Tag: Funny quotes

Quotes that made me laugh #51

That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, 

And dark and true and tender is the North*

Despite being a Graun-reading, socially liberal ‘bit-of-a-leftie’ I chuckled at Management’s recent despairing exhortation:

“Do you always have to be an unreconstructed 1970s northern male?”

Me? A wannabe Gene Hunt?

Gene Hunt: I think you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to.
Sam Tyler: An overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline-alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding?
Gene Hunt: You make that sound like a bad thing.

Really? I think not! But not quite renaissance man either, although I have had a bit of a soft spot for Longfella’s poetry ever since he performed his 2013 poem ‘This is the Place‘ at last year’s vigil in remembrance of the Manchester Arena bombing.

In fact, Longfella (aka Tony Walsh and now surely the de facto northern laureate having gently nudged Roger McGough aside) has written more generally in praise of the north in his poem ‘Up ‘ere‘ and there is nothing of the unreconstructed northern male about it (actually, the poem is explicitly about the north-west). In it, he writes in a rather overblown way: 

“… and some things run right through us just like sticks of Blackpool rock;
Courage, kindness, humour, hope.
Sometimes … it’s all we’ve got.“

I suppose that’s the price of his declamatory style and can be forgiven, but now, be honest, does an unreconstructed 1970s northern male quote Tennyson and Tony Walsh in his blog posts? Nay, missus! Nay, nay and thrice nay! So, now that’s out of the way, any chance of a brew, luv?

* The Princess: O Swallow, Tennyson

A limerick a week #93

Some like it hot…

My goodness, it’s been quite warm in Aberdeen this week (relatively speaking!). There’s no real sign of the haar, you see. The haar is a cold east coast sea fog that specialises in turning warm sunny days into a chilling, soul-extracting gloom; a ghostly apparition that rolls in from the sea and whose glacial dankness obliviates life’s vital force as readily as Azkaban’s Dementors.

An Aberdeen fantasy

The haar is an advection fog in which warm, moist air cools as it passes over the North Sea. As the moisture condenses out, a prevailing easterly wind pushes the resultant fog landward and it may even travel a mile or two inland.

When the haar is ‘in’ anyone sashaying eastwards towards the coast is met by a cold wall of fog and instantaneously transported from glorious summer into a dreich, late-autumnal day. But not this week…

Roasting (sort of)!

It could almost be an English summer up here (okay, that’s not quite true) and long may it last.

It is also limerick-inspiring weather, recalling the day when Management and I were wandering the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon during a heatwave. We’d arranged to meet mon frère who, being a lawyer, turned up in a tweed jacket when everyone else was in T-shirts and shorts. A little while later he confessed “I’m beginning to regret the tweed!”.

So, here’s one from the archives…

If a walk in the sun’s what you need
The least you can do is to heed
The advice that exhorts:
“Wear T-shirt and shorts”!
Or you’ll end up regretting the tweed.

Meantime, Matthew McConaughey wears herringbone tweed in a Californian summer. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Postscript: I spoke too soon 😣

I knew it was too good to be true!

Bonus feature:

Germany’s premature departure from soccer’s World Cup seems to have delighted the sort of folk who take pleasure in the misfortune of others. That appears to include most of England’s football fans whose team usually falls prey to Germany.

My take on it is that the German fans will now understand the air of despair that usually surrounds the English. Moreover, when it all goes belly-up for England later in the tournament, at least it won’t be at the hands of their usual nemesis!

The Germans trudged home all annoyed
When their World Cup hopes were destroyed.
“Their loss is our gain”
Was the English refrain.
As they revelled in pure schadenfreude!

 

Quotes that made me laugh #49

When I was a kid my dad used to take me to watch Kendal United play football. That was because a doctor had told my folks that, as an ill child, I needed lots of fresh air.

I was probably about six when I came home after one game and asked mum “How old do you have to be before you can swear?”. Her reply was “You’re never old enough!” and that was when I ratted on him: “But daddy swore today!”. (I think he’d said ‘bloody’ – serious stuff, eh?)

Karma came back and bit me on the a**e many years later when I momentarily forgot The Tall Child was in the car when, in complete exasperation at the antics of a lorry driver, I less-than-silently mouthed “Oh, for f**k’s sake!”. It didn’t take long before I was ratted-out in turn when we returned home: “Mum! Dad said the F word!”.

And that is why I laughed out loud when I read the BTL comments that followed the online Graun’s review of Harlequins’ poor showing in rugby’s Aviva Premiership this year. It’s the last line that made me chuckle …

Quotes that made me laugh #48

So whose fault was it?

John Barclay, Scotland’s rugby captain, plays his club rugby professionally in Wales. Consequently he was at his home in south Wales when a minor earthquake hit it last week. His comment made me laugh:

“It was scary, I didn’t know what was going on. My five-year-old ran through and said ‘it wasn’t me dad’.”

