Bob's meeting and he had known her all her life. She could get away with a lot where Uncle Bob was concerned, and it was to her great satisfaction that Melissa knew that.

Jennifer caught sight of herself in a mirror and decided that it might be an idea to duck into the toilets and freshen up before facing whatever the rest of the day had to throw at her. Whatever that was, it could only get better, she thought, dabbing the coffee stain with a wet paper towel in the rest room. She was therefore somewhat surprised when the open cubicle behind her flared with light which gradually faded leaving four rather dazed children staring at her in the mirror.

"Hello," said Peter.

"You couldn't tell us where we are, could you?" asked Susan.

Jennifer turned round slowly, stared at the children and sidled cautiously out of the room. When she reached her office she called security.

"I say," said Edmund to the large guards who were escorting them out of the building - and who had a large hand pressed into Edmund's shoulder, "There's no need to be so rough!"

"Resistance is useless!" roared the guard, before pushing them through the revolving doors at the entrance to the office block.

"Great," said Lucy. "Where are we now?"

"Some kind of city," Peter replied. "Let's hail a taxi - the driver will know."

The chance of successfully hailing an empty taxi in the business section of a large city without having to recourse to subterfuge such as waiting for someone else to get one to stop and then stealing it from them, or standing in the middle of the road shouting "Stop, you bastard!" is astronomically unlikely. The children were therefore rather surprised when no sooner had Peter suggested it than a cab pulled up beside them and the driver greeted them cheerily with the words "You look lost, do you need a cab?" Even more remarkable - and the direct cause of precisely 5.235 Professors of Statistical Probability at the University of Universal Science, located on the fourth planet of a little-known system in a dark backwater of the Andromeda Galaxy, exploding without warning during morning tutorials was the driver's further comment of "I was just going off-duty for the day, but you looked like you needed a ride."

Of course the children, and the cabbie, were unaware of any professorial detonations, although ten years later the University Chancellor, who did not take kindly to his staff covering the chalkboards with their entrails halfway through most interesting discussions about McMillan's Theory of Universal Improbability, would finally track down the cause of the event and send a Galacticab to bring the taxi driver in for a cosy chat, a cup of tea, and some rather sharp metal probes. When he was returned to the Earth the cabbie, who now found sitting down rather painful, gave up his job and wrote a book about his experiences, which made him a modest fortune and enabled him to retire to a tropical island where he would eventually die after being hit by a meteor, which, at truly incalculable odds, was really an urn carrying the remains of 0.235 Professors of Statistical Probability. Fortunately the University was on summer recess at the time and no more professors were injured.

All this, however, was some way in the future. "Where are we?" Lucy asked as they piled into the back of the taxi.

...to be continued.

AND FINALLY...

Three women were sitting around and bragging about their children. The first one says, "You know, my son, he graduated first in his class from Stanford. He's now a doctor, making $250,000 a year in Chicago."

The second woman says, "You know my son, he graduated first in his class from Harvard. He's now a lawyer, making half a million dollars a year and he lives in Los Angeles."

The last woman says, "You know my son, he never did too well in school. He never went to any university but he now makes one million dollars a year in New York working as a sports repairman."

The other two women ask "What is a sports repairman?"

The woman then replies, "He fixes games... you know, hockey games, football games, baseball games...."