Matt Roper as Wilfredo in Edinburgh last week (Photograph by Garry Platt)
As I am still a zombie from the after-effects of the Edinburgh Fringe and not yet fully able to string thoughts together, here is a blog (to quote Slaughterhouse-Five yet again) “somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from”.
Matt Roper is almost unrecognisable as Wilfredo, the greasy singer he performed as at the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show in Edinburgh last week.
But yesterday, Matt was paying for fuel at the counter of the Texaco garage in Totnes, in the South West of England, when the girl behind the counter asked him: “Are you Wilfredo?”.
He replied: “Not at the moment, no”.
Matt says: “As I was punching my PIN number into the card machine, she was showering me with praise… I love what you do… I keep up with what you’re up to… It’s so good to see you doing so well! And, at that very moment, with a queue of customers waiting behind me, my card payment was declined.”
Meanwhile, this morning, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent Anna Smith, who lives on a boat in Vancouver, sent me an e-mail:
Anna Smith has been thinking about dinosaur eating habits
We had a major wind storm here that knocked down trees and left 700,000 people without electricity for up to four days (including me).
Apparently information websites crashed with people wanting to know when the electricity would return.
My phone is near dead. I dropped it in the bilge… Well it slid off my bed as I slept through the windstorm of ninety kilometer per hour gusts that was knocking trees onto houses and cars. But it is now in a bag of red rice from Texas, so maybe that will revive it.
A young server at the McDonald’s Drive Through restaurant suggested I put the phone into a bag of dry rice. It is supposed to work the way rice dries out salt in a salt cellar.
This, in itself, seemed a little surreal to me, but then she added:
Did Tyrannosaurus Rexes hallucinate on prehistoric acid trips?
Did you hear about the scientist who found ergot in amber? I was listening to a CBC radio program about it. They were speculating that dinosaurs were having acid trips…
I thought I had better check up on this and, indeed, the Daily Mail wrote a piece about it in February, headlined:
DID DINOSAURS GET HIGH?
FUNGUS CONTAINING LSD COMPOUND IS FOUND
ON A 100-MILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSILISED BLADE OF GRASS
with the sub-headings:
– Ergot produces compounds that can induce delirium and hallucinations
– Scientists in the 20th century used these compounds to synthesise LSD
– Researchers say herbivorous dinosaurs are likely to have eaten the fungus
And I thought the Edinburgh Fringe was strange.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 