Pornography, by Kevin

Pornography is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What pornography is, is looking at pictures or, sometimes, films, of people who are partially clad, or semi-clad, or not clad at all, and deriving pleasure from it. Clad means having clothes on. Not clad means not having clothes on. Mostly, the people who are in pornography pictures and films are ladies, but quite often there are men in them as well. This is because the main users of pornography are men, but so that they feel less guilty about it, they try to include their wives or girlfriends (if they have any) in their enjoyment, and they think that putting men in the pictures will cater for their partners' interests. The truth is, though, that the women have no interest in looking at the pornography and are only joining in because they think it will please their boyfriends or husbands. It certainly reduces the guilt associated with enjoying pornography because it tacitly condones men using it, but in truth the men would rather the women weren't there and also that there were no men in the pictures because it means they have to look at the pictures with one eye closed, blotting out the man.

I am not entirely sure if there is a specific way in which pornography is intended to be used. I asked my mom what people do when they use pornography, and she said that sometimes they kiss the pictures of the ladies or lick them—the paper is usually shiny so that you can wipe them afterwards (I guess this means some men wear lip balm when they look at pornography). Other times they spread the pictures out on the floor of their bedroom and kneel over them. Sometimes in front of the mirror. I know! But this what my mom said, and she isn't in the habit of lying. And sometimes, she said, they find a picture that they like particularly, and they rub it against themselves. She said this with a straight face, but I'm sure she was winding me up. Who on earth would do that?

My favourite pictures in pornographic magazines are the ones where the lady is smiling at me. These are the best ones. They are the best ones because the lady in the picture looks like she likes me, and also that she is enjoying the experience as much as I am. She looks like she would like to have a conversation with me and perhaps a drink as well, and hang around with me for company. I do not like the photographs in which the lady is looking stern. It is as if she is saying, "Don't pester me now. Can't you see that I'm baking cakes?" or "I don't think it's appropriate for you to be deriving pleasure from looking at this picture of me. You can see that my daughter was murdered and that I have had an operation that renders me unable to conceive again. Only someone who is totally unfeeling or else sociopathic would imagine that it is acceptable to rub me against their tummy."

Even though the Internet has become a major source of pornographic material in recent years, traditionalists and those who want more flexible access to their pornography far prefer the print medium. Collecting pornographic magazines continues to be the number one hobby among British men aged 14 to 92, and that includes darts, football, fishing, drinking beer, and farting. In my collection, which I keep under my bed, I have a combined total of 348 magazines, going as far back as 1996. This total is made up of 213 issues of Woman's Own, 112 issues of Woman, 7 issues of Marie-Claire, 5 issues of Cosmopolitan, 3 issues of Closer!, 3 issues of Bella, 2 issues of Hello, 2 issues of OK!, and one issue of Ladies Volleyball. I have more Woman's Own than any other magazine for two reasons. One is because it is the best. Two is because it is the magazine my mom gets. This shows that pornography is indeed something that can be enjoyed by both sexes, but my mom principally reads the articles and does the crossword. Some people get confused by the title, but it is a pun. Just like Boyzone (Boy's Own) is really a musical pop group aimed at girls, so Woman's Own (Woman Zone) is principally a magazine aimed at men, although girls are allowed to read it as well.

The ladies in Woman's Own are generally very nice and often look a bit like my mom, which I like. Woman's Own and Woman are the most popular pornographic magazines because they aim at the mainstream, accepted definitions of sexuality, which is why everyone finds it acceptable to have the magazine lying about the house. The ladies in the magazine are usually clad or partially clad but sometimes unclad, particularly in the adverts in the back for breast enhancement or cancer. Magazines like Marie-Claire and Cosmopolitan are a bit more risqué, and you will find more unclad ladies in them, but in order to compensate and disguise this naughtiness, these magazines will frequently contain articles on apparently serious issues such as female genital mutilation or genocide in Rwanda, so that if you are caught with these magazines you can say that you buy them for the articles, but the truth is that nobody reads the articles in them unless they are sat on the toilet. Cosmopolitan is the drink that the ladies in the pornographic movie Sex and the City drink. Marie-Claire is a French girl's name and is therefore exotic and a bit kinky, like a girl who doesn't wash.

