Greetings From Happisburgh*, or, Wilful Misspelling.

The Irish are probably the worst. Give them an alphabet of 26 letters and they run mad. This article names one "Fionn MacCumhail" for example. It took a moment or two to realise that yer man here was talking about someone I thought of as "Finn McCool" or similar. It was actually years before I twigged that "Dun Laoghaire" was the same place I'd heard spoken of as "Dunleary".
The Welsh do it like mad: for God's sake.
And how many times have I been asked by American tourists, for Lye-sester Square? (Leicester Square, pronounced "Lester").

But am I really asking for standardised phonetic spelling? No, far too dull.

More examples from around the world, please.

*pronounced "Heysburra". It's in Norfolk you know, but just barely.

Whee!

Massup & I, off to NICE with sleazyjet for the weekend. Byee!

Displacement Activity

Nothing to say? Then fanny about with your template.

Diary of Samuel Pepys: Friday 22nd November 1661.

"Within all the morning, and at noon with my wife, by appointment to dinner at the Dolphin, where Sir W. Batten, and his lady and daughter Matt, and Captain Cocke and his lady, a German lady, but a very great beauty, and we dined together. Spent all evening fannying about with my Blogger template until my eyes went runny, and so to bed."

Swift's Journal To Stella - September 2nd, 1710.

"We made our Voyage in 15 hours just; last night I came to this Town, and shall leave it I believe on Monday. Spent all night arseing about with my Blogger template and thus have written or done nothing of note since."

Quick. Get Help.

"Exit my Life, you Uninteresting and Spurious man: I want to run with the Stag and sing with the Bee."

Pausing only to give the gladsome eye to the only man on Earth less interesting and more fully egregious, she accepted a job as a croupier in an egg-box factory, and passes from our tale.

I turned away sighing, and briefly shared, with a dangerous spider from Costa Rica and a novelty Donald Duck towel hook, a penthouse barrel reachable only by ladder. On venturing out one lunar eclipse and several redolent tavernas later, I met and beloved the fabled Massup and a new beginning was begun. Forged in the thrill of an A-Frame dress and an A-team T-shirt, all was 'la' and 'hap' thereafter, as we spooned to the Goombay Dance Band and danced by the light of the moon, the moon.

That's what I tell people anyway.

Weekend Pursuits

Let's go out and Kick Some Leaves! If you can't get pleasure out of Kicking Leaves you're getting OLD!

Frightening man, RIP

Some of the scariest moments in movies occur when Howard Keel contorts his face so that his chin starts to blend into his neck and you think, "Oh God, he's going to SING! Run away!"
Man, he was in some strange stuff. Watch "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers" if you don't believe me: seven men in varying stages of gingeryness and wearing colour-coded shirts kidnap and imprison equal number of women, with view to marriage. Features dancing with axes.

"Bless your beautiful hide, wherever you may be
We ain't met yet but I'm a-willing to bet
You're the gal for me."

Seriously Weird.

Then he was in "Dallas". Some career. I thought he must have died already, but he hadn't.

So, farewell then.

Anti- American? Tempting, but no.

Look back. The peoples of India (now India, Pakistan & Bangladesh) absorbed, embraced and also enhanced a great deal of British culture: cricket, railways, government, much more: there are still many people of Indian extraction both in the UK and in India who were brought up believing in and who continue to believe in Britain as, in some limited sense "the mother country", as a result of the years of British rule there. And yet ultimately the people of those countries could not bear to be ruled by Britain and there were years of violent, and famously, non-violent protest and pressure to be free of Imperial rule.
And now? The people of the world drink in the American Way with their Pepsi. We watch Buffy and West Wing and the Hollywood movies and we love it. A man will wear a T-shirt with the word "Michigan" printed on it, but wouldn't dream of wearing one that said "Gloucestershire".
The anti-Americanism only starts when we see the iron fist behind Mickey's glove. The fist was there in Carter's or Clinton's time as much as it is in Bush's. We've had US forces in the UK and Europe since WW2. But we in Europe didn't truly see the iron fist, it wasn't displayed to us. All empires have it. The stupidity of the present US administration lies in its carelessness in displaying that fist. We'll embrace so much of the culture, much as the Indians did of the British culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries. But only so much as we'll consent to.
We're belatedly starting to realise, partly thanks to the neo-cons, that the USA is a truly foreign country, just as much as The Ukraine or Uruguay, and not a powerful lost colony that will always be on our side.
We have to realise that the USA will only be our friend on its own terms, not ours, and deal with it on those terms and stop deluding ourselves about "special relationships".

Yes, still being po-faced. Perhaps a beer will help. Incidentally, my Google search for "Gloucestershire T-shirts" yielded no results at all.

Management skills

12 sales people in my company were summoned to see the man. "I'm sorry", he said, "We're going to have to make 4 of you redundant".

So far so sad, but so normal.

"We're not going to tell you which 4 until tomorrow."

Sheer class.

Casinos

I'm getting a bit po-faced here, and I'm dying to rejoin young Orlando in his pee-po-belly-bum-drawers campaign, but first here's a copy of a dull email I've just sent to my MP.

Dear Ms Moran

Casinos

I'm really bothered by the casino provisions in the proposed gambling legislation. You and the local authority may be tempted by the possible windfall that new casinos appear to represent, but I believe the cost far outweighs the benefit.

