100. Another art.

Today was to be my last post. Number 100. I don’t usually plan my posts. I just go where the mood takes me on any given day, but today was going to be different. I have been thinking about it for a while. It was going to be a simple thank you to the people who have so kindly indulged me in my folly. But no more. I’ve been ambushed. Derailed. Kiboshed. By a vagina. An enormous, screaming, laughing vagina.

Due to the sensitive nature of today’s topic, no relevant pictures can be posted. So here’s a picture of Donald Trump’s hair rising up to strike down his enemies.

99. Something fishy.

In 1950, a rather surprised angler caught a two metre Zambesi shark at the confluence of the Levuvhu and Limpopo Rivers in South Africa’s Lowveld.

Duuum dum. duum dum. dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum.

This must have come as a little bit of a surprise, since the nearest ocean, the Indian, is over 400 km away.

98. 14 weeks.

This is it; the last weekly update. And it will not, I fear, be a very long one. I have, you see, been at war today. I’ve seen some things in my life. I’ve climbed to over 4000m in the Alps. I’ve been charged by elephants and stood less than 20 metres from a wild lion. I’ve run with the bulls in Pamplona. I’ve been caught on a barbed wire fence as a bush-fire raced towards me. But I have never been through anything as harrowing as I did today. I was in a battle today.

Although I was wearing more comfortable pants.

97. The mile high club.

I am not, by world standards, a particularly large man. I weigh between 80 and 90kg, depending on how much I have needed to run away from Mrs 23thorns in any given month. There are times, however, when I feel like a huge, misshapen freak. Antique shops terrify me.

Aaaargh! The horror!

They all seem to have been laid out by the same entry-level sociopath, who gets his kicks out of watching physically awkward strangers sweep tiny glass statues of swans off tables, or knock over hat-stands that form the supportive bases of complicated structures made out of imitation Ming vases and peeling mirrors in elaborate gilded frames.

96. Balls.

This unfortunate soul was Joseph Merrick, better known as “The Elephant Man”

He had the misfortune of being horribly physically deformed in Victorian England. He could find no employment, and was rejected by his father and stepmother after his mother died. But all was not lost. Because in that less sensitive age, people would pay good money just to come and look at him. He became a sideshow freak. He was not alone. There were the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng.

95. Wildlife in a can.

Just a short post today. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I read the best story in the news today. A zoo in China got bust trying to pass a dog off as a lion. Even better, the visitors only cottoned on to the deception when the lion started barking

ROAR!

94. Spots.

There are some people, I was reminded this morning as she danced around the dustbin waving a bin-liner in homage to Isadora Duncan, who might accuse Mrs23thorns of being a little eccentric.

I have no idea where they would get that notion from.

What nonsense! The woman is as sane and as rational as the day is long! But she does, I thought as she pretended to strangle herself with the bin-liner, have just one peculiarity. She has a favourite animal.

Don’t worry. I know CPR.

93. Corkwoods.

This is something that almost everyone reading this has heard of.

No, that is not Yuletide crack.

If you live in a westernised country, you’ve been talking about it since you were small. You’ve sung songs about it. You’ve watched people carry it about in little boxes or in bottles on stage. And if you’re anything like me, you have never really bothered to find out what it was. Maybe this will help.

Yes, good people, that funny yellow dried snot looking stuff is myrrh. As in “gold, frankincense and myrrh.” It was of huge religious importance in biblical times. It was used by the Egyptians to embalm their dead and by other groups, including the Israelites, as incense in their temples. It was pretty hard to come by. So hard, in fact, that it could be mentioned in the same breath as gold as a nifty little present for a baby. And it was made by beating up a living creature and harvesting its blood.

92. Pride.

I am, I fear, one of those fathers who has given his son a lot to live up to on the sports field. I was, you see, captain of my rugby team. Those are some big shoes to fill.

It should in no way diminish my achievement in your eyes if I tell you that I was captain of the seventh team. There were only seven teams. We would occasionally find ourselves playing against kids who were missing limbs, and there was this one guy who kept breaking down in tears when we got the ball away from him.

Seventh team rugby players prepare for another tough match.

91. 13 weeks.

Well, here we are. The second to last weekly update. If you are new here, I am doing 100 posts in 100 days. Or roughly 100 days. I was also trying to get 60 000 views in those hundred days, but that’s not going to happen, so I’m going to take a page from the book of the politicians. I’m going to radically shift the goalposts, and then claim overwhelming success. I’m now going for 30000 views in 100 posts.