HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Life in the early 18th century was a necessarily slow-paced affair for the average citizen.  They would walk to school, to work, to market, to church and to the pub, in all weathers.  Life was uncomplicated, monotonous and time-consuming.  Steam-powered trains had only just begun to be used and even they were confined to industrial settings, unavailable to anyone other than rich industrialists and hobbyist lords. Rather like first-class travel today. Whilst there were other inventions waiting to be discovered such as aeroplanes and computers, Samuel Johnson didn’t invent the dictionary until 1755 so they wouldn’t have known what to call these new-fangled devices anyway.

One chap, however, was brimming with ideas.  Cuthbert Smugbeard was a skilled blacksmith, always working away at his forge to come up with new ideas for improving his life.  He’d recently been looking into the problem of donkeys moving at, well, a donkey’s pace.  Whilst this was all well and good if you were transporting goods to market or ferrying kids along Blackpool Beach, Cuthbert wanted a faster way to get to the pub after a hard day at the forge.  And a faster way to get home after a hard evening at the pub.  Drunk in charge of a Donkey was not yet on the statutes.

Being a farrier as well as a smith, he was well used to shoeing hooves of various beasts, and hit upon the idea of inserting a thin slice of wavy steel between the iron shoe and the hoof.  This, he determined, would impart extra spring in the step of the beast which would enable a longer stride, a higher step, and an ability to leap a five bar gate at even the easiest of canters.

Upon seeing Cuthbert riding his newly invigorated donkey with the special shoes, a nearby landowner, Lord Slooty, invited Cuthbert to fit two pairs of his marvellous new device to all four hooves of his prize stallion, thereby enabling the lord to win that year’s 50 guineas race by several lengths (and due to a minor metallurgical miscalculation by Cuthbert, several heights too).

Slooty invited Cuthbert to go into business together to manufacture the device, but they needed a snappy name for it.  Cuthbert wasn’t too good with words (nobody was until 1755 when Johnson invented them), and wanted to call it the Springing Stallion Slither O’Metal but Lord Snooty eventually came up with a much snappier name for it, the…

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Answer: > bouncy horse shim <

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

The John Lewis Christmas advertisement production team were having a brainstorming session, trying to decide on a new bold direction for their annual campaign. After several years of adverts featuring families, stuffed animals, real animals, and plenty of heartstring-tugging emotional denouements, the newly-appointed creative director Crispin Brand wanted to up the stakes a little and produce something “with extra raunch” as he put it. Ungrammatically.

“I want something more sexy, with more funky music, maybe a famous musician from the 80s who will appeal to our demographic in new and exciting ways” said Crispin. The creative team bandied around a few names but he rejected each one:

Kylie Minogue? Too 90s

Madonna? Too expensive

Michael Jackson? Too dead

Elton John? Too 2018

Ozzy Osborne? Too much… in too many ways

Then Chloe, a junior member of the team and resident millennial, suggested Nile Rodgers - the famous guitarist currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity amongst the fifty-something festival glamping set. Crispin was astonished that Chloe even knew who Nile was, until she pointed out that her mum watched Glastonbury on BBC2 every year while wearing glitter make-up and a Jo Whiley wig.  

“Brilliant!” said Crispin. “We can combine the sounds of ‘Le Freak’ with a little vignette about Nile discovering his fancy footwork capability and then seamlessly segue into ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer’ for the final few seconds of the advert, while Nile gyrates his hips provocatively. The glampers will love it!”

The team swung into action. They worked up storyboards, hired Mr Rodgers and a film crew, and chose a location in a cobbled street in West Barmsby, Yorkshire, which Strategy & Planning had assured them would appeal to the Werther-bothering triple-locked pension demographic.

Nile was insistent that he wanted to use the latest dance moves which he’d “got off YouTube” and involved twerking his bum around all over the place. No matter, thought Crispin. If people ridiculed the moves but it increased sales for the lead-up to Christmas then he'd live with it. After all, the audience's biggest creative criticism a few years ago had been that John Lewis didn't sell pianos. What do they know.

The ad made its debut on ITV at 9:15pm on 30th November. The reaction was incredible. People loved the advert, the response to the gyrating Nile Rodgers was adulatory, and the team and their clients were looking forward to the second showing the next day.

And at that point they received a call from the Advertising Standards Authority telling them that they were not allowed to air the ad in the remaining 24 days leading up to Christmas.

“But why?” asked Crispin. 

“Well you see,” began the ASA “as well as having a watershed for children’s snacks and not allowing nudity, we can't permit adverts in the last month of the year that prominently feature specific 1980s funk band members' bums, I’m afraid.”

While it was not invoked often, this very specific rule was called the...

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Answer: > december chic butt ban <

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

The monks were revolting. That is to say, they were in revolt (although Brother Rancid was, to be fair, a little on the pungent side).  

The local head of Callygrafy Servyces, Bishop Retamanger, had recently been tasked with implementing cost saving measures among the scribes under his command. Since that pesky fellow Caxton had appeared on the scene, the demand for hand-illuminated bibles and other notable works – okay, just bibles – had gone through the floor, and the monastery was losing money hand over sandle.

The savings made so far included a reduction in the storage capacity of the wine cellar, principally undertaken with extraordinary enthusiasm by the abbot himself over the course of several months, as well as the rationing of food for the monks by diluting their daily gruel to the official ecclesiastical consistency of “thin”.

But the measure that really irked the scribes was the replacement of the usual stiff goose-feather quills with much more floppy feathers from the underbelly of the Little Bittern. These were lacking almost entirely in rigidity, drooping and flapping around while the monks tried to write, causing numerous mistakes and ruined manuscripts.

The monks had heard of a new-fangled device popular on the continent, a wooden stick with a metal nib attached. These were purported to last for many decades and would thus reduce costs year-on-year while simultaneously avoiding the annual Bittern slaughter.

After a clandestine 2am meeting of the revolting monks – which due to the vow of silence was conducted entirely via hand-drawn caricatures rather like a medieval Zoom session – the head scribe was sent to confront the abbot with a demand that they be provided with these stiffer writing devices. Whilst he was unable to speak to the abbot of course, he presented a note to him with the following text:

Abbot – we can no longer cope with these droopy old-fashioned writing methods, we need the stiffer new devices from the continent.  Take away our floppy quills, and…

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