On the chat show the, "Kumars at Number 42", they had an interview with Alan Alda, and the father asked him:

"I understand you started smoking a pipe at the age of three years, was that to make you look older Alda?"

Labels: Jokes

Could Astrology actually be true? It seems awfully unlikely but it is - of course - possible.

There are a variety of systems which exist in the world which sound almost laughably silly but help because they make things easier to remember. For example Feng Shui is effectively the practice of furniture arranging viewed as "what would a dragon do"? You might not think that dragons know about the arrangement of furniture but think of it another way. When you sit in a space and you feel too cramped what the arranger has forgotten is that people need space around them, when you look at a room that seems to be broken up and bitty you have forgotten that the room needs a visual sweep and that if you put a lamp in a precarious position you have forgotten that a dragons tail needs space when it goes round tricky corners. In fact it's much easier to remember the few key rules of dragons and how they work than all the specific rules of style. It's a form of systemization. It's kind of like not having to remember exactly how long an inch is but instead measuring the thing with the bit between your knuckle and the tip of your fattest finger - a kind of rule of thumb.

Astrology probably developed in a similar way. People for a variety of reasons will tend to be similar if similar things have happened to them, and similar things will tend to happen to them based on the times of the year that they are born. These could vary from temperature of the child in bed in the first few days of life to being one of the oldest or youngest in the school year. So the stars could have nothing to do with it working or not working they could just be the way that people identify which time of the year you were born.

Actually I've never read a horoscope and had it ever come true. I've never seen it and said, "oh yeah that's incredibly spooky". There is so much generalisation in there as to make it completely irrelevant and stupid. The part that is harder to throw away is the descriptions of your sign. Some descriptions of Aquarius, Taurus etc seem to be reasonably accurate of the kind of people who fit in that group. And I think that part of it is probably reasonably likely to be due to a combination of real world factors as described above (eg. temperature, age oldest to youngest in class, etc).

But I once suggested this to a keen astrologist and she said I was completely wrong. So I asked her for her "scientific" explanation of astrology. Her answer? She said that the human brain gets a real kick at the exact time of birth and that kick is incredibly subtly influenced by gravity. So that even the exact positions of far away stars can affect the way that the child's brain will grow from that moment on. Sounds unlikely to me but then I suppose - you never know.

Labels: Articles

...but I think I could do it with my hands tied behind my back.

Thanks to Phil Nicol who just won the if.comedies which is the new name for the Perrier award. They really do have to change that name again, the new name is rubbish.

Labels: Jokes

Literally* the problem of the birds and the bees. I was asked the other day about why different kinds of birds can't mate. And it's a question that seems to divide people. Some people seem to think the answer is really obvious and others seem to think that they probably can.

This seems to all stem from a strange feeling that people have that birds might be a species rather than a class. So some people think that you can kind of go: cats, dogs, birds in a list and that this would be a sensible list. But it's not really true. You would be able to go: cats, dogs, chickens. These are all animals or species of animals, but the first list contains a class. So you should go, mammals, birds.

In fact birds are more diverse a class than mammals and yet we wouldn't think of cats and dogs mating (although I once met a person who thought that cats are female dogs but they were stupid). Compare a hummingbird to an emu would you think they could mate? (Although a lot of people think that emus and ostrich are closer to mammals than other birds they are still closer to dinosaurs than mammals actually.

*There was a story during the first world war of a village that wanted to show that it had more food and supplies than it actually had so that they enemy wouldn't want to attack it. But all they really had was one cow so they painted the cow a different pattern every day. The first time I heard somebody talking about this story was when they were talking about a painting of this incident. And this they had to say was a painting of a person literally painting a cow. It's a great example of somebody using literally correctly, because literally has become now an autoantoym which means that it means the opposite of itself. Other examples are dust. To dust can mean to remove particles from something and can also mean to add particles to something (first like cleaning, second like cooking). Literally means in actuality something and also can mean figuratively something. So you can use literally to say explain how when you translated something into English you translated it word for word, "he translated it from the Latin literally". Or you can use literally to make a metaphor stronger, like "he was literally ready to explode". The second meaning came about by accident and shouldn't really be acceptable as far as I'm concerned.

