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The butane flare burns the air and it’s blue light illuminates the irises of the black eyed men. “Kneel down, my friends; lock in your spanners” shouted Manfred, as the Victorian ceramic of the latrines crumbled around him “hold fast as you tighten the tundish!” There was a screeching sound that made the massive nape of Manfred’s neck tightened suddenly. He could feel the hairs on his neck stick out perpendicularly, just before it was lacquered by the gush of water spewing uncontrollably up from the main drain, forming a glistening hemp out of his mullet…

Popular consensus: Er, don't mean to stop you in mid flow, but what's going on here?

Me: Oh, sorry, this is a little experiment. I found this application on the Web that allows you to update your website or blog with interesting purple prose without having to do a stroke of work yourself. You just insert any old text, select a genre and press a button. It then connects with some database in California and converts your text into a colourful blog entry. This sample above was generated using my shopping list and uses the genre Gothic Fantasy. I just entered what I bought yesterday: Toothpaste, Jam, Gerkins, Thumb tacks, Pop Tarts, Strawberry Muffin Flavoured Condoms…

Popular consensus: Stop there right now. Now, do you know of any way of erasing what I’ve just read from my memory before my brain melts completely?

Me: Er, no. Sorry – perhaps too much information there.

Popular consensus: I thought not. Well, that aside the above adventure seems to be centred on plumbers. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t find plumbers prominently featured in Gothic Fantasy novels.

Me: Yes, yes, you seem to be right. I didn’t notice that. The content seems a bit arbitrary. Yesterday I put in Michael McDowell’s speech to the Seanad and set it to Literary Picaresque and it provided a yarn about an Aristocratic Count running from his ancient mansion before the pitch fork and torch wielding mob of local villagers get to him.

Popular consensus: Funny that. But is it not a bit dishonest, using a machine to provide entry to your blog?

Me: No, not all. Sure weren’t those L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S always doing stuff like this themselves, using inappropriate lists to make poems and using random word patterns in their work. And then there’s William Burroughs and his word collage where he’d write something…

Popular consensus: What, you’re comparing yourself to William Burroughs now, that heroine addict; that shirt lifter; that degenerate….

Me: Steady on, now. Burroughs got a good reputation for himself at the end of his life. He was even inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Popular consensus: Anyway, back to this web application thing. It reads like it was written by someone one drugs. Not a very satisfactory outcome in our opinion.

Me: Well you’re entitled to it, but there’s another opinion out there that the vast majority of blogs are terrible anyway (“The BBC's head of interactive cheerfully accepts that 99% of all blogs, including some of the corporation's, are "complete crap"), and even Charlie Brooker is giving out about the pointlessness of it "you might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky [as debate online]". It would be fun to write blog entries on drugs but I personally find it hard to type when you’re convinced that your fingers are tapping away on the back of a crocodile.

Popular consensus: Still could you not write about something that actually means something.

Me: How about that photo of McDowell scowling in the Dail that was published on the front of the Irish Times yesterday. When you hold the page up to the sun it merges with the picture of an animal on the back with the result that it looks like McDowell has two horns sticking out his head.

Popular consensus: Not more about McDowell. Does he not get enough publicity as it is?

Me: Well okay. Let me think. It’s hard to find a top Irish news story where he doesn’t feature. How about binge drinking. Three times higher than any where else in the EU! Shocking statistics, except when you look at what constitutes a binge. Only five pints! And apparently Irish people do that on average 32 times a year! That amazing. Considering that there’s 52 weeks in the year and each week contains, to the best of my knowledge, a weekend then there’s plenty of weekends when people are on the dry. It inevitably means that the average is balanced by the high number of people who are hardly ever or don’t drink at all. If you take those people out of the equation then those who do drink have more than 32 so called binges.

Popular consensus: It doesn’t exactly help the national stereotype. But this is not very funny.

Me: How about Japanese War Tubas. There’s a picture of them being inspected by here.

To find out more about the devises that were used to find enemy aircraft using elaborate horns attached to your ears before radar was invented check here.

There's loads more about other whacky inventions like the overcoat parachute on the the excellent kircher society blog.

Is that funny enough for you?

Hello, hello? Oh right, you’re on the Bad Science site. I don’t blame you.

His hand fell limply down and the black pine scented air of the forest filled his coke irritiated nostrils…