When you walk into a crowded pub/resturant in winter and your glasses immediately steam up, rendering you embarrassingly blind and discombobulated, like a confused mole.
You then spend a frantic minute trying to find something to wipe your glasses on while squinting around trying to make discern the whereabouts of the people you came to meet, while strangers wonder why you are staring at them funny.
No 2: The feeling of self-rightious disgruntlement experienced after struggling into work through heavy snow only to find that none of your collegues have bothered to do the same.
Literally a short while after ruminating about snow, we are now suddenly literally balls deep in snow.
I love snow, it’s the only thing that has got me off work in the last year except uncontrollable vomiting. And unlike uncontrollable vomiting, snow is fun for all the family! I was so grateful for snow for getting me off work I wanted to hug snow. This is difficult, though my housemate had a go last night when a snowy path and unsuitable footware found her performing an inpromtu face-down snow-angel.
I might build a snowman and then hug that.
My Snowman (Feb 2009)
Attached is the snowman I made when it snowed last February. I was very please with him, specially the hat and eyebrows, but I felt he was missing something. Then I gave him an enormous cock and balls and the whole thing came together.
It’s an oft-quoted curio that Inuits have hundreds of words for snow*. However, as we the English have hundreds of words for ‘penis’ it is probably best not to draw conclusions from this.
In spite of this apparent excess of words in our language you still seem to come across things which many people know about but yet seem to lack a their own word. Let me illustrate:
Exhibit A: The person who has risen to a position of authority not through competence at what they do, but by such an extreme lack of competence that colleagues are willing to recommend them for promotion just to get them out of their hair. I can think of a number of previous colleagues whose competence I would have been willing to lie my arse off about if it meant they would be shipped off to become someone elses problem.
Suggested Word: ?
Exhibit B: The no-win situation between two individuals (usually a a male-female couple if truth be told) whereby one party had resolved to be annoyed with the other party regardless of their actions. Typified in the following exchange:
Her: Fine, if you want to (go out with mates, order a pizza, change the channel on the tv) then you just (go out with mates, order pizza, change channel). Don’t worry about me!
Him: (Detecting frosty tone) I don’t have to, I mean, if you don’t want me to?
Her: No! Don’t consider my feelings! You just go ahead and (go out with mates, order pizza, change channel)!
Him: (desperation setting in) But I won’t (mates, pizza, channel)! I don’t even want to! I mean, if you don’t want me to then I won’t!
Her: No, you go ahead. I want you to! GO!
Him: (pleading now) I will go! I mean, I won’t go! I don’t mind!
Her: (crosses arms in a gesture of enraged finality) …
Him: (breaking down) God, please just tell me what to do!
Result = Either A) he (goes with mates, orders pizza, changes channel) and she sulks all evening, OR B) he doesn’t (go with mates, order pizza, change channel) and she sulks all evening.
Suggested Word: Catch 22 Strop
I’m hardly a Twitter evangelist. I only signed up a couple of months ago and don’t check it/post to it religiously, but I’ve become attached to it enough to get a little bit tired of the recent wave of Twitter backlash, most of which seems to have missed the point by a mile.
The main criticism that seems to get leveled at Twitter is that it is purely used to ramble about irrelevant bullshit, like what you had for lunch. Now here’s the secret for all you non-Twitter users: if someone only tweets about boring nonsense that you don’t want to read you don’t follow that person. Why would you? Instead you go an find people who consistently post interesting stuff that you do want to read and you follow them instead. The bottom line is that if a person’s Tweets bore you it is the fault of the boring person, not Twitter. Twitter is a communications medium, just like email or the telephone. Would you say ‘Telephones are stupid, all the people who call me are boring’? No, you’d say the people are boring and stupid (and you’d change your telephone number)!
Twitter is often assaulted with dumb irrelevant statistics such as Twitter Tweets are 40% Babble(BBC News Website). Someone in the US has done a survey and classified 40% of Tweets as ‘babble’. Skipping over the fact that ‘babble’ is a really subjective term (and the question of who pays for these pointless surveys anyway?), how is this Twitter’s fault? See above, if someones tweets are 40% ’babble’ then you make an educated decision about whether the other 60% are worth hanging around for and then whether you decide to keep following them is entirely up to you, not Twitter.
Another randon statistic that has been used to somehow criticise Twitter goes along the line of “95% of all Tweets posted by 5% of Twitter users!”. Erm, so what? Is the fact that some people Tweet more often than others somehow a problem? Some people talk on the phone more than others but you don’t see headlines reading “95% of phone minutes used by 5% of phone owners!”. 99% of books are written by 1% of people with the ability to write, but that doesn’t mean you should stop reading. Many people (me included) signed up for a Twitter account purely so they could follow other people. You can get lots out of Twitter without writing a thing.
