Category: Funny Stuff

One More Kindred Spirit

Funny Stuff, Good Stuff, Old Fartism

My loathing for seagulls has been well documented (here, for example), so when I saw this little snippet, I was mightily pleased, oh yes I was:

A blue plaque has been installed to commemorate a man made famous – for swearing at seagulls.

The honour was cheekily bestowed on Huw Davies – who was renowned for shooing the pesky birds away with expletives.

Huw, from Aberystwyth in Wales, was previously honored with a joke plaque on his favourite bench when he passed away.

And the new one (which is not as funny because OMG swearwords doubleplusungood):

I wish that I could achieve such fame, for so trivial a cause.

I suspect that

Kim du Toit
Used to sit here and shout
FUCK OFF!!! at authority figures

would be tripleplusungood, even though it’s a very accurate summation of my lifelong attitude.

But yet, we persevere.

Meanwhile In Texas

Funny Stuff

Here we go:

A Texas woman was left with brutal injuries after she was viciously attacked by both a snake and a hawk while mowing her lawn. 

Peggy Jones told how she’d been on a tractor mower when the snake fell out of the sky and landed on her at her home in Silsbee.

As it began to tighten around her arm, a hawk then swooped down, and began clawing at a defenseless Jones in an effort to grab its prey.

Beat THAT, Australia.

3 Questions That Shouldn’t Need Answering

3 Inexplicable Things, Guy Stuff

Every so often one will come across a question to which the answer is self-evident, but someone’s going to ask it anyway.  Here’s an example:

1. “When you find a rusted-out old kitchen knife, why not just toss it out and buy a shiny new one from Williams-Sonoma?”
— because nothing looks as fine as a well-restored blade, not just in appearance, but in its intrinsic history.  Need proof?  See here, where some guy with mad skillz goes after an old cleaver.

Here’s another one:

2. “Why would someone spend $170,000 on a replica of an old car?”
— because as long as the replica has been manufactured by engineers with all respect for quality as well as heritage, it’s worth it, and not the least because the originals require not just stupid money, but insanely-stupid money available only to Russian oligarchs, software company founders and parvenus like Jeff Bezos (also criminals, some overlap with the aforementioned).


(watch the second video at the link…)

Here’s another question of this ilk (but by no means the final one):

3. “Why is The Repair Shop such a popular TV show?  All they do is restore old junk.”
…it’s not “junk”, it’s heritage, history, treasured artifacts and sentimental objects.  To watch Steve Fletcher fixing an old clock, Will Kirk restoring an old piece of furniture or even those two old pink-haired biddies bringing wrecked toy dolls and teddy bears back to life is to see and feel the joy of a miniature triumph of life over death.  If you are not moved by that, you are a foul, crass and cynical human being.

The overall answer to all the above questions can be summed up in one word:

Craftsmanship.

It’s a rare talent (and becoming rarer still when so many people are seduced by cheap, fragile and nasty knock-offs from China or Eastern Europe), and if we hold on to no other custom, craftsmanship is worth everything. To quote Oscar Wilde’s words from Lady Windermere’s Fan :

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

I know I’m always teetering dangerously close to the latter, but all I can say is:  guilty as charged.  Especially where beauty and craftsmanship are involved.

Poking Fun

Food & Drink, Mocking Furriners

I like the way this guy works:

Ben Reid, from England, recently spent a few weeks on holiday around Italy and learned that many locals were quite specific about their food.

The English man was constantly chastised for making ‘adjustments’ to his meals – such as dipping his croissant in coffee, and pouring water into his espresso.

Ben eventually started ‘trolling’ strangers with bizarre acts. 

However, the act that evoked the most condemnation was cutting spaghetti with scissors.

Two waiters actually went up to Ben and told him he ‘wasn’t allowed’ to consume his food like that.

‘You have to roll the pasta with your fork, you cannot cut it with scissors. People will think you’re an idiot,’ the waiter said, and then confiscated the scissors.

Brilliant.  I’m just surprised he wasn’t scolded for not having a glass of wine with his dinner.

I do the same kind of thing in Chinese restaurants by using a fork instead of chopsticks.  Let ’em sneer or roll their eyes, I don’t care.