This evening, I shall go through the yearly ritual of strangling three chickens and slitting the throat of a goat to appease the gods and ward off the evil Halloween spirits.
It’s always me who has to make the sacrifices in this house.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is an awesome name.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is a Star Wars name.
Why can’t we have leaders with Star Wars names? John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron: they’re a bit bland to say the least.
I suppose Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman wasn’t a bad name. Nor was Bonar Law (if you conveniently overlook his frankly embarrassing Andrew). But they don’t have quite the same ring to them as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Neville Chamberlain
The day one of our political parties elects a leader named Duk-Duk Oomondo Calrissian is the day that party gets my vote.
They’re missing a trick, I tell you.
I just bought a Chapstick®.
I wonder what women use to protect their lips in this chilly weather.
[Chap-stick. Do you see what I did there?]
Greetings from unseasonally sunny Cornwall, where Jen and I are taking a few days’ holiday with our mate Bill and his gay dog, Skip.
I must say, Cornwall likes to encourage healthy competition when it comes to pasty shops:
Some Cornish pasty shops this morning.
…OK, perhaps not all that healthy.
We’re off to Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant this evening. I’ll let you know if they do fish fingers.
[More holiday snaps here or on this slideshow.]
Postscript [13-Oct-2010]: No, they don’t do fish fingers. Nor scampi in a basket. Call themselves a seafood restaurant! But they do do scallops followed by turbot in hollandaise sauce, which was something of a revelation. I even enjoyed the oyster Jen let me try. I have tried for years, hitherto unsuccessfully, to enjoy oysters.
Today is 10/10/10. Because it seems only right, I am posting this item at 10 seconds past 10:10am.
101010 is the number 42 in binary.
42, according to the late, great Douglas Adams, is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Irish Mick once met Douglas Adams half way up Kilimanjaro. He was wearing a rhino costume. Douglas Adams, I mean. As far as I know, Irish Mick does not own a rhino costume.
Kilimajaro was an album by The Teardrop Explodes, which featured the song Reward:
Reward was the first single Jen ever bought.
Jen and I once danced cheek-to-cheek with the lead singer of The Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope. (In the case of Jen and me, the cheeks in question were on our faces.)
In this month’s Address Druidon, Julian Cope writes:
…In those ancient days before the stinking concept of nationalism obtained a hold, certain insular ancient English places such as The Wirral, the Cotswolds, The Weald (in Kent) all took their ‘world’ names from enthusiastic ancient locals who’d been convinced that their patch of land was the only world worth considering.
I was born on the Wirral.
I am 45 years old.
Not 42.
Something is not quite right with the Universe. It doesn’t quite add up.
Your thoughts, please.
I just came across a couple of YouTube videos of the song Barabadabada by the late, great Ivor Cutler (the man who gave the world the word Gruts). The internet needs more nonsense like this:
W00t! Today, my babaceous mate Stense is 15,000 days old.
Fifteen THOUSAND days.
How awesome is that?
Stense not looking anything like 15,000 days old (although, admittedly, this photograph was taken when she was a mere 13,260 days old, so you need to factor in an additional 1,740 days, as well as several changes in hair colour).
Let me try to put this frankly amazing figure into perspective:
In other words, Stense has been alive for a lot of days.
Congratulations, mate! Happy 15,001st day! Keep up the good work!
“I suppose I’d better just lie down and get it over with,” said Carolyn, the other week.
“Who do you think you are, Queen Victoria?” I asked.
She was talking about photographing bees:
Carolyn photographing bees recently.
Obviously.
Approaching the breakfast cereals in Tesco on Thursday, I saw a smartly dressed elderly gentleman standing by the Bran Flakes apparently in some sort of crisis. So I turned about and went to buy some Yorkshire Tea instead.
When I returned, the elderly gentleman was still there, gazing into the Bran Flakes. So I sneaked round the side of him and removed a packet from the shelf.
“DON’T BUY THOSE!” he exclaimed, triumphantly. I froze. “Look! You can buy two 500g packets for the same price as a 750g packet!”
In the background, I saw an elderly lady with a shopping trolley shake her head in exasperation and walk away. I presumed she must be his wife.
I pushed the 750g packet of Bran Flakes back on to the shelf and picked up two 500g packets instead. “Thank you,” I said.
“People don’t look, you see,” said the elderly man. “You need to check these things out. Compare the prices!”
I didn’t point out that I usually do check these things out, and that I usually do compare the prices, but, on this particular occasion, a well-dressed elderly gentleman happened to be standing in front of them.
