Tag: Sargon of Akkad

By Popular Demand: The Queen’s Not There Yet OY RODNEY REPRINT

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From December 21. 2017

All right, everybody, you asked for it: another installment of Oy, Rodney by Violet Crepuscular: Chapter CIV.

As Lady Margo tries to find out who is Queen of England at this time, Princess Didi visits Scurveyshire incognito to get the lay of the land. When she approaches the wading pool in the vicar’s back yard, Constable Chumley promptly arrests her. “Ye come alang wi’ me, lass,” he says, “ye’ll not be wilmin’ by yon brawnnick gulsen.”

“You fool, take your hands off the daughter of the Queen!” Her protests are to no avail, and she is deposited in the local lockup.

Meanwhile Lord Jeremy Coldsore, awaiting his marriage to Lady Margo, fobs off his creditors with a promise that the Queen herself will pay his bills. “Her Majesty is to be an honored guest at my wedding, and will spend the night in the Royal Suite of Coldsore Hall.” He does not mention that no one has spent the night in the Royal Suite of Coldsore Hall since 1603, when the Duke of Dobley went in one night and never came out.

Having convinced Lady Margo that he and the American adventurer Willis Twombley are one and the same and that it therefore doesn’t matter which one of them appears at the wedding as the groom, Lord Jeremy’s peace of mind is rattled by Twombley’s off-hand question: “Say, Germy, was you really jist a foundling left on the steps of this here hall? Margo says so.”

This is the first Lord Jeremy has ever heard of it. “I am sure the lady has me confused with someone else,” he replies.

“Someone else besides me?”

“Please, Sargon!” Twombley believes he is Sargon of Akkad. “Please concentrate on the arrangements for the wedding! I’m growing rather concerned about the vicar. Ever since recovering from his conniptions, he skips everywhere instead of walking, and makes cryptic remarks about some writhing tentacles he thinks he saw under the pool. I fear his mind may be unsettled.”

“Oh, he’ll be all right for the wedding,” Twombley says. “Anyhow, it’s your turn to go to Margo’s tonight for supper. Try to be cheerful, ol’ hoss! Soon as the Queen gets here, we’re goin’ to get hitched and all your troubles will be over.”

Given the prodigious length of the rest of the book, we are at liberty to doubt the accuracy of that prediction.

And we still don’t know who the dickens “Rodney” is.

The Queen Will Visit Scurveyshire REPRINT

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From December 14, 2017

The news today is just awful, as usual, so turn we unto something a little less awful…

In Chapter CII of Oy, Rodney by Violet Crepuscular, everything has been disrupted by the startling news that the Queen plans to visit Scurveyshire.

“What queen?” wonders Lady Margo Cargo.

“It don’t matter–a queen’s a queen,” replies her fiancee, the American adventurer Willis Twombley, who thinks he is Sargon of Akkad.

“But this is wonderful, Sargon! If we have her as a guest at our wedding, she may help you get your empire back!”

“Well, maybe. But listen, l’il gal, I got to tell you a secret, and you got to keep it. Okay?”

“I can keep a secret, my dear. I always forget secrets before I can tell them.”

Twombley takes a deep breath. “L’il gal, it’s like this. You know Lord Germy Coldsore?”

“I’ve known Lord Jeremy all his life,” says Lady Margo, “ever since he was a foundling left on the doorstep of Coldsore Hall.” Anyone else would be floored by this shocking revelation, but Twombley lets it slide right past him.

“Here’s the secret: me and Lord Germy, we’re the same guy. So when you marry me, you’ll be marrying him, too.”

“Oh, Sargon, how can that be? You don’t even look like him.”

“That’s on account of my secret Akkadian powers of illusion,” Twombley explains. “I can look like me and him standin’ side by side at the same time. Been doin’ in for years. I had to learn it because, you know, bein’ king of Akkad, I got a lot of enemies. Especially them Babylonians–they’re always tryin’ to do me in. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind what?”

“Me bein’ Germy, too, and you marryin’ him and sayin’ it’s me. That’s okay with you, ain’t it?”

