Final gif(t) tomorrow.

As the "Dreadful Thoughts" club badges begin to wing their way around this wide world (i.e. Ireland) my thoughts have turned from the sunlit plains of munificence to the shadowy valleys of greed. I've enjoyed being a giver – but now it's time to take something (badge-shaped) back.

Midget Wrangler (spurred on by Damien Mulley) recently introduced us to the "Filthy" badge – a scarce and highly-desirable item awarded to those bloggers who've managed to plumb the depths (or should that be scale the heights?) of delicious dirtiness. What follows is my modest bid for this rare prize.

Though the universes of Star Trek, Buffy and Harry Potter (!) have been thoroughly probed and penetrated by writers of slash/adult fan fiction, there remain, I'm happy to say, some niche (and outré) areas of "fandom" that have yet to be fully explored. While, for instance, the Buffy section on (the indispensable) adultfanfiction.net bursts at its seams with over 3500 tales,¹ the My Little Pony archive can boast but one sad, solitary entry – "Belle of the Ball Until Dawn Comes". Admittedly, this may be one more entry than you expected…

Getting it on for the titillation and entertainment of…I'm not sure who exactly,² are the below pair – Twinkle Twirl (L) & Star Catcher (R):

While daylight hours no doubt find them prancing gaily about the fields and meadows of Ponyland, they're at play of a different sort once night falls:

"Star Catcher!" She breathed. "HARDER!" She panted in a breathy equine sort of way, shivering.

He thrust into her harder still, gasping as he did.. IN and OUT…. in and out… back and forth… faster and faster… "Oh! TWINKLE!" He called out heavily. "Twinkle Twirl… you're wonderful…!!!!!"

Hmmm. Though I may have forgotten (due to the nepenthean effects of passion), I don't think that I've ever called out – at the moment of climax – "Oh! [insert name here].. you're wonderful…!!!!!"

It's probably a (little) pony thing…as (unless I'm not doing 'it' right) is the panty, equine, breathy-shivering (not to mention the nibbling, biting and "loving head butts").

Given the tight shorts, moustaches, Hawaiian shirts, camp & arch Englishmen, purring & pistoning Ferrari engines (etc) – it's quite surprising that the adventures of Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV (et al) have not been more enthusiastically "slashed".

Again we find but one lone example, though that makes up for the general lack by giving us good 'n' juicy stuff. In "Peeping" we're introduced to two colourful (but fairly obvious) pairings – Rick/T.C. (I always suspected as much) and Magnum/Higgins (that bitchy, but affectionate, verbal sparring was a dead give-away). Kicking us off in gentle fashion is the former couple:

Rick stared at the broad back of his best friend and lover. Walking over, Rick wrapped his arm around his lover’s waist. Leaning over he rested his head on his beloved’s shoulder. Turning his head, he kissed his lover’s neck, then reached for his lover’s glass and drank the whiskey.

"Rick! Stop that."

"Sorry T.C…." Rick kissed T.C. again, "But I love to kiss you with whisky lips."

"And I love to taste you with whisky tongue."

All so well and so tender, but the motor is quickly revved up a few notches:

Using his strong hand, so gentle on the joystick of a copter, so firm on his lover's flesh. He caressed his lover’s cock, squeezing and massaging until he could feel his lover rocking and whining for T.C. to bring him off.

I'll never look at T.C.'s "chopper"…

…in quite the same way again…

One assumes that this intimate exchange is but the warm-up for the main event – the Magnum/Higgy bonkfest – but no. Their love act is but an afterthought and takes place entirely "off-screen". That doesn't, however, prevent the build-up from from being anything less than the stuff of high hilarity:

Magnum walked back to his brilliant red Ferrari and started the engine. Half way back to his cottage he called ahead to the house.

"Hello, Mildred?" Magnum said as Higgin’s [sic] wife answered.

"Yes?"

"Tell Higgy to go into the cottage and be naked, ass up when I get home. I’m about 15 minutes away."

