It's Twofer Monday!

A lot of our Gems come from when we are driving. I'll be concentrating on the road and the pillocks on it, and Julie will normally start drifting off to sleep, passing through a rich vein of Gems on the way.

On Sunday, we took Roxy back to the rescue centre, where she met up with one lady who had formed a deep attachment to her - and it was mutual. Both Roxy and this volunteer were over the moon to see each other.... but I'm getting way off track.

Years ago, I used to work at a dairy that was some distance from home. Despite this, there were a number of colleagues that lived in the same town as us - or pretty much on the way. This meant that there could be a bit of fuel saved if we shared a shift and a car for the journey. One of my colleagues had a fun little habit. Instead of wolf-whistling or shouting some crude epithet in appreciation of a comely young lady, he would shout 'sausage!' This wouldn't be aimed directly at the young lady, but just exclaimed in general, almost as an observation.

It's not hugely subtle, I admit, but since I picked up the habit - and then passed it on to Julie, it's become a lot less subtle. Shouting it out about a man? Wow...

The first time Julie did it, we were driving past a cyclist. I'm not sure who was more surprised, me or the cyclist. I know we both wobbled as we tried to keep on the road. Apparently, Julie had forgotten her window was open..

Sorry - I'm veering off track again - it's those sausages... er... yeah...

Um, where was ...ah, yes.

Anyway. Out for a drive to the rescue centre, and to the side of one road were the remains of an animal. A mammal of some sort - that's all we could tell.
Mind you, Julie reckoned it had a doppelganger.

This last was aimed at a cyclist we were passing. As I tried to contain my laughter, I looked my mirror and found that the lycra-clad bloke was doing the same thing...

For reference - some people may not have seen Ice Age (why not?). Scrat is a sabre-toothed squirrel with a fondness for acorns and a case of bad luck big enough to hold the world.

Acorn just out of shot...

Meanwhile, Sid the Sloth is an intentionally pathetic character who nonetheless has a decent side. Useless at pretty much everything, Sid only ever achieves anything by accident, and sleep usually only arrived at after some awkward shifting around on a bed of rock (and it's possibly that was meant to be a geological pun).

I have to admit tossing and turning a lot like this...

Fingers of a troll

The last time the two of us went to visit my family in Birmingham, it was for the Christmas break. Since then, I have been up there a few times, but Julie has had to stay behind. Partly due to work constraints, and partly because we couldn't take Roxy with us.

It's a long-standing joke, both between me and Julie and for my family as a whole, that no matter what pains any of us may take to remember everything we want to take on a journey, there will always be something forgotten. Normally, it's a minor thing, but I have been known to turn around to get my wallet...

On our Christmas visit, it was a decent enough journey. Even the infamous M25 was behaving itself.
The only problem with that, though, is that there is no traffic to moan about, and I have to concentrate that bit more.

I am very much a defensive driver; I assume that every other driver on the road is a idiot or a complete arsehole. After a fair amount of time driving since passing my own test, it seems to me that I have a pretty strong theory going, and as a result, I am forever looking around me and trying to second-guess cars that are two lanes away from me.

During these times of concentration, Julie's normal habit is to drift off to sleep. This time, however, was different.

It took a while, but I gradually became aware that Julie seemed to be repeatedly counting something off on both hands...

For miles afterwards, all I could think of was this scene from Bruce Almighty:

Long and wrong

The weather in the southern parts of Britain have not been what you could call clement lately. In fact, to paraphrase Robin Williams' character in Good Morning Vietnam, it has been (and apparently will be for at least a couple of weeks more) "wet and pissy with outbreaks of increasingly windy, wet and pissy."

(Real quote:
[imitating Walter Cronkite]
Adrian Cronauer: I just want to begin by saying to Roosevelt E. Roosevelt, what it is, what it shall be, what it was. The weather out there today is hot and shitty with continued hot and shitty in the afternoon. Tomorrow a chance of continued crappy with a pissy weather front coming down from the north. Basically, it's hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut.)

If you haven't seen that film, do so.

Back in Eastbourne, the weather continues to be windy enough to go straight through you, rather than bothering to go around. And, because it's that time of year in the northern hemisphere,* it's a tad on the chilly side. That means that driving is a little cool on the hands - until the heating warms up enough that the steering wheel doesn't try and give you frostbite.

Yes, I have gloves. Yes, I have been wearing them. After a while, when things are a bit warmer, I take the gloves off and, if Julie is with me, pass them to her to look after while I do the driving.

Last night, we realised shopping was necessary - never mind us, the dog food was running low. Since Roxy enjoys going for a ride in the car, we took her with us and took the long way to Tesco. Eventually, the inside of the car reached a temperature that my fingers considered to be comfortable, so I doffed the gloves and gave them to Julie.

