So, as previously, I am stuck on a boat in the North Sea, unable to go to work and thinking about whether to start drinking a foolish amount of coffee. I've made a dedicated effort to write something, no matter how peurile, every day and I've mainly been sticking to it. I skipped last night because I spent all day writing a report and couldn't be bothered to distort my vision any more.
I decided the other day to have a look at some of the writers who I hope have influenced me and who have certainly given me a heap of enjoyment and something to aim at, no matter how wildly.
I'm slightly delayed by having an abandon ship drill so I've just finished my shower and I've got Lyle Ritz playing jazz ukulele on in the background, the light is dim and behind me and there's a bottle of iced tea passing as a bottle of Jameson's so I'm feeling like a real writer.
I'll start with one of the early ones who I've come back to more recently, Stephen King. Me and the Faulkner brothers, Steve and Tony used to hang around a lot together and read, watch videos (VHS), listen to all manner of music, set fire to things, play with guns and drink, rather a lot. One of the authors we read (and, I'm ashamed to say, shoplifted when we had no money but there was a book we really wanted) was Stephen King, this was just after he had started on the road to mega success that he had later, when films of his books were starting to come out on video as well so we read and watched along with things like Firestarter, The Dead Zone, Carrie - I didn't like Cissy Spacek which sort of ruined the book for me, The Shining and, apart from these, there was the lesser known Creepshow, this even had a cameo of the great man himself and we went to see it at the cinema too so there was much debate until the VHS came out what seemed a few years later. Piracy has improved the time it tales for a film to leave the cinema and come out on DVD hugely and I thank the pirates for it, I hate going to the cinema now. A topic for another day, I suppose.
Back to Stephen King. We loved his books, this affair running from maybe 1983 to 1990 or whenever It came out (I didn't read that Dark Tower series so that might date it). The greatest things he gave me were a knowledge that you could write about the place you were from and therefore knew intimately but twist it to such an extent that everything could happen there, anything at all. His marrying of down home yankeeism and terrifying batshit madness from another dimension was perfectly affecting for us small town boys. We would have been terrified by Lovecraft too, if we had the first understanding of nineteenth century New York high society but we really didn't, Uncle Steve gave us a language and an idiom that we understood, we'd never seen fifties small town america but we'd been exposed to it so much, from Happy Days to Superman to Rumblefish that we were intimately aware of the situation and how distorted and terrifying it could become in his hands.
As I'm writing I keep flashing onto more and more great little scenes from his stories, the chases from the bullies in It and The Body, The bar scene with Stuttering Bill in It, The race to the Raft, The state of that first rock hammer in Shawshank Prison and the knowledge of what it must have meant to Andy to have persevered to such an extent, What the toilets in that bar must have smelt like in The Talisman (and I smelt toilets in bars like it plenty in my later life, both as a patron and as the appalled employee the next day). Evocation is the key to King's writing and the fact that he leads you down these atrocious paths as an older brother, promising that this will be as gross and scary as he can make it but he's right there with you so it's okay.
The greatest moment in his writing, from a response of purely visceral fear, came one night in Steve Faulkner's room at Keele University, I was sat up, reading Pet Semetary and we'd already had the stuff with the cat coming back and then the boy and that was all truly awful and compelling and terrible but it was also all on the decent side of the logjam, this night I was reading the description of the manitou on that side of the wood while sat with my back to a window and rain pouring outside. King didn't really show me very much, there were some vague shapes and a lot of noise and some feelings but he gave me all the space I needed to fill with enough to scare myself silly. I wasn't sat with my back to that window very much longer, I was all the way across the room and the curtain was firmly closed. Didn't stop me looking up at it to make sure nothing was looking in, from time to time, though.
Later on I read Danse Macabre and I found out where he'd discovered that technique and a lot of other things and I grew to love that book, an update would be wonderful but I bet there's not much that's happened since that would creep in past the radio horror of the fifties. Despite how many times The Thing has been remade I'm pretty sure nothing comes close to the first time that chest opens up. His other behind the scenes book is On Writing and I love the glimpse it gives of the wizard pulling the levers behind that curtain, Dorothy was a dick to be impressed with that ridiculous light show and disappointed with the amazing system of levers and machines the great man had used to create it. I'm like that with Stephen King, I love the effect and I love the process that brings it rushing out at me even more.
He wrote On Writing, following a life threatening incident where he got run over by a car while out walking and this book gave a great insight for me, it wasn't simply a manual of technique and how to set up your desk (though that's in there, it turns out I need to get a nice big house in the country and put a desk in it). King looks instead at a lot of life experiences and memories and tells us how these fed into his work and into the guy he is. I think that's the real diamond in all this, it's the person you've become who does all the writing, any number of manuals won't help you with your voice though they may help motivate you, I tend to think that what I'm doing when I read a book about writing is a displacement activity. Fiddling while Rome sits over there in the corner, not getting written about. Going to try to avoid a lot of that from here on.
For the sake of form, here's a joke I left in Aberdeen airport a good while ago while waiting for a flight that I hoped would never leave. I didn't have a camera handy so I might head over there and stage a reconstruction at some point. It did leave the following day.
Q: What is ET short for?
A: He's only got little legs.
Badoom and, indeed, tish.
Bringing back the lolly stick joke for people who drink more coffee than they eat Zooms.
Thursday 30 August 2012
Friday 4 May 2012
Hemingwayishness
Hemingway wrote a lot about life. He wrote well. He wrote in short sentences. Then he killed himself.
