My Dad Wrote A Porno - Footnotes: Understanding The "Timeline"

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

To help us understand where we currently are in Rocky's erotic saga, pre-eminent 'Belinda Blinked' historian Cian O'Mahony talks us through the full "timeline" so far, flaws and all. You can see Cian's very impressive timeline breakdown in full at https://www.belindablumenthal.business/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to My Dad Wrote a Porno The Footnotes. Now, in this week's chapter, we were getting a little bit lost in the timeline, as Rocky calls it. We weren't really sure what was happening, where and when. So, to help us figure it all out, we're speaking today to the preeminent Belinda Blinked historian, Kian O'Mahoney, who has created a website, which you can see for yourself at belindabloomenthal.business, with a full chronological breakdown of everything that has ever happened

in the Belinda Blink saga thus far. Kian, hello. Hey, how are you? Very good, thank you. And what a website it is. Oh my God, Kian, this must have taken forever. You have far too much time on your hands. Do you have a job?

Oh God, you'd think so. Yeah, God, it didn't take too long to put together. What took the long time was actually researching it and reading the books and cross-referencing. It was an absolute nightmare. Well, just reading the books is a nightmare. But I gave up around three times, honest to God. Like there's bits where she referenced,

oh, I'll meet you in 10 days. And then you check what she did 10 days later and she was like in a different country, plotline dropped. So yeah, it took a lot of nerve to finish it off, I think. Cian, if people don't have it in front of them right now, I mean, I think everybody should go and look at it because it is so clear.

It's amazing. I mean, it's as clear as it can be when it stems from Rocky's work. But if people aren't looking just yet, what exactly have you made? Yeah, so we take that we. We! I take it.

Me and my team of scientists. The research department. No, I took day one as being the day she's interviewed at Steeles and then broke down what she does in every day, who she visits, and I've added like continuity stuff. So if something doesn't make sense, I point it out. If there's like things wrong with uh her calendar if things are just flat out unrealistic i flagged that too i love how you flag them because it's a big red

patch that says community alert with a massive explanation point yeah if um i was only going to do the continuity alerts and then i kind of realized there's a lot of generalizations there's a lot of belinda bitching at people and so i kind of broke those down to uh on a day-by-day basis because like Belinda's quite a mean person when you start reading the books on their own she's she's got a kind of she's got a dark streak an edge definitely yeah yeah I mean she called Bella a dog like at that wedding she did yeah I remember that I mean to be fair that's the least of her sins I feel true true uh yeah and I noticed that she gets kind of worse as the book... I've noticed there's more of those in the kind of later books.

She just gets more aggressive as time goes on. Yeah, I mean, she reduced the RSMs to tears at one point when she was doing that meeting, calling him a stupid goon. I mean, the only defence really is that she's kind of consistently unpleasant to everybody when she is unpleasant. Yeah. And I think as well, we tend to forget that she responds to people in her head a lot. That's even worse in person when someone says, oh, hi, Belinda, how are you? And she just like doesn't respond, just thinks to herself the answer.

So a lot of the time she's just silent and people are sort of hanging around waiting for a reply. Yeah, she just ignores them. And then if she does speak does speak she just insults them what a way to live your life so let's go back to um why we had you on in the first place where are we exactly in the timeline right now like how long has belinda been at steals how long is all the stuff that's happened yeah so where we are now we're about 102 ish days since we've met Belinda. So everything that we've experienced from book one, Blink and Her Lids and that interview to right now is about three and a bit months. So the wedding, the proposal. Wedding, the proposal, her bish, everything has been a bit over three months.

And we're in 2015 still yes so like as the season as the years of this show go on we're getting further and further away from it like um it's supposed to be like one thing one of the things i can't pin down is the time of year we're in because it's described as being quite sunny at moments like do you remember when belinda crashed her car in epsom yeah she just decided to flop out in the tarmac naked to wait for someone to pass by. That's like a really warm summer's day. But in the books, 10 days later, there's a blizzard in Berlin. Climate change, climate change.

