I recently converted back to Judaism from atheism, and I felt born again, Rejewvinated, you might say.
As part of my training I had to go to the Hebrew library, but I couldn't find the books I wanted because they hadn't converted to the Jewey Decimal system.
They did have some books about dinosaurs, that's all I could find, but only about the Jewrassic period.
Although one book about the Native Americans did make it in there, something about Jewronimo.
Anyways, as I was leaving, I saw a library guard chase a man outside, but once the man had left the grounds, the guard stopped. I asked him why, and he said it was outside his jewrisdiction.
The police came in carrying the man and asked the guard if it was the person who was stealing books. The guard said he was. Jewstice at last. Apparently he's up for trial by jewry.
Obviously none of this is true, but I felt I had to put that disclaimer on the end.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Friday, 24 September 2010
Rabbits
Two rabbits got married. I hear they're going on a bunnymoon.
A monk married a girl. I hear they're going on a nunnymoon.
Two bees got married. I he...Wait a minute!
...I've outstayed my welcome. The punnymoon period is over.
A monk married a girl. I hear they're going on a nunnymoon.
Two bees got married. I he...Wait a minute!
...I've outstayed my welcome. The punnymoon period is over.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Seating positions
Choosing your seat in an sort of theatre (Lecture, Movie, Operating ("Who are you?! Get that popcorn out of here!")) is always a nightmare. You come in, and a quick scan of the surroundings give you a pretty good idea of where to sit.
You don't want to over-commit. Too close to the front, and you're practically involved. Too far back, and you won't be able to see. If you're in a theatre to watch a play (Or other theatre-based activities, perhaps you're into contemporary dance. It's really up to you) you'll mill around half-heartedly somewhere in the middle, being forced into one row by a decisive family member or perhaps a particularly impatient passer-by, desperately trying to get to a seat before he is left to sit at the front, isolated and alone, like a dog left out in the rain, his eyes displaying unknowing disappointment. "What did I do wrong?" he seems to say. "What did I do to justify this torment?".
Or, worse, you could sit too far back. A nightmarish scenario. Perhaps the passer-by himself committed early to a row and this forced you back a row or two whilst you made up your mind. It's a scenario I can scarcely begin to imagine before shuddering in horror. All of a sudden you're struggling to see, and if you're in a class of any sort, the lecturer consigns you to the scrapheap of slacking failures.
So you've gone in and eventually sat down. You think it's a decent seat, perhaps 4 rows back. All of a sudden, from the other end (This is a dual-open row, a hasty decision to sit there can leave a man feeling overcome with remorse merely seconds later) comes a person whom it is unlikeable to sit next to. Perhaps he has a particularly pungent body odour. Perhaps he insists on using his phone. Perhaps he talks to you. I can only speculate on these matters.
Being as you are a person of class, it's too late to back out without being rude. The second you step into that row you are committed to a brief fling of a relationship with whomever you end up paired next to.
Speaking from personal experience, I was seated next to what I like to affectionately term a Querier, and in my less fond moments, describe as a shaved gibbon foolishly let into a class.
You know the type, of course, and it seems pointless and needless of me to elaborate, but for those of us who have not had the honour and privilege of having someone relentlessly interrupt a riveting lecture (In my particular example, Relativity and the effects it has. Your lectures may vary) with their self-involved "Look how clever I am" questions. They're mainly rhetorical, with an overarching theme of "I'm really trying hard and I'm clever!" which is almost specifically designed to make me go back to my flat with a sense of burning passion to undeniably thump him in the final exams, to serve him right for being such a brown-noser.
As it was, of course, the Querier usually sits at the front, so I felt relatively safe sitting as far away as possible from his usual location as I physically could without being dreadfully rude and sitting like a leper in the corner. Sadly, however, he sat next to me, and, being as I was fully-connected with the seat, to back out at such a late stage would have been nothing short of a social faux pas on a par with eating with your fork in your right hand. Perhaps even worse, as if such a thing is imaginable.
Then, as if such a thing would have even crossed your mind, he spent the majority of the lecture pretending he had friends by texting. "Dear Mum...", I imagine they all begin. To relieve the tedium of texting his mum with updates, he asked pointless questions (Largely about the Doppler effect with regard to light. The excitement got to me too.) and shuffled awkwardly in his seat, frustrating me to a degree.
However, the final coup de grace came only at the end of the lecture, when, whilst packing up, he asked me to move to allow him past. "Excuse me, could I please get out?" was precisely what he did not say. "Man," he opened, and my teeth ground gently. "Could I just squeeze past?" he muttered as his final pointless question. It was only with the greatest of self-restraint I found myself letting him past instead of shouting "You sat next to ME, you horrendous man." at him.