“Whatever you say, Sargon dear.” At this point she has to pause and rearrange her wig.

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Sargon of Akkad: add a cowboy hat, and his resemblance to Willis Twombley is easily detectable.

Meanwhile Constable Chumley, guarding the wading pool in the vicar’s back yard, reports that “I seen a perby divvil of a throll peekin’ out from under yon pool, and it skeered the limmins out of us!” No one is quite sure what he means.

Trouble in Scurveyshire REPRINT

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From February 24, 2018

 

Turn we unto Chapter CXXX of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney.

All is not well in Scurveyshire. The vicar is laid out with conniptions. Jasper the village idiot is in jail with Princess Didi, who, it turns out, is neither a princess nor any relation at all to Queen Victoria, but only an outcast from the nearby village of Plaguesby. Lady Margo Cargo, claiming a touch of leprosy, has gone into seclusion.

Worst of all, various people of questionable morality are whispering that “Black Rodney” has returned from the dead and is “at it again, puttin’ curses on the shire.” No one dares approach the wading pool in the vicar’s back yard.

Meanwhile, desperately trying to raise money to keep Coldsore Hall, Lord Jeremy Coldsore has opened a lemonade stand at the entrance to his palatial drive, selling it for five guineas a glass. As an economy measure, he has dismissed all his servants except for his footman, Sir Reginald Fumfer, who works for whatever food he can scrounge from the larder. Sir Reginald has descended to this lowly estate as a result of an unnamed spot of trouble out in India. Her Majesty’s Government have forbidden him to speak to anyone. But at least Lord Jeremy has enjoyed a brisk business so far.

“Say, Germy ol’ hoss, jist how much debt have you got?” asks his friend, the American adventurer Willis Twombley.

“Roughly one million pounds, old boy.”

“That’s a lot of lemonade!”

“I do what I can, Sargon.” Twombley still thinks he is Sargon of Akkad.

“Well, so do I, Germy. I jist shot another one of those creditors of yours. I put him in that closet in your billiard room. No one’ll ever find him there, as long as they don’t look in the closet.”

“That’s a great comfort to me,” says Lord Jeremy. He has given up trying to dissuade Twombley from murdering the creditors. It does no good.

Now arriving on the scene is a wandering spider collector, Miss Lizzie Snivel, a character left over from one of Ms. Crepuscular’s unpublished novels. “I could not bear to see her go to waste,” Violet confesses to her readers.

‘Oy, Rodney’: The Saga

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There’s a rampaging rhino on the loose in Scurveyshire, but not to worry–Violet Crepuscular, “The Queen of Suspense,” is back on the job, back to her laser-like focus on the plot.

Introducing Chapter DCXLXI (or whatever it is) of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Ms. Crepuscular addresses her readers directly.

“I am back on target!” she declares. “Yes, my lords and ladies, I have learned ny lesson! No more long, drawn-out digressions on that poop of a baby-sitter that I had when I was six. Nor will I venture into politics, or offer resolutions to burning social issues. From now on, it’s Plot, Plot, Plot! Just like an Icelandic saga–didja ever read one of those? There’s this saga about some guy named Egil, or Harvey, or something…”

[Editor runs screaming to the sidewalk.]

By now the angry rhinoceros has made a shambles of Scurveyshire’s Museum of Agricultural Implements. Charged with stopping the unstoppable conquering beast, Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad, is still loading his six-gun.

“Better hurry up,” says Johnno the Merry Minstrel, “or there’ll be nothing in this town worth saving.”

“You made me lose count of the bullets!” grumbles Twombley.

[Yes, she stopped writing here. No, I don’t know why.]

Chaos at Coldsore Hall! (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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In Chapter DXVIII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular, the Queen of Suspense, told us how Lord Jeremy Coldsore, locked out of his ancestral hall by roistering servants who think it’s still the 18th century, fell off his perch and was gored and trampled by a rhinoceros. All 213 bones in his body were broken. “That will teach him to try and evolve wings,” writes Ms. Crepuscular.