Magazines like Closer! and Bella and Hello and OK! are what is known as fetish magazines, which means that they are aimed at a readership who become aroused by unusual pictures. Usually it is pictures of famous ladies' cellulite. Personally, I cannot see what the attraction is, but lots of ladies also enjoy this magazine, so I suspect the men who get turned on by these pictures are gay. Not that I know a lot about homosexuality. It is a perversion that I have not explored.

Ladies Volleyball is not as exciting as it sounds. I was quite disappointed.

Collecting and reading pornography is a perfectly healthy, enjoyable, and commonplace activity that can be fun for all the family. Indeed, my mom is frequently making fun of me, saying things like, "Kevin, I don't know what on earth you could possibly get up to spending all that time in your bedroom. It isn't like those girls can talk to you." But she is wrong, because with a bit of imagination you can have really interesting conversations with the ladies in the magazines. Last week I had a roundtable discussion with two ladies from Woman's Own, three from Cosmopolitan, and Kerry Katona about the Holocaust because I'd read a book on it. Did you know the Holocaust never happened? That's what Kerry told me.

I really hope that you will do pornography now that I have shown you how brilliant it is.

And that is the end.






(Kevin MacPherson is James Brown Chair of Voyeurism in the Department of Women Studies at Newcastle College of Coarse Art.)

Barbie, by Kevin

Collecting Barbie dolls is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What collecting Barbie dolls is, is either buying or stealing the various dolls brought out by the Mattel Corporation in their Barbie range. Barbie is a lady doll principally targeted at pre-teenage girls and homosexual men in order to acculturate them to social norms such as shopping, bulimia, and bitching about others, but for some strange reason the doll has also acquired a phenomenal popularity among antiques dealers, bodybuilders, masseuses, interior designers, and librarians. Interestingly, according to statistics, 90 percent of collectors of Barbie dolls and Barbie doll–related ephemera and accessories are women, with an average age of 40 and an I.Q. of over 65, which undermines the stereotypes both of Barbie collectors as weird inverts and of women as lacking business sense and being unreliable with money: A 1965 mint condition Midnight Red Barbie sold for a record £9,000 in Sotheby’s a couple of years ago. If the owner had invested the £1.30 she paid for the original 43 years ago elsewhere, such as in gilts or Krugerrands, it would now be worth £1.45. Which just goes to show, doesn’t it?

There are hundreds of different Barbies, brought out by Mattel in an attempt to meet the insatiable demand for novelty among collectors. Each time a new Barbie is released or “born” (although she is born as a fully grown non-menstruating woman), there is mass hysteria among the collecting sorority, although I do not mean to use the word “hysteria” in a sexist derogatory way to imply that the collectors’ minds are in some way dominated by their wombs and that the birth of Barbie in some way represents for them an irrational opportunity to revive their own failing fecundity or else to fill a yearning hole in their lives formed by the absence of their own flesh-and-blood children. On the contrary. This hysteria is much more like the bloodlust of crazed, one-breasted, Amazonian she-warriors determined to dominate the ultracompetitive, cruel, and unforgiving Barbiesphere, as the world of Barbie collecting is known. Besides, if you have been doing mathematics for any length of time, you will have worked out that one in ten of those hysterical collectors are men, and men do not have wombs, so how would you account for their berserkery? It is not like Barbie is a real lady and they are mad after her because they want to have sex with her. Barbie is nothing like a real lady. For one thing, you cannot splay her legs like you can with a real lady. Also, if you lick her between her legs, she tastes of polyethylene resin, not fish sweat and wee. And I have the Miss Nude Universe Barbie.

The great thing about Barbie doll collecting is the Barbiefest, which is the bi-annual get-together of all the leading Barbie collectors, distributors, accessories designers, marketers, and clinical obsessives, who gather in a location usually somewhere in Brighton (but also once, and notoriously, in Milton Keynes, which was supposed to have kitsch value but which also coincided with an MK Dons home match, with the result that the fest was packed beyond capacity and human endurance) to share information, compare collections, swap gossip, generate unsubstantiated rumours, exchange phone numbers and photographs of one another dressed up as Barbie (the men) or Ken (the women), and get horribly drunk during the daytime and then start a fist fight outside the convention centre with a small girl and her parents over the significance of Batgirl Barbie.* Attendees also get the chance to bid for rare and highly coveted limited or special editions, such as Valentino Barbie, Space Walk Barbie, Abu Ghraib Barbie, and Ladyboy Ken. It is almost impossible to put a price on these items before they come to auction. This is because, by definition, an auction involves putting a price on items. Afterwards, it is much easier. Usually they go for about £350.

During the many years that I have been collecting Barbies, I have had many fascinating and unusual encounters with a diverse range of people from all walks of life and involved in all manner of professions, trades, and businesses. That has nothing to do with collecting Barbies, but I mention it just so that you know that I am not one of those sad, deluded, emotionally stunted shut-ins who comprise the majority of Barbie doll collectors, Barbiefests notwithstanding. No. I am one of the sane clever ones who regard the process as purely a business enterprise, a sound investment option when everyone else is putting their money in the bank or in property, like the fools they are, reading their newspapers and listening to so-called financial experts and advisers on the radio wireless and television and following the herd like the dumb animals they are. I fully expect that, sometime soon, western capitalism will self-destruct, poverty, pestilence, disease, and despair will cascade through society in an ever-accumulating vortex of horror, and all that will be left of civilization will be me and my Barbies, concealed in my secret underground lair out in the woods behind the campus. And when everyone else is dead and decomposing in the fields or in their cellars or on the toilet, it will then be down to me and my Barbies to start the human race all over again, from scratch. And a good thing it will be too. This time we will be able to get it right.




(Kevin MacPherson is Halifax Building Society Chair of Cognitive Dissonance at the University of Reading and Writing.)





* See also Geraldine Buttock’s article “Hol(e)y Unacceptable! Batgirl Barbie: Cashing in on Crass Consumerism or Commenting Ironically on Career Options for Women in the 21st-Century Post-Postmodern Marketplace?” in the forthcoming issue of The American Journal of Barbie Studies, University of Minnesota Press.

Geocaching, by Kevin

Geocaching is brilliant. A lot of people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What geocaching is, is finding hidden treasure using your handheld GPS receiver. GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It uses a constellation of between 24 and 32 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals, which allows GPS receivers to determine the location, speed, and direction of the user. It was developed by the United States Department of Defense and its official title is NAVSTAR-GPS. It is used by the United States Air Force in its jet fighters and bombers and missile systems, by the CIA to locate operatives and take secret photographs of enemy installations, and it is also used in map-making, land surveying, the scientific study of earthquakes, and synchronization of telecommunications networks. I use it for geocaching.

With geocaching, what you do is you go to a geocaching Web site (there are literally millions on the Internet, with names such as geocaching.com or geocaching.co.uk, but not geocaching.fr) and you decide where you want to go to look for treasure. Let us say you live in Birmingham, like I do, and you want to spend a pleasant day not in Birmingham. Then you will go to the geocaching Web site and type in, for example, Hockley Heath or Warwick Castle or Stratford upon Avon or the Lickey Hills or Packwood House. Packwood House is very nice and you can take sandwiches which you can eat in the grounds and they won't throw you out. I take a Tupperware box with a tomato a banana an apple and luncheon meat sandwiches and a Fanta. I give my tomato to the peacocks because I don't like tomato. Packwood House also has a walled garden that you can hide in until your sister cries.