The Internet loves Hemingway's four rules of writing. The Internet also loves ignoring the rules by waffling on about the rules. I am not one to buck the trend, after all, who knows more than the Internet?
Contrary to the rest of the Internet, I will attempt to sum up the rules in a shortened form:
Keep it short.
Don't write like a ponce.
That about covers it, I think.
I would love to know who it was that gave Hemingway these rules on his first day at the Kansas City Star. I bet that guy wrote some great stuff about prohibition era Kansas City and I bet he'd already written some pretty strong stuff about the first world war.
Hemingway didn't invent the rules but he did live by them in an incredibly focused way and that is to our eternal pleasure.
Reading his work brings out an unpleasant tendency in a certain sort of person (and we'll see if I am that sort of person in a second) to mistakenly think that because something is simple it must be easy to replicate. I thought about this the other day while I wrote a parody of Hemingway (saw that coming, didn't you?)
The man was on the train north to Paris, it was the good train, the one we all took. It was a slow train but they let you shoot cows from the doors so we all took it when we'd been in the south.
The man was returning home to England where he would knock his wife around and drink good whisky with too much water. He'd seen things, he said, in the war, bad things that the whisky didn't wash away. He'd seen a sergeant shout at a man once, he said and another time had seen soldiers made to get up early, even if it was raining.
We didn't believe him but his stories helped pass the time between cow fields so we bought him harsh wine that was cool and good and little pastries with cheese and sausages which were salty and good. He got drunk on the wine and we thought less of him as a man until he hit a big bull flush between the eyes when we thought him fine again. He said a tailor in Carcassone owed him twenty francs so he got off the train and we didn't see him again.
We talked then about things that mattered at the time but didn't after. We drank more of the wine bought from the Spanish steward with his left sleeve slack. He'd lost it at Guernica, he said and we saw in his eyes the loss of the arm didn't bother him more than the loss of the war. The war was the thing we all lost and that we would all never lose, as long as we had the royalty cheques coming we would never lose that war.
So, in short, it's easy to write in a way that sounds like Hemingway but I won't be expecting a Pulitzer for that any time soon.
People make a similar mistake in other areas, believing that keeping things simple will make them seem too easy and thus be something you won't want to pay for. The next time a waiter shows up with a yard long pepper mill ask yourself how long you think the peppercorns that you'll shortly be getting ground onto your plate have been inside that thing. An ostentatiousness may be masking the fact that it is actually pretty easy to put your own pepper on your dinner. You might even graduate to pouring your own glass of wine next.
Hemingway did give us at least one rule for modern life entirely of his own invention and that is that it's okay to name your children after your favourite booze. This rule has largely escaped use by his traditional readership but has been enthusiastically taken up by the wives of professional sportsmen and those who would emulate them. It even extends to other favoured consumer goods with ever more interesting variation in spelling, how many modern classrooms don't have at least one Chanelle, Shardonnee or Thunderbird? Maybe not that last one so much but there is plenty of time and seemingly no shortage of victims for increasingly experimental parents. When will the first Meffadoan be registered?
That this rule is ignored by those Internet users who so love the rules for writing is, at first, a mystery. It seems that this is a cohort that loves to be different, loves booze and loves naming things. Closer inspection reveals that the one leg of the support structure missing is the most essential. The Internet geek is not noted for his great fecundity. That is a topic for another, more ribald, day.
As I've taken the subject of rules for this blog I suppose I should break at least one so there is no joke, I'm afraid. This is partly because I have no stick on which to write it, being at sea, currently unable to get to work because of the weather.
Life afloat is rather good though and though there are no sticks, the Coffee is as thick as a good soup, as befits this type of industrial demand.
Hopefully back with more directionless drivel shortly but I make no promises.
The Internet loves Hemingway's four rules of writing. The Internet also loves ignoring the rules by waffling on about the rules. I am not one to buck the trend, after all, who knows more than the Internet?
Contrary to the rest of the Internet, I will attempt to sum up the rules in a shortened form:
Keep it short.
Don't write like a ponce.
That about covers it, I think.
I would love to know who it was that gave Hemingway these rules on his first day at the Kansas City Star. I bet that guy wrote some great stuff about prohibition era Kansas City and I bet he'd already written some pretty strong stuff about the first world war.
Hemingway didn't invent the rules but he did live by them in an incredibly focused way and that is to our eternal pleasure.
Reading his work brings out an unpleasant tendency in a certain sort of person (and we'll see if I am that sort of person in a second) to mistakenly think that because something is simple it must be easy to replicate. I thought about this the other day while I wrote a parody of Hemingway (saw that coming, didn't you?)
The man was on the train north to Paris, it was the good train, the one we all took. It was a slow train but they let you shoot cows from the doors so we all took it when we'd been in the south.
The man was returning home to England where he would knock his wife around and drink good whisky with too much water. He'd seen things, he said, in the war, bad things that the whisky didn't wash away. He'd seen a sergeant shout at a man once, he said and another time had seen soldiers made to get up early, even if it was raining.
We didn't believe him but his stories helped pass the time between cow fields so we bought him harsh wine that was cool and good and little pastries with cheese and sausages which were salty and good. He got drunk on the wine and we thought less of him as a man until he hit a big bull flush between the eyes when we thought him fine again. He said a tailor in Carcassone owed him twenty francs so he got off the train and we didn't see him again.
We talked then about things that mattered at the time but didn't after. We drank more of the wine bought from the Spanish steward with his left sleeve slack. He'd lost it at Guernica, he said and we saw in his eyes the loss of the arm didn't bother him more than the loss of the war. The war was the thing we all lost and that we would all never lose, as long as we had the royalty cheques coming we would never lose that war.