There are more here: http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html

Labels: Articles

That one day my four little children… whoops I don't have any children.

But I did have a dream the other day which was pretty odd. I was dreaming about track racing, more specifically I was dreaming about the four hundred meters race. Now in Formula 1 racing there is a specific thing that happens if it rains, you still go out and race but you use different tires. Obviously this situation was weighing on my mind at the time of this dream, as I noticed that it was raining at the track. And just as I wondered what they do in the running races when there is a wet race then I heard the commentator explaining that exact thing. This is what I heard:

"Well the race has been declared officially wet. So we are expecting that all of the racers will have gone for their wet trainer. The wet training shoe has spikes in it and also has been warmed so that it displaces more water than a usual cross shoe. But what's interesting today is that only three out of the four racers is using their allotted dog."

Yes that's right, "dog". As I looked down at the track I could see a set of dogs lying on the blocks of three of the racers, but not the fourth. I carried on listening:

"Yes, three of the competitors are racing as usual with dogs on their stocks, but not the racer in lane four. There are obvious advantages to having a dog on a wet track, especially fluffy dogs like these, they tend to soak up all of the water on the start line. But of course there are disadvantages, first some runners prefer to not have to stand on either side of the dog as they feel this unduly slows them as they start running. And of course, as Kriss Akabusi found to his chagrin back in the late eighties your start dog can also bite".

It was at this point I woke up. And the only thing that I can add right now is that I suddenly realised a few hours later that the dream didn't make sense. I mean of course it doesn’t actually make sense, but it doesn't even make sense in it's own internal logic. If you were going to get a furry dog to lie on your starting blocks before the start of a race wouldn't you get them to move out of the way just at the last minute? Rather than standing on either side of the dog when basically you'd still be standing on the wet?

Labels: Fiction

The bartender says, "I see, the buck stops here".

Labels: Jokes

I was talking to a taxi driver the other day and he was telling me that he was going through a rough patch at home.

I like to get into conversations with taxi drivers about them rather than their political beliefs and so on. I think it's kind of interesting to talk to them about what makes them tick because frankly it must be kind of boring being a taxi driver. And there are the main thing that everyone likes talking about is - themselves. So I imagine that it gives them some fun and is an interesting diversion in their day. Of course it might be that every other punter is doing the same. Or it might be that underneath their brusque exterior they are essentially very shy people and that is why they chose a job where they spend no time with anyone but also hopelessly close to them?

So anyway for whatever reason I do it I tend to talk to taxi drivers about their personal lives, and you get some very interesting stories. And this guy, Paul was his name, was going through a rough patch at home. He had done something he said, he didn't want to say what it was, but he had done something a few years ago and his wife had never really forgiven him. And then his wife in retribution had cheated on him, which - he told me - had stretched things to breaking point. There had been a lot of rowing and shouting and this, he said, had been their way of things for the last few years. But a few months ago they had been on best behaviour as they had been called into the school of their child and had been told about how their child's behaviour had been getting worse for the last two years and had suddenly got so bad that they had been called in. So, he said, he wasn’t now sure what it was that had caused it to happen but he thought it might have been because they were all dressed up to meet the headmaster, and had been on best behaviour themselves, but after the meeting they had sat in the car in the carpark and had a conversation.

The conversation, he said, had started because he had said to her, "You know how we're always saying that we're staying together for the kid? I'm starting to think that it might not be doing him much good".

And ever since the conversation things had started to get better. Because while they still argued, there was more chance of a conversation now then their had been. Things still weren't great though he said.

At this point I made a suggestion, it was just a little suggestion, but one that I'd been thinking about for a while. I suggested to him that he swap sides of the bed with his wife. I mean there's no reason why you have one side or another, people just start on one side or the other and then stick with it forever. And really, in the end, you're just getting stuck in a rut. And even though it seems such a small thing it does three things simultaneously. It literally gives you a new perspective, it moves you out of your comfort zone and if you argue with the idea then you know that there's no hope. What I mean by the last point is that there is no real reason not to try it, it might help it might not. But the person who suggests it is at least trying to make things better, the person who says no has no leg to stand on if they aren’t even willing to change sides of the bed to save their relationship then the relationship is probably doomed.

