Quotes that made me laugh #56

The first advertisement that I remember was produced when I was seven years old. It was a billboard poster and depicted the Bayeux Tapestry as interpreted by Guinness, with the strapline: Battle of Hastings 1066, Bottle of Guinness 1966. I recall being fascinated by the play on words.

Sometimes, though, adverts can comprise a more soulful message.

Reflecting on the northeast of Scotland’s decadal exposure to dull, overcast and drizzly weather, the Garioch (pronounced Geary) Glazing Company is currently advertising its services on a local radio station, Original 106, with the following gem that made me laugh.

… and remember, dreich weather ayeways looks better through a Garioch Glazing window.

Only in the northeast!

A limerick a week #160

Open wide… 

My four-month-old border collie pup (@calliebordeaux) has started teething. In fact she has just lost her first tooth in a puppy play fight with a five-month-old spaniel called Molly.

Her lower right canine has since gone missing in action!

The two pups meet regularly on their morning walks and seem to take it as read that they’ll have yet another scrap until they finally settle which of them is the higher ranked. I suspect Callie will prevail as, to quote Molly’s owner, “She’s a feisty one, isn’t she?”.

There once was a young border collie
Who thought it would be rather jolly
To battle it out
In a no-holds-barred bout
With a spaniel puppy called Molly

… and there it was, gone!

(All fights were play fights and no pups were hurt in the writing of this limerick!)

A limerick a week #159

And ‘zing’ went the strings of her heart

The Third Man, Britain’s finest film noir, celebrated its 70th anniversary this year and a restored version of it was recently screened by the British Film Institute in UK cinemas.

The viewing was preceded by an introduction to the zither and the soundtrack for which the film is renowned (by Cornelia Mayer) and was followed by a Q&A with Angela Allen, the only surviving member of the film crew, and Hossein Amini, a modern-day screenwriter. (You can read about ‘behind the scenes’ here.)

Mayer and Allen were amusing, informative and entertaining. Amini was less so, often commenting on the basis of assumptions rather than fact, only to be shot down by Allen (or, in the words of Max Boyce, “I know ‘cos I was there”). Amini unintionally irritated me by referring to film noirs instead of films noir; in my view an unforgiveable mistake from a man of the movies!

The film showcases the blackmarket and air of gloom in post-war Vienna and, unlike earlier DVD releases or TV showings, the restored version of the film is pin-sharp and the narrative can be heard clearly above the background music; in fact the audio is superb.

Allen clearly held one of the principal actors, Orson Welles, in contempt. His late appearance meant that distant shots were often of a stand-in rather than Welles. His refusal to venture into the city’s sewers more than once also meant that a stand-in had to be used (not so much a third man as a turd man😂) and any close-ups from the sewer scenes were shot in a reconstructed stage set in London. (Actually, the sewers at the point of filming were not foul-water sewers, so there was no stench; it was more like an underground river).

Allen gave us snippets – the famous scene from street level of the mortally wounded Harry Lime’s fingers reaching up through a grate to escape the sewer was of the director, Carol Reed’s, digits and not those of Welles – and was authoritative in saying that Welles was not there for most of the filming, let alone effectively directing much of it as he once claimed.

Alida Valli as the lovelorn Anna, once touted as the new Ingrid Bergman, shows in her performance just why that claim was made. Wikipedia tells us that she gave up that epithet by rejecting Holywood and focusing her career in her native Italy. (BTW her full name was Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenberger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg!) Joseph Cotten as Holly “I haven’t got a sensible name” Martins and Trevor Howard as Major “it’s Calloway-not-Callaghan” are perfect for their rôles and Welles as Harry Lime clearly performed better than he behaved.

Here’s the limerick (based on one of the most famous final scenes in all of filmdom)

Anna’s grief raced hither and thither
Now Harry was no longer with her
So she made Holly gawk
At her funereal walk
To the sad parting notes of a zither.

… and in case you want an alternative ending, here’s the one that I originally penned that inspired this post’s header, but later rejected:

As her heartstrings were plucked like a zither.