So, in short, it's easy to write in a way that sounds like Hemingway but I won't be expecting a Pulitzer for that any time soon.
People make a similar mistake in other areas, believing that keeping things simple will make them seem too easy and thus be something you won't want to pay for. The next time a waiter shows up with a yard long pepper mill ask yourself how long you think the peppercorns that you'll shortly be getting ground onto your plate have been inside that thing. An ostentatiousness may be masking the fact that it is actually pretty easy to put your own pepper on your dinner. You might even graduate to pouring your own glass of wine next.
Hemingway did give us at least one rule for modern life entirely of his own invention and that is that it's okay to name your children after your favourite booze. This rule has largely escaped use by his traditional readership but has been enthusiastically taken up by the wives of professional sportsmen and those who would emulate them. It even extends to other favoured consumer goods with ever more interesting variation in spelling, how many modern classrooms don't have at least one Chanelle, Shardonnee or Thunderbird? Maybe not that last one so much but there is plenty of time and seemingly no shortage of victims for increasingly experimental parents. When will the first Meffadoan be registered?
That this rule is ignored by those Internet users who so love the rules for writing is, at first, a mystery. It seems that this is a cohort that loves to be different, loves booze and loves naming things. Closer inspection reveals that the one leg of the support structure missing is the most essential. The Internet geek is not noted for his great fecundity. That is a topic for another, more ribald, day.
As I've taken the subject of rules for this blog I suppose I should break at least one so there is no joke, I'm afraid. This is partly because I have no stick on which to write it, being at sea, currently unable to get to work because of the weather.
Life afloat is rather good though and though there are no sticks, the Coffee is as thick as a good soup, as befits this type of industrial demand.
Hopefully back with more directionless drivel shortly but I make no promises.
Monday 22 November 2010
The Kestrel has landed
I've been pondering, the last few days, on the similarities in lifestyle between offshore workers and the unemployed, particularly the young unemployed of the eighties which was when I had a long period of unemployment and was young.
It wasn't like it is now for young unemployed people in the eighties, for one thing, you just had to turn up once a fortnight and sign on then a giro cheque came two days later that you cashed at the post office and walked out with cash money and nothing to do but wait twelve days until you could do it again.
This also coincided with a lot of other cultural phenomena that have disappeared - young people still hitch-hiked all over the place, thus putting a reduced strain on your giro money. Seriously, people actually stopped their 1980s cars and let young men they didn't know get in for however much of the motorway journey they were undetaking coincided with the young person's travel plans for the day. I frequently travelled from Manchester to Cornwall, in a single day, for nothing. It's not easy to travel from Manchester to Cornwall in a single day if you buy a rail ticket nowadays.
I used to love this feeling of whimsical travel, having a nearly adequate amount of cash in my pocket and no demands on my time is something it is hard to replicate in later life. Unless you do a job that pays enough to have two weeks off in every month and still cover the bills. Of course, working offshore is a trade off in that for the two weeks you work you are working 12+ hour shifts, can't go home and have to share a tiny cabin on a very dangerous factory with someone whom you have not chosen for the purpose.
Most of the time, I come home and I enjoy my home life, pottering about the house, taking photos, working on my awful car and generally living a life of small demand but I feel lately that I'm not making enough of this opportunity and I fancy taking the time to do a little travel around Europe, mainly to those places my other half would not choose for a relaxing holiday. She works very hard in a 9 to 5 type job and wants little more than to relax when she gets time off, this doesn't involve, in an ideal world, traipsing around foreign cities taking pictures of grotty corners or schlepping in and out of engineering museums, marveling at models of bridges.
So, I will be endeavouring to take myself off on two or three day trips to foreign cities on very cheap airlines and having a bit of a mooch around. To this end I have bought a new carry-on bag, the Tatonka Flight Case. I was looking hard at the Cabin Max bag, as excellently reviewed on the Polishing Peanuts blog but the Tatonka just had a few features that I wanted enough to pay the extra.
I will, of course be leaving sticks with terrible jokes on them in coffee shops and cafés throughout Ryanland, it would be nice if I could come up with actual jokes in the language of the countries I visit but I doubt I'm up to it so I'll aim for jokes about the country or themed on them, whichever is most likely to cause bafflement and upset.
So, in tribute to the nostalgia for the eighties that prompted this idea, and in one of the smoothest segues you can expect from me, here's the joke.
Today I wrote my stick of tortured humour in Rocksalt & Snails again but this time I actually left it behind.
The joke is one kindly provided by my friend Trixx though I rewrote the setup as it wasn't convoluted, obscure or laboured enough. He's been saving this punchline up for decades in the hope of a good feed line and, hopefully one will come along before he dies.
If you really want to know, here's the text:
Why did Andy McCluskey not finish moving his falcons until well past bedtime?
Because he started his kestrel manoeuvres in the dark.
Now, before I apologise and let you get back to whatever it was that you were doing before, that joke may need one or two points of explanation, particularly if you are young or indeed old.
Andy McCluskey is a singer who was one of the founder members of a band called Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.
Kestrel sounds a bit like Orchestral.
There are other elements of punning wordplay in there too.
That's it.
Sorry.
It wasn't like it is now for young unemployed people in the eighties, for one thing, you just had to turn up once a fortnight and sign on then a giro cheque came two days later that you cashed at the post office and walked out with cash money and nothing to do but wait twelve days until you could do it again.