So you type in the name of the place not in Birmingham that you want to be in, and on the Web site, if you are lucky, there will be the very precise GPS co-ordinates of the nearest geocache to that place for you to find. So what you do is, you key the co-ordinates into your GPS system, and you activate it so that the receiver also finds your current location, and then you put on your socks, your pants, your vest, your trousers, your shirt, your pullover, your Casio watch, your glasses, and your shoes, and you go to the toilet. When you have been to the toilet, you get undressed and have a shower, get dressed again, say goodbye to your mom and dad, and go home for breakfast. After you have had breakfast, you pack your Tupperware box, put on your bicycle clips and cagoule if it looks like rain; if it does not look like rain, you can pack the cagoule in a haversack or pump bag for when it rains later.

If you want, you can invite friends to go with you geocaching, but usually that ruins it. They will always think they know better, and they never do, and then they will race to find the cache, and it is a pain in the hole when they get it first, because they always pull the gonk out and wave it around and say ha ha ha, look Kevin it's you. People are just stupid.


What a gonk is

A gonk is a small troll-like toy with fiery pink or orange hair that girls put on the end of their pencils.


What a gonk is not.

A gonk is not a term of abuse for people with red hair. Anyway, my dad says at least it proves my ancestors were born in this country. Where do your ancestors come from, Stephen Higginbotham? Probably Russia or somewhere.


The GPS system used by the American military is precise down to millimeters, so they can locate and destroy something as tiny as an ant living in Moscow using an intercontinental missile fired from the Persian Gulf, say, or Poland. The GPS system that we civilians are allowed to use is not so precise, however, for fear that a nutter should get hold of a nuclear bomb and decide that HE wants to kill ants without permission. What this means is, is that when you get to the geocache site, there is always an element of suspense because you will not be able to locate the cache straight away. Besides, the person who has hidden the cache does not want just any old thicko finding his cache. They would not appreciate it and would probably treat it derisorily. Derisorily is a word that means "with contempt." That would spoil everything for geocachers, but there are some people who are like that. In my class, even.

So you have to search for the cache, usually hidden under a bush or down a drain or inside the base of a statue. Once, in Hockley Heath, I found a dead dog in the canal. It was nothing to do with the cache, though. In fact, over the years, I have found more than one dead dog in Birmingham's canals. I expect they committed suicide. Birmingham can do that to a dog.

When you find the cache, you take a photo of yourself holding it to post on the Web site to prove that you found it and not just saying you did to impress girls. In the typical cache, you will find a gonk, a Blue Peter badge, a 3-D or Magic Eye picture, a puzzle like a Rubik's Cube that you can solve and then mess up again for the next cacher, a photograph of Stephen Hawking, a model Darth Maul, and a piece of paper for you to sign, indicating who you are and the date on which you found the cache, and what you took out of the cache and what you put into it. This is the particular joy of geocaching, because you are allowed to take a piece of the treasure and in return someone else gets the chance to choose something of yours that you put in. As you can see from the above list, however, you can't just leave behind any old crap. It has to be something that you know other geocachers will treasure. Also you cannot put in food or living creatures, even if they are crap ones like ladybirds, not because it is cruel but because who wants a dead ladybird? If everyone did that, the cache would eventually contain nothing except dead ladybirds, and there would be no point to the entire exercise, would there? No. You have to put in something which shows (1) that you are clever and (2) that you are considerate of the interests of other geocachers. I usually leave a page from one of Douglas Adams's books. All geocachers like Douglas Adams, and reading the page will give them happy thoughts. Also, the Independent on Sunday gave away a whole load of Douglas Adams's books a while ago, so they cost me nothing. I got them off my dad. He didn't want them anyway. He was just annoyed that the paperboy hadn't delivered his Mail on Sunday. I think he went to the paper shop and got the boy sacked.

Anyway, I hope that you will do geocaching now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.





(Kevin MacPherson is head of psychogeography at King Edward VII School for Boys, Edgbaston.)

