Category: Comedy

Made up abbreviated words

I’ve often wondered about words like these, but Susie Dent explains:

You can be gruntled (satisfied), kempt (combed), couth (polite), ruthful (full of compassion), whelmed (capsized), and gorm-like (have an intelligent look about you). And, for a while in the 1600s, you could be shevelled too.

A commenter adds the words “chalant” and “consolate”, which were apparently first used in a New Yorker piece.

Also in that piece: “wieldy”, “descript”, “gainly”, “cognito”, “make bones about it”, “beknownst”, “it would be skin off my nose”, “both hide and hair”, “toward and heard-of behaviour”, “maculate”, “peccable”, “new hat”, “terminable”, “promptu”, “petuous”, “nomer”, “choate, “defatigable”, “committal”, and quite a few that I surely missed.

Immaculate and impeccable are odd ones. Does im at the front mean not? It’s not clear. Pressive? Pact? Mitate? Agination? Immiserate sounds the same as miserate. This can get very intricate. Although, you may think it to be not very tricate. Also, I hope you are being ritated rather than the more common negative of that.

“Indefatigable” could be shortened twice. Defatigable. Fatigable. Which means something very similar to indefatigable.

Timidate. Timate. Genious. Sipid. Cest. Ert and Ept, I’ve heard before. Nuendo. Finitesimal. Juriours,

For “over”, you could just put “der”.

I hope this posting has interested you. My apologies if, instead, you have been terested.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My original version compared to 6k’s version

I like my photo:

But I also like what 6k has done with it:

So, which is better? There’s only one way to find out!

Compare the two by looking first at one, then the other, and back again, and so, until you are able to decide.

Did you think I was going to say they should fight each other? That would be ridiculous. Photos can’t fight other photos. (Nor is it wise to fight fire with fire. Just found out about that one.)

I think I prefer the 6k version. Which is why I shamelessly stole borrowed it for here. That big 2, bottom right, is much clearer. But, not sure about the greeny-yellowy colour. You decide.

Ain’t the internet amazing?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Granny Weatherwax does not allow inequality

For years now, I’ve wanted to nail down a particularly choice Terry Pratchett quote, concerning the limits of the idea of equality, which is that for there to be equality, someone has or some people have to insist upon it, and if that insistence is to count for anything, then there goes your equality. My problem was that I didn’t have the name of the character that the quote was about.

But today, I described the quote as best I could to my friend Adriana, and she told me at once that the name of the lady in question was Granny Weatherwax. And once I had the name, the rest was easy.

The quote I was looking for is the second from the bottom of these Quotes About Granny Weatherwax:

“Mistress Weatherwax is the head witch, then, is she?’

‘Oh no!’ said Miss Level, looking shocked. ‘Witches are all equal. We don’t have things like head witches. That’s quite against the spirit of witchcraft.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Tiffany.

‘Besides,’ Miss Level added, ‘Mistress Weatherwax would never allow that sort of thing.”

That is to be found in A Hat Full of Sky.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

BMdotcom insult of the day from Bette Davis (or from Legend)

According to Legend, Bette Davis, on hearing that Joan Crawford had died, said this:

“You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good … Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

Legend may have made this up. But if so, I say: Well done Legend. Terrific stuff. Keep it coming.

I learned of this while watching an episode of the TV series Talking Pictures, devoted to Davis and Crawford. Shown to coincide with the showing of Feud.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Gayer-Anderson Cat

Not long ago, Perry de Havilland told me what sounds like an old, old joke, about the difference between dogs and cats.

We feed and pamper and love and look after dogs, and from this, dogs conclude that we are gods. We feed and pamper and love and look after cats, and from this, cats conclude that they are gods.

As I say, it sounded old, but I liked it. And I remembered that joke when, this evening, searching for quota cats or quota other creatures, I encountered these photos, of books, in the British Museum. Including a book about a cat …:

… and of that same cat, celebrated on a clutch of mugs:

I took these Gayer-Anderson Cat photos in Feb 2010, but I doubt it’s moved since then.

Read about the Gayer-Anderson Cat, which actually was a god, here. Gayer-Anderson wasn’t two people. He was just the one, a certain Major Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson.

Get your own Gayer-Anderson Cat, for £450. (£405 to members.) Or, you could 3D print your Gayer-Anderson Cat.

When I took these photos, I was in point-shoot-forget mode, and have given them no further thought until now.