I referenced The Third Man in an earlier post, and make no excuse for once more including a still from the final scene and my comment that accompanied it:

A long, slow walk to the accompaniment of the haunting refrains of Anton Karas’ zither as Anna decides that a happy ending is far too bourgeois for one of the 20th century’s most pivotal films noir …

… or watch here as Anna walks out of Holly’s life:

Postscript: The Third Man completes a trilogy of classic films noir that I’ve seen on the big screen thus year: a special Valentine’s Day screening of Casablanca, Gilda at Aberdeen’s Granite Noir festival and now The Third Man. A good year for the classics!

A Limerick A Week #158

On three years of A Limerick A Week

Yup, that’s three whole years without missing a single ALAW. Some have been good, some not so good and some, a few,  memorable, but as those who remember the TV show of yesteryear will remember, ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’!

There’s no highfalutin mystique
To the ‘artless-but-enticing’ technique
And occasionally sublime
Meter and rhyme
That brings you A Limerick A Week

A limerick a week #157

Talking tripe… 

A couple of years ago the The Poke‘s website referenced the Eddie Mair interviews that skewered Boris Johnson (the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time). As The Poke then commented, “Mair once called him ‘a nasty piece of work’. Now he’s an ill-informed one”. You can read here what I thought at the time.

And now it seems that David Cameron, the UK’s former Prime Minister, has also shared a few home truths about Johnson. Cameron has written both that “Boris Johnson is a liar who only backed the Leave campaign to help his career” and that he “didn’t believe in [Brexit]”.

So now we have one failed Prime Minister whose right-wing neoliberal policies fertilised the Brexit movement attacking another, a charlatan whose blind ambition has taken sophistry and dissembly about the European Union to a new peak. You couldn’t make it up, could you?

Johnson talks tripe

Johnson, whose previous utterance was that Brexit would be a ‘Titanic success’ (which, given the fate of the Titanic seems prescient in terms of the current unfolding disaster) has now styled himself as The Hulk.

I strongly suspect that Marvel Comics would argue that The Hulk would not have left by the back door, like Johnson did recently, to avoid protesters after meeting Scotland’s First Minister. Neither would The Hulk have cancelled a press conference this week when faced with a handful of middle-aged, middle-class expatriate protesters in Luxembourg. A coward and a sulk.

There once was a stereotype
Of a ‘chancer’ whose words were just hype
And whose selfish ambition
Has brought to fruition
The fact that his bullsh*t is tripe!

A limerick a week #156

Need more time to find the rhyme… 

After leaving it late to produce last week’s ALAW, I had one prepared in good time this week for all but its ultimate line.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get a reasonable rhyme for it, so you get this instead…

A limerick writer once said
That writing them messed with his head
‘Cos time after time
He struggled for rhyme
And his verses went, sadly, unread

A limerick a week #155

Lying down on the job… 

It’s been an unedifying week for political debate in the UK as Boris Johnson’s attempt to ape the populism of Donald Trump took centre stage. However, his supporting act of Jacob Rees-Mogg took it to a new low, with puerile insults aimed at those who disagreed with him, so much so that, seemingly, one member of his own political party considered him to be an able recruiting sergeant for the opposition. (True and, no doubt, that helped the opposition win the day).

Perhaps that was also due, in part, to his subsequent rather louche display of contempt for proceedings in the House of Common when he lay down across the green benches with, at times, a smug grin on his face whilst listening to a crucial debate on the issue of Brexit.

Rees-Mogg lying down on the job.

Quite rightly that brought fierce criticism from parliamentarians (of all sides) and the public alike. It also inspired this…

A politically right-wing upstart
Showed the world that he’s not all that smart,
‘Cos that posh demagogue, 
Alt-Jacob Rees-Mogg, 
Had to lie as his plan fell apart!

A limerick a week #154

On thin ice…

Firstborn tells me that following an ice skating session, she discovered that unbeknownst to her something had ripped both her leggings and her, ahem, undergarments – torn in a fall, perhaps?

Fortunately, her modesty and dignity were preserved in equal measure by the skirt she was wearing as a top layer. Just as well, really…

She was struck by the ice skaters’ curse
And fell, but things soon got worse
(Or so she alleges)
When the razor sharp edges
Of her skates took a slice ‘oot her erse’.

