Month: August 2020

Let’s see who this really is!

I bet you wouldn’t know who I was talking about if I name-dropped Norville Rogers.

You may have a better idea if I also told you that he knocked about with Fred Jones and Daphne Blake. No?

OK, another clue: Velma Dinkley was also part of the gang.

For anyone that is still in the dark (surely not), Norville had a pet, a Great Dane, and the four humans comprised a group of ghost-hunters by the name of Mystery Inc and drove a psychedelically-painted van, the Mystery Machine. That’s right, Norville is ‘Shaggy’, the gang of four are ‘those pesky kids’ and the dog is Scooby-Doo!

The cartoon series that feature the foursome and the eponymous dog, first aired in 1969 and is still around along with a host of spin-off productions. However, one of its co-creators, Joe Ruby, is no longer around as his death at the age of 87 was announced yesterday. That’s sad for him, his family, friends and fans, but silver-linings and all that, it gave me a theme for this week’s ALAW…

Young Fred will be feeling quite blue
So will Vilma and, I guess, Daphne too,
‘Cos they’ve just put the skids
Under ‘those pesky kids’.
Shaggy’s gone and so’s Scooby-Doo!

Saving her bacon…

West Berlin fans of Elsa, the wild boar that featured in last week’s ALAW, are aghast at the Grunewald forestry authority’s concerns that she poses a threat to the public and may need to be ‘withdrawn’  (or ‘shot’ for the less euphemistically inclined).

 

“Hogwash!” say her supporters. Elsa has co-existed peacefully with visitors to the Teufelssee over a long period and they argue that she poses no threat to bathers or picnickers in the area.

They have even mounted a petition to save her. You can sign it here.

Meantime, she’s still making headlines!

 

 

I hope it doesn’t end like this:

There once was a sow felt forsaken
When she heard the decision they’d taken,
‘Cos they told the wild boar
That her days were no more
And that soon she’d be turned into bacon!

 

A twist in the tail…

I was highly amused by media reports of an overweight German naturist who ran nakedly through a picnic site while chasing a wild boar that had run off with a bag holding his laptop.

The accompanying photographs made me laugh out loud…

Here’s the limerick:

A wild boar once tried to elude
A corpulent teutonic dude
Who, strangely enough,
Chased the swine in the buff,
‘Cos he liked to hang out in the nude!

Make mine a Corona

So, we ventured south from Aberdeen to see the Matriarch in Kendal.

We did so a day before details of the Scottish city’s booze-enabled coronavirus outbreak emerged and we head back there in a couple of days to a city that is now in lockdown.

And it’s all because some folk are selfish enough or arrogant enough or ignorant enough (or all three) to dismiss infection controls as irrelevant to them. Meantime, they (and others) forget or don’t care that drinking alcohol lowers inhibitions and leads to bad decisions about the need to maintain social distancing. So they crowd together in queues or head off on pub crawls.

Well, who’d have thought it?

There once was a virus that spreads
So fast that everyone dreads
To see in the news,
The crowds and the queues
Of some socially clustered p**sheads.