He said he was going to try it.

Labels: Articles

Andrew Lloyd Webber walks into a Burger King and says, "Give me two Whoppers".
And the guy behind the counter says, "You're good looking, and your musicals are great".

Labels: Jokes

I've always believed that nobody in the world goes into a pub and orders a "pint of lager", but on soaps people do this all of the time. Surely the next question that the publican would have is "which lager would you like? We have several on". In soap operas I can sort of understand it because they don't want to be mentioning a brand all of the time. But I don't see why they don't do what Coronation Street does and invent a brewery that way people can simply order the imaginary beer from that place and not sound really silly.

The only time that I had seen people do something similar was when they would order a lager top (a ridiculous drink in my opinion which is simply beer with lemonade in the top). I have been told by some people that it is very refreshing drink, which may be true but I can't imagine it, personally I find lager a refreshing alternative to bitter on a Summers day so I can't see how making it even sweeter and fizzier is going to help the poor drink. But I do understand why if you're ordering a lager top you are effectively planning on ruining the taste of whatever beer you're ordering so you may as well have the cheapest one that there is, hence "lager top", although I have increasingly heard "Fosters top" being used which presumably is because the lemonade doesn't have enough sugar in it.

On a slight aside, I can understand the lager top thing being refreshing really, I know that other people have different tastes than me - so that's fine. The thing that annoys me about them is that certain people seem to think that putting a small amount of lemonade in the top of their beer renders them alcohol free. I mean it will reduce the alcohol level slightly but only by the inch of beer that they didn't put in. This is a big annoyance for me, and for a time when I would ask people why they were drinking a lager top and they told me that it was because they were driving I'd suggest to them that they should simply have an inch less than a pint in their beer - but somehow they felt that the dilutive effects were much stronger than they possibly could be. I think that the entire practice probably came from another horrible invention the lime top. This came from the Mexican beer trend of having lime in the neck of your beer (a very good thing) and applying it to regular beer by putting an inch of lime cordial in your pint of beer (a very bad thing).

But back to the main point of not ordering a specific beer. A few weeks ago I actually saw somebody do just this. They said, "a pint of lager please". And I almost spilled my pint! The waitress (for it was a pub with waitress service - oh yes) started reeling off names, he said, "whatever's cheapest luv". Which reminded me of an ordering I'd seen years and years before (this time somebody I knew) which went, "Which beer do you serve which has the most alcohol in it? I'll have that one". Which is sort of the same but hadn't triggered the concept in my mind because they didn't use the magic phrase "a pint of lager please".

There is an element of this conversation which revolves around the idea of beer as a "getting drunk delivery system". Some people in certain situations just want to get drunk. They don’t care how they do it. But I'm not sure that's what's going on here. Because in that case they'd know what they were doing and sit outside with a can of Special Brew. Here they know they are in a pub and they know they want a lager but they haven't ever even bothered to learn what they like.

I wonder particularly if it is something about beverages which is the thing, or rather a thing that bugs me. Because it also bugs me when people say, "a tin of pop" or a "can of drink" surely you know what kind of drink you want. But on the other hand I will ask for a pack of crisps. Because sometimes you know you want a packet of crisps but you don't know which ones you want.

I have always explained this discrepancy by simply referring to the sheer number of crisps available and the fact that in pubs while they might have all the beers out on display for you to read out their names, the crisps are often hidden away.

It probably shouldn't annoy me, but it does. Because I want to believe that people drink beer because it's a nice drink, not just to get pissed. And if they don't even care which of the beers they are drinking then its certainly not going to help.