This also coincided with a lot of other cultural phenomena that have disappeared - young people still hitch-hiked all over the place, thus putting a reduced strain on your giro money. Seriously, people actually stopped their 1980s cars and let young men they didn't know get in for however much of the motorway journey they were undetaking coincided with the young person's travel plans for the day. I frequently travelled from Manchester to Cornwall, in a single day, for nothing. It's not easy to travel from Manchester to Cornwall in a single day if you buy a rail ticket nowadays.
I used to love this feeling of whimsical travel, having a nearly adequate amount of cash in my pocket and no demands on my time is something it is hard to replicate in later life. Unless you do a job that pays enough to have two weeks off in every month and still cover the bills. Of course, working offshore is a trade off in that for the two weeks you work you are working 12+ hour shifts, can't go home and have to share a tiny cabin on a very dangerous factory with someone whom you have not chosen for the purpose.
Most of the time, I come home and I enjoy my home life, pottering about the house, taking photos, working on my awful car and generally living a life of small demand but I feel lately that I'm not making enough of this opportunity and I fancy taking the time to do a little travel around Europe, mainly to those places my other half would not choose for a relaxing holiday. She works very hard in a 9 to 5 type job and wants little more than to relax when she gets time off, this doesn't involve, in an ideal world, traipsing around foreign cities taking pictures of grotty corners or schlepping in and out of engineering museums, marveling at models of bridges.
So, I will be endeavouring to take myself off on two or three day trips to foreign cities on very cheap airlines and having a bit of a mooch around. To this end I have bought a new carry-on bag, the Tatonka Flight Case. I was looking hard at the Cabin Max bag, as excellently reviewed on the Polishing Peanuts blog but the Tatonka just had a few features that I wanted enough to pay the extra.
I will, of course be leaving sticks with terrible jokes on them in coffee shops and cafés throughout Ryanland, it would be nice if I could come up with actual jokes in the language of the countries I visit but I doubt I'm up to it so I'll aim for jokes about the country or themed on them, whichever is most likely to cause bafflement and upset.
So, in tribute to the nostalgia for the eighties that prompted this idea, and in one of the smoothest segues you can expect from me, here's the joke.
Today I wrote my stick of tortured humour in Rocksalt & Snails again but this time I actually left it behind.
The joke is one kindly provided by my friend Trixx though I rewrote the setup as it wasn't convoluted, obscure or laboured enough. He's been saving this punchline up for decades in the hope of a good feed line and, hopefully one will come along before he dies.
Why did Andy McCluskey not finish moving his falcons until well past bedtime?
Because he started his kestrel manoeuvres in the dark.
Now, before I apologise and let you get back to whatever it was that you were doing before, that joke may need one or two points of explanation, particularly if you are young or indeed old.
Andy McCluskey is a singer who was one of the founder members of a band called Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.
Kestrel sounds a bit like Orchestral.
There are other elements of punning wordplay in there too.
That's it.
Sorry.
Saturday 20 November 2010
El Salvador!
So, today I left a couple of jokes on a variation in the Tinderbox cafe in the Union Square mall. It's actually a very decent coffee place and you get to watch people coming and going from the train station and around the mall from the tables on the balcony. It's a really good position and the coffee is good. If you ever arrive at Aberdeen station and want a coffee I urge you to bypass the Lemon Tree Cafe, Peckham's, pass the Costa and head up the escalator to Tinderbox. There are at least three other coffee shops in there but no bookshop. Tragic, isn't it?
I just had a search for a Tinderbox website and came across The Coffee Story blog about Aberdeen coffee places. I'm so glad, this is going to make finding coffee places a little bit easier and I see Stephanie agrees with me about Tinderbox.
So, on to today's joke(s):
Did you hear about the illiterate pimp?
What a terrible indictment of a failing society.
This is a joke in tribute to John Thomson's character Bernard Righton.
For young readers Thomson's act may not seem particularly brilliant or cutting edge in light of the availability of great comedy today but at the time the memory of the TV show The Comedians was still very fresh, comedy did not tend to look inwards and relied on a hackneyed routine of telling the same jokes as one another about the same one dimensional stereotypes.
The coming of alternative comedy brought with it the spectre of poe-faced, earnest removal of comedy as some people appointed themselves arbiters of taste and political ideal. What Thomson did was to mock both sides with a brilliantly observed caricature of a politically re-educated club comedian. Something later done by Al Murray though I worry that many of Murray's current audience may not spot the irony.
More Thomson:
And now, for those of you traditional minded readers, here's the 'jokey' version of the joke:
Did you hear (again) about the illiterate pimp?
He had a warehouse full of hoes.
I can see you rolling your eyes, you know.
I really ought to not put this stuff in with proper comedy.
I left both sticks together on the table and hadn't gone ten feet before someone sat down and I could tell at a glance that I had utterly wasted those two sticks, there is no chance whatsoever that they were a) going to enjoy those jokes and b) ever going to read a blog like this.
Ah, well.
I picked up a new pen up at the University yesterday so today's joke was written with a Mitsubishi Uni Pin 0.05 pen, it coped fairly well but was thrown a little by the grain if I didn't have a very firm grip on the stick.
I just had a search for a Tinderbox website and came across The Coffee Story blog about Aberdeen coffee places. I'm so glad, this is going to make finding coffee places a little bit easier and I see Stephanie agrees with me about Tinderbox.
So, on to today's joke(s):
Did you hear about the illiterate pimp?
What a terrible indictment of a failing society.
This is a joke in tribute to John Thomson's character Bernard Righton.