Butterflies, by Kevin

Butterflies are ace. Some people think that they are not ace, but they are wrong. Famous people who have collected butterflies as a hobby include Robert Mackenzie, the Canadian man who operated the Swingometer on election nights on the television, but he is dead now; Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born novelist who courted controversy with his publication of Lolita, about a grown man lusting after pre-pubescent girls, and who is also dead; and Julius Caesar, a Roman. Non-famous people who have collected butterflies include Xavier McWhirter, Hilary Collins, and Harry “Mad Dogg” Dog. I mention Hilary Collins for a reason. The reason is that she is a lady. The reason why her ladyness is important is that collecting butterflies is usually regarded as a hobby that only men do. It is not. It is a hobby that predominantly men do, but some special ladies can do it too. The reasons why it is a predominantly male hobby are that 1) men are better at collecting things and 2) men are better at killing things. These factors are both important in the collecting of butterflies because 1) collecting butterflies involves collecting and 2) killing them is the best bit. The reason why men are better at these aspects of collecting butterflies is that men are far more likely than women to be autistic. It is scientifically proven. In the past, this has meant a restriction in popularity for the hobby, but with so many more diagnoses of autism amongst children these days, there is great optimism among the butterfly collecting fraternity that the hobby will increase in popularity. We have the MMR vaccine to thank for that. Except that this is unsubstantiated pseudoscientific hogwash.


WHAT YOU NEED

In order to collect butterflies you need a net on a stick, a cultivated field not too far from your home, a mounting tray, a killing jar, some fixative, some preservative, and some pins. The best pins are flat-headed ones because those are the least visible when you push them through the butterfly’s body. You can also use pins with a black head, since blackness also has reduced visibility and does not attract attention. It is possible to buy pins with different coloured heads, such as red, blue, green, purple, orange, mauve, yellow, violet, brown, taupe, puce, russet, indigo, cerulean, azure, caramel, purple again, grey, pink, montenegro, scarlet, cream, and cerise, but none of them are any good for butterfly collecting. You cannot get pins with lemon heads because lemon is not a colour. It is a flavour. The reason why you cannot get pins with lemon-flavoured heads is that the manufacturers of pins do not want people to eat them. That is why they deliberately make all pins metal flavoured. It is also why they make one end of the pin particularly sharp. So that, if you swallow a pin as an experiment, you won’t do it again.


SOME CLARIFICATION

Collecting Butterflies has nothing to do with the BBC television comedy series called Butterflies and written by Carla Lane and featuring Geoffrey Palmer, Wendy Craig, Rodney and the other one. This statement is not entirely true, however: There is a vague connection, because Geoffrey Palmer’s character collected butterflies in the series. Sadly, however, the programme hardly ever focused on his hobby and instead spent most of the time following Wendy Craig around while she fretted about cheating on her husband. Butterflies have very little to do with adultery. This series was a solid gold opportunity to introduce butterfly collecting to the nation at large, but because Carla Lane is a lady, she failed to see the significance of the chance she had been given.


ANOTHER TRAVESTY

The lyrics to the theme tune of the programme Butterflies went as follows:

Love is like a butterfly
As soft and gentle as a sigh
The multicoloured moods of love
Are like its satin wings

Love makes your heart feel strange inside
It flutters like soft wings in flight
Love is like a butterfly
A rare and gentle thing.

There are a number of problems with these lyrics. The most obvious one is that they were written by Dolly Parton, another lady, and one who does not collect butterflies. It is clear that she has no idea what butterflies are like. One thing is for certain, and that is that they are nothing like love. And I speak as someone who doesn't even know what love is!


WHAT YOU DO

You catch the butterflies in your net, study them to see if they are ones that you have collected before or if they are different, kill them if they are new ones, take them home, then mount them in your display tray and put them in the attic.

There. I hope that you will take up butterfly collecting now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.