Labels: Articles

"Hi, I'm your new next door neighbor," I pointed to where next door was for dramatic effect.
It was only now that I looked up at my neighbor and realised what she looked like. She was young, blonde and pretty and was wearing a negligee* which left literally one thing to the imagination, her left arm. Her arm was bandaged, mummy style, from her nape to the tips of her fingers.
She saw me staring at her arm and seemed about to explain what had happened when I said, "please don't explain it. Otherwise you really will leave nothing to the imagination".
She looked back at me with that quizzical look that some people look at me with and said, "I bet you're good with knobs".
"I beg your pardon", I seemed, suddenly, to say.
"Well," she said coquettishly, "I didn't answer the door, you opened it. And this door hasn't opened by human force since the early eighties. We use the back for access".
I realised she was playing with me, and I decided not to play along.
"Now look here", I said, while I was pointing at a crack in the door, "I didn't force entry".
"I know," she replied, "you look innocent enough".
"I just wanted to borrow a bowl of sugar," I had even brought the bowl, and as if to prove the point I brandished it at the appropriate moment in the sentence.
"Oh," she said in that disappointed way that some people are terribly practiced at. It was as though, all of a sudden, I was the thirtieth person that day who had ambled past wanting sugar, when moments before she had genuinely thought it all a ruse.
"Do you have a picture of your wife on you?" she asked naturally.
Naturally, as an unmarried gentleman I did not, and I said so, "Sorry I don’t".
"Who, may I ask bought you that china if not your wife?"
"Oh it was my mother, years ago, she's dead now of course".
"Oh a mothers boy, looking for a replacement".

And with that she grabbed hold of my bowl and said, "well lets see where this take us".

* negligently as it was pretty cold that morning.

Labels: Fiction

A mouse walks into a music shop and asks the shopkeeper "Have you got a mouse organ?"
The shopkeeper replies "No".
The mouse walks off.
The next day another mouse walks into the music shop. "Have you got a mouse organ?"

it asks.
"No," replies the shopkeeper,

"but it’s funny you should ask as there was another mouse asking for the same thing yesterday."
The mouse nods and says "Oh yes, that’ll be our Monica".

Labels: Jokes

There is a new trend in the English Language and that is to verbify words. Verbifying words is the concept of taking a noun like mouse (like a computer mouse) and then describing the concept of using the mouse like this "I just had a quick mouse around the screen". It may have existed for a long time, but certainly in modern times it has become much more popular because of the rapid invention of new things. We all tend to know what the new thing is called (unless we're still referring to all of them as thingy still) but sometimes its more difficult to know how to describe using the thing itself. Another example is "Video" to mean the Video Cassette Recorder. Or "Video" to mean record things on the Video Cassette Recorder.

The extra fun part about "Verbify" is that it is self referential. "Verbify" is a "Verbified" version of the noun "Verb".

Verbify does have a rather ancient opposite though, something that we've all being doing for ages probably without remembering the name for it. A gerund* is when you take a verb and then turn it into a noun. Eg. "I am going to sing", and then in the next sentence, "Everyone hated Alex's singing". In the second sentence the thing that people are doing is "hating" so what I'm doing has become a gerund.

But despite being opposites they can be used together, hence "Verbifying" is a gerund version of "Verbify".

*I first came across a gerund when learning Latin at school**

**Yeah I know - weird huh***

***I would have been a judge but I didn't have the Latin.

Labels: Articles

...and says to the barman, "can I have one for me and one for the road"?

Labels: Jokes

I have a guilt half-life. It's quite useful because dealing with guilt is one of the most important things I have to do on a daily basis.

I feel guilty for everything. As Woody Allen once said, "if one guy is starving someplace, it puts a crimp on my evening". Basically the reason I get out of bed in the morning is because I feel that I would be letting people down if I didn't.

So what is this guilt half-life? Well basically every time I do something stupid I feel guilty about it but it gets a score (in my head) of how bad it was. But sometimes its difficult to tell exactly what that score is at the time. I feel bad at the time but the only real way to tell exactly how bad I feel about it is to see how long it takes to fall through the different levels of telling people how stupid I've been.

Basically, I like telling stories more than I mind feeling embarrassed about how the stories make me look. So when I do something stupid a bit of me knows that sooner or later I'll be telling people about what I did. Each story makes the following progression.

1 - Tell Katherine, she often gets to hear it when it's still very raw
2 - Close friends
3 - Family
4 - Friends in general in the pub
5 - The readers on this blog

So when it finally hits the blog that's a sign that I no longer feel embarrassed about what I did. Not really. And that's almost always the moment to retire the story from being retold. Everyone's heard it once, and if they haven't I guess they could always look it up. But the main thing is that if you're telling the story in public you've got to have the fight between "embarrassment at finishing the story" and the "need to get another laugh" to give it the emotional punch you want. It definitely makes it funnier, which is why when it gets to the blog it's probably over for the guilt and the story itself.

