Glasgow Urban Myths (8 page)

“He was able to squelch the rumours in the past, but now it looks like we have found the smoking gun,” says a State Department source.

Al-Sabah claims that Saddam, then a struggling law student, acted in porn to make ends meet, as it were, and because he was addicted to gay sex.

In the newly uncovered 86-minute prison movie, set in Barlinnie, Saddam, then just 34, plays a naive young man who is wrongly convicted and sent to jail. He is initiated into homosexuality by a series of older and more experienced cons.

“Saddam’s acting in the picture is actually quite good,” al-Sabah notes. “One scene, in which he buries his face in a pillow and cries, is so touching you can almost forget you are watching a low-budget sexploitation film.”

The trial continues.

Harry Potter is the creation of a former English teacher who promotes witchcraft and Satanism. In the first book, Harry is a 13-year-old wizard. Her creation openly blasphemes Jesus and God and promotes sorcery, seeking revenge upon anyone who upsets them by giving you examples (quoting author and title references) of spells, rituals, and demonic powers. I think the problem is that parents have not reviewed the material.

The name seems harmless enough – Harry Potter. But that is where it all ends. Let me give you a few quotes from some of the influenced readers themselves: “The Harry Potter books are cool ’cause they teach you all about magic and how you can use it to control people and get revenge on your enemies,” said Bearsden pupil, 10-year-old Craig Davies, a recent convert to the New Satanic Order of the Black Circle. “I want to learn the Cruciatus Curse, to make my muggle science teacher suffer ’cause she’s a pig.” (A muggle is a non-believer in magic.)

Or how about the really young and innocent impressionable mind of a 6-year-old when asked about her favourite character? “Hermione is my favourite, because she’s smart and has a beauty wee kitten,” said 6-year-old Jessica MacDonald of North Kelvinside. “Jesus died because He was weak and stupid.”

And here is Ashley, a 9-year-old, the average age of a Harry Potter reader: “I used to believe in what they taught us at Sunday School,” said Ashley, conjuring up an ancient spell to summon Cerebus, the three-headed hound of Hell. “But the Harry Potter books showed me that magic is real, something I can learn and use right now, and that the Bible is nothing but boring lies.”

Or how about a quote from a High Priest of Satanism: “Harry is an absolute devil-send to our cause,” said High Priest Joe Egan of the First Church of Satan in Sauchiehall Street. “An organization like ours thrives on new blood – no pun intended – and we’ve had more applicants than we can handle lately. And, of course, practically all of them are virgins, which is brill.” (Since 1995, applicants to Satanic worship have increased from around 100,000 to 1.4
million
children and young adults.)

I think I can offer you an explanation as to why this is happening. Children have been bombarded with action, adventure, thrills and scares to the point that authors and film makers can produce nothing new to give them the next high. Parents have neglected to see what their children are reading and doing, and simply seem satisfied that Wee Peem is interested in reading.

Still not convinced? I will leave you with something to let you make up your own mind – a quote from the author herself, J. K. Rowling, describing the objections of Christian reviewers to her writings: “I think it’s absolute rubbish to protest about children’s books on the grounds that they are luring children to Satan,” Rowling told a Glasgow
Evening News
reporter in a recent interview. “People should be praising them for that! These books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son Of God is a living hoax who will be humiliated when the rain of fire comes, while we, Satan’s faithful servants, laugh and cavort in victory.”

Wee boys and other creatures

There is a prevailing myth in Glasgow that all wee boys are smart-arsed experts in repartee, not to mention banter and talking back.

There is the standard story of the chap parking his car outside the football and being asked by mini-blackmailers: “Watch yer car, mister?” This is, of course, an implied threat that if you don’t give them a quid or whatever the going rate is, that something nasty, like disappearance, especially if you are in Ibrox or Parkhead, might just happen to your vehicle.

The story goes that a guy points somewhat condescendingly to the Dobermann/Rottweiler/Irish Wolfhound in the back of the car and says: “I think my dog can watch my car for me.”