“You’re not thinking of buying vinegar, by any chance, are you?” the elderly gentleman asked. I confirmed that I indeed wasn’t. “Only you can get two half-size bottles for less than the price of a full-size bottle. It’s crazy!”
“Crazy,” I agreed.
“I wrote them a letter.”
“…And, when you’ve finished, you end up with two bottles instead of one!” I observed, entering into the spirit of things.
“Yes!” said the elderly gentleman. “Not that that’s much good these days. You can’t take them back any more. They used to give you money back for your old pop bottles, you know. But you’ll be too young to remember that.”
I informed the elderly gentleman that, au contraire, I did indeed remember taking pop bottles back.
“We used to get a ha’penny each for them!” he said.
“I think we used to get 10p,” I replied.
“Ten pee!” exclaimed the elderly gentleman in astonishment, apparently having worked out how I managed to have the wherewithall to be able to fritter away good money on 750g packets on Bran Flakes.
I thanked the elderly gentleman for his help, bade him farewell, and, as I headed towards the frozen fish, thought to myself, That’s me in twenty years, that is.
Or ten, more likely.
Have you ever read such nonsense in your life? (Other than on this website, obviously):
I’m pretty sure we would all remember being bitten in the head by a sodding gorilla!
I know what you’ve been wondering all of these years. It’s written all over your face: Where can I find a photograph of a heron being startled by a porpoise?
My friend, your search is over:
A heron being startled by a porpoise recently.
One of the many blurry snaps from my recent holiday.
We’re off for a week’s holiday in the land of the leek and the male-voice choir.
In the meantime, feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
We did that!
Taken very hurriedly outside my house this evening. The black line is a telegraph wire. The white line is the International Space Station.
True story: Last year, my mate Karen received a phone call from the International Space Station. She was out. So the astronaut left a message that he’d call back later. Which he did.
(Stuff came out my nose.)
While I was in the chemist’s yesterday, stocking up on my illegal stash of hydrocortisone cream, I couldn’t help noticing a gentleman wearing a bright blue cloak and tricorne hat browsing through the non-prescription medicines. In any other town in England, this man’s garb might have been considered a bit unusual, but this is Hebden Bridge, and we’re used to oddballs.
An oddly garbed gentelman yesterday.
Town criers are like morris men, people who pretend to be statues, and Big Issue sellers: I am glad that other places have them, but I don’t particularly want them drawing attention to themselves in my hometown, thank you very much. (And don’t get me started on so-called mime-artists.)
Then it occurred to me, what kind of ridiculous job is town crier anyway? It’s the twenty-first century for Pete’s sake! We all have iPhones and RSS readers these days. We don’t need some loud-mouthed hooligan yelling the news at us. We can get that off the telly.
Still, though.
I wonder how they recruit town criers. Advertising for them in the local paper would demonstrate the utter pointlessness of the job: we’ve got a local newspaper; we don’t need a town crier. I suppose, if they were going to do it properly, they would make the outgoing town crier yell out advertisements for their replacement. But that would mean that no town which didn’t already have a town crier would ever be able to recruit one. Which is fine by me.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, you can tell.
I didn’t get to see what the Halifax town crier was buying in the chemist’s. I more than half suspect it was throat lozenges.
Darwin, Shakespeare, Nelson, Churchill, Newton… Bale.
It’s not every day that someone new earns their place in the pantheon of all-time Great British Heroes. But that is exactly what Mary Bale (spinster, 45) did yesterday when this moment of selfless bravery came to light:
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by such heroism.
Come on, Your Majesty: a damehood is surely in order.
Jen and I are just back from a weekend in the Yorkshire Dales with Hitchin & Soo and their sprogs. Here are the obligatory photos.
This week, I invented an entirely new genre of photography: craparazzi photography.
Craparazzi photographs are photographs of celebrities taken off-guard, which are so ineptly taken that you can’t actually tell who they’re of…
Comedy legend Les Dennis.
Last week, during my lunchbreak, I was walking along the Liverpool waterfront with my sunglasses on, cup of coffee in hand, when I notice a young couple looking at me from inside a bus shelter.
As I approached, the lad stuck his head out of the shelter and announced, “‘ey, mate! Me girlfriend reckons you look like one of them movie stars!”
The lad’s girlfriend went scarlet. I suspect what she had actually said was something more along the lines of “Who does this fat tosser think he is? Some kind of movie star?”
I turned to the blushing girl. “Happens all the time,” I said. “You’re thinking of either Sean Connery or George Clooney.”