!Leonardo Mind for Modern Times, by Donnie Ross

!Leonardo Mind for Modern Times, by Donnie Ross

Downloadable from the Apple iBookstore FREE!
http://itunes.apple.com/book/id541725141?mt=11

The definitive Atlas of Facial Expressions from Aardvark to Zebra, the acoustic design of car-door slamming, musico-erotic compositions for cello, these peculiar topics lead the reader into the first Findo Gask Mystery.  A fierce bronze Greek gynecoid is dredged from the sea in a fisherman’s net off northern Scotland, while a plot is hatched to displace the quasi-assassinated  Holy Emperor Tony Blair from his niche as a cryochilled presentation to future generations, but what on earth is happening in the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Anthropomimetic Genetics?  Never mind that, who is this Memus44, who spends the last ice age in quite a well-known cave in the Cairngorm Mountains, polishing his mind and emerging from time to time to make sure culture triumphs but Findo Gask doesn’t?

The first Findo Gask Mystery in the Trilogy can hardly be expected to solve the entire mystery, but it might be fun to find out just how far !Leonardo Mind for Modern Times might succeed in answering all these questions, as a series of apparently unconnected preliminary short stories covering a wide range of human experience finally coalesces into an extraordinary postmodern interactive sci-fi novel, building to a powerful climax before falling apart into glittering fragments.  Expect cave ravens, masses of medical detail, excruciating jokes, non sequiturs, invented languages, philosophical posturing, a treatise on sculpture in Plato, erotic encounters of half a dozen kinds.

Illustrated with videos, drawings and paintings by the author, this chaotic book has several underlying intentions - but a sense of humour is essential.  And, if you can find it, a copy of the Atlas of Facial Expressions from Aardvark to Zebra.

© Donnie Ross 2012

http://itunes.apple.com/book/id541725141?mt=11

MacBless

Act 1 Scene 1:  A Clearing in a Bog

1st Witch:  When shall we three meet again, in sleety showres sote or pishing doon rain?

2nd W:  Spikkin aboot, y'all sumph?  Stir the pot, stir th'effin pot.  Or smoke it, wotevvah.

3rd W:  By the pingin of m' iPad 2, somefink Baldy this way's due!

"Howdy now, y'all crones!, said Tristram Mump, bursting into the soggy clearing like a porn-star on corned beef entering the inner sanctum of a west-coast vegetarian speakeasy with a wardrobe malfunction of the fudamental particles.

1st Witch (aside): It's him!  Saw'm on the telly.  Ugly bastard in the flabby flesh, inne?

2nd W:  Mark him, Gladys, yon Salmond man dine with a lang speen or he be poached rudderless ere St Swithin's Day dawns o'er St Swithin Street, not a stone's throw from Union Strasse as the GPS flieth.

3rd W:  Ay, and Swinney's goose be already cooked, no golden eggs neither or I'm a trannie.

Meantime Mump was leaning on a Cauldron, which given the price of diesel was unsurprisingly on the chilly side, wearing a mean, bored, cynical, existentialistic, world-weary, hypovuncular, vacuo-paternalistic, unduly plottocratic expression on his rubicund facies sans Gallois:  not a pretty sight.

His Ginger Tom of a supra-patical rug was rugose, plethoricish, bathetic, hebephrenical, plurihypopotentialistic, kryptoprurient and evidently in need of a good combing.  It smelled of frangipani, Pakistani and incontinent old manni, and had anyone held it up to the light a number of lacunae would have been evident even to the naked eye of a semi-recumbent odalisque's samovar-attendant squinting from below a tartan turban against the trend of current opinion (but isn't everyone?), each translucent hirstute space occupied by a died-in-the-wool tick or other rodent small beastie whose sole passion and raison d'etre is human skin, whether black, white or tartan - or, as in this case, lightly attached to and coterminous with a mass of loathsomely putrescent git-plasma.

"Where was we?"  asked Mump, his pterygoid processes already aching with the effort of making conversation with a broad cross-section of the real people of Scatland.

1st Witch:  All Hail MacMump, thou shall be Laird hereafter... ha ha ha.

2nd W:  All Hail MacThump,  Nae wee mon born o' wumman shall stick a haggis up yer kilt the noo.

3rd W:  All Hail MacChump,  an qhuen did youse graduate fae Charme Schule?

The Witches, tutti:  Oh and by the way, yer gowff coorse and, ahem, housing complexe, will fairly prosper... until the gweed fowk o Scatland grow wise, give up the Thdrink and cease from electing gowks, ne'erdeeweels and vacuous cu...sumphs, or until a Forest of aff-shore Wind Machinies appears east of the links, whichever is the sooner.

