2006-03-20
I somehow lost the enthusiasm to write in here, just at the same time as a lot of people that I read seem to have done the same. Maybe we’ve said the things we wanted to say to each other, maybe we’ll all drift back at the same time. Maybe I should start to engage with a new set of friends..There were some bits already settleing beside the exit-port for the March brain dump so I’ll just splurge while they’re in my head and active.‘what a marvellous sight, to see you eat in the middle of the night…sick as a sheep spinning round and round’. Quite an interesting insight into the home life of Robert Smith of The Cure, I think.
Ben Kingsley has denied that he insisted on having his title ‘Sir Ben’ put on the posters for his latest film. This was after several knights and dames of the realm had rubbished for being so pretentious. Michael Caine was particularly scathing, saying that he would never dream of doing something so ridiculous and snobbish. However, he went on to say that he never opens any mail that isn’t addressed to him as ‘Sir Michael’, as, after all, the writer can’t know anything about him if they don’t know he’s been knighted…I suspect Caine has such a chip on his shoulder about ‘recognition’ because deep down he knows he can’t really act, and fears he’ll be found out. Roger Moore’s the same.
A favourite moment from the Winter Olympics: ‘That’s incredible!…but not at all surprising!’ Sports commentators talk crap don’t they? And they introduce nouns as though they’re verbs. So we got ‘to medal’, ‘to podium’ and ‘to DQ’. Altogether now :- ‘I podium, you podium, he/she/it podiums, we podium, they podium. I podiumed. I will podium. I have podiumed, I am podiuming.' And have you noticed how they talk about ‘the dressing room’ when they mean ‘the team’?
And how exactly do Mozambique qualify for the Commonwealth Games?
If we aren't supposed to eat animals why are they made out of meat? Why is there a light in the fridge but not in the freezer? Why do toasters have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible black crisp no-one would eat?
We got one of those home-made cards from my father-in-law telling us that Lynne and I have been married 9000 days – possibly longer than a lot of my readers have been alive.
For reasons I won’t go into I once had sight of a medical report on Anna Nicole Smith. Clearly the doctor had a sense of humour – after filling in details of blood pressure, pulse, temperature, eye colour, condition of teeth he’d got to the box marked ‘Lung capacity:’ and had just written “Massive chest” and left it that.
The Fatman’s wife has been tracking back through his family tree and discovered one of his ancestors was a lady by the name Fanny Large, and that she had eighteen children - which is a kind of chicken and egg thing. Was she Fanny Large as a result of all those children, or were the children a result? [Which needs explaining for our American listeners: in the words of Keith from The Office “A word of warning if you’re travelling in America…Over there a bum-bag is known as a fanny-pack...because in America, your fanny is your arse. Not your minge.”]
Why are baby clothes pale blue, white, or pink? Wouldn’t a pale mustard yellow colour be better for hiding a multitude of stains?
The end of ‘Grease’ is odd isn’t it? Sandy starts dressing up like some rock-chick and it’s portrayed as though it’s somehow liberating for her – as though becoming a ‘bad girl’ makes her feel real. And yet all that’s happened is she’s swapped from being the male virgin-fantasy to the other male fantasy of a girl who shouts out that she needs to be fucked.
Maybe time doesn’t run around us in a constant way. Maybe it flows quickly and thinly over the good times, and congeals and coagulates around the bad times. And if Einstein is right about relativity then maybe last Wednesday still exists somewhere, and next Tuesday too. All time running in parallel, divorced from substance.
All these emails about penis enlargement, and still nothing about vaginal shortening.
And photographs can’t be relied on. There’s a tendency to assume that the second you’re looking at extends from the second before, and into the second after. But each second can be unique; a beaming sarcastic smile in the middle of a blazing row captures the opposite of the truth, as does the contorted ‘little death’ face of the moment of orgasm.
When I was younger we used to have milk bottles delivered with foil tops, and the blue tits would come down and peck through them and drink the cream. OK – so the foil has been replaced by plastic nowadays, but I don’t understand why the milk doesn’t separate like it used to. Have Europe outlawed that, like they did with straight bananas?
My latest ‘invention’, for when the smoking ban comes in. when the children were young they used to have a play tunnel, which was really just a plastic covered wire coil which could be concertina’d down to a hoop. Now if smokers had their own personal tunnel (which compressed down to a handy ring that they could carry around with them) covered in clear plastic they could connect it to a ceiling chimney and stand in it and talk to people as normal while legally being in their own 'room'.
All roads lead to Rome, no point in getting a satellite navigation system then.
Whose shirts did Major Tom wear? Did it ever get into the papers?