Postscript: Wholly unrelated to this week’s theme, but my puppy, Bordeaux Callie (@calliebordeaux), has been off-colour with ‘the runs’ this week. Still, it inspired this bonus ALAW:

I’ve a wee collie pup who is grand
But her bowels just got out of hand.
So as decreed by my spouse,
She’s now barred from the house
‘Cos my bonzer dog’s doo-da is banned!

A limerick a week #153

On Baa Baa Black Sheep and POTUS’ hissy fits…

In the early 1980s, a fisheries scientist from the then MAFF Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft presented a novel assessment of the size of mackerel stocks to his overseas colleagues at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea’s (ICES) headquarters in Copenhagen.

Although the principle behind the method was not new, it was newly applied to the mackerel stock and, in a nutshell, it required an estimate of the abundance of eggs produced during the mackerel’s spawning season in order to quantify the number of mackerel necessary to have produced them.

Although not immediately adopted, the egg production method has now been the mainstay of the ICES’ northeast Atlantic mackerel assessments for many years, with a huge effort put into the triennial mackerel egg surveys and estimation of the other biological parameters related to egg production. But it had a difficult birth.

It was rejected for use initially because it was unproven and relied on relatively few observations. When subsequent years’ data were available and some loose ends had been tied up, it was finally accepted as an appropriate assessment method for mackerel, notwithstanding what came to be known as ‘the million tonne mistake’ (see Postscript #2)!

Ironically, when originally presented, the most critical comments on the method came from the man-from-MAFF’s UK colleagues, albeit it from colleagues ‘north of the border’, who added spice to the rivalry between the senior Scottish and English scientists of that era.

As a result of the Caledonian criticism of his method, the man-from-MAFF wrote a vehement letter of complaint to the Director of the Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, the late Alasdair McIntyre. In it, he wrote of his disappointment that fellow UK scientists were the most vocal critics of his work whereas other nationals were more amenable to it.

I was shown the letter many years ago and the reply (copies of both were held in the old registry of the Marine Laboratory, but I suspect the file holding them has long since been destroyed). I can’t recall the exact wording of the complaint, but it was pretty much a frustrated rant.

On receipt, Alasdair forwarded the complaint to the head of the laboratory’s Fish Team, Alan Saville (also since deceased), a herring scientist and the foremost critic of the new approach for mackerel, asking him to reply directly.

His riposte was blunt. He told the man-from-MAFF that his response to the criticism at ICES reminded him of a tantrum thrown by a toddler when its parents’ reaction to the child’s first ever rendition of Baa Baa Black Sheep did not receive the applause and approbation that he felt it deserved! Ouch!

I was reminded of this earlier this week when Donald Trump truculently called off his Presidential visit to Denmark because his plan to buy Greenland was labelled ‘absurd’ by leading Danish politicians. Trump (of all people) later framed the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments as ‘nasty’.

Personally, I think even a toddler would have reacted with more maturity than POTUS.

Here’s the limerick…

So POTUS told the world he’d derail
A visit to the Danes because they’ll
Not accede to his whim
(When they pricked his thin skin),
‘Cos Greenland, they said, ain’t for sale!

Postscript #1: Saville’s harsh rejoinder to the man-from-MAFF was amusingly ill-timed as it preceded publication of the DAFS Marine Laboratory ‘green’ book, Developments in Fisheries Research in Scotland published by Fishing News Books.

It must have been a delightfully retributive occasion for the man-from-MAFF who reviewed it for the ICES’ Journal du Conseil, damning it with faint, if any, praise!

Postscript #2: The million tonne mistake. Imagine, if you will, a graph that looks like a triangle and think of the area under the triangle as representing the number of eggs produced in a mackerel spawning season; that’s the egg production curve. Now imagine the same triangle with a notch taken out of it where that notch represents the egg production of about one million tonnes of mackerel.

In the early days of the mackerel egg survey, a notched curve was the only one observed and scientists were unsure whether the notch was a genuine property of seasonal egg production or an artefact due to sampling error.

Tbe conservative approach was to err on the side of caution and to accept the lower (notched) estimate of stock size albeit with caveats. Sampling in subsequent years indicated the notch to be an artefact and the retrospective view of the stock size was increased accordingly by a million tonnes.

So, who was right? The scientists for taking a cautious  approach with clearly explained reservations, or the pelagic fishing industry that christened it the million tonne mistake?

Answers on a postcard, please, to…