On This Day

Jeff Mills - Contactspecial AX-A
that rare?!!!!!
that much!!!!????
mills keeps a blog?!?!!??!
axis records site

Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Gary Lineker were born this day, although they were already very much alive. Aged 19, Jonathan Swift encountered a band of travelling walnuts who robbed him of his clothes and left him bleeding all over tarmac tied to a plastic drainpipe with thick blue rope. As the walnuts made off their eerie high-pitched laughter rang in his ears. Cars and rickshaws cruised past at top speeds, there was no way they could hear his calls for help. In one of those rickshaws, Winston Churchill, 21, was feasting on the stomachs of sixteen seventeen-year-old Russian girls, belching loudly inbetween gulps and farts, both arms were covered in blood up to his elbows and his cummerbund had come loose. The smell of blood, meat, urine and farts was quite appetising to "the greatest living Englishman". He had unravelled his bowtie and was using it choke his wife as she looked sadly out of the window at what we know to be the battered barely-together body of a brusied Jonathan Swift, who - at that precise moment exactly - was just beginning to get preemptory intuitions regarding a novel about the travels of a man named Gulliver that would bring Swift himself glory and fortune and would ensure he could hire protection from the walnuts. Churchill and wife (and the still living, screaming and torn open bodies of the seventeen Russian girls she had bought off Timothy Dalton for a wedding anniversary gift) were rushing to Crystal Palace which was all ablaze and could be seen miles away. Originally erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, its designer Sir Joseph Paxton was in tears, ignorant though he was of the blaze, a few miles down the road in Amsterdam where the kidnap of brewing millionaire Alfred Heineken had gone wrong - the police had barged into the cellar, they'd seen the machines and the high-technology maps employing four differently-shaded red LEDs, they'd thrown the tape decks on the floor, untied the sobbing grateful millionaire and the henchmen were out cold while Paxton, the brains behind the whole operation, was regretting ever having popped in for a look on the way to the flower shop. While Paxton was carried away, the television above the bar was relaying news that Floyd Patterson had successfully overcome triple heart bypass surgery and was now in a position to be crowned the youngest ever boxer to win the world heavyweight title. With drawn face and arched brow Floyd bawled into the microphone stories about how he couldn't control his dreams, they were getting worse, and last night he'd dreamt his mum had died like that guy dies at the start of Night of the Living Dead. His opponent, Archie Moore, knocked out in Round Five in Chicago, told the crowd that the best man had won - but only his family were listening, as the rest of the crowd were distracted by the body of Oscar Wilde falling from a height and crushing the Italian tenor Benjamino Gigli, who was there as a favour to a friend high up the BBC ranks and was interviewing the Marx Brothers, of whom Zeppo had died earlier that evening - but was otherwise none the worse for wear. Nearby, a game of football between England and Scotland in 1872 was dragging itself out to a no-score-bore draw conclusion, and Gary Lineker aged four and a bit was in the crowd with Charlie Chaplin, Sir Terence Rattigan the playwright, Joyce Grenfell the actress and Andrea Pallardino the architect who built the Villa Rotonda single-handed, and it was then he realised that he wanted to be a footballer. The HMS Vanguard was launched onto the pitch afterwards, killing everyone who hadn't either left earlier or not turned up, and abroad, the first purpose-built aircraft carrier, the Japanese navy's Hosho began its first sea trials.