I was invited to the cinema last night to see the new horror film ‘Orphan’. I was really keen to go but couldn’t, but in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t after seeing a Twitter post today from one of the party who did go. It read something like:
“Went to see Orphan last night, wasn’t scary! I roared with laughter the whole way through!”
… which reminded me exactly why, despite being a big horror fan I rarely go to the cinema to see horror films these days: annoying pricks who seem to think the point of a horror film is to be as un-scared as possible, as loudly as possible. Yes well done, you are clearly a big boy now and so very very brave that, yes, why don’t you do your best to spoil any possible tension the film may possess by laughing uproariously at it all the way through.
Perhaps you’d like to come again tomorrow when a comedy is showing and loudly protest, “That wasn’t funny, I didn’t laugh at that, did everyone see me not laughing at that? Anyone who laughed at that is stupid” after every joke?
My suspicion is that they are just worried that if they take the film as it was intended to be watched and let themselves get into it, they know they would be wetting the bed for a week.
n.b. I am of course not talking about the Horror films with intentional humour! Some of my favourite horrors are the ones that get the balance of horror and comedy just right (Braindead, Dellamorte Dellamore, Evil Dead etc).
Just read the following on the BBC News website:
He also faces two charges of having articles for terrorism – including the weedkiller, firelighters and three tennis balls…
…and immediately thought shit, I’ve got those too! Admittedly the tennis ball is attached to a strong plastic cord and a steel pole as part of a Swingball set, but isn’t it shocking to realise you are a terrorist and you didn’t know it? There was me thinking about clearing the weeds from between the patio slabs the week before the barbecue without realising I was inadvertently assembling a terrorist arsenal.
I’m glad I read that article, I’ll go and turn myself in forthwith. Thank you BBC for showing my the error of my inadvertent ways.
Watching a huge crowd of Oxford students pour out of an exam somewhere up the High St yesterday I admired their huge flowing formal gowns but couldn’t help but wonder if the university has overlooked the enormous capacity for swinish cheating that these gowns provide?
Forget writing the answers on the back of your hand, you could hide the entire encyclopedia britanica under there!
It’s been a while since I took a sit-down exam. I never cheated but I did enjoy antagonising the invigilators during my a-levels by finishing the exam early and then carefully painting my nails.
But the world of academia is a sinister one. As Stephen Colbert pointed out with regards to leather elbow pads, what do professors do behind those lecturns all day that so wears out the elbows?
Without lengthly or unnecessary preamble, here’s some amazing stuff I found whilst doing no work this morning:
1001 Rules for my Unborn Son
A lovely idea, would make a really good gift book if some clever publisher picked it up.
The Tweed Run
Ever feel like you are wasting your life by, like, NOT spending your days cycling a round town bedecked splendidly in rough herringbone tweed? I do.
Chimpanzee “meat for sex hypothesis”
Stranger than fiction. More disgusting to.
Oh, and you can now also Follow me on Twitter should you so wish (by which I mean ‘please do’)
I’d not deny it, things have been pissing me off. Here’s a brief rundown:
1. Post-Master at a small Post Office who has started refusing to serve customers who can’t speak English.
a) You are a racist.
b) You have to serve them, IT’S YOUR JOB.
c) You argument doesn’t even make sense. If they can’t speak English AT ALL then you wouldn’t be able to serve them anyway because you wont understand what they are saying, regardless of whether you are a fucking ignorant Daily Mail-reading BMP fuckwit.
d) How do you know they are immigrants and not some poor soul on holiday?
c) How would you like it if you went to France and post offices, shops or ticket offices refused you service because your French was a bit basic? (Disregarding the likelihood that you are one of those toss-sacks who happily travel round the world and think everyone who can’t speak English as a second language is a savage)
d) Every week we hear people bemoaning how local post offices are struggling and faced with closure. Turns out YOU are turning your customers away!
d) You should be fired, both from your job and from a cannon into a brick wall.
2. THISnews article in which vice-chancellors of Oxford University and Oxford Brookes get abused for trying to be polite when put awkwardly on the spot. They were sitting right next to each other in the fucking House of Commons. When asked ‘Is a 2:1 from both your Universities of the same value’, do you really expect…
a) The VC of Oxford Uni, sitting right next to the VC of Brookes, to say “Clearly my degrees are worth more because we are a world-class university of renounced exclusivity and they are just an ex-Poly”?
b) The VC of Brookes to say “Yes I quite agreed, you are much better off going to Oxford University than my university (if you have the choice) because they are Excellent while we are mearly Good”?
They had no choice but to be evasive when confronted with a question so blunt that for either to answer it honestly and PUBLICLY would cause a massive public outcry/backlash. The MPs expected the VCs to stand up and say “Oxford U is better than Brookes”. Neither can do this without seriously harming the reputation of their institution.
This is also a shameful example of tabloid-esque shit-stirring of which you would expect better from the Guardian.