I may have been concentrating on driving, but I was vaguely aware that Julie was fiddling with my gloves; I never gave it much thought, to be honest.

After a moment of silence, just as I was about to drive us onto a junction, Julie announced this...

NOT what you want to hear as you attempt to negotiate a busy junction. I do have to admit, though, that I was most impressed with the way Julie managed to begin with a basic malapropism and then stutter her way into a snippet from Gilbert and Sullivan...

Again, many thanks to the internet, where almost any image you search for is but a few clicks away. Googling 'tentacles and testicles' yielded this beauty.

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* by the way, please spare a thought for people in the southern hemisphere. While Britain is being blown about and drowned, and the US and Canada are having ridiculously low temperatures, places like Australia are suffering with forest fires and the like. And when they have fires, they don't muck about. Be safe, my antipodean friends.

Stop! Grammar time! - featuring Igor Stravinsky

So, Trivial Pursuit. You get asked a question, you answer it. If you get it right, you get another go. If you're in the right place, you also get a token to place into your playing piece - 'getting another wedge for your cheese', as we often say.
And that's it.
In theory.
In practice, there will be lots of banter, cries of 'how am I supposed to know that?' and accusations of skulduggery. There will also, if Julie is playing, be random observations on the question, the answer, a different question or answer, or anything that happens to be on her mind at that particular time. And when I say 'random', you know I mean 'random'.

I suppose we ought to be grateful Julie didn't burst into song with 'Old MacDonald had a farm'...

Warning: Cheats will be crucified.

It must have been because it was my birthday - Julie suggested the other day that she bought some wine and we had a night of games - a choice of Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit in our case. Since wine was in the equation, that meant my suggestion was to have some fun with questions and answers. As a result, you lucky people can now look forward to a week of alcohol-soaked Trivial Pursuit-related Gems. That's a whole week, so don't think you have nothing to look forward to on Tuesday or Thursday... or the weekend, come to that.

To start off with, I thought we'd reference some popular culture, to wit the film which consistently tops the (British) polls for the best comedy film ever; Monty Python's Life of Brian. It has always astounded me that Julie simply does not 'get' Monty Python - or The Goons either. I mean, when you consider how anarchic she can be and how supremely surreal (a term I had to explain to her, bizarrely enough), you would have thought she'd be able to quote the films and programmes with the best of them. But no. I will be almost literally falling off my chair with laughter as Michael Palin's Pontius Pilate discusses the apparent hilarity of his friends name with his uncontrollable legionnaires. Julie will be staring at me with a baffled expression. That's if she's even in the room.

So, when Julie pulled out the card to ask me a question, she groaned as she read it.

This was going to be a long game...

By the way - fancy a blast of fwankly wisible humour?

Private Eye: Dumb Britain. Julie responds.

There is a satirical, highly politic and left-leaning magazine in Britain called Private Eye. It's efficiency in annoying the establishment, the arrogant and the merely(?) powerfully inept shows up very well in light of the times that the publishers and editors have been called to court for daring to challenge a dangerously unbalanced status quo. And won. Among many things, Private Eye dislikes celebrities and the cult thereof, the class system, hypocrites, biased journalism (yes, I know), corrupt officials and excess of most kinds.
They also like to poke gentle fun at other things, such as poorly-worded signs, odd things for sale under bizarre pricing conditions, and just how some people only open their mouths to insert their feet. One of their features in this vein is the 'Colmanballs' column. Another is 'Dumb Britain', which centres on questions in quiz shows and the otherworldly responses. Admittedly, it is sometimes the quizmaster fouling things up, but it's usually the contestant. Sometimes, it appears as though the magazine is poking fun at people less educated than themselves, but it does have to be said that a lot of answers go against any kind of internal logic and clues that the question has provided. Take a look at the feature from the latest issue.

In the first two, there is definitely an element of educational snobbery, but the third one has no excuse. They have already been given the county and they go and mention a different one? And as for the 'Dumb Australian', (s)he was told that the answer was a country. Where on Earth is there a country that has a name sounding like 'Fiddler on the Roof'?

Julie enjoys this section usually, so I was reading out the questions to her. Once she had provided an answer, I would go on to inform her what the contestant had come up with. When it got to the final one, I asked, "Which Mediterranean country, whose name sounds like that of a musical, owns the island of Rhodes?"

Oh dear. I thought she was Being Silly, until I saw her expression...
Mind you, at least Julie,unlike the contestant from Australia, managed to come up with an answer that was geographical. The rest of it can be put down to her admirable lack of grasp of matters geographical.

Actually.. and I can't let this slide... Julie really should have known better, because the correct answer, of course, was 'Greece'. The homophonic musical, Grease, is one of Julie's all-time favourite films and musicals.
Oh dear.

Pinocchio vs Prince Charming

OK, so here's something of a classic scene from an OK film. Shrek the third had some good moment, but they were generally lost in a morass of bad ideas. Much as I liked Monty Python, having Eric Idle play the same role as he always does was not a good moment. Even worse, he couldn't even do THAT well.