Aftershocks were felt in Edinburgh a few days layer as Barclay led his Scottish team to a well-deserved, victory over England!

Apparently it was not clear which fault had caused the less-than-earth-shattering ‘quake, possibly because no-one could pronounce it. Most reports from outside Wales said the epicentre was near Swansea, when really it struck directly below Cwmllynfell 👀

Quotes that made me laugh #46

If you encyst …

It’s been a while since a quote made me laugh out loud, but last week’s report of a sushi-loving Californian’s encounter with a tapeworm supplied a couple.

According to the Graun, a resident of Fresno managed to ‘pass’ a tapeworm around five feet six inches in length. Afterwards, he wrapped it around a loo roll and took it to his doctor and asked to be treated for ‘worms’.

The patient had initially been concerned that an extrusion from his derriere was a part of his intestines prolapsing. So why he thought it a good idea to give it a tug is anyone’s guess, but tug it he did and the rest of the tapeworm followed.

The article outlined the life cycle of the tapeworm in the region, noting that bears feeding off salmon can be an alternate host that re-transmit the parasite’s eggs when defecating in rivers. Larvae then hatch and infect small crustaceans that are eaten by salmon that are then caught and processed into sushi which is eaten by wannabe human hosts.

It’s a big’un (ruler is 12 inches).

It was the doctor’s comment that made me laugh:

“He told me he was freaked out, but I guess when you think you’re dying because your entrails are shooting out your bottom and you find out it’s not you, but something else, that’s probably a good thing.”

As did a number of the BTL comments, notably this one:

“‘A typical life cycle might include a bear that feeds on salmon, then defecates back into the river’. That is what happens when bears don’t stick to the rules: they are meant to shit in the woods, not in the river“.

A gratuitous cartoon only loosely linked to the theme of this post.

Postscript: One of the most interesting courses of my undergraduate years was on parasitology, which is why the stated size of the tapeworm didn’t surprise me. They can be much longer than the one above.

The human broad fish tapeworm (Diphyllobothriun latum) can grow up to 10 metres in length comprising a head and thousands of segments (proglottids). Proglottids regularly detach from the tail end and are ‘passed’ by the host before hatching into larvae.

As one of the symptoms of a tapeworm infection can be weight loss, it is no surprise that some people have been tempted to infect themselves for that very purpose (ingesting cysts from the beef tapeworm).

Indeed, tapeworms-as-diet-aid have been marketed for that very reason since the early 20th century – the soprano Maria Callas is reputed to have lost weight dramatically due to the tapeworm diet although many think it unlikely.

But be very careful, people! If the wrong species is ingested, larvae can migrate through the body before encysting which can have all sorts of serious effects (cysticercosis) including death. So don’t eat raw pork!

Quotes that made me laugh #45

Only time will tell … 

Years ago on our pre-having-a-family mega-blowout holiday to the Antipodes, we crossed the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand. On the approach to landing in Christchurch the (Aussie) pilot reminded us of the time difference between the two countries and also added:

“Turn your watches back two hours … and your calendars 30 years!”

At the time he was right. All the cars we saw were from the 1960s and apart from the adreneline junkies’ Nirvana at Queenstown, the country had a definite retro feel to it. (I’m told that’s no longer true!)

I was reminded of that quote yesterday when I came across comedian/writer/director David Schneider’s autumnal advice on turning our clocks back to daylight saving time – funny, but a little too close to home:

Seems about right!

Postscript: The easy way to remember when the clocks go forward and when they go back is via the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back”, just as Firstborn does when she tries to get up in the morning!

Quotes that made me laugh #44

Mr. White: We think we got a rat in the house.

Mr. Pink: I guarantee we got a rat in the house!

I keep meaning to make my posts apolitical, but politicians keep feeding the fire. In this instance only indirectly as it is not from a politician, but a former head of the UK civil service, Bob Kerslake, reflecting yesterday on the current state of the Conservative Party in government.

Here’s the quote:

“The Cabinet is behaving like Reservoir Dogs with extra ketchup!”

Mr Pink, Mr Blonde, Mr White
Liam Fox, Boris Johnson, David Davis

World cup woes. ..

Life is short? So are our footballers!

Gordon Strachan, Scotland’s current football manager, has recently added a cracker to the pantheon of lame excuses for his team being not good enough.

Apparently, “Technically we’re fine, but our guys have to work harder to get on the ball than bigger lads at six foot three. … What I do know is that genetically we are behind … Genetically we have to work at things. It is a problem for us.”

Hmmm, I suspect he may be the butt of a few jokes as a result of that.

Jokes did I say? Well guess what? Irn Bru has stepped into the breach by re-issuing a seven-year-old advert on Facebook in which a lassie fae Dundee sings a lullaby to her bairn claiming to have “done the deed” with a Brazilian chap to enhance the gene pool of Scotland’s footballers.

Or as Irn Bru trolled Strachan: “Let’s make babies with Brazilians (like we said way back in 2010)”