Anyways, I hope this tale of woe guides you in your seat choices. I know for certain I shan't risk it, and I hope you can learn from my experiences.
You don't want to over-commit. Too close to the front, and you're practically involved. Too far back, and you won't be able to see. If you're in a theatre to watch a play (Or other theatre-based activities, perhaps you're into contemporary dance. It's really up to you) you'll mill around half-heartedly somewhere in the middle, being forced into one row by a decisive family member or perhaps a particularly impatient passer-by, desperately trying to get to a seat before he is left to sit at the front, isolated and alone, like a dog left out in the rain, his eyes displaying unknowing disappointment. "What did I do wrong?" he seems to say. "What did I do to justify this torment?".
Or, worse, you could sit too far back. A nightmarish scenario. Perhaps the passer-by himself committed early to a row and this forced you back a row or two whilst you made up your mind. It's a scenario I can scarcely begin to imagine before shuddering in horror. All of a sudden you're struggling to see, and if you're in a class of any sort, the lecturer consigns you to the scrapheap of slacking failures.
So you've gone in and eventually sat down. You think it's a decent seat, perhaps 4 rows back. All of a sudden, from the other end (This is a dual-open row, a hasty decision to sit there can leave a man feeling overcome with remorse merely seconds later) comes a person whom it is unlikeable to sit next to. Perhaps he has a particularly pungent body odour. Perhaps he insists on using his phone. Perhaps he talks to you. I can only speculate on these matters.
Being as you are a person of class, it's too late to back out without being rude. The second you step into that row you are committed to a brief fling of a relationship with whomever you end up paired next to.
Speaking from personal experience, I was seated next to what I like to affectionately term a Querier, and in my less fond moments, describe as a shaved gibbon foolishly let into a class.
You know the type, of course, and it seems pointless and needless of me to elaborate, but for those of us who have not had the honour and privilege of having someone relentlessly interrupt a riveting lecture (In my particular example, Relativity and the effects it has. Your lectures may vary) with their self-involved "Look how clever I am" questions. They're mainly rhetorical, with an overarching theme of "I'm really trying hard and I'm clever!" which is almost specifically designed to make me go back to my flat with a sense of burning passion to undeniably thump him in the final exams, to serve him right for being such a brown-noser.
As it was, of course, the Querier usually sits at the front, so I felt relatively safe sitting as far away as possible from his usual location as I physically could without being dreadfully rude and sitting like a leper in the corner. Sadly, however, he sat next to me, and, being as I was fully-connected with the seat, to back out at such a late stage would have been nothing short of a social faux pas on a par with eating with your fork in your right hand. Perhaps even worse, as if such a thing is imaginable.
Then, as if such a thing would have even crossed your mind, he spent the majority of the lecture pretending he had friends by texting. "Dear Mum...", I imagine they all begin. To relieve the tedium of texting his mum with updates, he asked pointless questions (Largely about the Doppler effect with regard to light. The excitement got to me too.) and shuffled awkwardly in his seat, frustrating me to a degree.
However, the final coup de grace came only at the end of the lecture, when, whilst packing up, he asked me to move to allow him past. "Excuse me, could I please get out?" was precisely what he did not say. "Man," he opened, and my teeth ground gently. "Could I just squeeze past?" he muttered as his final pointless question. It was only with the greatest of self-restraint I found myself letting him past instead of shouting "You sat next to ME, you horrendous man." at him.
Anyways, I hope this tale of woe guides you in your seat choices. I know for certain I shan't risk it, and I hope you can learn from my experiences.
Saturday, 11 September 2010
24 hour shopping
Since I have an almost unprecedented level of free time on my hands, now seems as good a time as any to turn my attention to 24 hour shopping. 24 hour shopping has been catering to insomniacs and the deranged as long as I can remember, so I opted to test the facilities on offer to me and go shopping at three am, because that's the kind of impulsive man I am.
Firstly, the place is eerily emptily. I felt less like a customer, and more like a half-hearted ghost haunting the place on a whim. Drifting silently through the empty aisles is a bizarrely disturbing experience. It's akin to that whole "What would you do if you were the last man on Earth?" hypothetical scenario, but instead of say, racing a trolley up and down the aisles, you just go gently mad and feel desperately alone. Still, in the interests of science, I wandered through the shop and collected my things, occasionally bumping into night-stockers, who completely ignored me (emphasising the ghost thing).
