This blog is about me. It’s not interactive. It has no message board. It’s not about Monty Python, or The Rutles. It’s not about you. You cannot contact me, you cannot post replies, there is no interactive Chat Room, and I won’t even know you’ve been here. Call it a message in a bottle, call it selfish, call it narcissistic, call it Fanny Mae if it’s a girl, but it’s still about me. Me, me, me.

You can sing that if you want. It’s the Diva Scale: Do, Re, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me….

It’s not that I don’t care about you, whoever the heck you are, // I do care deeply in a very warm and caring way//

Oh by the way, see those signs? The ones that look like this: // They’re irony signs and I just invented them. Feel free to use them. As much as you like. // I wish to go down in history as the inventor of the irony mark.//

See how useful they can be? I was being ironic about using irony. //Clever eh?// Now you too can be ironic without the unpleasant misunderstandings which occur when people don’t notice you’re being funny.

I have observed that when texting or reading email people have a tendency to take everything at face value. There’s nothing to indicate that you might perhaps be being “tongue in cheek.” I was frequently offending people, particularly in email, when I had no intention of upsetting them. They had just missed the irony. Now you have my irony marks: and //the world will be a better place. // (//©E. Idle.)

Of course they’re going to have to reprint tons of Jane Austen books, but that’s a small price to pay for clarity.

My good friend Mike Nichols () told me he had the same problem.

By the way that sign () indicates name dropping, so that if I am being ironic and name dropping at the same time, it would look like this:

//Sarah Palin would make a great President// is clearly ironic.

Sarah Palin would make a great President: of Wal-Mart. Needs no irony marks.

//() My friend Sarah Palin would make a good President ()// would be both name dropping and irony.

You’re getting it right? It’s a breakthrough in Semiotics. Perhaps we should call it Semidiotics? I shall ask Steve Martin () what he thinks.

While I was working on this brand new concept of irony marks (//©E. Idle) I had a few failures. I soon discarded ++ as you have to use the Num Lock and you tend to forget to turn it off so suddenly you write 352e th5s and have to search for the damn Num Lock again.

For a while the leading contender was <>

I liked the look of this but it unfortunately involves using the shift key which is annoying, whereas // does not.

Also I realised that if one was name dropping and being ironic at the same time you would end up with this: (<>) which I felt looked like a sphincter.

After some thought I decided to use that sign to indicate asshole, as in the sentence:

The other day Dick Cheney (<>) came out with a new book which //sets the record straight on the invasion of Iraq.//

There you see I’m using both the asshole sign and the irony marks and my meaning is much clearer.

Mike Nichols () told me he that had one golden rule when Directing and Producing: “Never tolerate assholes.” This works nicely for me because when I founded PythOnline, back in the mid-nineties, I chose this image for The Spam Club on the fledgling website:

The Latin motto, and //I needn’t tell you how to translate Latin // means: “No Assholes.”

Still a good motto.

Eric Idle ()

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