That's it! The end! "Higgy" waits (forever), "ass up" and naked in the cottage. What happens next is left to our fertile & licentious imaginations. Lovers of explosive crescendos and "money shots" will, no doubt, feel somewhat teased and cheated.³

Badge, please.⁴

1. And features one story ("My Own Demons") that lists the following perplexing – and mildly terrifying – codes in its summary: Abuse, Anal, Angst, AU/AR, BDSM, B-Mod, Bond, BP, DP, F/F, H/C, HJ, Humil, Language, MC, OC, Oral, Other, Preg, S&M, SH, Slave, SoloF, SoloM, Tort, Toys, Trans, UST, WAFF, WIP, Yuri. [back]
2. What fetish, one wonders, is being catered for here? [back]
3. And what's this with a Mrs. Higgins? I always thought (even before reading this) that Mr. H was a "man's man"…if you get my meaning. [back]
4. I can't finish without mentioning a classic line from a Captain Scarlet/Captain Blue story – "Hush Adam, I feel the same way, you were just braver than me, I may be indestructible, but my heart isn't." Genius. [back]

I'm only relying on auditory prompts however for (like a pale, wan, consumptive Victorian child) I'm cuddled and huddled up in bed with the curtains drawn. While everyone else enjoys the fruits of global warming I lay here smothered and suffo-ma-cated with a bitch of a cold. So it goes…

As is my wont on such days I have forsaken the morning shave. Though such a move may lend other men a smouldering and rugged look, it does little for me other than make me look considerably sicker. It's the source of some regret that I've never been able to produce decent quantities of facial hair…the main problem being that I have a significant amount of cheek space where the stuff just won't grow.

Previous (half-hearted) attempts to cultivate a proper beard have ended with me looking like a demented cross between a 19th Century gent and a gay biker. Needless to say, this was not the intended effect. I seem to be cursed with a gene that steers me along beardy paths I dare not tread. When left untended the hair sweeps down from the sideburns before changing direction and shooting back toward the upper lip. The space between this area and the chin remains (however long I leave it) baby's bottom-like.

Those well-versed in the technical lingo of facial hair growth will probably have recognised that I'm naturally inclined towards the "A la Souvarov" or the "Franz-Josef":

All of this is simply by way of protracted introduction to today's manky object. While it's not a toy, in the strictest sense, it was discovered in the toy section of William Street's "Euro 2″ shop, so that's good enough for me. Ladies and gents, allow me to introduce "5 Moustaches":

It's the perfect gift for a child with a fluid, or insecure, sense of identity. Today he's "The Hollywood", tomorrow "The Hero". On bad-tempered, tantrum-filled afternoons he becomes "The Bruiser". When chaos and lawlessness threaten the household he slips on "The Sheriff". Forced to come to terms with the death of an aged relative he assumes the role of "The (late) Granpa". Forget transformers, "5 Moustaches" allows you to transform yourself.

The packaging and presentation are (somehow) evocative of dadaist/surrealist art. I know Marcel Duchamp playfully defaced the Mona Lisa (by giving her a moustache) but I have visions/memories of another piece (possibly by Magritte) which bore more than a passing resemblance to today's offering. Ceci n'est pas une Schnurrbarte, perhaps?

Back I go to my sick bed and my feverish dreams.

Due to popular demand (or at least the absence of popular opposition) I’m dipping into my Letts Boy's Diary 1986 once more to pull out another absorbing extract.

When last we looked in on my younger self I was waxing lyrical about the excellence of the Burgerland milkshake (and the "brill-ness" of Back to the Future) while bemoaning the continued non-appearance of Halley's comet and voicing concern about my brother's burgeoning jam sandwich addiction.

All of that just in January too. What a month.

5 days after the Burgerland adventure, I had this to say:

Thursday, January 30th, 1986

Learned about sets in school. Magnum was good. Cats had a tour of the house. Played Hyper Sports.

A particularly full day I'm sure you'll agree. Let's take the various sentences in turn (leaving out the bit about sets…of which I remember nothing):

1) Magnum was good

Recipe: Take one 'tache, one Ferrari, one strict (but dryly witty) English estate manager, one never-seen millionaire author, plenty of Hawaiian shirts (well it was Hawaii), countless Film Noir-ish interior monologues (etc) and bake for 60 minutes.

Result: The marvellous (fústar family favourite) Magnum P.I.

According to tv.com, the episode aired on the night in question (in the US at least) was "All Thieves on Deck" (Season 6). The synopsis reads as follows:

Magnum is to spend a week aboard a luxury cruise ship guarding an Amakua, a valuable wooden Hawaiian statuette recently purchased by Robin Masters, to be displayed on the liner while en route to the Hilo Museum. But Magnum and Higgins find that Apollo has been shot and seriously wounded after thieves attempted to steal the artefact from the Estate. Expecting the would-be robbers to try again during the cruise, Magnum secures Rick and T.C.'s additional help in guarding the artefact, but they find themselves on-board with a ship load of suspects, all potential thieves of the Amakua.