For young readers Thomson's act may not seem particularly brilliant or cutting edge in light of the availability of great comedy today but at the time the memory of the TV show The Comedians was still very fresh, comedy did not tend to look inwards and relied on a hackneyed routine of telling the same jokes as one another about the same one dimensional stereotypes.
The coming of alternative comedy brought with it the spectre of poe-faced, earnest removal of comedy as some people appointed themselves arbiters of taste and political ideal. What Thomson did was to mock both sides with a brilliantly observed caricature of a politically re-educated club comedian. Something later done by Al Murray though I worry that many of Murray's current audience may not spot the irony.
More Thomson:
And now, for those of you traditional minded readers, here's the 'jokey' version of the joke:
Did you hear (again) about the illiterate pimp?
He had a warehouse full of hoes.
I can see you rolling your eyes, you know.
I really ought to not put this stuff in with proper comedy.
I left both sticks together on the table and hadn't gone ten feet before someone sat down and I could tell at a glance that I had utterly wasted those two sticks, there is no chance whatsoever that they were a) going to enjoy those jokes and b) ever going to read a blog like this.
Ah, well.
I picked up a new pen up at the University yesterday so today's joke was written with a Mitsubishi Uni Pin 0.05 pen, it coped fairly well but was thrown a little by the grain if I didn't have a very firm grip on the stick.
Thursday 18 November 2010
Pop!
Had to go and pick up a parcel today so I thought I might as well have a wander up to the University and have a coffee in the refectory.
This is something I rather like about working offshore in the oil industry, you get the lifestyle of an unemployed person for half the year and you also get paid. I spend half my time acting as though I have no job because, for half the time, I do have no job. I get to mooch about all day or play computer games. If I want to head off for a day out in Glasgow or somewhere I can do that too or I can play in the garage all day at making sparks and mess.
Today I went for a coffee at the Uni and marvelled at how much it has changed since I went there, the refectory/cafe that used to be a dingy kind of room full of rows of tables, steam and depression is now a lively looking 'Hub' with a Tiki coffee thing in the middle of a random spread of tables and chairs that look like Ikea and Barbapapa had a pile of unwanted babies. The outside of the room is now lined with shops and computers and depression. Some things never change.
After I had a decent enough coffee I went to the beach to check on the surf for my mate Chris who is offshore and thus unable to surf, I went to take pictures for him so he could work on his resentment and yearning. It's stormy but horribly messy so he hasn't missed much. Nice and showy though.
I was also really pleased today to see that I've had a massive 200+ page views on the blog and for that, thanks to all fans of terrible jokes on sticks everywhere. Secondly, I noticed that there had been a hit from Chile where someone had done a Google search on the string "an american werewolf in london's knock knock joke comic" and decided to have a click on the blog. Well, I can only apologise to that person for what must have been a crushing disappointment but also to thank them for giving me a taste of the exotic in my morning. I did the same search and noted that I am 11th in Chilean Google for that search term, not bad and, with a bit of luck this post will break through into the top ten for me.
Today I decided to go out on a structural limb and leave a triplicate of jokes around the coffee place. There is a theme and they are as bad as you've come to expect.
So, from the top we have:
What do you get if you half fill a can of Campbell's soup with lemonade?
Shandy Warhol
Then:
What do you call a man who makes silk screen repeats of jelly babies?
Candy Warhol
And finally, if you've managed to struggle this far:
What do you call a man who makes post modern images of grit?
Sandy Warhol.
There you go, a triumvirate of Andy Warhol puns written on coffee stirrers, proof if proof were needed that any shite you can imagine can be found on the internet.
I'm actually a little bit proud of the first one, I know I have no reason to be but I am so there.
This is something I rather like about working offshore in the oil industry, you get the lifestyle of an unemployed person for half the year and you also get paid. I spend half my time acting as though I have no job because, for half the time, I do have no job. I get to mooch about all day or play computer games. If I want to head off for a day out in Glasgow or somewhere I can do that too or I can play in the garage all day at making sparks and mess.
Today I went for a coffee at the Uni and marvelled at how much it has changed since I went there, the refectory/cafe that used to be a dingy kind of room full of rows of tables, steam and depression is now a lively looking 'Hub' with a Tiki coffee thing in the middle of a random spread of tables and chairs that look like Ikea and Barbapapa had a pile of unwanted babies. The outside of the room is now lined with shops and computers and depression. Some things never change.
After I had a decent enough coffee I went to the beach to check on the surf for my mate Chris who is offshore and thus unable to surf, I went to take pictures for him so he could work on his resentment and yearning. It's stormy but horribly messy so he hasn't missed much. Nice and showy though.
Waves: Splashy.
I was also really pleased today to see that I've had a massive 200+ page views on the blog and for that, thanks to all fans of terrible jokes on sticks everywhere. Secondly, I noticed that there had been a hit from Chile where someone had done a Google search on the string "an american werewolf in london's knock knock joke comic" and decided to have a click on the blog. Well, I can only apologise to that person for what must have been a crushing disappointment but also to thank them for giving me a taste of the exotic in my morning. I did the same search and noted that I am 11th in Chilean Google for that search term, not bad and, with a bit of luck this post will break through into the top ten for me.
Today I decided to go out on a structural limb and leave a triplicate of jokes around the coffee place. There is a theme and they are as bad as you've come to expect.
So, from the top we have:
What do you get if you half fill a can of Campbell's soup with lemonade?
Shandy Warhol
Then:
What do you call a man who makes silk screen repeats of jelly babies?
Candy Warhol
And finally, if you've managed to struggle this far:
What do you call a man who makes post modern images of grit?