(Kevin Macpherson is Archangel Lepidopterist at the Royal Society for Killing Things, Walthamstow. Hilary Collins is a man.)

Kung Fu, by Kevin

Kung Fu is really brilliant. Some people think that it is not really brilliant, but they are wrong. The reason why they think that it is not really brilliant is because kung fu requires years of dedication to become as good as the people on television and they are too lazy to make the effort.

Kung Fu, or gung fu as it is called in China because they cannot pronounce their k's properly, is a martial art invented by Bruce Lee, who was, at that time, the best kung fu master in the world. Lee was a Chinese Buddhist monk born in San Francisco in 1940 who did not believe in violence but who was constantly being beaten up on the way to the monastery every morning on account of being a Chinese in America and therefore much smaller than everyone else (Buddhist monks usually become as fat and obese as Americans, but it is only after years and years of sitting around training). Although he was a pacifist, Lee kept having his dinner money stolen, so it became a matter of principle for him. In order to resist the bullies, he learned himself kung fu, only it was called Wang Chung back then, under a wise guru named Master Po, who was an expert in Chicken-style kung fu, which mostly involves running away. Unfortunately, Lee was not a very fast runner, having only short Chinese legs, so he decided he would learn himself another kung fu that involved less running of the legs and more the kicking of them. There were many different styles of kung fu, such as Tiger style, Monk style, Doggy style, Emu style, Drunken Wino style, and Randy Goat style, and Lee became proficient in all of them, taking from each one the most lethal manoeuvres and incorporating them into his own system, which became proper kung fu.

Once he was able to decimate all his opponents and keep his sister out of his room, Lee was approached by Hollywood who wanted to make films of him showing off his skills to the world for a lot of money. At first, Lee said, "No way! These are valuable, esoteric treasured cultural traditions that should not be reduced to circus antics performed by trick ponies for the delectation of decadent Western audiences," which was true, with the exception of Trick Pony-style kung fu, which was invented for precisely that purpose. Nonetheless, Hollywood was very persistent and promised not to demean Chinese culture in any way. So, in his first film, Marlowe, Lee played a Chinese henchman who accidentally jumps off the balcony of a skyscraper doing kung fu after James Garner calls him a gayboy. In the next film, The Big Boss, he plays an ignorant Chinese yokel working in an ice factory that is a cover for heroin smuggling. In The Way of the Dragon he plays an ignorant Chinese yokel who travels to Rome, with hilarious consequences.

It wasn't until Lee got directorial control over his movies that kung fu became world famous, however. In Enter the Dragon he plays an MI6 agent infiltrating a martial arts tournament organized for no apparent reason on an island full of prostitutes and drug addicts. In Game of Death there is nothing but kung fu, but Lee was killed before the film could be finished by sinister kung fu masters who thought he was revealing too many of its secrets to the Western world. Since then, Lee's mantle has been taken over by Jimmy Wang-Yu, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude van Damme, and Will Smith's baby.   None of them are anywhere near as good as Bruce Lee, of course, and I think he could have taken them all on at the same time and whipped their arseholes.

Kung fu itself has survived Bruce Lee's death, however, and you can easily find a kung fu school near you where you can learn how to defend yourself against your sister, bullies in the staff common room, and snidey quips when you ride your bicycle on the campus and people say "that's a girl's bike," which it isn't, just because it has a basket on the front. It depends on where the crossbar is, so there. I have been doing kung fu now since I was 13 and have a green belt. This is very good. The highest belt is purple belt, although many people think it is black belt and they are wrong. The grades go white, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, purple. If you see anyone wearing a red belt, it is probably Timmy Mallett.

When you do kung fu it gives you a greater level of self-respect but also more self-discipline because you become aware of the awesome power at your disposal to be able to poke someone's eye with your bare finger. With great power comes great responsibility, and therefore all kung fuers are required to take an oath when they become grand masters that they will only use their ability to maim, disfigure, and kill for good. This means most you cannot use it at football matches, against traffic wardens, or against the man in the newsagents with the funny voice who always makes conversation but you can't understand what he's saying and everyone looks at you. No. You can only use it in self-defence, which is why most kung fuers find they have to go looking for fights and then provoke their assailant into making the first move. Otherwise learning kung fu would be a waste of time.