However, one of the saving graces in the film was the moment when Prince Charming tried to quiz the Gingerbread Man as to Shrek's whereabouts.

When this scene played out, I just looked at Julie, who was suddenly very interested in how badly the carpet needed vacuuming...

By the way. This is one of my other favourite scenes. Seeing Snow White go all badass is pretty... well, badass. Plus Led Zeppelin were amazing.
Then again, the scene where the bad guys invaded works well for me, too. Because it uses this excellent tune.

Happy Sunday, folks!

Snape approves: ExpelliaaAARRGGH!

I had a rough day on Saturday; each time I get a nasty cold I get a vicious little headache just as the cold is coming to an end. This means I wind up with a day of having the cold AND a near migraine experience. As it was, I wound up sleeping in an armchair that night, covered by a duvet. It was the only way I could be near comfortable.
Sunday morning, I was fine. A slight tightness of the head, but nothing I couldn't ignore.
Julie came into the lounge to see how I was, and wound up giving me a head rub. You know how cats and dogs go when they're on the throes of ecstasy? Well, that's me when Julie is giving my scalp a good massage. After that, all I ever want to do is flop down and drift off to sleep. Unfortunately, Julie was in 'Gem Mode', so I had to be (relatively) alert in order to catch as much as I can.
By the way, I used the qualifying 'relatively' just there, because I can remember the Gem itself, but not the situation that led up to it. We weren't watching Harry Potter, nor were we reading it. There's nothing visible in the room to bring it to mind, but Julie still managed to reference it in our conversation. Like I said, I had not long returned to the waking lands (plus Julie's head rub had relaxed me once more), I wasn't too coherent either. With that in mind, here's the whole Gemming conversation (barring a little coda).

We both agreed that it would have been highly entertaining and good ol' Harry just swanned up to Lord Voldemort and surprised him with a swift knee to the 'nads.

Shortly afterwards, I had stood up (so I could grab my pen and jot this Gem down). However, I still wasn't quite awake; I was stood there in a bit of a mental haze and a blank expression on my face. Julie was amused and asked me if I was alright.

You look like someone's just kicked you in the knackers.
Eh? Ye gods, no. This is the look of someone who's just been kicked in the knackers (folds up into a small, whimpering ball on the floor).

And with that, I shall bid you au revoir! See you next time!

Shaft - can you dig it? Well, yes, actually.

Iiiiiiit's Trivial Pursuit time again, folks! And this time, it's t'pits.

Poor old Moses - he'd turn in his coal bed.

Sunday Bonus: Filmy logic

Every now and then, I like to have a trawl through the website Not Always Right, all in the hope of bringing you news that there are plenty more people out there that seem to apply Julie's seemingly personal brand of logic to everything. To be honest, it usually doesn't take to long to find something or someone, I should say whose grasp of logic is rather tenuous.

To be honest though, when I read this one, I was immediately put in mind of the following meme:

ABBA were from Bristol, you know.

Last Saturday night, there was an ABBA tribute act in town, followed by an open-air screening of the film Mama Mia. As part of Julie's birthday present, I bought us tickets to go and see it. What I didn't know, was that Julie would be bringing Reynard, a cuddly toy hedgehog with us.

ABBA tribute in the dark

Julie and Reynard the Hedgehog

I think it was something of a cheek for people to be giving us odd looks, considering the outfits they were wearing... I mean, I know ABBA wore the jumpsuits and flares, but some folks were wandering around in full-on 60s flower-power regalia.
That aside, we were chatting away, enjoying ourselves, when our accents suddenly underwent a seismic shift a hundred miles or so to the West. I know I have a wandering accent, and there's a family tendency to pick up the accent of an area we're barely even passing through. Also, Julie has previously demonstrated a certain inability to fail an accent by immense distances (see this one for proof). However, for us to both spontaneously move from a sub-cockney accent to something akin to The Wurzels was a little odd, to say the least.
Not as odd as the following conversation though.

Er... what?

Trivial Pursuit Week II: Spartahorse

Happy Monday, folks - how was your weekend? Do you remember much (or any) of it? Can you remember far more than you really want to?
Or was it a nice quiet time in, sat around the table and playing games?
We didn't get to play any games ourselves this weekend, but I found some excellent Trivial Pursuit Gems mixed up in the stack of papers that is my filing system.
The category is entertainment. Shall I ask the question?

Um... no. No, it wasn't actually, love. The answer was King Kong. Even if you try to justify dates by claiming you were talking about the films, it still doesn't wash. 1933 vs. 1960.
What am I talking about? I'm trying to use logic again, aren't I? Gah...

Anyway, see you Wednesday for some bro-king thinking - and don't forget to enter the free contest!