I love the internet.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A clean dirty joke

Earlier today I was at a party, and sitting in on the party was Alexa, the cylindrical robot from Amazon. So, one of us asked Alexa to tell us a Dirty Joke. Alexa replied: “Why do you call a chicken covered in dirt crossing the road?” Answer, although I didn’t hear if Alexa actually said this or merely assumed that we’d get it: a dirty joke.

Not bad. And funny because, although a joke involving dirt, it is not a dirty joke in the sense of there being any sexual innuendo involved.

But, was Alexa trying to tell a joke? Or merely trying to do as she was told, without in any way understanding what the thing she was being told to do actually meant? I know, Alexa never “understands” anything. She’s a machine, with no consciousness. But, you surely know what I mean.

Another rather perfunctory posting. But, I spent quite a lot of my day going to a party, partying, and getting back from the party. I may, although I promise nothing, do better tomorrow.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Meanwhile in East London …

Indeed:

Click on that sliver of horizontality to see the building in question.

No doubt this has already received much www attention. And now, I attend to it. Photos taken by me, outside Hampton Wick Overground Station, yesterday.

The graffiti in the Hampton Hackney Wick and surrounding areas is dispiritingly ubiquitous. I prefer the way my part of town handles graffiti, which is for it all to happen in a tunnel.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My comment on the Six Nations so far

I am hopeless at drawing, as you can see.

But having been watching the Six Nations rugby tournament for the last few weeks, and having in particular been listening to the various television commentators, I feel the need to offer you all this attempt at a cartoon.

Anyone who wants to copy this, or indeed copy it and improve the graphics, is most welcome. I am surely not the first to have thought of this particular observation.

(There was a bit of fiddling about with the presentation of this, on account of my software not actually showing me exactly how a posting like this will look. Sorry about that.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

New Tricks is popular because it is full of old people and it is mostly old people who watch telly

While channel hopping in search of an entirely different TV channel earlier this evening, I happened to catch this snatch of dialogue, from the TV show New Tricks:

“When you’re looking for something, it’s always in the last place you look.”

“That’s because when you find it, you stop looking for it, you berk.”

Well, I laughed. And I reckon it’s an improvement on any of these.

I didn’t know New Tricks was such a success in foreign parts:

These curmudgeonly coppers, baffled by new technology, hating modern policing methods and clearly in no state to mount a rooftop chase, proved gripping to viewers across the globe.

Actually, it’s pretty obvious why New Tricks is so popular with TV viewers everywhere. It’s because TV viewers everywhere are mostly the same age as the curmudgeonly coppers in New Tricks, and at least twice the age of all the other cops on television.

Speaking as an oldie myself, I can tell you that jokes about not being able to remember where you put things speak to me, very loudly. Yesterday, my oldie friend was helping me with my Ryanair checking in (another thing not all oldies to put it mildly are very good at sorting out) and during this my debit card was required. So I produced it, from my wallet, and two seconds later I placed my wallet … into a black hole, and couldn’t for the life of me find it anywhere. It just totally vanished into thin air, into a parallel universe, with its entrance portal on the far side of the moon. And then it reappeared, on top of the plastic sugar jar.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Strutton Ground shop and a Strutton Ground pub

Photos mature with age. The most commonplace snaps can turn into something a bit more interesting, with the passing of time.

Consider this one, one of the very first that I took with my Panasonic Lumix FZ150:

I know. It’s a shop.

But the thing is, it’s now boarded up. That photo was taken in January 2012. In January 2013, this happened:

The administrators to Jessops face a battle to rescue any of the company’s 192 shops after leading camera makers tightened the terms on which they sell products to the company following a downturn in the market.

Rob Hunt, joint administrator for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: “Without the support of certain people, we are looking at complete closure.”

Jessops has since made a partial return to life, but so far, that Jessops, which is in Strutton Ground, near where I live, has remained shut.

In the years just before it closed it had an unbearably “helpful” shop assistant, who behaved like he’d been on some mad American training course in how to relate to customers. He wouldn’t leave you alone, and instead would engulf you in loud, totally fake bonhomie. I used to browse around in there from time to time, occasionally buying things like batteries and SD cards, and pondering my next camera. But because of this person, I stopped going there. Was I the only one, I wonder?

Talking of Strutton Ground, did you know that the Goon Show first saw the light of day in Strutton Ground? Yes, on the top floor of the pub at the far end of it from me. I saw this in a TV show about Spike Milligan.

I guess that’s probably more interesting than a Jessops closing. I’ll see if I can dig out more photos of things that have changed, that are rather better than that one, taken longer ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog