Glasgow Urban Myths (3 page)

He then tilted enough to fall out of the bucket and continued with his gravity experiment. Eventually he landed on top of the pile of bricks and broke a leg. He collapsed in pain there on the bricks, but was glad to be alive, so he let go of the rope and cried out for help. Very shortly afterwards the bucket, still obeying the laws of physics, fractured his skull.

An acquaintance of mine who was a contractor there told me that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvellous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by aeroplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water’s edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, he says, “The pilots fly out to sea and then directly to the penguin colony and fly slowly over it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently on to their backs.”

Then of course they have to p-p-p-p-pick themselves up.

Two loads of fanny

Subject: Internet Clean-Up Day

THIS MESSAGE WILL BE REPEATED IN MID-FEBRUARY.

*** Attention ***

It’s that time again!

As many of you know, each year the Internet in Scotland must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it and give it a wee tidy. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email and inactive FTP, www etc, means we get a better working and faster Internet.

This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on February 27 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on February 28 (the time least likely to interfere with ongoing work). During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet search engines situated around Scotland will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.

In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:

1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.

2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.

3. Disconnect all disks and hard drives from any connections to the Internet.

4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.

We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.

We thank you for your cooperation.

The above is complete nonsense, but there have been versions of it around for years. This is the first specifically Scottish one I’ve seen. “A wee tidy”, indeed. Delete it if you get it and don’t forward it.

A young friend of my daughter’s was due a gynae check and was a bit nervous, so she cleaned up and scooshed herself from the wee plastic bottle to make herself smell nice. When she gets to the clinic and she’s in the stirrups, the doctor comments: “Aye, very nice.” The young woman was mortified and completely embarrassed that the doctor would comment in this way, and was thinking of making a complaint.

When she arrived home and went to the loo, she discovered that she had used glitter spray and not deodorant.

Rats and scary stories

Someone repeated this next one to me recently as happening to his sister’s boyfriend. I seem to remember that it started life as a Jim Kelman short story, years ago, or maybe Jim was just passing it on.

A young guy in a supermarket in Glasgow was sent to clean up a store room. When he got back, he was complaining that it was really filthy and that he had noticed dried mouse or rat droppings in some areas.

A couple of days later, he started feeling that he was coming down with the flu, aching joints, headache, etc, and he started throwing up. He went to bed and never really got up. Within two days his face and eyeballs were yellow. He was rushed to emergency at the Western, where they said he was suffering from organ failure. He died shortly before midnight.

The doctors specifically asked if he had been in a warehouse or exposed to dried rat or mouse droppings at any time. They said there is a virus that lives in dried rat and mouse droppings. A post-mortem was conducted to verify the doctors’ suspicions. This is why it is extremely important to
always
carefully rinse off the tops of any cans of soft drinks or foods.

There is a whole lot more of this nonsense, and it
is
nonsense. Always a good idea to wash the top of a can, though.

I know a lot of rumours have been going around about planned or possibly planned terrorist attacks. Most of these emails I read and just go on about my day. This, however, sounds
serious
.

Don’t go to the toilet on October 19th. The CID reports that a major plot is planned for that day. Anyone who has a jobbie on the 19th will be bitten on the bum by a big black dog. Reports indicate that organized groups of dogs are planning to rise up into unsuspecting Glaswegians’ toilet bowls and bite them when they are going about their business.

I usually don’t send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is going out with this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this woman whose husband buys smuggled fags from this guy who knows a shoe shop man who sells shoes to a postal worker who has a friend who’s a drug dealer who sells drugs to another man who works for the government. He apparently overheard two men talking in the toilet about big black dogs and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked.

So it must be true.

You know how I know it isn’t true? Men don’t talk in toilets.

Unlucky for some

The ultimate myth and hoax email.

The following was forwarded to me and it is absolutely true. Everyone knows that I don’t send out erroneous emails. This completely clears up all the misunderstandings concerning internet hoaxes, conspiracy theories, pranks, schemes etc. Of course, the following information has been confirmed by the CID and/or the government. So next time you are unsure if an email that you have received is true or not, please check with the following to confirm its accuracy. If you feel that any particular hoax or theory has been left out, please email it to me with the details and I will include it in future. Once again, the following is 100% true and well worth the read.

