So, Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Oscars ceremony last night and used the occasion to continue his ‘feud’ with Matt Damon.
I didn’t watch the ceremony, but loved one of the lines he was later reported to have used against Damon:
“He has almost no discernible talent, but it works”.
Now who does that remind me of at my work?
On the occasion of POTUS’ latest gabshite utterances …
There’s no refugee crimewave in Sweden
So it’s hardly a problem that’s need’n’
That comb-over chump
AKA ‘Walloper’ Trump
To lie to his minions, or mislead ’em.
The Scots terms, above, are taken from the description of POTUS in Lorna Wallace’s epic portrayal of him as “a tangerine gabshite walloper”.
(For those needing help with the language, gabshite refers to someone mouthing-off loudly on a subject (s)he knows nothing about and walloper is a slang term for a limp dick. Seems about right.)
… from the Graun:
The actor/singer/producer Paul Nicholas has had an astonishingly full and varied career from the 1960s to date. His recent tongue-in-cheek quote on being an ageing star made me laugh:
“I used to get young girls hanging around the stage door, now it’s women in their 60s and 70s. You have to walk quite slowly when you’re being stalked these days.”
A contemplative rhyme for Kratos, my Ice Cream Buddy’s rabbit, on his recent visit to the vet:
‘Tis the end now of Kratos’s rollicking
Adventure of love, lust and frolicking.
In the worst of all spectacles
He lost both his testicles
When Anna arranged his de-bollocking!
In 2012 Beatrix Campbell was in the World Pride Power List of the 100 most influential gay people of the year and is a self-styled “republican with politics rooted in Marxism and feminism”. Although she is not a person without flaws, I was impressed that she had this to say about cycling:
“In the context of the great debates about identity politics – are you gay or straight, nationalist or republican, British or English and so on – I would ask, “Do you ride a bike?”
Of course I do!
Dance floors always remind me of ‘the first dance’ on my wedding day – and not in a good way.
I’d had lessons and received bespoke tuition to a specific track on Disque de Danse (volume 2). In fact, the dance studio gave us the record so that I could waltz to a familiar tune on the big day.
Nevertheless I froze and was dragged around the dance floor by Management like a fossilised log with all the natural rhythm of something that had been turned to stone over the millenia.
Consequently, a few years ago when Management and I were invited to a friend’s birthday party and the Tall Child asked if I was going to show off any ‘killer’ dance moves. I told him “Yes. People would die laughing”.
So imagine the amusement (at my expense, of course) when, several months after my sister-in-law’s celebratory ceilidh, Management’s oldest friend, with whom I’d danced an approximation to the St Bernard’s Waltz, wrote in a birthday card to her (in all seriousness) that:
“He’s a good dancer, that man of yours”
Laugh? I nearly signed up for Strictly!
On trugs and affaires de coeur…
Aficionados of a certain class of televisual whodunnit will be familiar with the scene, so picture it now:
A chocolate-box village invested with bucolic grandeur by the landscape that envelops it. Its artfully thatched cottages keeping a hirsute watch over their grounds; gardens that were crafted with love through the hazy days of tranquil summers past – the halcyon summers of her untroubled though solitary mid-life years. And now she kneels. Alone. Trowel in hand.
In faded redolence of her life a tired, but much-loved summer frock mirrors the careworn passion of her being. Her youthful countenance conserved by the wide-brimmed flowery hat that wards off the ageing ravages of the sun’s beguiling embrace and frames the handsome visage of a woman in her prime. How many times has her story been told? Morse? Miss Marple? Midsomer?
Midsomer! We know what happens next…
A never-was-and-never-will-be-beau from decades past returns to haunt the vestige of his youth. He rediscovers long-departed yearnings. He rediscovers her.
She screams! His heinous revenge, exacted for youthful, ill-imagined slights, leavens the madness of his life. His early passion unbeknown to her. Unbeknown and unrequited. For him, unforgotten. His madness now destroys the daylight dreams that once consumed his waking hours. Her scream subsides.
She lies there. Still and silent amid the splendour of her flowers. The tools that shaped her garden recline solemnly beside her in an open casket, a hand-crafted gift of yore; a simple wooden trug.
“She obviously lived alone” said Barnaby.
“How so?” asked his young sergeant.
“The trug” he replied, “it’s a dead giveaway. You see, at a certain age they replace the men in their lives with a trug. Never forget that Troy”. He sounded bitter.
The older man continued: “The day will come when you too will be asked to forgo a romantic moonlit dinner or a picnic nestled by the river on a summer’s day. No more jewels or trinkets desired. No more weekend-away-surprises. No more négligée. No more déshabillé. No more passion. No more … you! Just a trug”.
Barnaby’s face fell as he remembered that day. The day that Joyce had told him she wanted a trug for her birthday “but not a plastic one”.
So with Cully’s help he had bought her a wooden one. An expensive hand-made trug sculpted from willow and chestnut, but it mattered not. Now viewed from marital exile in his cheaply rented rooms, his life had never since been the same.
But Joyce and her garden blossomed. Until, one day, a long-forgotten school-day confrère reappeared in her life.
He had worshipped her from affair, but she hardly knew his name, or cared, as she collected her tools in her trug.
In his lodgings, Barnaby heard a piercing scream rent the air…
“I’ve no need of a passionate hug”
She said with a nonchalant shrug.
“‘Cos I’ve now reached the age
Where I’d rather engage
With my garden; so get me a trug!”
… this is why I so like Berger & Wyse:
Orangutans with ape-itude …
There was a cheerful story from the Netherlands this week. Staff of a primate park near the Dutch town of Apeldoorn are showing pictures of potential mates to their adult orangutans to see if they have a preferred choice of partner. Tinder for Apes!
Meantime Chester’s orangutans have become the stars of The Zoo, a TV documentary series that follows the lives of the zoo’s animal collection. Their ability to break out of their compound and go walkabout has been most endearing, but perhaps they’d be better behaved, or at least ‘otherwise occupied’, if the zoo introduced Tinder for Apes for them too:
They get into all sorts of scrapes
When a group of them sometimes escapes.
But a Dutch zoo has found
That they all hang around
When they swipe right on Tinder for Apes!
Postscript: For a while now my place of work has promoted a networking scheme for staff via its so-called ‘Random Coffee’ club. Its aim is to encourage staff to meet colleagues they would not normally bump into. Interested parties put their names forward and random pairings are then drawn to share a coffee break at a mutually agreeable date. Random Coffee is, in fact, a location-based social discovery service that facilitates communication between mutually interested users.
That is all very worthy and innocent, but can you spot the obvious? Let me help. The last sentence of the paragraph above is a truncated version of Wikipedia’s opening paragraph in its entry for Tinder:
Tinder is a location-based dating and social discovery service application (using Facebook) that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing matched users to chat.
Yup! It was not long before Random Coffee became known as the Lab’s version of Tinder. I don’t know who coined it thus or if it has yet led to romance, but it’s given us two limericks for the price of one this week …
I sent out a new memorandum
That staff should now meet up at random.
So forget about Tinder
And let us not hinder
Your efforts to hook-up in tandem.
You must be logged in to post a comment.