Being a true and honest transcript of my keynote of the same name at the 1st International Noder Symposium on Malarkey Studies

Int. Exhibition Hall. Day.

MUSIC: "Love Me Like You Do," by Ellie Goulding.

Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Erm. Oh wait. That bit's later. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Christ, this public speaking thing is difficult. It's more than that. It's hard. But not as hard as - Yes, not as hard as that. Thank you.

So. Ropy erotic novels, and the questionable sexual practices depicted therein. I hope you have all, as requested by our organiser, brought your towels, and your STD test results. After all, when people during the pandemic referred to clapping for the NHS, they didn't mean it in having a dose of neisseria gonorrhoeae brexitensis. So I hope everyone is clean. For their sake

"How to Dodge a Cannonball" is a 2025 novel by Jamaican-American writer Dennard Dayle, and is a black comedy set in the Civil War. It follows the wartime career of Anders, a teenage flag twirler that pretends to be black as he fights in an all-black regiment, and as he gets swept up not just in the war, but in a series of tangentially related conspiracies.

Several comparisons have been made to Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse Five is another obvious comparison. I myself was

It's my partner's birthday this Friday. She is turning 25. I check my bank account: $61.06 until the 15th. I think I can stretch it into flowers and a dinner out, hopefully.

We are low on cash because we recently took a vacation we couldn't afford- not that it was lavish, but our time off was unpaid. Actually, vacation is a bit of a stretch for Arizona in June, but it was time off, back home. The first night we were there we shared a cigarette. It was well after dark, but the air was 90+