Sandy Warhol.
There you go, a triumvirate of Andy Warhol puns written on coffee stirrers, proof if proof were needed that any shite you can imagine can be found on the internet.
I'm actually a little bit proud of the first one, I know I have no reason to be but I am so there.
Tuesday 16 November 2010
And now Nick does what Nick does best...
Today I felt that I'd been favouring the large chains a bit so I went into one of the best independent coffee shops in Aberdeen, Kilau Coffee. They make a really good cup of coffee there and I even used a photo of one of their latte's as the background for this blog.
Leaving a coffee stirrer with a joke on in this place presented me with a small problem, namely that they don't have wooden coffee stirrers. Easily solved by me popping into the Costa in what used to be Ottakars on Union Bridge on my way there and pinching a few of their excellent stirrers.
This is something I've noticed, coffee stirrer sticks all look much the same but I've found, by writing on them, that they vary quite a lot. This may be the secret to the massive success of the chains like Caffe Nero and Starbuck's, they have much smaller sticks and the savings they must make in using maybe 5% less stick per stir may be all the competitive edge they need over smaller independents and Costa, who make their profits larger by using brown gravel instead of coffee beans.
I was reminded of a great source of amusement from my past this morning so went in to Asylum comics in the Adelphi and bought a Groo book. I started reading Sergio Aragones work in the margins of Mad magazine when I was maybe ten years old and was delighted when I came across a whole comic book by him in the old Forbidden Planet comic shop in Hanging Ditch, Manchester. Now, thirty years later I was also delighted to have a copy of the Fanboy trade paperback foisted on me by the very nice owner, Mike.
Before the joke, I was in a slight quandary over the rules regarding leaving sticks in places that don't use sticks. Turns out it was fine, I checked in the giant book of rules and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Phew.
Now, one of the things you may have noticed is that the setup is ridiculously long. I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't fit everything on there and am very glad I went into Costa to get some of their frivolously expansive sticks, I'd have still been trying to fit all that on a Caffe Nero stick.
The joke:
What did Arnold Schwarzenegger say when he announced the classical music themed fancy dress party?
"I'll be Bach".
That was worth it, right?
No, didn't think so.
Until next time.
Leaving a coffee stirrer with a joke on in this place presented me with a small problem, namely that they don't have wooden coffee stirrers. Easily solved by me popping into the Costa in what used to be Ottakars on Union Bridge on my way there and pinching a few of their excellent stirrers.
This is something I've noticed, coffee stirrer sticks all look much the same but I've found, by writing on them, that they vary quite a lot. This may be the secret to the massive success of the chains like Caffe Nero and Starbuck's, they have much smaller sticks and the savings they must make in using maybe 5% less stick per stir may be all the competitive edge they need over smaller independents and Costa, who make their profits larger by using brown gravel instead of coffee beans.
I was reminded of a great source of amusement from my past this morning so went in to Asylum comics in the Adelphi and bought a Groo book. I started reading Sergio Aragones work in the margins of Mad magazine when I was maybe ten years old and was delighted when I came across a whole comic book by him in the old Forbidden Planet comic shop in Hanging Ditch, Manchester. Now, thirty years later I was also delighted to have a copy of the Fanboy trade paperback foisted on me by the very nice owner, Mike.
Before the joke, I was in a slight quandary over the rules regarding leaving sticks in places that don't use sticks. Turns out it was fine, I checked in the giant book of rules and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Phew.
Now, one of the things you may have noticed is that the setup is ridiculously long. I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't fit everything on there and am very glad I went into Costa to get some of their frivolously expansive sticks, I'd have still been trying to fit all that on a Caffe Nero stick.
The joke:
What did Arnold Schwarzenegger say when he announced the classical music themed fancy dress party?
"I'll be Bach".
That was worth it, right?
No, didn't think so.
Until next time.
Monday 15 November 2010
Kitson and coffee.
Today's venue was the Caffe Nero on the corner of Rose St and Union St.
I walked into town, initially to post something and also as it was a really nice, cold bright day and I was listening to Daniel Kitson's podcasts and I wanted to carry on listening as I walked, it's a great way to listen to comedy as it makes you look really rather psychotic, especially if you have a hat, some unobtrusive earphones and a beard to hide the wires.
People give a lot of room to large men bustling through town laughing to themselves and that makes walking in any town a much more pleasant experience. That I also had some great comedy to listen to was the icing on an already icing filled cake. Essentially a cupcake cup full of icing.
I also went into Waterstone's to have a look at a copy of 'Just My Type' by Simon Garfield which I bought for my Kindle the other day and I now, having seen how well done it is in the paper copy, I sort of wish I'd bought as a real book. The typefaces all get to make little cameos as he mentions them and this doesn't render properly on a Kindle as it has a limited number of fonts and uses whichever one you've set as the default for almost all of them. This makes it a slightly less satisfying book as, though I am thoroughly enjoying it, I have to imagine most of the fonts.
Yet more complaining from me. I had a great walk, nice cup of coffee and listened to some great work and I find the time to complain about something. This doesn't reflect my mood, I was very happy all day. I even fixed the indicator lenses on my car where I'd smashed them off a few weeks ago.
So that brings us to today's joke:
What trousers should you wear to drink coffee?
CappuChinos.
Don't for one second think that I am unaware of the irony of talking about Daniel Kitson in a blog and then presenting that joke. You are now reading that joke at some remove, I was actually listening to Mr Kitson's act as I wrote it on the stick, I felt like a man daubing stick figures on the wall of the Louvre with his own shit. The things I go through to bring this drivel to you.
