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.