I hope that now I have shown you how good kung fu is that you will join your local kung fu class straight away. Tell them Kevin sent you.

And that is the end.


(Kevin MacPherson is Grand Sifu and Kwai Chang Caine professor of Modern Dance at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Hereford. His book The Dying Swan: Contemporary Ballet and the Triads will be published one day.)

Comics, by Kevin

Comics are ace. Some people think that comics are not ace, but they are wrong. The reason why they think comics are not ace, I think, is because they confuse stand-up comics with lie-down comics and lie-down comics with sit-down comics. Stand-up comics are men (and, increasingly, two women) who stand up in front of an audience of people and tell jokes. Examples would be Jimmy Carr, Jimmy Tarbuck, Jimmy Cricket, and Jimmy Riddle, although you do not legally have to be called Jimmy to be rubbish. Lie-down comics are comics who are dead, such as Harpo Marx, Bill Hicks, Lenny the Bruce, and Jimmy Tarbuck (again). I agree with people when they say that stand-up and lie-down comics are not ace, but not when they say that sit-down comics are not ace. Unless they mean Ronnie Corbett.

Sit-down comics are pieces of paper folded several times, or cut and stapled together to form a collection of "pages," which are then printed with drawings and text that tell a story. One of these is called The Incredible Hulk. It is very good. Another one is called The Spider-Man. NOT Spider Man. It is also very good. Another one is called Catwoman. It is rubbish. It is for girls.

Sit-down comics are called sit-down comics because you read them sitting down. Usually in a chair or a settee, but also sometimes on the toilet. Sometimes if my latest copy of Iron Man is missing, it will be because my father is reading it on the toilet while he is having a dump. Then he will deny it completely and say it was my sister who had been reading it. But that is a lie and he knows it. My sister hates Iron Man. When she has a dump she takes her mobile phone in and sits there texting her friends things like "Im hvng a dmp. Wht r u dng?" Comics are beyond her.

Comics are becoming so popular now that Hollywood has decided to make them into films, which are really just real-life motion versions of comics. I think this is a terrible development because it means that viewers (which is what readers of films are called) do not have to use their imaginations any more. Needless to say, those of us who read and collect comics look down on people who think they know all about Spidey and Bruce Banner just because they've seen films about them. Movies are clearly an inferior form of medium to comics, appealing to the great unwashed and the lowest common denominator, thick people who are not intelligent and need to have everything depicted for them explicitly rather than saying the words on the page to themselves in their own heads, like normal people do. People who go to the cinema are people who move their lips when they read. You will also notice that all the comics that have been made into films are really good ones, which is to say, superhero comics, not crappy football ones like Roy of the Rovers or useless girls' ones like Bunty. This is because superhero comics are ace. Which is what I meant at the beginning.

Collecting comics can be a really rewarding pastime, and because most comics are thin, they can be stacked in piles in your attic or under your bed or in the shed by the hundred. Unlike books, which take up much more space. If you want, you can have decades of years of comics in your attic, and you don't even have to look at them, just read them once and put them up there safe in the knowledge that nobody else can mess with them or that Michael Sutch will have to get his own copy the tight-fisted shitter. Personally, however, I think that collecting comics and hiding them like this is a bit childish and a sign of immaturity. What is the point? When you have read your comic, you might as well get rid of it. I make a point of only ever having 31 comics in my collection at any one time. Thirty-one is a prime number. That way, you always have enough space for your collection, and you can be sure that your collection is made up only of the most recent, brand-new, shiny glossy comics, not faded crappy badly drawn comics from the 1960s. My uncle Tony left me his collection of D.C. and Marvel comics from the 1950s and 1960s. There were thousands of comics, all in cellophane wrappers. I think he must have been a bit of a mentaler. I burned the whole lot of them. Who wants to be a mentaler?