I seem to have settled on a Pilot 0.1mm Drawing Pen, it works well and I had one handy.
I walked into town, initially to post something and also as it was a really nice, cold bright day and I was listening to Daniel Kitson's podcasts and I wanted to carry on listening as I walked, it's a great way to listen to comedy as it makes you look really rather psychotic, especially if you have a hat, some unobtrusive earphones and a beard to hide the wires.
People give a lot of room to large men bustling through town laughing to themselves and that makes walking in any town a much more pleasant experience. That I also had some great comedy to listen to was the icing on an already icing filled cake. Essentially a cupcake cup full of icing.
I also went into Waterstone's to have a look at a copy of 'Just My Type' by Simon Garfield which I bought for my Kindle the other day and I now, having seen how well done it is in the paper copy, I sort of wish I'd bought as a real book. The typefaces all get to make little cameos as he mentions them and this doesn't render properly on a Kindle as it has a limited number of fonts and uses whichever one you've set as the default for almost all of them. This makes it a slightly less satisfying book as, though I am thoroughly enjoying it, I have to imagine most of the fonts.
Yet more complaining from me. I had a great walk, nice cup of coffee and listened to some great work and I find the time to complain about something. This doesn't reflect my mood, I was very happy all day. I even fixed the indicator lenses on my car where I'd smashed them off a few weeks ago.
So that brings us to today's joke:
What trousers should you wear to drink coffee?
CappuChinos.
Don't for one second think that I am unaware of the irony of talking about Daniel Kitson in a blog and then presenting that joke. You are now reading that joke at some remove, I was actually listening to Mr Kitson's act as I wrote it on the stick, I felt like a man daubing stick figures on the wall of the Louvre with his own shit. The things I go through to bring this drivel to you.
I seem to have settled on a Pilot 0.1mm Drawing Pen, it works well and I had one handy.
Sunday 14 November 2010
Back to Basics
Today's joke was left in the Starbucks just across the road from Marischal College which is handy for having a look at the development of the new and obviously much needed council offices. Much better use of my council tax than, for instance, picking up the rubbish or fixing the roads a bit.
This branch of Starbucks is also nice and handy for the Vue cinema on Shiprow where I was going to watch Burke and Hare with Clare. An enjoyable enough film but more an exercise in cameo spotting (Bill Bailey + razor = a completely unrecogniseable man). That it wasn't a genius film is something I should not be disappointed about, this kind of career droop is fairly excusable in John Landis, he'd have to make some pretty terrible films in order to eclipse my affection for An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers and Trading Places.
Another director/writer who has almost reached the end of the plank as far as I'm concerned is Kevin Smith, I adored his films from Clerks which I saw subtitled in Paris and made me happier than I can tell you about the possibility of making films for nothing, with your friends and a smart script (not that I have done that but I'm happy that the possibility exists) right through to Jersey Girl which I still thought was a decent film, especially in light of the sort of rewrites that must have been necessary to boot his best mate's ex-girlfriend out of the flick without seeming too hasty.
Then came Miri and Whatsisname Make an Abysmal 'Comedy' and some awful Bruce Willis film. The twin graphs of Kevin's film career where cost and quality are plotted against time looks like a fish's tail, draw it out and see for yourself. Complaining aside, I've got six films, two live Q&As and a great interview with Stan Lee to watch and bask in the light of a great talent and a funny, funny man. He still writes great stuff too, it's only the films that have lost their soul.
I'm yet another fanboy bitching and not making anything better, I suppose.
So, in the spirit of classic and simple callbacks to a happier time, here's today's joke:
Pretty ironic to be criticising John Landis and Kevin Smith in the same blog post as I take credit for leaving that in a public place, eh?
Again, for the photographically challenged, here's the text:
What is brown and sticky?
A stick.
Awesome, I love the childishness of that joke with its fascination with pooh and wordplay. I can't take credit for it, obviously, and I've known it for so long I don't know who could but if you know that someone definitely originated that joke then please do let me know.
This is the first joke I've left in a coffee place and I hope someone picks it up and looks here to see what the hell someone is doing leaving stupid jokes around the place.
This branch of Starbucks is also nice and handy for the Vue cinema on Shiprow where I was going to watch Burke and Hare with Clare. An enjoyable enough film but more an exercise in cameo spotting (Bill Bailey + razor = a completely unrecogniseable man). That it wasn't a genius film is something I should not be disappointed about, this kind of career droop is fairly excusable in John Landis, he'd have to make some pretty terrible films in order to eclipse my affection for An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers and Trading Places.
Another director/writer who has almost reached the end of the plank as far as I'm concerned is Kevin Smith, I adored his films from Clerks which I saw subtitled in Paris and made me happier than I can tell you about the possibility of making films for nothing, with your friends and a smart script (not that I have done that but I'm happy that the possibility exists) right through to Jersey Girl which I still thought was a decent film, especially in light of the sort of rewrites that must have been necessary to boot his best mate's ex-girlfriend out of the flick without seeming too hasty.
Then came Miri and Whatsisname Make an Abysmal 'Comedy' and some awful Bruce Willis film. The twin graphs of Kevin's film career where cost and quality are plotted against time looks like a fish's tail, draw it out and see for yourself. Complaining aside, I've got six films, two live Q&As and a great interview with Stan Lee to watch and bask in the light of a great talent and a funny, funny man. He still writes great stuff too, it's only the films that have lost their soul.
I'm yet another fanboy bitching and not making anything better, I suppose.