Yeah, I mean, it's like the day after tomorrow or something. I don't know what's happening. It could be one of those very unseasonable, you know, sort of temperate days. A cold snap. If we're being kind, you know, I can see perhaps that Rocky's just reflecting that. Yeah. Another thing as well is just that

I wanted to bring up was Bella's age. So you're kind of led to believe in the books that Bella's roughly the same age as Belinda. But if you, now this is me being way too into Rocky Flintstone. If you subscribe to his newsletter he sends you a chapter from Bella's perspective and now I'm not British

but you do your A-levels when you're like 17, 18 isn't it? So Bella did that in 1990 Oh boy! So there's this chapter that's set from Bella's perspective and it starts in June in 1990 and she's doing her exams and she gets interviewed at steals so she's been at steals for 25 years and she was the receptionist when we met her yeah so she's just stayed there she's

happy out um but it does kind of make other events in the books a bit different knowing that because like do you remember again the wedding when she turns up at Giselle's wedding in a wedding dress and then starts crying

do you think this will ever happen to me it kind of feels a bit differently because we think of her as sort of the little sister of the Glee team but she's the grandma

but she's the grandma she could be Belinda's mother the only kind of claim to fame I could have with this is that after I published this timeline, Rocky revised the page to remove the year. So now he's kind of retconned the history to match what he wants.

Fucking hell, you cannot keep up with his fucking... He changes it from one day to the next. That's the biggest problem. Do you have any kind of favourite plot holes, Cian? Oof. One of them is the bombing at steels because steels is in the first book it's described as being so close you can't get a taxi to heathrow but like the minimum distance is about 200 meters for a taxi before the fare increases so like steels is

less than 200 meters from heathrow oh my god and you have them getting taxis and getting collected to be brought to the office. And you can probably see it from the terminal. Like it's insane. But when the bombing happens, like the whole scene unfolds, it's like five, 10 minutes long, maybe of them running around and checking who's dead. Yeah.

But the emergency services only come when they're called. Yeah, that's so mad, isn't it? The ambulances and the fire engines would be all over it. Yeah, a bomb went off, like literally on the grounds of Heathrow. With the head of MI6 present. With the head of MI6 present, lest we forget. And her horse, of course, Toffee Apple Chew.

Toffee Apple Chew. Do you ever wonder about Toffee Apple... Do you ever wonder? My God, listen to me. But, like, when she turns up at places on Toffee Apple Chew, she's riding from Epsom. So she's going from Epsom into, like, Soho. How far is that, Kateia that's about 20 miles jesus wow each way even up to like steels up to heathrow like that's a long distance down to go on a poor horse and also it's not all side roads is it a lot

of that's motorway yeah a lot of that is going to be dual carriageway unless she's hopping in the piccadilly line or something with the horse who knows yeah she couldn't get on one of those deep line tubes could she overground only yeah then again she's head of my six so maybe she's like hella lifted out or something who knows can you imagine just toffee apple chew hanging from below the helicopter i mean it doesn't bear thinking about so do you think that we're being a bit pedantic because if you're creating an incredible world like rock is created there's going to be little holes here there's going to be little inconsistencies there are we being picky um no i don't think so i i i think normally there's like a continuity editor and there's

editors in general to realize these things but when you're dealing with revelations that change earlier stuff like like finding out that the duchess is the head of my6 like a book earlier she was driving around the country there with her her tits out you know you wouldn't want that from the head of social services that would be a news story for sure yeah it just kind of it's weird how some things were clearly planned and some things weren't like he didn't he thought of the duchess on the fly but the special one he did plan from the second he introduced her which i found very interesting why do you say that because like the first thing she thinks is what it's something to do with like oh yes family like this the reason she's doing it is family and it ended up being true um that

she was doing well I mean that's me probably reading too much into the scraps of information I guess um I want to talk about Tony and Giselle actually talking of the special one uh and their relationship because it was a real whirlwind wasn't it i mean it all seemed to happen quite quickly but how quickly did it actually happen yeah so you remember when they got engaged giselle was just like showing everyone the ring so clearly just happened yes so they're engaged their engagement lasts 16 days. Their marriage lasts for 15 days. So the marriage was shorter than the engagement. Shorter than the engagement, wow. And then within 20 days of the marriage ending,

Tony has just fully moved on to Maeve. So less than 50 days. Yeah, all happens in 50 days. He and the heart wants what the heart wants. That is unbelievable. And is there anything else that Dad has got legitimately right? So if you're saying that the special one kind of was seeded quite early, what else is quite impressive in terms of his storytelling technique,

if I can say that? Oh, God. So if he gets right, I mean, I think in the first two or three books, when he says, oh, I'll meet you in 10 days' time in Brusselssels a lot of that does happen and i was kind of surprised by it where in book one she'll say in 10 days i'll meet you here and if you follow the timeline in book two that actually does happen but for every one thing he gets right he gets about six wrong and it's quite a good ratio actually i would have thought it was worse than that no it's like des martin and his wife do you remember when the wife walked out on him within within within 20 days they're fully divorced and the house is fully sold

within what 20 days it's 20 days um from the moment she walks out so there's not even like a trial separation or anything like that's the fastest divorce i've ever heard of and also to have it on the market and sold i mean fair play um it must have been a great property the um wash that man right out of your hair is what i say there's another kind of weird temporal thing with helga and you did a footnote once about helga and her case files yes um yeah you can get the text for the case file on rocky's website. And so Helga's been investigating Dr. Robbins for 22 years before we meet her. The report is dated

1993 and that's like her first encounter with him when Dr. Robbins steals like a million cans of baked beans to put into a shop. Oh my god. And so she's been, she's been like investigating him for over two decades.

