Samuel Pepys
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Samuel Pepys (pronounced “Pooperscooper”) was the irascible, multi-tasking 17th-century English genius who invented jellied eels, jokes, after-dinner mints, the bookcase, and the fire extinguisher, among many other items we take for granted today like total idiots.
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[edit] “I’m not cut out for this, I can tell you”
Born into poverty, shame and a mysterious twinkling destiny on February 23, 1633, Samuel Pepys was cruelly employed by the Royal Navy from 1649 as the teenage figurehead of HMS Thar She Blows, a 15-gun overspliced battle-ketch built in Basingstoke, but he suffered from severe back trouble after attempting to stand still and look pretty for long sea voyages, and after three years he began complaining loudly. His calls were heeded and he was sent to scrub the browner nooks and crannies of the ship’s heads, or washrooms if you landlubber types prefer. When Pepys complained loudly once again, this time of the “foulest stench I have yet tasted”, he was asked very nicely to walk the plank, whereupon he fell into the Indian Ocean and emerged on a tiny island inhabited only by purple seashells with hairy legs and Man Friday, a male personal assistant trained by the Manpower organisation and paid 2 guineas a month.
The young, spotty Pepys' seminal work was The Secret Diary of Samuel Pepys, Aged 13 1/3, or, A TRUE and FAITHFULL Accompt of my Teen-Age Years, in the Year of Our LORD 1646. In it, Pepys describes his childhood crush on Nell Gwynne and his harsh treatment at the hands of 'Bully Cromwell' (who stole all his lunch farthings on a daily basis), as well as the usual teen-angsty drivel.
[edit] Fictional account
A fictional account of Pepys’s desert-island years was written by Daniel Defoe and entitled Swiss Family Robinson. Then the esteemed novelist wrote a sequel called Lost in Space, which was eventually made into an endless television series starring Bill Muny, a big spaceship without satnav, and a chimp with alien horns. Being fictionalized, it was mostly made up and nothing like the truth.
[edit] Leaving the island
Samuel Pepys packed his bags and said goodbye to the island. Off he went with a trumpety-trump, trump trump trump. Nobody knows what the island was called, or what it is called now, but 118 people in Missouri, including the acclaimed stuntman Ronnie Rondell, speculate that it was Paradise. “That’s not what I would call it,” Pepys once offered. “I had to wash everything by hand, including Man Friday’s designer thongs, and it became the reason for my subsequent invention of the washing machine.”
[edit] Fame, fortune and frolicsome ladies
He didn’t really see any of that, being ugly and shy, but he was on hand with a quill and a notebook at the Great Fire of London in 1666, which must have been exciting. “I worked up a real sweat when I saw the flames licking at my one true love, Miss Myrtle Moneypenny,” he memorably wrote, inspiring Bob Fleming to write the James Bond books a few years later. Pepys’s notebook became his official diary as soon as he started writing dates in it, and when he sent it to the publisher Reg Varney in a big brown office at the back end of Piccadilly it became an overnight bestseller. But he was dead by then and the flames of London were long extinguished, so many readers accepted the work as science fiction. He thus invented the sci-fi literary genre, many decades before Mary Shelley and Ben Elton.
[edit] What else did this phenomenal chap invent?
Well, apart from all the aforementioned treats and labour-saving contraptions, Pepys invented the game of knock down ginger, still played today in Merrie England, whereby young rapscallions rap on folk’s doors and run off. The effect, unseen by said rapscallions unless they wish to ruin the game and be caught by the rozzers, is that the innocent and gormless householder comes to the door to find nobody there. Astonishing!
Pepys also invented the self-cleaning tampon, the cordless telephone, the Polish-Slovakian dictionary, overeating, the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, obesity, reggae, the Sunday Times colour supplement, and the game of pub darts. When he wasn’t inventing things or talking or writing, he was mostly asleep or drunk. He was a monster fan of the liquid lunch and its myriad benefits, as he saw them. “Let’s go down the pub” was his self-invented catchphrase from one day of the week to the next.
From June 2005 to January 2006, the ghost of Pepys contributed a column to the Sunday Times called Born with The Same Ankles, which compared and contrasted the lives of famous people with exactly the same ankles – such as Marc Bolan and Diana Ross, Margaret Thatcher and Graham Norton, and Sooty and Professor Stephen Hawking. Pepys' ghostie has also written extensively about photography, and provided the text for the 2004 book Get Yer Cameras Out, about the annual nude penguin photographic award.
[edit] Geeks of the world unite
Opinion is now divided as to whether Pepys was a geek or a nerd. He did keep his head down and continually invented stuff, so both could apply. However, he was also an inky chap with a tendency to Write Things Down, which has led to claims of autism, especially Asperger’s syndrome. Dustin Hoffman played him as an irritating retard in that film that nobody likes any more.
[edit] Death
Pepys died in his sleep at the Beaver & Cucumber twilight alehouse on his 115th birthday, February 23, 1748, having told the landlady, Stella Gibbons, to “go away and fetch me some rubber bands, a quart of Guinness, and some iron filings”. It is speculated to this day by scientists and school prefects that he was about to invent the DVD player, but there is no proof and other people point the finger in the wind after it has been moistened by saliva from the tongue. Goodbye, dear old Pooperscooper, we miss yah.