"Suits me," sez Mump, as the ravens began dropping stone dead from the gloomy sky, such was the lack of respirable atmosphere in them days.  Aye, we hardly ken we're living noo in this age of jollity and Scandinavian fillums.

1st W:  Have a brussel sprout, yer grace?

Mump:  Naa, they make me fart like buggery, confuses the hell out of my acolytes who try to make verbose sense out of my proctogaseous remarks.

"Och me," murmured Cøcø, rousing from the fireside with a Gargantuan Bøner, "That Inspector Lund, och me, och me..."

Exeunt omnes, singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" in B flat minor and dragging the Sardinian Engine with difficulty and hempen ropes, thereby exemplifying and illustrating a form of Zeugma as a sop to the more discerning among the audience, or at least those of that ilk who had so far resisted the charms of Morpheus, a pusher of this parish.

© Donnie Ross 2011

The Sardinian Engine

Vinlandian Krillionaire Tristram Mump sat glumly on an upturned fishbox, the legendary legend ‘Fraserburgh Box Pool’ stamped on one end barely visible through a glairy layer of the glistery guts of long-dead mackerel, clutching the tufted remnants of a comatose ginger tom to his hairless pate, moaning to himself in fragments of a fractured Ancient Assyrian dialect known only to a few fellow initiates and rubbing a calloused, broken-nailed, cigarette-tar-stained hairy hand over his contused and lacerated facial skin.

“Look here,” expostulated Achilles Parrot, whose hand it was, “Kindly get your physiognomie offa my hand, you maroon-visaged Yanqui frotteur-de-la-face!”

Across the narrow oily subterranean passageway from the VKTM, George Clooney and his inebriate reprobate colleague Dr. Moebius T. Flugelpik worked feverishly with spanners of their own devising on the Sardinian Engine, a device so astonishingly complex, so preternaturally arcane and so unutterably oleaginous that only a lifetime of severe training could prepare even the most talented engineer for what whirligigs, mechano-elastic gyres and senior thermo-zimbalistics – nay, what outré and extraordinary thingies that dis yon - lay under the silver-inlaid & cloisonneé-enamelled manifold and rocker cover.

With a gracile torrent of high-precision abuse directed in a high voice at Flugelpik’s glabella, Clooney threw down his spanner, wiping the sardine-oil off his girlish hands with an irregularly quadrilateral silk tie-dyed mouchoir.

?????????????????????????

Will Tristram Mump and his band of reprobates succeed in using the Sardinian Engine to fracture Space Time into a million highly expensive bits?  Will they then succeed in selling the pieces back to God at a tidy profit?

Is it called The Sardinian Engine because it originated in Archimedes’ franchise in Sardinia, or because it’s lubricated using Sardine Oil?  Will the damned thing even start on a freezing morning?

To find out, watch this FLOOGLE Mystery space!

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2011

Tristram Mump and the Ginger Tom

The succession of insanely screaming young women which had been chasing a well-known Aberdonian author up and down the aisle for the previous four hours passed once again in a kakocoprolalophilokryptographobillkirtonomanic iteration.  As the noise faded, an elderly American hove into view, pushing a laden trolley.  “Lunch is sunny side up!” exclaimed this gentleman, his glossy bald head gleaming in the gloaming.  “Hey puss!” he added, addressing the ginger tom, who was attempting to look inconspicuous but failing in the same way as an iceberg might not quite succeed in being un-noticed if it were to attempt a surreptitious beaching next to a naked red-head on the beach at Cannes, especially if it were so poorly advised as to try the line, “Mmm, nice Cannes!”

Tristram Mump seized the unfortunate feline by its penile appendage, explaining as he did so to the classically untrained that penis is Latin for tail, and  “a nice piece of tail” is what butchers in South London call, well never mind, said Coco, isn’t that a sufficiently long animadversory dysvarification?, and clapped the goddamned cat right back on his stupid looking head, muttering as he did so, “Why should I pay vast sums for a fucking stupid looking rug when a fucking stupid ginger tom will do just as well?”

The ginger tom demurred.  It would be inaccurate to say he depurred, but there we are.

“Where the gastrojuicical hell have you been, Mump?” expostulated the starving Clooney who by this time was on the brink – the very cusp - of chewing lumps out of the carriage’s aged upholstery.