She hasn't gotten any closer to arresting him. And then she just like leaves the case to go help Belinda. Let's be fair, she wasn't getting any of that. Oh no. It's a sunk cost.

Oh my God. This is absurd. This is stupid. Cian, do you have a favourite character from your kind of professional scholastic position? Yeah, I mean, I think my favourite character is probably Madame Sweet Juice

just because of her entrance So I had to do a bit of maths for this one So basically, do you remember when Madame Sweet Juice is lowered into the Moulin Rouge? And she's covered in a thousand and one balloons. And so I worked out that the average volume of a balloon times a thousand and one,

if you ignored her own mass and the gap between the balloons, that's a sphere of balloons four meters tall, almost. Wow. So she would not be able to reach her hands out and start popping she'd have to pop from the inside out and if she popped one every second it would take about 16 minutes to pop all of them so you'd be just sat there hearing things pops for about 10 minutes before you saw anything

oh right because she would just be breaking out and then she would finally get to the outer shell of course that's not much of a show is it no and then like also did they hoist her up there and leave her there while they like opened the doors of the building and let everyone in like was she just there for hours yeah i have another question on that then keen so if it's four meters how tall is the moulin marant because like it's a little windmill, isn't it? So, I mean, four metres is high, isn't it? Ceilings-wise. She'd be taking up quite a lot of the headroom.

Like a cathedral. Yeah. But you'd walk underneath it and just think it's a balloon drop. Like you wouldn't think there's a person inside. And could those balloons, like could 1,001 balloons, sustain the weight of a human being, do we think? I don't know. I think they're described as being tied down with licorice, i don't know oh and there was bread and cheese in them as well

so actually oh yeah they get quite a lot of weight yeah one other thing you did was you broke down like statistically some elements of the book right you counted uses of certain phrases and yeah i counted the number of blinks. So there's 74 blinks in the first five books, which is the books that I have the text for. 74 blinks in what, three months? In three months. Wow. And then there's also, there's, I think the word fuck is mentioned 104 times, which surprised me. I thought there'd be a lot more than that. Yeah, me too. Ish words?

Yeah. Should I list them out oh please do yeah yeah so all the issues so far at least were youngish quickish tallish trampish warmish sixish longish smallish thinnish 60ish largish newish biggish boyish goodish devilish oldish whitish wickedish brightish boldish sharpish prudish centralish ticklish and boldish, sharpish, prudish, centralish, ticklish and shortish. Ticklish! Ticklish is like the one real issue. That was me being a bit pedantic. And what's amazing is that you've included the Christmas specials as well.

And we see them as like completely, like where do they fit into the whole timeline? Yeah, so Christmas is an interesting one. Christmas, none of the Christmas chapters overlap. So they could all be one Christmas. like one's new year's christmas eve one's christmas day so you could take it to be christmas 2015 if you wanted remind me how we know it's 2015 does that come from the cv yeah the cv it's like um her she finished her last job in 2015 and that's like the only reference to a date i mean that's an absolute gold mine that cv then i mean not just because of tongui of course norman tongui but um for all the all the data that's in there i'm wondering if we've only been at steals or belinda's only been at steals for

three and a half months i mean she's got a long way to go till she knows if she's got the bonus because that's usually an end of year bonus isn't it yeah there's one thing actually just this morning i realized I was on, just doing some prep for this and I went to Rocky's website. He published Belinda's address. Well, that's dangerous. There's a fake listing for her flat because she's selling it apparently.

And it's priced at 2.95 million pounds. What the fuck? Well, it is central London, guys. Yeah. But it's 61 Half Moon Street, London, W1J7AZ. £3 million, pretty much. And my favourite detail is it's about a two-minute walk from the Ritz Hotel. So she doesn't need to keep getting taxis between the place.