Labels: Articles

instead of being a short story is a video - it's my first upload to YouTube and I made it for my Formula One blog. But I think you can enjoy it even if you don't know anything about Formula One:

Labels: Fiction

And the landlord shouts at him, "Get out, You're bard".

Labels: Jokes

American English is a difficult beast. Oscar Wilde said America and England are two different countries separated by a common language. But sometimes it seems that there really is less in common between our languages than we think. In fact I was just writing about some of those differences the other day.

Unlike many other British authors of the moment I choose not to point and laugh at our American cousins. The Americans do seem to be the one group that it is socially acceptable to be xenophobic about. But i did discover an interesting thing about Americans as a group which might sound like it was me taking the mickey a little bit. But I'm not it's just interesting that's all.

I don't know if you've installed any software recently. But if you have then you'll probably have had to choose the language that you want the software installed in. And recently, in the last few years there has been a change. In the old days you would get either English or a choice between American or British English (usually you would get the choice if the software included a dictionary of some kind).

But now in situations where it would before only offered English or another language we only get the American English choice. And this is because, it turns out, a number of American people don't think that are speaking English. They think they are speaking American.

Labels: Articles

Stop peeking at me!

Labels: Jokes

Recently while at a Vietnamese restaurant, I ordered noodles instead of rice with the dish that I wanted. The weird thing about this is that I didn't know that I was ordering the wrong thing. The menu gave me no guidance. And in a restaurant which I often go they have the same dish and there I have ordered noodles and never been corrected. But when I was in this restaurant the waitresses gave me a look that told me I was crazy - it's a look I've experienced before. And she suggested that I tried the rice with it because it would go much better. I continued with my order for two reasons. First because I've never been a massive fan of rice and second because I've had the combo of this dish and noodles before and I've very much enjoyed it.

But I could tell that in this particular case which my misbehavior had been truly revealed. I had clearly been a snob and not taken the food advice that I was given which is something I rarely do. My favorite thing is to go into a restaurant and ask them what they would recommend. And usually it is fantastic. So why different. It is because I had become used to what I wanted. But the same could be leveled at the person telling me off.

I was trying to think during the meal of the local cultural equivalent of what I had done and I can only imagine it is like ordering roast beef and bread, or something of that ilk. Maybe ordering Chicken and Yorkshire pudding although it's becoming more acceptable these days. Something that would be so outrageous that the waitress in a country pub would tell me off.

But it led me to a thought which I think is one of the most interesting things in British cooking (although there are many things which are terrible) the most important good thing is that chefs here seem to be more willing to experiment against the grain - against the combinations that people have become comfortable with - than in most other countries. And perhaps this is because they have had no national reputation for so long that they have been forced into cooking a wide variety of imports. But the creative spark of cooking genius which does appear in Britain seems to take these bits and pieces and turn them to their advantage. And perhaps it is the way in which Britain has been accused of having no style that it really excels because what fantastic British food seems to me to be about is an ability to embrace the best of everything and put it next to something you wouldn't expect would be fantastic but is. Because British chefs have more room than most to be able to say, "I've tried this, and you know what? It actually worked".

Labels: Articles

Last time we left Simon he was about to poison all of the cheese on the moon. If you need to refresh your memory then please check out: Moon Miners.

Simon had announced at a large meeting of all of the leading mice that to save the moon they needed to re-establish the aristocracy. That the mice he had brought to this meeting deserved to be treated better than all of the other mice (to this he had great applause they all thought so too). But how would they be able to show to the other mice that they were better than them (at this he got muted grumbling about it had been his idea in the first place to tell everyone about the cheese)? He told them that he had finally decided to tell them the last secret the prince had told him before he died it was a secret so amazing that it would mean a way to re-establish the aristocracy. There was a way, he told them, to get to the centre of the moon and that when they got there they would have access to the most fantastic fresh cheese in the world, the cheese that they would find there would make normal moon cheese seem flat and tasteless and that with help from all of them they could have exclusive access to this cheese.