Ho ho. Sounds like the Magnum episode Agatha Christie would have written if she hadn’t (inconveniently) died 10 years previously. I'm sure the luxury cruise setting was duly exploited to allow Higgins many snide remarks RE: Magnum's uncouthness: "Do I really need to explain why you can't wear sneakers to the baccarat table, Thomas?"

Great stuff entirely.

2) Cats had a tour of the house
The cats in question were Nelson and Felix – two utterly mouldy, manky (yet strangely loveable) strays. Nelson looked like the result of a (Fly-like) teleporter accident that had fused the worst elements of a cat and a rat. Not only that but he was – like his famous namesake – minus an eye (and even the existing eye was nothing to write home about). Felix – while affectionate and fond of leaping onto the nearest available lap – was also not without fault. His enjoyment of physical contact was somewhat regrettable since any attempt to stroke him tended to result in a cloud of dead skin, dandruff and general filth being released. Why we saw fit to grant them a tour of the house is anyone’s guess.

21 years on and, once again, 2 cats roam our house,¹ though these 2007 versions are far cuter and less prone to falling apart than their 1980s counterparts. Pet name enthusiasts might be interested to learn that Cat A is called Buster (after Mr. Keaton, one of my heroes) and Cat B (following a vintage comedy theme) was due to be called Harpo.

For the first 2 weeks after we got them home, however, 'Harpo' would dart (terrified) under the bed as soon as one of us came anywhere near him. This practice reminded us both of the peculiar habits of "Fragile" Frankie Merman of Seinfeld fame. Fans of that great show may recall that when suffering emotional strain or anxiety the young Frankie would run off into the woods, dig a hole, and sit in it till the mood had passed. Thus it was that "Harpo" became "Frankie".

3) Played Hyper Sports

Hyper Sports (for those not in the know) was the rather lame² sequel to the seminal arcade game Hyper Olympic (1983). In their home computer incarnations – we had an Amstrad CPC 464 – these games required the user to perform a lot of frantic joystick waggling to make the onscreen athletes do their thing (and this at an age when that other form of "joystick waggling" was becoming an all-consuming leisure activity among my school mates and I). The average lifespan of a joystick exposed to the ferocious battering of Hyper Sports/Olympic³ was approximately 8 seconds. After that your pixilated athlete friend would stand immobile and forlorn while you – with tears of anger and frustration welling in your eyes – waggled with increasingly desperate and futile ferocity.

The joystick, of course, was a wholly unsuitable instrument for such games. Any arcade junkie worth his/her salt would have told you that "button bashing" was the only way to go. The most effective technique was to put your head down, tense your fingers and shoulders, and try to perfect a sort of ferociously intense tremble. When performed most effectively this method appeared (to the untrained eye) to involve little obvious movement. In reality, of course, the movement was so rapid that the eye simply couldn’t keep up.

Flamboyant, over-animated button smashing immediately pegged you as a rank amateur: someone who’d tragically failed to realise that the key to athletic success lay in making the interval between left button and right button taps as brief as humanly possible. Failure to adhere to this basic maxim inevitably resulted in a catastrophic (and competitively disastrous) loss of speed at crucial moments.

One alarming aspect of the "ferocious tremble" technique was that the player could occasionally appear to be exhibiting all the signs of cardiac arrest: purple complexion, extremely tense and rigid limbs, chronic shortness of breath etc. The last time I witnessed this worrying sight was one evening (not so many years ago) in my parents' house. In attendance were yours truly, my brother Brian (Mr. Jam Sandwiches) and Copernicus (Mr. Midnight Court).

The game was the passably entertaining International Track & Field 2: a more sophisticated (but less fun) version of Hyper Olympic. As the evening wore on it became apparent that Copernicus was developing a technique of such prodigious intensity that we could no longer make out the distinctive individual click-clack sounds of alternate keys being pressed. All that could be heard was a deafening and incessant drone as Copernicus' onscreen representative crossed the line for a record obliterating 5.3 second 100 metres.

As the brother and I turned to congratulate him we were greeted with the sight of a young(ish) man utterly spent and possibly in need of urgent medical attention. I actually thought he was going to die there and then before our eyes – snatched away at a moment of minor triumph. Fortunately the palpitations subsided and (after a sit-down and a restorative glass of something or other) his heart resisted the urge to explode.

The shock of it profoundly affected Brian and I though and we never went near the game again – thus ensuring that the record still stands to this day, a testament to Copernicus' willingness to push himself to the trembling limits of human endurance.

More from the diary at a later date.

1. Not the same house mentioned in the diary of course. [back]
2. Gymnastics? Skeet Shooting? [back]
3. Yes I know it sounds odd, but it really was called Hyper Olympic not Hyper Olympics [back]