Wednesday 30 June 2010

Howler's English? English howlers!

On my early morning power walks, I'm rarely without my MP3 player. Occasionally, I'll select the radio mode just to reassure myself that the world still exists.
This morning I did just that, just in time to hear Radio 4's John Humphrys interview a Guardian journalist.
Oxymoron unintentional.
Now, one might be forgiven for believing that being a Guardian journalist is embarrassing enough, but that was obviously not the case for this particular hack.
He was being interviewed about his passion for collecting World Cup football stickers. A grown man with a 14-year old son! But let's not dwell on that embarrassment.
In successive sentences, he talked about the "amount of people" and the "amount of women".
For whatever reason the Guardian exists, patently they are not there to act as guardians for the English language.
One can only hope that this journalist's articles are as widely 'read' as the colour that ought to be suffusing across his fizzog.
As a stickler for the language, it's enough to make John Humph.

Tuesday 22 June 2010

Hear, hear!

A research team in Ghent University, Belgium has established a link between listening to an iPod and poor hearing.
Oh really?
On the face of it, such findings seem pretty obvious.
Researchers may well have arrived at the correct conclusion but, to my thinking, the logic behind the cause and effect is seriously flawed.
It is merely the Gaia Principle being applied to the human body.
The vast preponderance of those who use MP3 players listen to the biggest load of unadulterated crap that masquerades as modern pop.
Noise rather than music.
At a conscious level, this is the choice they exercise even though I think it would be better exorcised.
Their subconscious agrees with me and subsequently rejects it.
Consequently, when the earphones are removed, the body continues to reject all noise leading to the assumption that the hearing has been damaged.
I put this very point to Dr. Hannah Kempler who led the study.
Her response was quite clear.
"Pardon?"
Did she honestly not hear me or was her subconscious merely filtering out my unadulterated crap?
Now I'll never know.

Friday 18 June 2010

Two sticks. Unstuck.

Two sticks in hand, Caveman's smug look suggested he had just lit Cavewoman's fire.
Soon they would marry, real sparks would fly and, just as he fathered a troglodyte, necessity mothered invention. The wheel was 'born', Caveman got the hell out of there and introduced wild oats to the world.

Sunday 13 June 2010

United. Untied.

'Let's celebrate, darling' said the anagram crossword compiler. 'It's our Silver Wedding.'
'Silver...' she mused, sipping champagne.
'...key word...'
'SLIVER!' she garbled, choking on a shard of glass.
'Olive' he purred.
'Olive...' she mused. 'I love..? O' evil..?
The solution? A scarf made from voile.
Tightened.
Her present. His future.

A citizen's arrest

A young man detained a suspected dealer in stolen goods by sitting on him until the police arrived.
Speaking to reporters, he claimed he only recognised the accused because of his most unusual gait.
He added, "We are all stakeholders in society and I merely looked upon what I did as my duty."

In short, man sits on fence with unusual gate and a stake to hold onto.

THE AUDI. THE AUDIT. THE AUDITION.

THE AUDI
The new Audi A3.

THE AUDIT
£16,085. 41mpg.

THE AUDITION
Arrange a test drive today.

Another one of my ads that are strewn all over the cutting room floor.

Thursday 10 June 2010

Any chance of a confession?

My local priest has spent his life in vestments.
My local bank manager has spent my life investments.

Tuesday 8 June 2010

The first cuckoo offspring?

The cuckoo has a funny call,
it sounds just like its name.
It lays its eggs in others' nests
so others get the blame.

Thursday 3 June 2010

Whatever happened to Erry Wogan?

Witter v. To talk with an annoying lengthiness on a trivial subject.
Prefix it with a 'T' and you are restricted to 140 characters.
So what happened to Erry Wogan?

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Don't mention the war...especially Abyssinia

Admittedly, Italian history is not littered with stories of great war heroes. That old joke about who put the last bullet into Mussolini (twenty Italian sharpshooters) certainly rings true.
There is an impressive range of mountains that runs down the spine of Italy called the Apennines.
Try scaling them and then try telling me that Italy is spineless.
But let's not fight about it.

Tuesday 1 June 2010

Full stops that are edited out of text

Are we missing the point?

Change of climate or climate change?

Having been in Italy for scarcely a week, there is little doubt in my mind that the change of climate is doing me good.
There is even less doubt in my mind about the massive effect that climate has on our lives.
However, because of the terminology, it might be easy to overlook the fact that there is more than a subtle difference between a change of climate and climate change.
When I bought my airline ticket, whether I like it or not, I voted for both.