Right. Well, that would explain why she always visits the ritz because it's basically her local it's her local yeah yeah it's just wild that's the tone of a man who's thinking about his life choices yeah why did i do this again kian have you ever met or spoken to anybody who knows as much about blinder blinked as you no but um when i put the timeline on Twitter, there was a bunch of people who gave me corrections and notes. So there are some people out there who care.

Cheeky little wenches. You were like, I have a PhD in this, back off. No, I think by the time I put it online, I was so burnt out. I was like, oh, grand jazz. The more the merrier. Any help you can get would be great. I think there was one person who got very upset that I misspelled the Isle of Wight on the timeline.

And then I had to screenshot the book and be like, no, no, no, this is what Rocky said. S-I-C in square brackets. I'm imagining, Cian, if anybody ever hadn't spoken to you in a few days, couldn't get hold of you and came to your flat, you would have one of those like slightly crazy sort of Homeland style things on the wall with lines between bits of paper well you'd basically be

like belinda was in book five when she was trying to work out where what was she trying to work out oh that graph she did like on the flip chart a flip chart yeah exactly yeah where she just circled bish and germany and called it a day. Yeah, exactly. Bish circle, Germany circle, connect the two and done. Thank you very much. Is there anything else you want to raise with us, flag with us, make us aware of? No, the only other thing was like the trioxybrillopan. How amazing it is, like it would end world energy issues,

but also how would you wash a pan that can boil water in a second? Maybe it's one of those pans that you never clean, you know, that's supposed to be better for cooking. Yeah, don't you just like whiz a bit of kitchen roll around it with some oil? I'd love to think that they, because like you could power, you know, energy reactors and stuff like that, but I'd love to think that Steele's has patented it, this like life-changing technology and no one can use it except for pans.

Yeah, how philanthropic of them them why think big when you can think pans is i think the you know the motto of steals um so obviously uh we're in australia at the moment uh which is you know it takes what 24 hours to get there yeah roughly yeah does he always get kind of travel timelines right he gets them right some of the time i mean i think he was i think it took him like four hours to fly from London to Amsterdam once. Four hours, yeah. But there was one time when Belinda crashed her car. I keep going back to that moment when Belinda crashed the car. And she says there's not a soul for 25 miles, which would encompass a lot of London, like more than half of London.

If you were halfway between Epsom and London you're only 10 miles away from London so yeah I think Rocky doesn't know where some places are in relation to London probably oh yeah

he doesn't get to London all that much and also it really slows you down if you use Google Maps to check so who checks really why bother

do authors really check because like you say is that the editor's job to make sure it all makes sense and dad has foregone that you know an expense not worth it for him and if it wasn't for thorns in his side like yuki and he would get away from you know he'd get away with it i should say that he's been

an absolute sweetheart to me he uh he got in touch after i put it online and he sent me a little goodie package with like posters and stuff yeah and he invited my a friend a friend of myself to uh your hbo recording and it was very nice film like he didn't he's very good to his fans he is he's great yeah he is he did he did stand me and my friend up though he was he was saying oh i'll uh take you for a drink before the show and then we got there and we were like oh we'll wait for his text notes look out for a irishman in his 60s and then never heard from him. He's a man of mystery. He's an enigma, Cian. This is the thing.

He did email me the next day going, oh, I couldn't get out. HBO wouldn't let me leave or something like that. He was locked in a dressing room. Honestly, we did chain him up for the evening. He was too drunk.

I think that's what it was. But, I mean, do you really want to meet your hero? That's the question. Oh, no, absolutely not. No no you were relieved that text never came it was just morbid curiosity this is so brilliant it's just really making me laugh and also it's such a nice trip down memory lane yeah it's so thorough like you have to go and look at it it's so incredible he's even read the extra bits oh my god going on Rocky's website

in your spare time and I love that like you think that that would be dad's opportunity to make things make sense but you know just makes it more complicated he actually

he never corrected me on it so I can only presume everything I've done is accurate oh yeah you'd have had a cease and desist by now I think yeah well Kian

it's been so so great to talk to you and yeah kind of remind us of the whole world of Blender Blinks. It's quite an epic piece of writing, Dad. Yeah, I would say you've cleared things up, but you really haven't. But thanks anyway.

I try, I try. That's the main thing. The website is, again, Kian? Yeah, so if you just go to berlindablumenthal.business and have a look. I love that it's.business. Of course it is. Fantastic. And it's super nerdy and super great.

We just love stuff like this. And it's just so unbelievably detailed. It's great. Kieran, thank you so, so much for joining us. No worries. Thanks for having me. Just timelining. Own each step with Peloton. From their pop runs to walk and talks,

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