They agreed so rapidly that Simon thought it might even be a trap, but it wasn't. These powerful mice had been feeling so silly of late that they had been no better than a common mouse that they were ready to do anything to be able to prove they were better. They were completely desperate to re-establish their superiority.

So off they set and started digging, it was tough work, and these mice had never really done a days work in their lives so keeping them motivated was hard at first. But after a short while the cheese taste had improved so dramatically that the greedy mice were rushing to try and get back to the front of the digging party.

Simon bided his time, he knew that once they reached the fondue centre of the moon then he would be ready, but until that time he would simply have to keep up the pretence.

Then finally, the big day came with a squeal of delight one of the mice had struck liquid cheese and it had oozed out all over his whiskers. They all kept digging around as Simon instructed until there was a wide opening, and Simon called out, "Bring the carrying barrels". They brought down the barrels of poison from the surface which Simon had told them were barrels for transporting the cheese up (he told them that they were reinforced to deal with the heat which is why they were so heavy). As they were set down on to a specially constructed platform which Simon had built himself he turned to the other mice around him and said, "You are my brothers, all of you but you are not friends of me or the moon". This place that was once so good has been destroyed by us all, and now one act of vandalism by me must restore the balance. And with this, before they could do anything about it, he pulled a special rope and all of the barrels went rolling straight into the centre of the moon. Each one melting in the sheer heat of the centre and realising its deadly poison.

"I have poisoned the cheese, and although the cheese grows slowly the poison will not, within two days all of the moon will be poisoned, and within hours it will be too risky to take a bite. You must all go back to your old ways of eating grain and working for a living. There is nothing you can do now to stop it, the moon will be saved and if you ask me why I did it I did it for our children." And with that Simon jumped into the molten cheese and instantly died.

Labels: Fiction

He's only got little legs.

Labels: Jokes

...but I am to learn that one at least one of the big shifts in English language of the last twenty years the emoticon (smiley :) has a specific inventor. His name is Scott Fahlman and he invented :-) and :-( to point out which posts were jokes and which ones weren't on a server, and this was back in 1982. Some people do talk about a guy called Kevin Mackenzie who suggested -) to be like a tongue sticking out the - is the middle of the tongue and he did that back in 1979 but most people say that it was Scott who did the business. I tend, if I do use emoticons to use ;) the most as it seems the most friendly and also the most useful way of pointing out that something is tongue and cheek.

I went to a talk by the playwright Alan Aykbourne a few years ago [you may want to read about the whole week starting here, and in that talk he said that he despised the use of emoticons. He said that "if something was supposed to be funny then it should be funny enough to be identified as funny by the person reading it laughing at the end. They shouldn't need a pointer at the end". He effectively compared smileys to the laughter track on television.

He was wrong of course because, at least in my experience, they aren't used to say "this is a joke" after a bona fide joke. They are used to say "this is a joke" after something which could be taken deadly seriously.

Now I should find out about that other shift in English Language: text speak. Oh wait I already did.

Labels: Articles

He's a little terror I can tell you.

The main problem with having a pet lobster is that they like to go outside and frolic a lot more that you are probably willing to entertain. When you want to stay in they want to go out, and when you want to go out they want to curl up next to a pat of butter.

It's very very tricky to deal with, because when they go in and out they like to hold the door open for a long time, I don't know why they do this, cats don't do this with a cat flap. They simply must like doing things very very slowly (except when they go for a little clip of your finger, then it's ultra fast). And the door being open for such a long time means that the temperature in your house drops a lot in the winter and rises a lot in the summer, and this is a terrible terrible thing.

So I have been searching long and hard for a solution to this particular problem, but could I find one? Could I heck fire! Until just this very morning when via e-mail I was sent a picture of the exact thing, apparently it provides two doors which allow the lobster to step through the first door as slowly as it likes, which then seals behind it and then, the lobster steps through the next. The process is repeated the other way around when it comes back in.

I believe the product is called:














…wait for it...












A Lobster Thermos Door.

Labels: Jokes