Having gathered everything I need (Beef mince and pastry; how very exotic), I trudged wearily along the checkouts till I found the one manned by the distinctly tired and disinterested woman, who idly scanned my things, but gave me a curious glance. "£3.20" she said, and with a cursory nod, I handed over the exact change (That's how I roll) and hauled my things away, leaving behind the silent, cavernous solitary isolation unit that was the 24 hour shop, the fluorescent lights combining to emit a glow of quite staggering mundaneness, lighting up the depressing pre-dawn world.
Ordinarily, this would have been the end of my little adventure, and I would have sauntered home listening to the squawking of seagulls, but on this occasion, being as it was three in the morning, I was accosted by a man who told me he had been fighting, and the police couldn't help him, and did I have 80 pence he could have. Generally, the correct response is "No. No I do not. Terribly sorry." and to continue, but since it was dark, I was catastrophically alone, and the man looked like asking for the money was merely a polite stage before getting the money by other means, I consented and generously donated 80 pence like a buffoon.
So! Shopping in the darkest and dreariest hours of the day. Highly un-recommended, unless you enjoy being completely alone in a huge, vast expanse of usually busy, but now unnervingly quiet shopping aisles, and you can budget extra money for the hazards of massive tattooed blokes asking you for it, in which case, it's ideal.
Firstly, the place is eerily emptily. I felt less like a customer, and more like a half-hearted ghost haunting the place on a whim. Drifting silently through the empty aisles is a bizarrely disturbing experience. It's akin to that whole "What would you do if you were the last man on Earth?" hypothetical scenario, but instead of say, racing a trolley up and down the aisles, you just go gently mad and feel desperately alone. Still, in the interests of science, I wandered through the shop and collected my things, occasionally bumping into night-stockers, who completely ignored me (emphasising the ghost thing).
Having gathered everything I need (Beef mince and pastry; how very exotic), I trudged wearily along the checkouts till I found the one manned by the distinctly tired and disinterested woman, who idly scanned my things, but gave me a curious glance. "£3.20" she said, and with a cursory nod, I handed over the exact change (That's how I roll) and hauled my things away, leaving behind the silent, cavernous solitary isolation unit that was the 24 hour shop, the fluorescent lights combining to emit a glow of quite staggering mundaneness, lighting up the depressing pre-dawn world.
Ordinarily, this would have been the end of my little adventure, and I would have sauntered home listening to the squawking of seagulls, but on this occasion, being as it was three in the morning, I was accosted by a man who told me he had been fighting, and the police couldn't help him, and did I have 80 pence he could have. Generally, the correct response is "No. No I do not. Terribly sorry." and to continue, but since it was dark, I was catastrophically alone, and the man looked like asking for the money was merely a polite stage before getting the money by other means, I consented and generously donated 80 pence like a buffoon.
So! Shopping in the darkest and dreariest hours of the day. Highly un-recommended, unless you enjoy being completely alone in a huge, vast expanse of usually busy, but now unnervingly quiet shopping aisles, and you can budget extra money for the hazards of massive tattooed blokes asking you for it, in which case, it's ideal.
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Beards
Beards. All the best paedophiles and serial murderers have them. Perhaps “best” is the wrong word, since it implies an air of moral authority that killings generally deprive you of. A better term, I suppose, would be “Most successful”. Obviously, I’m growing one, if only to show I don't pander to the whims of society and I am a maverick; doubtless enviable on many fronts except, it will quickly become apparent to strangers, for my ability to grow a beard.
You see, in keeping with my vaguely anachronistic life, my beard is faintly reminiscent of a late nineteenth century teenager desperately trying to emulate his father's illustrious beard, which, inevitably, wouldn't have looked out of place sitting on the face of Zeus himself. Sadly, my beard wouldn't look out of place in a news report about bodies found in a garden, but I persevere regardless with my wispy beard.
There’s good reason to persevere, though. After a certain point, you become ashamed to shave it off, as it’s almost an admission of beard failure. “I have shaved!” your clean, smooth face screams to the world at large. “I am unable to grow a beard. Pity me”. Those who saw your initial efforts will be forced to avert their gaze, and your distinct lack of beard will become an elephant in the room. Instead, I feel I have to endure it on the basis that “It’ll fill out!” and “It’s hard to see because it’s blonde”. I’m veritably a martyr to my beard now. It’s been 7 months. Months of hard beard-related work would be, literally, down the drain if I shaved.
So I haven’t shaved, and as such, I have a beard, of sorts. The whole thing is at best, patchy and asymmetric. At worst, it looks like a drunken child specially chosen for his inability to artistically create any sort of meaningful pattern has idly stapled clumps of hair to my face in the visual representation he thinks most represents chaos, only granting me the slightest of graces in ensuring I have sideburns on both sides.
