I'm worried about Dobbin. He's right off his cuttlefish.

The BBC have set up a helpful site where experts answer questions about bird flu put to them by idiot members of the public. And the idiot members of the public have risen magnificently to the occasion, with such questions as:


Could my horse be affected?


To which the answer, astoundingly enough, turns out to be... no. Not unless your horse is a bird.
If you’re having difficulty telling whether or not your horse is a bird, here are some handy tests:

1. Run at your horse, shouting, and waving your arms. If your horse flies away, your horse is a bird.

2. Offer your horse some tasty millet. If it pecks daintily at it, emitting little cheeps of pleasure, and ruffling its feathers, your horse is a bird.

3. Ask your horse who is a pretty boy then. If your horse replies that he is a pretty boy, your horse is a bird.

4. Wait until your horse is running towards you, and shout ‘Woah!’ If it fails to stop, your horse is a bird. Or a deaf horse.

5. Sit on your horse. If your horse is now dead, your horse was a bird.

...And 28/10 at weekends.

Heard this week:

'We're expected to work 24/7, five days a week.'

Penguins, however, He didn't get at all.

Sorry for the quietness, it's all got a bit busy round here. I expect you coped, though.

One of the tricks I use to fight my insomnia sometimes is to pick the dryest, dullest book I can find, and tell myself the only way I'm allowed to stop reading it is to go to sleep. Esentially, I'm holding my brain hostage. This plan was entirely foiled last night, however, by the promising sounding 'A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation', which in no way lulled me to sleep with the brilliant sentence:

'It might be argued that one of the most clearly established facts about Jesus is that he found camels funny.'

Might it? Don't get me wrong, I certainly think it should be argued, if at all possible, but... really?

Of course, I shouldn't have doubted the authors - they're absolutely right. The evidence is all there in the Apocrypha, in particular the Gospel of Bob, Chapter 7:

4. And Jesus spake again unto the Pharisee, saying: Doubt not that the Father hath placed in thee- pfffffffff! 5. Sorry about that. Sorry. 6. No, as I was saying, doubt not that the bhahahahaha! Look at his eyelashes! 7. And His disciples, who stood about Him, turned one to another and lamented, saying: 8. Oh, bloody hell, He's off again. He's seen another camel. That'll be it for the day now. 9. And so it came to pass, indeed, that nothing else got done that day , but for Jesus waxing increasing mirthful about the camel, and its stupid hump.

All hail the Hypno-ferry

Spent very nice weekend in Dorset, land of my fathers. And of my Granny. Discovered that the chain ferry in Poole is sporting a new banner it never used to have... and which I find a little sinister.



Forthcoming banners in the chain ferry's insidious propaganda campaign:

OBEY CHAIN FERRY WITHOUT QUESTION
CHAIN FERRY CAN SEE INTO YOUR BRAIN
TREMBLE BEFORE MIGHT OF CHAIN FERRY
BRING CHAIN FERRY HUMAN SACRIFICE
IN NAME OF CHAIN FERRY... NUKE BOURNEMOUTH

Together to the end

An online dictionary I use has a quote of the day on its front page. Today's is:

'Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.'
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

I like to imagine them lying in adjacent hospital beds, angrily chanting this in unison.

...Not to mention numbers 1 to 5.

Talking of adverts on the tube, this is quite a striking one:


Now, I'm no advertising executive, thank the Lord, but I'm quite tempted to write in to the University of Dundee, suggesting they run an advert to be placed next to this one, reading. 'Fact. You're quite obviously not.'

Lynne Truss has a lot to answer for. For which to answer, I mean.

In one of the lifts at Chalk Farm tube station, a scholarly debate is raging. Someone has amended one of those Microsoft adverts with the dinosaur headed office workers- the one featured a triceratops trying to get on with his photocopying, with the slogan 'This data is multiplying like rabbits.' The offended grammarian has crossed out 'This' and 'is', and replaced them with 'These' and 'are'. Fine. But, gloriously, someone else has crossed out the correction, replaced the original words, and added 'Stet. Data is an uncountable noun'. I just love the 'stet'. What, in case someone tries to print the lift?

(Of course, if it is an uncountable noun, you've got to worry about whether it can be compared to rabbits, plural. Perhaps the slogan should more properly be: 'This data is multiplying like the rabbit'. Or, for complete clarity: 'This data is multiplying at the speed colloquially associated with the species Oryctolagus Cuniculus.' But let's give the guy a break, shall we? After all, he has a lot of photocopying to do. And he has the head of a triceratops.)