The children’s tattoos laced with LSD that were supposed to be used for satanic ritual abuse at that nursery in Possil were mistakenly eaten by the choking Dobermann who was bitten by the snake that came out of the fur coat that was worn by the escaped homicidal maniac whose hook was found hanging from the door of the car of the teenagers who ran out of a lover’s lane when they heard that he had escaped and then went to the dope party where the girls who were supposed to be babysitting got wasted on dope and were so stoned they accidentally put the baby in the oven because the microwave was ruined by the exploding poodle that the girl with the beehive hairdo that turned out to contain beetles who had got an automatic First at college because her friend had committed suicide had put in to dry after it had got wet chasing the vanishing hitchhiker who had tried to warn the girl that her insides were cooked because she had stayed too long under the sun lamp at the local skin cancer inducer while her dad won a contest at that radio channel that played rock records that contained hidden commands and subliminal messages planted by the Jews, the Muslims, international bankers, the Illuminati, multinational corporations, and the spooks at Hanger 18 of Area 51 in Dreamland who performed the autopsies on the aliens who crashed at Roswell, New Mexico while on a mission to abduct people and conduct weird sexual and reproductive experiments on them because they knew we use only ten percent of our brains and that engineers had “proved” that bumblebees can’t fly and that sugar wakes you up even if you’re an MI5 agent who has recovered memories about conspiring with criminals and anti-New Labour extremists who woke up after a one-night stand in a hotel only to find that the girl he was with was gone and had written “Welcome to the world of Aids” in lipstick on the bathroom mirror which terrified him because he knew that it is just as easy to get Aids from heterosexual intercourse as it is from homosexual sodomy with an IV drug user because when the US government created Aids to commit genocide against black people who aren’t adversely affected by the minimum wage with the aid of immigrants who don’t give anything back to the community while smoking a cigarette that has no more been proven to give you cancer than evolution has been proven to occur because it’s only a theory and there are no real fossils and it violates the second law of thermodynamics unlike creation science which is not religious and fear of irradiated food which is rational because we know the government can improve our lives by suspending the laws of supply and demand to make prices fair and deciding how many people of each race and sex should be in universities and jobs which is good, because when control of everyday life is centralized in the New Labour-controlled state the people who make the decisions are never capricious or high-handed or make decisions favouring their friends and family and people who pay them money because if only we can get the right people into positions of control it will be safe to let them run things because clever people can work out how to allocate resources and what fair prices are for goods and services and work and who should be allowed to do what much more efficiently and constructively than just letting millions of people make their own decisions about what they should eat or drink or smoke or for whom they should work for under what conditions for how much money on what schedule based on their own perceptions, concerns and plans in accordance with their best interests.

But I digress.

A Craigton tale

A group of teenage girls were having a party one night when one of them had an empty (parents away for the weekend) and began to exchange ghost stories. One girl claimed that the old man who had been buried earlier that week in the cemetery at the back of the scheme had been buried alive. She claimed that, if you tried, you could hear him still scratching at the lid of his coffin. The other girls called her bluff and told her that she wouldn’t do it. They said she was too afraid to go down to the grave that very night. They continued to challenge her and eventually she gave in and accepted their challenge. Since she was going to go alone, she needed to prove to the others that she actually followed through with the task. She was supposed to take a wooden stake with her (presumably also useful against vampires) and drive it into the ground so the next day the girls would know that she had been to the grave.

She headed off, stake in hand, and never returned. The other girls assumed she had chickened out and had just gone home ashamed.

The next morning as they passed the cemetery they saw her there at the old man’s grave. Kneeling in the dark she had accidentally staked her dressing gown to the ground and when she tried to move away from the grave and felt the tugging, she died of fright.

Abominable a bomb in a bull story and a little old lady. Bless.

A worker at one of the big dairy farms who heard that bovine flatulence was largely composed of methane, and potentially explosive, decided to apply the scientific method to the theory.

While one of his contented cow charges was hooked up to the milking machine, he waited for the slight tail lift which dairy workers know signals an impending expulsion, generally something to avoid. Our hero flicked his lighter. His satisfaction at seeing the resulting foot-long blue flame lasted mere seconds, before the flame was subsumed by a rectal contraction. The poor cow exploded, killing the worker, who was struck by a flying femur.

And here is a letter from a South Side retirement home.

Dear Schoolchildren,

Thank you so much for the beautiful radio I won at your recent pensioners’ bingo lunch. I’m 94 years old and live at the local home in Pollokshields. My family are all dead apart from my daughter in Australia and I rarely have visitors. As a result, I have very limited contact with the outside world. This makes your present especially welcome.

The woman who shares my room, Maggie Cook, has had her own radio for as long as I’ve known her. She listens to it all the time, though usually with an earplug or with the volume so low that I can’t hear it. For some reason I have never understood, she has never wanted to share it.

Last Sunday morning, while listening to her morning religious programme, she accidentally knocked her radio off its shelf. It smashed into many pieces, and caused her to cry. It was really sad.

Fortunately, I had my new radio. Knowing this, Maggie asked if she could listen to mine.

I told her to fuck off.

God bless you.

Phone phantasy. With eejits.

I was sitting at my desk, when I remembered a phone call I had to make. I found the number and rang it. A man answered saying, “Hello?” I politely said, “This is John Thomas. Could I please speak to Robin Carter?”

Without a word the phone was slammed down on me. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be that rude. I tracked down Robin’s correct number and rang her. She had transposed the last two digits in her email. After I finished talking to Robin, I spotted the wrong number still lying there on my desk and decided to call it again.

When the same person once more answered, I shouted “Fuckin’ eejit!” and hung up. Next to his phone number I wrote the word “Eejit,” and put it in my desk drawer. Every couple of weeks, when I was feeling rotten, or had had a really bad day, I’d phone him. He’d answer, and then I’d yell, ‘Fuckin’ eejit!” It would always cheer me up.

Later that year BT introduced caller ID. This was a real disappointment for me. I would have to stop calling the eejit. Then one day I had an idea. I rang his number, then heard his voice, “Hello,” I made up a name, “this is Peter Smith with BT. I’m just calling to see if you’re familiar with our caller ID offer?” He went “No!”, and slammed the phone down. I quickly called him back and said, “That’s because you’re a fuckin’ eejit!”