The panic shroom

Oh, the ignominy. Oh, the shame. Sam Snort put pen to paper in this place last week to point out that since ‘God’ doesn’t exist, there can be no such thing as blasphemy. Like a man lighting a fuse in a cartoon bomb, I struck the match, saw the little flame, heard the sizzle – and then raced down into my reinforced concrete bunker in the basement of Snort Towers to await the big bang. And what happened? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Zero. At the very least, Sam was expecting a fatwa to land on his head, ideally followed by grainy TV images of effigies of yours truly being burned in holy places and religious leaders calling for a boycott of Hot Press in Islamabad. But no, there was bugger all, not even the small consolation of opening the great front door of Snort Towers one morning to be greeted by the heartening sight of a lone protestor keeping vigil on the frosty lawn with a placard reading, “Down With This Sort Of Thing.” Christ on a go-kart, what do you have to do to cause offence in this world – write in fucking Danish? Anyway, it’s all too much. What chance have I ever got of being brought on-stage by U2 or getting all sorts of literary lions to sign an open letter to The Irish Times in my defence, if the religious police won’t take a blind bit of notice of my crude provocations? Is it that they can never get further than the pictures in The Phantom or Jackie Hayden’s ‘First Cuts’? (“Damn, there’s nothing in here about beheading at all”).
Lunar Buzz
Ah, what the hell, it doesn’t matter – there are plenty of other things to divert a man with a mind as fertile as that of Sam Snort. Like the fact that astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was – wait for it – Moon. How cool is that? Sam is currently reading a splendid book called Moondust, in which journalist Andrew Smith tracks down the humans who have walked on the surface of the moon (as opposed to travelling on the underground, sez you), and generally waxes wise and wild about the space race, the counter culture, spirituality, conspiracy theories and how we all got from there to here (but not quite back again). But here’s the thing. Sam knows for a fact that long after – no, that’s not right, quite soon after, actually – he has finished reading the book, he will have forgotten just about everything in it apart from the fact that Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon. Or was it Mars? No, it’s Moon (I just checked it out). Seriously, isn’t that just the greatest? But still there’s the problem that even as I write this, I’m aware that I can’t think of any other single thing I learned from reading a book to which, for a number of nights, I have devoted my deep and undivided attention. Well, that’s not quite true either. I now realise that it has also given me the idea for an excellent pub quiz question, in two parts, as follows: part one, name the first man who walked on the moon (cries of, oh for fuck’s sake, ask us an easy one, is this what we paid our table fee for etc) and part two, name the last man who walked on the moon ( no cries, just dumbstruck silence at the beautiful cruel symmetry of it all). Hah, got you there, muthafuckas. To save you the bother of looking it up, the chap’s name was Gene Cernan, and his is indeed the most recent footprint to have appeared on the moon, assuming of course that those deluded dingbats who turn up regularly on the Discovery Channel to describe how they were brought there to have sex with aliens, haven’t actually been telling the truth. Much more likely, sez you, that they have been at the magic mushrooms – which brings me neatly to my sermon for this week, one which I feel superconfident will excite a far more vitriolic response than did my atheistic ravings last time out.
Memory Loss
So here goes: Sam stand four-square with the feds in their bid to stamp out the consumption of mind-altering mushrooms. The likely reason that Sam can’t remember much about anything he reads is that he has eaten six bowls of spotted toadstool every day before breakfast for 35 years and he thinks it’s beginning to catch up him. Of course, Sam Snort can handle this shit and all other kinds of advanced brain chemistry with only minor side-effects – memory loss, volcanic bowel
movements and a tendency to hum Quicksilver Messenger Service guitar solos – but the great unwashed don’t have his robust constitution. Consequently, they do embarrassing things, like opening shops with spectacularly silly names, growing unfeasibly long beards and rabbiting on endlessly about the lovely colours they see whilst under the influence. They also tend to think that Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ is a classic album, man. Look, kids, here’s the deal: anything that comes off a golf course can’t be good for you. Why do you think that so many male golfers dress like pimps? And surely even the most brain-addled devotee of these odious plants can’t but pick up on the clue contained within the name. ‘Mush’ is right. So today, Sam Snort says: well done Mary Harney and a big thumbs up to the feds for ensuring that our pop kids will no longer be exposed to a food fit only for Hobbits. Frankly, if you can’t handle five fingers of kinghell crank, you shouldn’t be allowed near anything stronger than a stalk of broccoli, anyway. And I look forward to the protest – dozens of wide-eyed zonks in those silly Tibetan hats bumping into each other on the great lawn of Snort Towers as they chant the mantra, ‘Remind me why we’re here, man’. By the way, did I ever tell you about Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name?