Time and motion study

Typing away at something just now, I decided to change the word ‘coincidentally’ to ‘accidentally’. Obviously, there was no point in deleting the 'ally' at the end - that's four keystrokes of my valuable time. So, I put my cursor in front of the a, and prepared to hit backspace. Then I noticed the words had more in common than I thought. There was a 'dent' I had no need to delete and retype... and come to that, a 'ci' in front of that! So, I diligently moved my cursor back through the letters till it was between 'coin' and ‘cidentally’. Then I started deleting. But when I got to the last letter, I noticed it was a c, and I needed a double c for 'accidentally'. So I hopped over it, and placed an ‘a’ before it. Voila.

All this was done without the least hint of self-awareness, as just the logical thing to do. My God, but for someone who is prepared to drop everything for half an hour to stick paper eyes on a tulip, I seem very careful not to waste vital milliseconds typing letters twice…

Return of the Killer Tulips

Interesting. I've had more emails in response to my evil tulip post than to all the other posts on this blog put together. Thanks, no doubt, to the link from the blog of well known author, frog collector and bon viveur Joe Craig. Thanks, Joe! Anyway, by popular demand, here are a few more shots of the little critters. Click to see the full size version. (Oh, and... I promise I wouldn't be pompous enough to mention this unless people had asked; but: yes, you're welcome to use these images yourself, so long as you say where you got 'em from. Although links are nice. Copyright remains with me. )

Don't you hate it when you buy a nice bunch of tulips, and then one of them turns rogue?

Liminal advertising.

I really like old adverts, the sort that tell you to buy Higginson's Coal Wax, because your coal needs waxing, and Higginson's coal wax is the best coal wax with which to wax your coal, so just buy some, ok? These ads often contain cartoon men frowning at their dirty, unwaxed coal; and then beaming at their shiny, waxed coal, twinkling with that unmistakable Higginson's gleam. I didn't think you could find adverts like that around any more, but this week Marianne and I were in Dublin, and came upon the following masterpiece in neon. It's an exciting tale in three parts.

Questions of baldness and hairiness have no meaning for me, for I have no top to my head. Nor do I have a mouth. Possibly these conditions are related, possibly not. Either way, going bald is the least of my problems.

That's better, I have a mouth... but it's a mouth set into a vexed pout of disappointment, because, would you believe it, I've gone bald! In fact, it would appear I've polished the top of my head so hard my skull's showing through. Botheration!

Hooray! Those good people at Universal have fitted me with a wig cleverly matched to be as red as my face, and I'm cheerful again! Especially as my wig is giving off rays of illumination, like the sun. That's got to be a good thing. Or possibly it's just fitted with seven spikes to stop pigeons landing on it. Either way, I'm on top of the world... and it's all thanks to Universal! Why don't YOU go and buy a wig now, Baldie?

If the post sparks a major diplomatic incident, my apologies.

You'll be delighted to learn that I had a very good dinner last night. It was a massive pie. And there are few things in this world I love more than a massive pie. Hosts, should you read this: thank you again. Thank you for the massive pie.

After the massive pie had been demolished (It really was a massive pie), we sat round with our wine glasses propped on our pie-filled stomaches, and played Articulate. (You know the one - describe the word on the card so your team-mate can guess it.)

This was my second-favourite moment:

Word on the card is 'Nut'

Describer: Pistachio is a type of...?
Guesser: Ice cream!

Of course, you can't fault her for accuracy. It is. Whereas the sentiment behind my favourite moment of the night is, um, a little more subjective.

Word on the card is 'War Office'

Describer: Ok, so a huge global conflict is a?
Guesser: War?
Describer: Yes! Now, where might one of those be planned?
Guesser: Palestine?

See a penny, pick it up...

...and all that day you'll have good luck. And, of course, boost your purchasing power to the tune of a hundreth of a pound. And certainly when I was a boy, I wouldn't dream of not picking up a penny. A penny, after all, could be traded for a blackjack or a spongy pink sweet in the shape of a prawn at Candy Chocs, the sweetshop in Broadstone Broadway with what I now realise was a very odd name. Come to that, when I was a little boy, and they were still around, I would happily stoop for a ha'penny. One fortieth of your weekly income is surely worth a stoop.

I don't remember when I made the policy decision that I had, if anything, too many coppers, and I would no longer stoop for pennies, or even tuppences. But it's been a while, and as I still seem to end up with jangly pockets of coppers, but have largely gone off spongy pink prawn-shaped sweets, I have never regretted it. However. Today, for the first time, I saw a 5p piece... and I let it lie. No stoopage occurred. I didn't even break my stride.