And you know what? I'm glad. Because society has these weird little rules called social norms, which seem to restrict me in what I can and cannot do without appearing like an idle malingerer, or dangerously insane cretin. Fundamentally, these are good; I never think “Hey, I should go around naked!” but when society has this norm wrong, for example, when we eagerly adopt, say, a weird and obsessive addiction to celebrity culture, I cannot help but question it, much like how I started to question the association of facial hair with seedy 70s porn stars and paedophiles.
The social norm seems to be against beards, with people in positions of authority almost always being clean-shaven. In a sense, I’m taking back the beard from society’s norms, wrestling it away like the mischievous scamp I am, and giving it to the people. I am Prometheus, and the beard is my fire. Enjoy it mortals, for I am destined to be shamed at every shop visit for eternity. I’m doing this for you.Sunday, 8 August 2010
Household Tasks
Household chores. I am not a man notably inclined towards performing these simple day to day tasks, but sometimes on the whim of the moment, I like to spontaneously perform some. My glaring failings as a human being are never more notable than during these misguided efforts to look after myself to any degree.
1. Cooking
Surprisingly, this is my strong point. I have three dishes, mostly revolving around "Brown Mince, add sauce, add vegetable/pasta", but I have yet to physically cause harm to anyone, although a brief foray into sausages could have ended badly, but fortunately, I appeared to cook everything adequately in some sort of massive cumulative fluke, not unlike a man wandering into a bookies, throwing his money on the desk and saying "Accumulator for the next five races on any horse numbered 4, please" and winning.
2. Dishes
You'll rarely find someone with so experienced a hand as mine with regards to dishwashers. I have many years of practice under my belt and am now sufficiently honed at this task that I hardly ever send the crockery spiralling towards the unforgiving tiles to their shattering demise, spreading dangerous shards across the floor like glinting desert islands illustrating my failure, isolated in a sea of my despair. Hardly ever.
3. Cleaning
Tidiness is not a trait I am well-documented to possess, but despite this, I am pretty certain of where roughly 50% of my stuff is at any one time. Sadly, inevitably, anything I ever need is in the 50% I know is "Somewhere in my room", or even more ominously, I am certain it is "Just around here". Cut to footage of me rootling around in one corner of my hovel, whilst the object I need (Or more likely, desire. At some stage, I just need to accept I have lost my copy of Pokémon red, and it's never coming back.) glints gently in a completely different part of my room. For added hilarity, the object should be wildly incongruous with it's surroundings (My red hat, for example, highlighted against my distinctly blue walls) and should be directly behind me.
4. hoovering
Another strength provided I avoid stairs, which leave me so flummoxed I can only stare in bewilderment, with a blank middle-distance gaze. whilst hoovering, I hate stairs even more than the Daleks hate them, and they really hate stairs.
5. Bedmaking
This is my biggest failing. I recently returned from a camping holiday (Where I visited the delightful Cumberland Pencil Museum, all 3 rooms of it! I've seen the world's largest pencil. That's not a euphemism.) and, reasonably tired, attempted to make my own bed. All it involved was putting on a sheet. I eventually managed to do it, but the end result looked like it belonged in a collection of photographs from an early 60s experiment into training gibbons to perform basic household chores to free up housewives' time. Next to a picture of a gibbon standing between a pile of shattered dishes and a pile of excrement-covered laundry would be a photo of my bed (But it'd be in a surprisingly well hoovered room. Gibbons look like they'd take hoovering seriously). Any video footage of me making my bed wouldn't look out of place in a documentary about the heartbreaking effects of oxygen deprivation.
A round up of my total inability to perform even the basic of tasks and which surely document my inevitable slide towards living in what can only be described as a disgusting hovel. Still, onwards and upwards, eh?
1. Cooking
Surprisingly, this is my strong point. I have three dishes, mostly revolving around "Brown Mince, add sauce, add vegetable/pasta", but I have yet to physically cause harm to anyone, although a brief foray into sausages could have ended badly, but fortunately, I appeared to cook everything adequately in some sort of massive cumulative fluke, not unlike a man wandering into a bookies, throwing his money on the desk and saying "Accumulator for the next five races on any horse numbered 4, please" and winning.
2. Dishes
You'll rarely find someone with so experienced a hand as mine with regards to dishwashers. I have many years of practice under my belt and am now sufficiently honed at this task that I hardly ever send the crockery spiralling towards the unforgiving tiles to their shattering demise, spreading dangerous shards across the floor like glinting desert islands illustrating my failure, isolated in a sea of my despair. Hardly ever.