I can find no one to which this has ever happened but the mythical replies grow year on year. So far I have heard:

“Yer dug pits oot fires, does it?”

“Yer dug blaws up tyres, does it?”

“Yer dug fixes broken headlights, does it?”

and the classic, “Paints oot scratches, does it?”

The new one this year is, “Worth much, that dug?” which, given that people are spending a fortune on the above breeds, really is pretty smart. You lose your car and your pet.

The other variation I have been told about was a couple of smart kids actually juggling bricks, a bit like saying, “I hope I don’t drop a brick on it.”

Throw them a rag and say: “Wash the windows and meet me here after the game.”

A couple of guys are out one night in town on the bevvy, with a few drugs thrown in. They’re highly illegally driving their car back to Easterhouse in the middle of the night, when something runs in front of the car and on to the other side of the road. For whatever reason, possibly because they are both steamboats and possibly because they have both seen
The Hobbit
, they agree that it was a goblin, and they pull the car over and attempt to apprehend the goblin in the interest of science.

They manage to catch the goblin and put it in the boot of the car. They get home to one of their houses, lock the goblin in the kitchen, and then pass out. When they awake, they wonder if the evening’s events were just a dream, a drug trip, or if there is in fact a goblin in the kitchen. They open the kitchen to find a frightened 5-year-old boy who has Down’s Syndrome. They called the police to report the boy, and end up being heroes because the boy had been missing for days and his well-off parents were frantic. They received a decent-sized cash reward for his safe return.

Two guys were walking in the Campsies when they came across a big hole. The two saw that it was a deep hole, but wanted to know how deep, as you do. They threw stones in and then bigger stones. When they heard nothing hit the ground, the two decided to use something heavier and bigger. Just at the edge of a farm field they found an old railway sleeper. It took both of them to lift it, but they finally got it to the hole and threw it in. Just then a goat came running towards the men at full speed. It went past the two, jumped up into the air and into the hole. The two looked at each other in amazement. Behind the men, a farmer came out from behind a dyke and said, “Have you seen my goat?” The two men looked at him and said, “Aye, we did. It jumped into this hole.” The farmer looked around and then said, “No, it couldn’t have been my goat. It’s tied to a sleeper.”

A cat that had helped itself to some salmon mousse, prepared for an upcoming dinner party, later turns up dead in the garden. The hostess, fearing her dish is poisonous, convinces her guests to rush to the Western and get their stomachs pumped. Later that evening a neighbour comes over to apologize for backing his car over the cat, which ran away injured.

For the final exam in a philosophy class at Strathclyde, the professor took his chair and placed it on top of his desk. He gives each student a blank piece of paper and said: “Prove to me that this chair does not exist”. Most papers handed in were essays explaining how nothing was real or references to ancient philosophers. The paper which received top marks was just two words long:

“Whit chair?”

Bus pass corner

An elderly lady went to the bar in a pub in Dumbarton and got a packet of potato crisps. She sat down at a nearby table and started to read a paper. Soon a young man came and sat down at her table. He lifted the potato crisps, opened them, and started to eat. The lady just watched the man eat the potato crisps, not wanting to cause any trouble. He noticed her watching him, then he offered her a crisp. She jerked it out of his hand and slowly started eating. She continued to stare. As soon the man was finished, he got up, put the empty bag on the bar, and walked away, staring back at her. She mumbled to herself, “Young people think they can do anything.” She finished reading the newspaper, rose, and then noticed that under her newspaper was her bag of potato crisps.

An elderly couple went doon the watter for the weekend. While on the boat, the man began to get a little seasick and leaned over the edge to throw up, losing his false teeth while doing so. He was pretty upset about the incident, but his wife couldn’t stop laughing about it. As a joke, she removed her own dentures and took them to her husband exclaming, “Hey, look what I caught!” Her husband put in the dentures and noticed that they didn’t fit. He took the teeth out and threw them overboard, shook his head and said to his wife, “Those wurny mine.”

