Veni. Vidi. Ego deditionem!
On quizzing…
If barking up the wrong tree, backing the wrong horse, being wide of the mark or pi***ng into the wind scored points, I’d be a record-breaker. This applies especially to the Royal Statistical Society’s Christmas Quiz.
I ask myself how that it is
I’ve come over in all of a tizz.
The answer’s statistical,
– Analytically mystical –
It’s the annual RSS quiz!
It’s beginning to look a lot like Excess…
It’s that time of the year again and Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas in the Piscibus household without me bemoaning the rampant over-commercialisation of the festive season. So here goes…
‘Tis the season, they say, to be jolly
And for halls to be decked-out with holly,
But there’s no more Divinity
Just the epitome
Of a monsterous Yuletide folly.
It’s interesting that the prospect of being served caviar, the roe of female fish, sends some folk into paroxysms of gustatory delight whereas the thought of eating cod milt (male roe) usually evokes a rather different reaction (for the record, I’d avoid either!).
‘Disgust’ was apparently the reaction in a recent segment of James Corden’s Late, Late Show. Former paramours Harry Styles and Kendall Jenner were obliged to ask each other ‘awkward’ questions. The forfeit if Styles refused to answer Jenner’s question was to sample a plate of cod milt.
Styles chose to forfeit when Jenner asked which of the songs on his last album were about her.
But I have a question too. Most people think of ‘roe’ as fish eggs, so I just wonder how many people have enjoyed cod roe as a kind of caviar for the proletariat without realising that if the product’s packaging said ‘soft’ roe, then what they were buying was, in fact, milt?
Just asking!
A girl that he once used to date
Challenged Harry to eat something he’d hate.
So he went at full tilt
And ingested the milt
Of a codfish served up on a plate.
A final flood of colours
We’ve recently said adieu to a quartet of well known faces in the UK: Gary Rhodes: Jonathan Miller, Clive James and, most recently, Bob Willis. It was the latter two that most engaged me over the years.
Celebrity chefs like Rhodes are not my ‘thing’ and Miller may have been an incredible polymath, but I found him a bit too full of himself to warm to (and according to the BBC’s obituary of him, he was also “famously cantankerous and grumpy, and on occasions devastatingly rude”, so not my tas de thé).
But, to a cricket-watching teen in the 70s (whole summers of free-to-air test matches on the tele!), Willis was a fast bowler who was always worth a spell. And although England’s 1981 series win against Australia is known as Botham’s Ashes, Willis’ 8-43 in the third test after England had been forced to follow on remains firmly lodged in cricketing folklore – the stuff of legends! (If my last boss was to read that sentence I can only imagine the look of contemptuous bewilderment on her face as she tried to fathom what on earth it means!).
Clive James was altogether different. His ‘bouncers’ were not hurled the length of a cricket pitch, but fashioned from words with a turn of phrase that would take out the middle stump of any conceit and pretence whilst standing in awe of his own literary heroes.
He could also bowl a verbal googly if required and although he started out as a literary critic, it was as a TV critic that he bowled to more popular acclaim. Both in writing and onscreen he never failed to delight in wordsmithing his take on the sometimes ludicrous world of the box in the corner of the lounge.
His autobiographical ramblings were humorously illuminating and clear evidence that unlike the Jonathan Millers of this world, he never took himself too seriously. Nevertheless, he never feigned gormlessness or a lack of intellect:
“I see the pain on your face when you say the word intellectual, because it has so many syllables in it.”
I wonder what the critic in him would make of this (not much, I suspect) …
There once was a literary critic
Whose words were quite sybaritic,
But sadly for Clive
He’s no longer alive
Cos his B-cells became lymphocytic.
Postscript: As it’s getting on for Christmas (again) it’s time for me to look back (again) to the story of Lovell’s bride. It’s traditional and it’s here…
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