Regeneration - I don't believe it. The owners, sleazy characters and shady corporations all, will, after a "honeymoon period", do their utmost to evade any fig-leaf social obligations and will lobby hard against "unfair" or "restrictive" rules and laws. Local life will not be improved one jot by these licensed fleecing parlours and once the feet are under the table YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET RID OF THEM. Ultimately we'll just have all these ugly barns full of sad losers wasting all their money, a lot of people most of us would want to avoid meeting getting mighty rich, and nothing for Luton Borough Council or the government to show for it bar a marginally-increased tax take and a whole new species of chancers and conmen and their victims to deal with.

I don't believe there is any significant demand for this measure; in fact it appears to be highly unpopular, and not just among snobs!

Additonally, does this government really want to be chiefly remembered (pace today's Guardian (3rd November)) for making Britain the Atlantic City of Europe? I'm going to risk sounding mighty pompous and say that I'd really hope this town and this country would be a more productive and upstanding place than that.


Best Wishes

Petition

Dear Friends,

I have just read and signed the online petition:

"Save The Aberfan Memorial"

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition
service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/aberfan/

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might
agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider
signing yourself.

Best wishes,

Luton types - #1 in an occasional series

A man of average height, uncut grey hair and a bulbous red-veined nose. He fumbles for his ticket, blocking the barrier at the station. He's wearing a tweedy herringbone-patterned suit... and a lime-green baseball hat.

John Peel

I didn't have a post today. Then I found out the news when I stopped-by here. Plenty of people who know more than me will express themselves better, but I actually feel bereaved here, as if I've lost someone in the family. I'm shaking.

Dead Iraqis

I had some time to spare yesterday afternoon so went to the British Museum. Whenever I go, despite the staggering range of artefacts on display, I'm always drawn back to The Assyrians. Shunning the namby showbiz of the Egyptians and those ineffectual poseurs the Greeks, I find myself in the martial world of Ashurbanipal, Ashurnasirpal and Tiglath-pileser III. Theirs is a story of rapine and conquest: to see the reliefs depicting their kings and Gods is to feel the presence of a people who ruled through strength and fear. Their deeds are recalled in bas-reliefs of battle, siege, slavery and severed heads, yet their art has great formal and stylised beauty. In honour of the Assyrians, this weblog will in future be written entirely in cuneiform script. Anyone got a syllabic font from about 600 BC? (It's not like Comic Sans, not really, no. More like Webdings).

Not a trainspotter oh no, not me guv.

I saw my first one of these trains (picture) while playing football at Wormwood Scrubs in 1976 or '77. We all stopped playing to point at it: "ooh it's one of those new trains!"- it must have been impressive. Or we must all have been real sad-hats. I think that was also the day I scored my only goal for the work team - off my shin came the 6th goal in our 7-1 victory.

Boggins' anabasis.

Higlight of the weekend was a mass welly-boot stomp round Sharpenhoe Clappers (although I of course wore my posh Brasher walking boots).
Stop pretending you're not enjoying it! It's fun. Yes it is... you can't be cold.
Let's go home then. Wassup, you missing The Simpsons?

Elderly

"Hold on a moment, you've got a hair". Hair in question is resting on my top lip. "I'll just get it off for you". "OW!".

It's ATTACHED. It's growing from the INSIDE OF MY NOSE.

Uselessnessabounds

Scientists are baffled by new figures which show an astonishing world-wide explosion in human uselessness. These figures include a staggering 300% increase in "children unable to find their own shoes", a 12.5% year-on-year inflation in the number of people unable to operate automatic ticket barriers and a 30% hike in the number of people unable to program a video recorder without accidentally taping something off Animal Planet instead.

Overall human uselessness and daily incompetence are estimated to have risen on average by at least 10% over the last decade: 8 of the last 10 years have shown the highest rises since records began in the early 18th Century. Speculation has focussed on fluoridation, Cartoon Network, multi-player role-playing games, OK magazine, Ocean Finance, or any combination thereof.

A spokesman for UNIFWIWTA (United Nations I Forgot What I Was Talking About) said today that this phenomenon could not be ascribed to natural background fluctuations alone. She would have continued but instead accidentally pulled the back off her mobile and the battery fell out.

"George" The Epilogue - I hope

A knock on the door at 10:30 Sunday morning. Boy answers door. When I see who it is I gently push past in an "I'll take over here now son, there's nothing to see" sort of way, because it's the drunken idiot from next door. Has he come to wreak terrible vengeance, because if so I'm fully prepared to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that, actually, my wife is out at the moment and would he like to call back later?

But no. He's come to apologise. He's completely bladdered and gives the kind of abject apology that only the truly drunk can - "I'm ree' ree' fxxxin' sorr' I wascompleetliootofordrr ye've gotalovelyfamily an' that". Up close you can see the mess the booze has made of him: he's as pale as the head of his pint & his face is cratered like one of the minor satellites of Jupiter. I do feel sorry for him - he'll probably not trouble the scorers much longer, and no-one will miss him when he's gone. How on earth he got to that condition I'll probably never know.

London Buses

The link in the header isn't to a new news story but I wonder how truthful the figures can be - London Buses in the central area these days work on the principle that you buy a ticket before boarding - so all the driver has to do is register people boarding and, I suppose, the type of ticket they have, on his machine..
Only 3 of us got on the 88 today at my stop and no-one got off, so why was the driver punching buttons like a man in the terminal stages of Tetris? There must have been about 400 people on that bus, so I was very lucky to bag a double seat.

POETS day

Not much in here this week. It's just been a shitty week at work and we've got a new dawg which takes up a lot of spare time with its endearing shitting and pissing agenda.

Will there be "George"ing tonight (see below) I wonder? Last post until Monday probably.