A mythcellany

At Glasgow airport the baggage handlers find a dead dog in a pet-shipping container. The airport employees decide to take up a collection and send one of the workers to buy a lookalike dog to replace it, as they think its death might be their fault. When the owner comes to claim it, she opens the pet container and the replacement dog jumps out and licks her face. The woman faints. She had been shipping her dead dog home for burial.

As part of an exam on solutions, a Strathclyde professor asks his students how to determine the height of a building using a barometer. Some of his students gave obvious answers like using formulas, timing the fall of the barometer from the roof to the ground, tying a string from the barometer and lowering it to the ground then measuring the string, measuring the side of the building in units of “one barometer”. The professor ruled all of these solutions unacceptable. The student that received the highest mark in the exam was able to answer the question in one sentence: “Give the barometer to the man who designed the building for the information.”

A professor who was famous for his creative exam questions handed out the final exam to his students. The exam had only one question: “What is courage?” The top mark given on that particular exam was to a quiet young man who wrote: “This is.”

A student in a very large class didn’t stop working on his exam when the professor called, “Time up.” When he went up to turn it in, the professor said he needn’t bother, he’d already failed. The student looked at the large stack of exams on the desk and asked “Do you know who I am?” The professor replied that he didn’t, and the student stuck his exam in the middle of the pile and said: “Good.”

A man who was tired of having his motors broken into specifically asked for no radio when he bought his new car. He put a sign in the windscreen that said in large letters: “NO RADIO”. One day he returned to it to find the window broken anyway. Beside his sign he found a note that read: “Just checking.”

A student stops by the prof’s office and finds that the professor has stepped out for a moment, leaving an unguarded pile of the next day’s final examinations on his desk. The student quickly steals one of the exams and disappears. Before issuing the exam papers, however, the professor counts them and notices that one is missing. He cuts an eighth of an inch off the bottom of every exam paper prior to distributing them to the class, then fails the student with the long one.

This next apparently really happened in Bearsden.

A golfer was angry at his poor playing. He’d hit several balls into the pond on the eighteenth hole. Crimson with frustration and embarrassment, he flung his golf bag into the pond and stormed off the course in front of a crowd of club mates trying not to snigger. A few minutes later, with the crowd watching, he returned to the pond, fished out his bag with the greenkeeper’s rake, retrieved his car keys from the bag and then threw the bag back into the pond.

A while back, during the construction of the Red Road flats, a worker was having a very hard day. He was being ordered to do work all over the place every second without a break. After eight straight hours of non-stop work, he was extremely tired. A Health and Safety nightmare. The foreman came up to him and told him that a piece of plywood needed to be removed from the roof. The worker grabbed the ladder and climbed to the roof. He had to be careful because the plywood was still in good condition. As he started walking back towards the ladder, he started to worry. He knew he was on a very tall building, and that if he fell it would kill him. So he started to pay more attention to his feet. The weight of the plywood shifted. The worker lost his balance, and fell off the roof. After a moment of panic, he noticed his fall had slowed. The plywood was acting like a parachute, and he was able to safely land on the ground.

A modern legend tells of a woman from Glasgow who visits Lourdes, famous for its stories of miraculous cures. Although in good health, the woman feels tired on the hot day of her visit, and she sits down in an empty wheelchair to rest, then falls asleep. Waking up when a priest arrives to bless the visitors, the woman jumps up from the chair and is immediately surrounded by a crowd screaming: “It’s a miracle!” In the excitement, the woman was knocked to the ground and her leg was broken.

A Newton Mearns resident called the fire brigade to request assistance in removing her cat from a tree. The fire brigade responded with a rescue van which had an extension ladder. The tree, however, was too tall and willowy, if a poplar can be willowy, to support the weight of the extension ladder. Rather than send men back to the fire station to bring the aerial ladder truck, one of the firemen suggested an alternative course of action. Two of the firemen supported the ladder while a third climbed high enough to tie a rope around the tree about halfway up.