A week later he’s up and around. The American adventurer, Willis Twombley, who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad, has used his six-gun to re-instill decorum in those wild and crazy servants. “Jist leave it to me, Germy,” quoth Willis. He needs to shoot only two of the servants before the others get the message.

This is all told in Chapter DXX. Chapter DXIX is too puerile and improbable to be reproduced here. Even Violet thinks so. “I have written a chapter too puerile and improbable to be reproduced here,” she writes. Send her a check for $3.98 and she’ll send you a summary of the chapter.

Meanwhile the rhinoceros, having laid several clutches of eggs, is now preparing to spin a cocoon in which to spend the winter. It will be a rather large cocoon.

 

Return to Coldsore Hall (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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Suddenly we find ourselves at Chapter DXIV of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy Rodney… without a trace of Chapter DXIII. We wonder what was in it.

“I am not to blame for chapters missing from my book,” she confides in the reader. “All faxaltation aside, the important thing is that Lord Jeremy, having made his hairbreadth escape from Mom’s Dungeon, now finds himself back in the familiar embrace of Coldsore Hall.” She hastens to add, “‘Embrace’ is a figure of speech! Us authors use them all the time.”

It might be nice if she used a plot from time to time. I just work here, what do I know? Last we heard, a burrowing rhinoceros was making a shambles of the gardens in the vicar’s neighborhood. The latest development there…

“Well shut my mouth!” exclaims Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad. He and Lady Margo Cargo are organizing a safari. He points to the earth, to three or four roundish white objects. “Y’know what those are?” Lady Margo does not know. Her upholstered wooden leg is giving her trouble.

“Those,” he proclaims, “are rhino eggs! We have found the rhino’s nest! I found one in Ohio once, but there was something wrong with it. Only chickens came out of the eggs.”

“This is a calamity which no mortal flesh should have to bear,” Lady Margo says.

The chapter ends before Lord Jeremy can actually re-enter his ancestral home. This is either a stroke of literary genius or merely running out of time.

A Captive Heart (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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Introducing Chapter DIV (pronounced “div”) of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular continues to describe the extensive preparations made by Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad, for a safari which, in all likelihood, will never venture out of sight of the vicar’s back yard.

He has forgotten why he’s organizing the safari in the first place. Lady Margo reminds him, “It’s to get rid of that rhinoceros that burrows under the vicar’s wading pool.”

“Better hire us some cavalry, too, then,” he replies.

Some of you surely noticed that the title of this chapter was supposed to be “A Captive Heart.” This refers to Lord Jeremy Coldsore, held as a “prisoner of love” (Oh, great scott!) by Constable Chumley’s mother, who leads a double life as Thir Lanthelot, the Lithping Knight. “I am getting better!” she confides in the reader. “Last year it was a triple life! But I am no longer Bomba the Jungle Boy.”

Jeremy would love to escape, but his cell is way high up in a tower that wobbles dangerously whenever there’s a wind. To keep his will to live, he writes poetry on his dinner plates and tosses them out the window to the River Rhine.

Here I sit in this miserable dungeon,

Waiting for someone to bring my lunch in.

Here Ms. Crepuscular indulges in an aside to the reader. “I have been blamed for the defects in Lord Jeremy’s poetry,” she writes. “Ignorant readers consistently scaphanize these verses. Well, pshaw on them!”

Lost–and Found (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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Introducing Chapter CDLXVII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney–after publishing Chapter CDLXVIII last week–Violet Crepuscular offers this proskynesis to her readers:

“Dear readers, I offer you this proskynesis to make up for presenting my chapters out of order,” she writes. “I am told, by thimbleheads who’ve never written so much as a grocery list, let alone a novel, that it mars the continuity of the oeuf–as if I, of all people, needed instruction in heightening the story’s suspense! I, Violet Whatsername!” She is too upset just now to remember her surname.

Anyhow, in Chapter CDLXVII, which should’ve been run last week, Lady Margo Cargo, charred wig and all, and the American adventurer, Willis Twombley, hopelessly lost in Scurveyshire Forest after seeing the Wee Pool Lady, are miraculously rescued by Mr. Bigcheeks and his family, who are having a picnic just a few yards away. If you stand beside their picnic basket, you can see some of the stately hovels of Scurveyshire Village.

“Will you please stop discharging that firearm?” foliates Mr. Bigcheeks. “We’re havin’ a picnic here!”

“Ah, the thatched roofs of Scurveyshire!” sighs Lady Margo. “I feared I’d never see thee more!”

“Ah, shut up,” mutters Willis. His conviction that he is Sargon of Akkad has been perilously shaken by this experience. Sargon would never have gotten lost in Scurveyshire.

“How’s that for suspense!” Ms. Crepuscular winds up the chapter. She has remembered her surname. “Toothpaste dip to go with your potato chips, anyone?”

More Paranormal Unexplained Romance (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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Introducing Chapter CDLXIV (pronounced “cuddle-xiv”) of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular soliloquizes, “There is no romance that does not contain a great big chunk of paranormal! I mean, look at me and Mr. Pitfall! It is the essence of romance to fluctuate, to burnish, to make impossible claims for Duracell batteries–”

Good grief, this goes on for 15 pages. I am the poorer for having read it.

Having discoursed on romance, Ms. Crepuscular transports us to the catuvellaunian depths of Scurvey Forest, where Willis Twombley and Lady Margo Cargo, having fled the nefandous specter of the Wee Plastic Pool Lady, now wander around, hopelessly lost.

“I think we’re hopelessly lost,” laments Lady Margo. She clings to the charred remains of her wig, not wanting to end her life bald.

“Guess there’s only one thing we can do,” says the American adventurer, who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad. Slowly he draws his pistol.

“Oh, Charlie!” The sudden introduction of this hitherto unmentioned name momentarily stuns Twombley. “We’ll die together, here in this unmapped forest! How romantic!”

“Shut up, ye durned fool!” That “Charlie” is going to rankle for a while. He points the gun straight up and shoots–six shots, bang-bang-bang (no, I won’t sit here and type it out six times: there is a limit).

Within seconds, a familiar face emerges from a nearby thicket. It belongs to Mr. Bigcheeks, a fat man who lives in Scurveyshire Village, in a cottage made famous by Shakespeare.

“Do you mind!” he snaps at Twombley. “We’re trying to have a picnic here!” He pulls a bush aside to reveal his whole fat family gobbling toothpaste-and-beef pies. This distracts the author into writing up the recipe.

 

Jackalope’s Rampage (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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When we concluded Chapter CDLVI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, monsters were ravaging Scurveyshire and Lady Margo Cargo’s wig was on fire. No wonder they call Violet the Queen of Suspense.

Then along comes Chapter CDLVII, which was all about some dopy cousin of hers who used to sit in mud puddles. Ah! But Chapter CDLVIII looks promising! It opens with the American adventurer, Willis Twombley, who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad, strapping on his six-guns. I’m sorry, but I don’t think he looks like this:

Sargon of Akkad - World History Encyclopedia

Johnno the Merry Minstrel, who is horse de combat because of the hydra (bit one of his arms off, actually), waylays Willis in the hall. “Twombley!” he pristulates. “Where are you going, man?”

“I’m a-goin’ to plug me that jackalope,” he explains. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Can’t let the critter eat everybody’s vegetables.” He cannot be persuaded to tackle the hydra instead. He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid.

It has been discovered that the name of the jackalope is Jack. Twombley will bear that in mind as he moves toward the fateful confrontation. Ennio Moriconne music plays in the background. It’s almost impossible to dance to Ennio Moriconne music, as Lady Margo and Lord Jeremy soon discover. Lady Margo removes her wig, now a blacked handful of ash.

“Jack!” Twombley’s voice rings out. “I’m callin’ you out, Jack!”

And out from the vicar’s kitchen garden hops–oh, the suspense! How the dickens can she leave it hanging there? A reader’s gonna get you for that, one of these days…