I'm not sure how I feel about this momentous rite of passage. I suppose it depends where the tipping point comes on an imaginary 3D graph representing 1) Inflation 2) My modestly increasing income and c) My slowly decreasing fitness. Or to put it another way, I hope the reason I didn't pick it up was that I'm so hugely successful and rich these days, and not because I'm so hugely lazy and fat. I also hope I'm not in for five days of bad luck.

To help me decide how to feel, let's have a survey. What's the least amount of money for which you're prepared to stoop? Honestly, now.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Boyo.

I've never really felt I could do a Welsh accent.

Then, this Saturday, I found myself at a bus stop in the centre of Cardiff, two hours after England had beaten Wales at rugby 47-13, with five very big, very drunk men in red rugby shirts, one of whom (the one wearing a Welsh flag over his shoulders like a cape) shouted at me 'D'you see the fucken game, then?'

Turns out I can do quite a good one.

Es is nicht groB und es is nicht gescheit.

Look, I'm really not the sort of person who looks for things like this. Honest. But I spent yesterday in a library, working opposite a floor to ceiling bookshelf containing a thirty volume German Encyclopedia. And I couldn't help but notice that right at the start, four consecutive volumes were labelled:

ASS - BAP
BAP - BER
BER - BRA
BRA - BUM

Which raises two questions. Firstly, why did the editors of this German encyclopedia leave the task of deciding the volume divisions to an English 10 year old boy? And secondly... what's rude about 'BER'?

(P.S. The child contained himself for the rest of the volumes, none of which are naughty at all. Until the end, when he broke out with an exuberent valedictory 'WEE')

Business News Editor In Sense Of Humour Shock

So, Pixar studios - you know, the animation studio behind Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, etc, and officially one of the Best Things In The World - has finally been bought up by Disney. A story the BBC News Website (coincidentally another of the Best Things In The World) has chosen to illustrate with this still:

Well, yes. Quite.

Mixed Messages

My girlfriend, because she knows me well, gave me lots of books for Christmas. The first one I unwrapped was called 'Never Let Me Go'. Hmm, I thought. Perhaps a little clingy. I unwrapped the next one... 'How To Be Alone'. Ah.

For sale: The Oxo Tower. Wld suit first-time buyer.

I do like watching a film somewhere where a line or a shot gets an entirely local reaction it wouldn't get anywhere else. The last good example was when I saw 'Shakespeare in Love' in Cambridge, and all the mildly high-brow literary in-jokes about John Webster or the dark lady were met with the ostentatious guffaws of English students anxious to prove to one another that they got the reference.

Well, there was another one yesterday. We went to see the new London-set Woody Allen film 'Match Point'. (Not perhaps the most subtle and nuanced work of his career. For instance, four people, three rich and one poor, are ordering in a restaurant. Rich Person 1 chooses 'Baked potato with truffles. Yum yum yum!' Rich persons 2 and 3 opt for 'the caviar'. Poor person goes for 'roast chicken'. Oh, I see. Because he's poor. Later on, this line is spoken: 'Perhaps it would be more fitting if I was to be apprehended.' Because that's how people in England talk, you know. I mean, you comprehend.)

Anyway, we saw this film at Angel, and easily the biggest laugh of the film came when the (admittedly very rich) newly-weds entered their enormous new flat, and the wife told the husband it had a lovely view. Cut to the view: a vast panorama of the Thames at Westminster, up to and including Big Ben. At which the audience, all of whom had presumably rented or bought flats in London, collectively wet itself laughing.

I'm fine, and broadly speaking I'm fine.

Happy New Year. May 2006 be full of the sorts of things you like, with barely any of the sorts of things you don't like.

Graffiti in Starbucks:

*Hello
*Everybody
*Hows life and hows your life in general

So many questions... Why did you separate the 'hello' from the 'everybody'? What is the mystic purpose of the asterisks? How are you hoping for 'everybody' to respond to your biro-on-coffeeshop query? And most of all... why the last six words? What's the difference between how life is, and how life is in general? Were you really worried that asking 'everyone' 'how life is' was a bit too specific?


Ha. See how I pick on only the loftiest and most worthy targets to bring down with my mighty gift of sarcasm. That's taught her a lesson!

My favourite quote of the Christmas party season

Girl shows her friend the uncomfortable shoes she's been wearing all day.

Friend: 'God, you were shopping in those? I see what you mean!'

Girl: Yes! I wasn't exaggerating when I said I wanted to chop both my feet off!