So, in the spirit of classic and simple callbacks to a happier time, here's today's joke:
Pretty ironic to be criticising John Landis and Kevin Smith in the same blog post as I take credit for leaving that in a public place, eh?
Again, for the photographically challenged, here's the text:
What is brown and sticky?
A stick.
Awesome, I love the childishness of that joke with its fascination with pooh and wordplay. I can't take credit for it, obviously, and I've known it for so long I don't know who could but if you know that someone definitely originated that joke then please do let me know.
This is the first joke I've left in a coffee place and I hope someone picks it up and looks here to see what the hell someone is doing leaving stupid jokes around the place.
Friday 12 November 2010
First post, and the agenda
Hello folks and welcome to this blog. I came up with the idea as I was sat in a coffee shop, desperate to write something in order to have a proper coffee shop pose to hide behind and show that I am a cool guy.
What I did instead was to have a flick through a magazine then think back to a bit on the Collings and Herrin podcast I listened to earlier and rewrite a hippopotamus joke that they told. In order to fit in with the mania my generation have developed for nostalgia and ironic joke telling I took a coffee stirrer and rewrote the joke (for rewrote you can substitute stole and then changed a bit) on the coffee stirrer stick.
For those people who are either too young, too old, have memory loss about their childhood or come from a country where this reference means nothing to you, I'm talking about the lolly sticks that Wall's used to have in the seventies, when I was a child, which had a joke with the feed line on the exposed portion of the stick and the punch line on the portion of the stick which was buried inside the lolly so you had to eat the lolly to gratify your desire to read completion of the joke.
For those of you that don't get the nostalgic reference due to foreignness, I appreciate that the word lolly may also be causing some confusion. It's a popsicle.
Here, then is my first effort:
For those who can't see or can't read my writing, the joke runs:
Where do brainy hippopotamuses hang out?
The hippocampus.
Now, think of that joke what you may, I propose to carry on doing this regardless so I have set myself something of a set of boundaries or rules for the continued wastage of these precious sticks.
First of all, the joke must follow the binary pattern of feed line - punchline. A joke in the child's archetype of what a joke should be. No knock-knock jokes, for instance and very little whimsical observational stand-up.
Secondly, the joke must be legible on the stick. This is going to force me to up my game on the handwriting front and find something that writes well on a very cheap bit of pine. The Pelikan fountain pen I used here wasn't great, too inclined to streak. It's also going to force me to keep the jokes short.
Thirdly, I have no problems with stealing jokes off cleverer people but I'll always endeavour to credit the originator of the joke on the blog. I welcome any corrections to my attribution, if the person I stole it from stole it from someone earlier than me then please do let me know.
Fourthly, I will leave the joke in the coffee shop from now on (I brought this one home with me) and photograph it in situ.
That's more than enough rules about writing bad jokes on sticks but I will try to give a mention to the place where I left the joke. This one was in a place pretty local to me, Rocksalt and Snails They don't seem to have a website but it's a nice place. Go there, if you are in the west end of Aberdeen, it's very friendly and they make nice stuff.
That's it for the moment, I need to go out and have more coffee soon. If you fancy having a go yourself, please send me pics of your jokes and I'll stick them up in the blog and plug your favourite coffee shop.
What I did instead was to have a flick through a magazine then think back to a bit on the Collings and Herrin podcast I listened to earlier and rewrite a hippopotamus joke that they told. In order to fit in with the mania my generation have developed for nostalgia and ironic joke telling I took a coffee stirrer and rewrote the joke (for rewrote you can substitute stole and then changed a bit) on the coffee stirrer stick.
For those people who are either too young, too old, have memory loss about their childhood or come from a country where this reference means nothing to you, I'm talking about the lolly sticks that Wall's used to have in the seventies, when I was a child, which had a joke with the feed line on the exposed portion of the stick and the punch line on the portion of the stick which was buried inside the lolly so you had to eat the lolly to gratify your desire to read completion of the joke.
For those of you that don't get the nostalgic reference due to foreignness, I appreciate that the word lolly may also be causing some confusion. It's a popsicle.
Here, then is my first effort:
For those who can't see or can't read my writing, the joke runs:
Where do brainy hippopotamuses hang out?
The hippocampus.
Now, think of that joke what you may, I propose to carry on doing this regardless so I have set myself something of a set of boundaries or rules for the continued wastage of these precious sticks.
First of all, the joke must follow the binary pattern of feed line - punchline. A joke in the child's archetype of what a joke should be. No knock-knock jokes, for instance and very little whimsical observational stand-up.
Secondly, the joke must be legible on the stick. This is going to force me to up my game on the handwriting front and find something that writes well on a very cheap bit of pine. The Pelikan fountain pen I used here wasn't great, too inclined to streak. It's also going to force me to keep the jokes short.
Thirdly, I have no problems with stealing jokes off cleverer people but I'll always endeavour to credit the originator of the joke on the blog. I welcome any corrections to my attribution, if the person I stole it from stole it from someone earlier than me then please do let me know.
Fourthly, I will leave the joke in the coffee shop from now on (I brought this one home with me) and photograph it in situ.
That's more than enough rules about writing bad jokes on sticks but I will try to give a mention to the place where I left the joke. This one was in a place pretty local to me, Rocksalt and Snails They don't seem to have a website but it's a nice place. Go there, if you are in the west end of Aberdeen, it's very friendly and they make nice stuff.
That's it for the moment, I need to go out and have more coffee soon. If you fancy having a go yourself, please send me pics of your jokes and I'll stick them up in the blog and plug your favourite coffee shop.
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