“Offly sorry, old chap,” said Mump, slyly winking at Flugelpik in a faux-anglais accent.

Things were looking black.  Not only had the trans-Siberian Orient Express been hijacked by a set of venal town councillors, but a soie-disant krillionaire was currently building three or four dozen golf courses on the train, without so much as a buy-your-grannie.  None of this prevented Clooney from tucking into his cold ptarmigan, the brace of pheasants sang-froid, the several loaves hand-made and beautifully crusty, the sweet little tarts imported frais from Bakewell that very morning, the dansak, the Hyderabad Utterly Unbeatable Biryani, prepared in front of the guests in a copper vessel with the rice steamed wonderfully over the meat, the chocolate cake with ground almond brought by the best patissiers of fin de siecle Straight Paris to a peak of mouth-watering perfection as warm and moist as… well, never mind, said Coco, we really must get on.

Dejeuner sur le Train

Suddenly an ear-splitting vibration was heard.  Flugelpik turned a deathly shade of pale and immediately made a frenzied dive for his pocket.  Here in rapid succession he discovered a hand, not his own, some car keys which didn’t seem familiar either, and finally his mobile telephone.  “Damned iPneumatic Drill App!”  he shouted, clapping the telephone to an ear with one hand and massaging his injured groin with the other.

By this time an exhausted George Clooney had finally desisted from his combative efforts to fracture Flugelpik’s skull, to the considerable relief of the catatonic ginger tom, whose wellbeing was further enhanced when a veterinarian staff-member of Danish Chemins de Fer took the opportunity to administer his belated depot injection of the antipusschotic drug, chlorpurrmazine.

“Oh Jesus, spare us these grizzly puns………What’s for lunch, Flugelpik?” demanded Clooney, reverting to his usual rough tones of a down-at-heel-ex-flick-artist.

“I’m just ordering it.  That was the automated menu being downloaded automatically by text message to my iPhone.”

“Fine.  I’m thinking the stuffed bear en croute, grizzly naturally, vole-au-vent de Coco, Won-Ton Number 256 for 6 people, cold pheasant, cold grouse, cold ptarmigan, hot Thai quick-fried veg (no red peppers), then we’ll see the menu again.”  “I could go a sweet little tart any time at all,”  he added, fingering his moustache absent-mindedly.


“Excusez-moi!” expostulated Parrot, “Zat vas my moustache, not yours, eef you don’t mind.”

Ginger Tom

Just a few seats down the carriage, a peevish voice was protesting:  “’Astings, please not to tell me any more stories about ze ladies, I do not weesh to know how often you are what you call ‘aving eet orff.  ‘Astings, you do nat ave ze clue, and wot we need is ze clues, n’est-ce pas?”

Opposite Achilles Parrot, lounging negligently on one elbow, although fortunately it wasn’t one of his own, somewhat red-faced, and slurping from time to time from a bottle of 12-year old malt whisky, was the elegant figure of Foyles Hastings, well-known bon-viveur, connoisseur, entrepreneur and part-time veterinary chirurgien.

“And then her father opened the door to see what all the noise was, and…”

But Foyles’ voice tailed off at this point, for the altercation taking place a few seats in front had reached a Fujian peak of volcanic vituperation.

“Listen, you pomaded yankee cross-dresser!” Flugelpik was screaming.  “I need that haggis, and I need it now!!”  His speech was considerably impeded by the savage blows being rained on his head by a raddled-looking old harridan, wielding what appeared on first examination to be an up-market version of a Davy Crockett hat, although it might equally have been a catatonic ginger tom.

The crone’s next whispered communication confirmed that this was indeed Clooney. The cool, slightly sardonic tones coloured even the barely audible hiss of his words.

‘Still taking the tablets, Doctor?’

Flugelpik tried to ease away from the stench, surprised that Clooney was still heeding the outmoded advice of Henry Cooper to ‘splash it all over’.

‘You know I have to,’ he replied. ‘Without a regular intake of … Well, you know very well what might happen.’

Clooney smiled.

‘Good,’ he whispered. ‘Because I have the Engine. Anna-Frid emailed me. She’s ready to trade. The Young Pretender is on the boat waiting, the proclamation has been signed and rolled in cling film.’

‘Cling film? What the hell for?’ asked Flugelpik.

‘To get it through customs. We had to hide it in a haggis.’

‘Shit,’ muttered Flugelpik. ‘You know the effect of oatmeal on contractual refinements.’

‘Of course,’ smiled Clooney. ‘That’s why Anna-Frid needs the Engine.’