A limerick a week #47

A mandate for the pub

The Graun reports that the east London LGBT community of Tower Hamlets has lost seven of its ten gay bars to residential development in recent years. So, after a spirited campaign by local activists, the planning authority made it a condition for the redevelopment of one such venue, The Joiners Arms, to include a pub that remained focused on the LGBT community.

The report added that to make sure this is achieved in more than name only, the Mayor of London’s office “will send an inspector to make sure it is gay enough”.

I have to admit to chuckling at that so here’s my take on it:

I’m here as the Council Surveyor,
And I’ve popped by just now to convey a
Planning consent
With legal intent
That will make your new bar a bit gayer!

Meanwhile, I have no idea how the planners intend to quantify ‘gayness’. The mind boggles …

Postscript:

… hot off the press …

It seems that the developer’s plans are on hold. As reported in today’s Graun:

Council rejects redevelopment proposals for LGBT venue Joiners Arms

Campaigners hail decision as victory after plan is turned down on grounds that it does not go far enough to ensure viability of replacement ‘queer space’

Good for them!

#StraightAlly

A limerick a week #46

Are you ready yet?

As you get older there can be times when you realise that you have well and truly inherited some of your parents’ traits.

The most obvious example for me is that just like my dad, I get a bit wound up when travelling if the rest of the family aren’t packed and ready to leave at the appointed time. The words stressed and grumpy may even apply!

So it was all very interesting this week when Firstborn told me that she gets a bit stressed herself if the folk she is travelling with leave things to the last minute. Nevertheless, the disdain in her voice was a bit uncharitable when she then blurted out: “Oh my God – I’ve turned into you!“.

If we set off late then we knew
The pressure would rise till you ‘blew’
And we’d all get the blame,
But now I’m just the same.
OH MY GOD, DAD! I’ve turned into you!

A limerick a week #45

I’m Kirk Douglas!

Something went awry with my budget at work last week. A lump of money that should have been allocated to my group hadn’t been and, due to a change in the budgeting process this year, we can’t track where the specific error arose. It could have been my fault, the fault of other group leaders in the team or the fault of my boss.

Any error would have been inadvertent, and I can’t conceive how any of the above could have made it. So kudos to my boss who reported the problem and accepted blame as the budget responsibility was hers. Very noble. Too noble in fact, so I also emailed the high and mighty to fully explain the issue and take responsibility because I had not checked my entries after others had amended the master worksheet. My boss emailed back immediately:

“I’m Spartacus!”

… which made me laugh and inspired the following:

A mistake in the budget quite startled us
But the esprit de corps was just marvellous
For we both took the blame
For the budgetary shame
By yelling out loud that “I’m Spartacus!”

Quotes that made me laugh #38

Going gaga for guga

The guga hunt is a Hebridean tradition where, annually, ten men of Ness on the Isle of Lewis travel north by sea to the uninhabited island and gannetry of Sùla Sgeir to harvest 2000 gannet chicks, known as guga.

The ‘catch’ of guga is distributed as food among islanders with some sold on for consumption elsewhere, but although traditional, artisanal and sustainable, it remains controversial with animal rights groups firmly opposed to it (and I suspect the recently contrived annual guga-eating world championship will inflame rather than temper opposition to the hunt).

In his book The Old Ways: a journey on foot, the travel writer Robert Macfarlane presents a sympathetic (albeit sanitised) picture of the hunt, but, in the quote that made me laugh, is warned off eating guga due to its oily, chewy and acrid taste or, as an islander told him:

I gave a piece to the dog and it spent all week licking its arse to take away the taste.

Postscript: There is a highly rated gourmet sandwich bar in Edinburgh called the Gannet and Guga that uses only free range chicken and outdoor-reared pork and beef; no mention of guga (free-range or otherwise)!

A limerick a week #44

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Dr …

Well, well, well! Hasn’t the decision to cast a woman as the latest incarnation of Doctor Who rattled the sullen cages of a few social media fogeys! Of course, it’s not the first occasion that a Time Lord has regenerated as a Time Lady …

Dalek: You are a Time Lord?
Missy: Time ‘Lady’, thank you. Some of us can afford the upgrade.

As I recall, ‘Missy as Master’ rattled cages too, but Michelle Gomez’s character has since been the highlight of every episode that she’s appeared in! That makes it even more ridiculous for the fictional concept of a bi-cardiac regenerative male anthropoid (in a time-travelling police box somehow bigger inside than out) to be considered rational to some folk who then throw their toys out of the Tardis because they consider the female equivalent to be irrational.

Such griping sounds like sanctimonious bollocks to me, so, given the Tardis has finally arrived in the 21st century …

Reactionary ‘broflakes’ apart
The rest of us now can take heart
That the antediluvian
World of the Whovian
Has a Doctor Who’s state of the art!

Postscript: I was going to tell you a time-travel joke, but you didn’t get it.

A limerick a week #43

Fade to black …

Yet another limerick-as-eulogy. That’s three in fairly quick succession; a bit worrying!

Anyway, for UK moviegoers during the 70s, 80s and 90s there was really only one credible film critic on TV. That was, of course, the recently deceased Barry Norman who solo presented the BBC’s review show from its inception as Film 72 through to his end credit on Film 98. (Clapperboard, hosted by Chris Kelly and aimed at children, was not a direct challenger to the primacy of Bazza’s show).

Norman was always fair in his reviews even if he personally disliked the actor whose film he was discussing, but I’m not so sure he was as well-balanced when he was utterly captivated by one. There was a fair number of the former with whom he went toe to toe, stars such as Charlton Heston, Robert De Niro, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis; at least one of whom he walked out on after being made to wait interminably (Madonna); and another, an inebriated John Wayne, who apparently called him a “goddamn pinko liberal f****t” for laughing aloud at him during an interview in which Wayne called for the US to consider bombing Russia as a reaction to the Vietnam war.

In truth Norman rarely appeared starstruck, although he did have a bit of a love-in with Tom Cruise and was wholly beguiled by Michelle Pfeiffer. I can still recall his reaction to her flirtations during a Film 92 Special and it’s hard to believe his protestations that he didn’t really have a crush on her (his wife appeared not to believe him either). It was just so funny to watch him almost drool as he interviewed her.

Michelle sings “Makin’ whoopee”, Bazza thinks “If only …”

And so to his tag line. Although his doppelgänger on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image often referenced his supposed catchphrase “… and why not?“, Norman himself credited the impressionist Rory Bremner with conceiving it and, although it was not his creation, and something of a myth that he regularly used it, he did later borrow it as the title of his autobiography.

Anyway, both Michelle P and his catchphrase inspired this week’s limerick:

Michelle made you blush on the spot
When it seemed that you’d quite lost the plot.
‘Twas not hard to decipher
Your thoughts on Ms Pfeiffer,
But as you said once yourself: “And why not!”

 

A limerick a week #42

Of Mice and Men

Apparently, the mice used in drug trials are usually all males despite a “prevelance of sexual dimorphism in mammalian phenotypic traits”. There may be good reasons for such a gender imbalance in such trials, but there probably isn’t:

There’s a sexist researcher called Billy
Whose trials are really quite silly.
For his method entails
That he uses just males
‘Cos the girls, it appears, lack a willy!

She cut of your WHAT with a carving knife?

Postscript: This limerick was published in July 2017 as a light-hearted contribution to an altogether-more-serious discussion that was taking place in a Yammer group, to which I belonged, on women in science and engineering.

Since then, a book written by Caroline Criado-Perez has illuminated the issue with great clarity: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Chatto & Windus, March 2019, ISBN: 9781784741723).