Middle earth
UMMM
A frustrated office worker learns that he is the son of a professional assassin, and that he shares his father's superhuman killing abilities. – IMDB plotline, for WANTED
She will sit down after a choo choo train of cigarettes, and you’ll know she’s in the vicinity because of that rotten pong seeping out of her nicotine radiated pores. Her skin has the texture of old tobacco leaves. Yellow. Filled with premature wrinkles and veins that look as though they’re carved out of old pieces of shipwrecked wood. The whole body is contaminated with toxic substances, and even more toxic thinking. It’s a cycle of vicious poisoning. It’s climate change on the scale of a single body. It’s a Devilish concoction stewing and fulminating.
We’ve been through this before, but I reiterate:
She’s as thin as a rake, and has the same bristly personality. She has pointy features – from the pursed, sneering, thin lips, to the knobbly knees and bony hips. For such a thin, raky person she has an unusually deep voice. It has that nasal, raspy quality that people with sore throats generally have. Her hair looks like that stuff that gets caught in a broom when you sweep a particularly dirty room. It’s looks part dirty, part electrified. She has a raspy cough, which has the irritating intermittent quality of a dripping tap, or a crying baby. Except that The Devil always has the sore throat sounding voice (as though she has just come from somewhere where she has spent several hours shouting at someone). As a prefix to anything and everything she says, The Devils starts with a loud and unmistakable: “UMMMM…”
Perhaps she uses it to stir up negative vibrations.
Sometimes she forgets what she was going to complain about. Sometimes she finds the solution to a point she hoped to criticize, and the UMMMM goes unsung, unechoed, unsavored. It hangs in the air like a crow in the crosshairs of an assault rifle or a flame thrower. But then nothing happens. Usually though, an UMMMM comes with no warning and portends trouble. For example:
“UMMMMMM…Nick. Would you mind going through all the emails of the past year, and find out where these people work. Umm…get their names, where they work, and the subject of the email. Make a database. Ummm…how long do you think that will take you?’
Stunned silence. Then: ‘Well, depending on how many emails there are in a day I’ll have an idea how long a month will take to go through, and that will give me an idea of how many emails there are likely to be for the past year.’
‘Ummmm…well, get started then. Thanks.Oh…ummm – while you’re at it you might as well do 2007 as well.’
The Devil’s home, we all know, is HELL: And there I am: Horrific Egghead, Lurking in Lies.
Meanwhile, am learning my lesson yet?