Anyway, I hope that you will collect comics now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.



(Kevin Macpherson is the incumbent of the Jack Kirby Chair of Sit-Down Comics at Warrington School of Art and Design.)

Stamp Collecting, by Kevin

Stamp collecting is ace. A lot of people think that it is not ace, but they are wrong. Stamp collecting means collecting stamps that are used on envelopes, envelopes being folded pieces of paper that are used to send love letters, birthday cards, electricity bills, ransom notes, death threats, lockets of hair, money, fingernails, and so on, through the post (but not ears—you are thinking of the film Blue Velvet, which was fiction—the envelope would fall apart because of all the blood). Stamps can be used as an alternative to currency, and because all the mail in the United Kingdom belongs to the queen, this makes her a very rich woman. Most of her wealth comes from stamps. People generally do not realize this, which is probably why so many of them think stamp collecting is crap instead of really good.

Another man who made a lot of money as a result of stamp collecting is the slum landlord Nicholas van Hoogestraten. He got his start in slum landlordism from selling his stamp collection for £30,000, which was a lot of money in the 1960s, which is when this was when it was. Hoogestraten had such an excellent stamp collection because his father was a shipping agent, who obtained stamps from all over the world for his son as a result. My father works for the Gas Board in Cheltenham. When I began my collection in the 1970s, it was with Green Shield stamps. Green Shield stamps are like postage stamps except they cannot be used as postage. Nonetheless, they can be exchanged for real things, such as the Ronco Electric Cat Brush/Harmonica and the K-Tel Telescopic Oven Radio. My father would let me stick all the Green Shield stamps in the special Green Shield stamp album and for a few weeks the entire collection was mine, until he went to the shops and exchanged it for something useful. This, for me, was like magic and inspired me to begin my collection.

Some people who are "into" stamp collecting like to collect stamps from lots of different countries from all around the world, but what is the point of that? There are millions of stamps in the world, and they will never collect all of them. Personally, I prefer to focus on one stamp, which comes from a country in Africa known as Zaire. The genius of this is that Zaire stopped making stamps in 1997, probably when everybody got mobile phones and email, so there is only a finite number of Zairean stamps to collect.

Zairean stamps come in two denominations: the 12 makuta stamp, for local letters, and the 3-zaire stamp, for overseas letters. There are far fewer 3-zaire stamps because people in Zaire did not send many letters abroad. They didn't get on. Consequently, this gives me a much better chance of cornering the market in 3-zaire stamps. So far, I have 4,713 3-zaire stamps. Some of them are mint. I am not entirely sure how many 3-zaire stamps were made altogether, but there can't be many more to go. Then I shall have a monopoly and will be able to charge whatever I like for them. Alternatively, I could use them as my own personal stamp, putting them on envelopes so that the recipients will know that they are from me. But that would probably be a waste.

Do not forget when you are mounting your stamps that you should not lick the reverse of the stamp when you put it in your album. If you do this, it will be impossible to remove the stamp from the album when you want to use it to send letters or to sell to someone, and your mother will have to cut around it very carefully, using scissors. Not normal scissors, either, but those special crimped ones that give wiggly edges. Like a stamp has. And even then the prospective customer may spot what you've done and not want to buy your stamp off you after all.

No. You must use special mounts. This will cut into your profits, of course, but it is probably still a worthwhile expense, because the last thing you want is to have book after book of entirely useless stamps worth bugger all on the open market festering in your attic. That would be a calamity. People would laugh at you, if they knew.

There now. I hope you will take up stamp collecting now that I have shown you how good it is. If you would like to buy some stamps from me, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Most of them are in really decent condition.

Thank you.


Kevin MacPherson is Stanley Gibbons Professor of Philately and Anal Retention at Guildford College of F.E.