3. Cleaning
Tidiness is not a trait I am well-documented to possess, but despite this, I am pretty certain of where roughly 50% of my stuff is at any one time. Sadly, inevitably, anything I ever need is in the 50% I know is "Somewhere in my room", or even more ominously, I am certain it is "Just around here". Cut to footage of me rootling around in one corner of my hovel, whilst the object I need (Or more likely, desire. At some stage, I just need to accept I have lost my copy of Pokémon red, and it's never coming back.) glints gently in a completely different part of my room. For added hilarity, the object should be wildly incongruous with it's surroundings (My red hat, for example, highlighted against my distinctly blue walls) and should be directly behind me.
4. hoovering
Another strength provided I avoid stairs, which leave me so flummoxed I can only stare in bewilderment, with a blank middle-distance gaze. whilst hoovering, I hate stairs even more than the Daleks hate them, and they really hate stairs.
5. Bedmaking
This is my biggest failing. I recently returned from a camping holiday (Where I visited the delightful Cumberland Pencil Museum, all 3 rooms of it! I've seen the world's largest pencil. That's not a euphemism.) and, reasonably tired, attempted to make my own bed. All it involved was putting on a sheet. I eventually managed to do it, but the end result looked like it belonged in a collection of photographs from an early 60s experiment into training gibbons to perform basic household chores to free up housewives' time. Next to a picture of a gibbon standing between a pile of shattered dishes and a pile of excrement-covered laundry would be a photo of my bed (But it'd be in a surprisingly well hoovered room. Gibbons look like they'd take hoovering seriously). Any video footage of me making my bed wouldn't look out of place in a documentary about the heartbreaking effects of oxygen deprivation.
A round up of my total inability to perform even the basic of tasks and which surely document my inevitable slide towards living in what can only be described as a disgusting hovel. Still, onwards and upwards, eh?
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Penguin Island
I sat down this morning with a heady mix of excitement and delirium, as I had just received news of a television show. Now, I didn’t have anything other than the title to go on, so I frantically searched iPlayer while idly imagining what the show would entail. After all, a name like Penguin Island inspires this in any reasonable, right-thinking man.
Disappointingly, however, Penguin Island, is not, as the name suggests, a blatant rip-off of the Orwell classic, Animal Farm, except this time with Penguins and a complex allegory about the pitfalls of a capitalist society, with Gordon Brown played by a penguin named Scott, Lehman Brothers bank played by a group of daredevil risk-taking penguins named, as a troupe, The Wings, and society’s gradual demise and collapse represented by the slow melting of the icecaps. Nor is it, in fact, a brief Batman-based spin-off, finally giving Penguin his own television show with an island he has bought with his copious amounts of crime money, only to be foiled by Batman in his plans to hold Russian missiles just off the coast of America (Oh, a Cuban missile crisis joke? How topical am I?). It is, sadly, neither of these things, and is in actuality, a show about penguins. Who live on an island. Tell me if you can’t follow this.
Anyways, the very precisely and teutonically accurately named Penguin Island is ostensibly a show about penguins, but to be honest, it’s taken the Meerkat Manor (Remember those heady days of television greatness?) approach, and turned it to penguins. So it’s a curious penguin-based soap opera as narrated by Rolf Harris, who is casually sidling in to sully David Attenborough’s unmatched excellence (And by extension, the BBC’s Natural History unit) with his voiceovers.
It features a star-studded cast, of Rocky, a typical telegenic penguin. And Spike, who is near identical. And Bluey, who is also pretty similar. And Sheila, a doppelganger for EVERY OTHER PENGUIN. Seriously, if you’re not a pretty serious devotee of penguins like Marg, who looks after the orphaned penguins and tells them apart by name (“Every penguin I’ve ever met has a different character, heehee”), you will just have to trust Rolf Harris’ voiceover. Which, being as it’s Rolf Harris, I would trust less than the Yorkshire Ripper upon finding him in a specialist hammer shop going “I’ll need four. I’m going to do a lot of…nailing”.
So we see Spike have sex with Tash. And then Tash, filthy little penguin slag that she is, runs off to frolic with Rocky. A fight ensues between Rocky and Spike, and after a certain point Tash comes out and starts hitting them both. This could only be more British if a bloke called Brian was holding Rocky back going “Leave ‘im Rocky! He ain’t wurf it!” They couldn’t make the show more like a soap opera if they revealed one of the penguins was an alcoholic mate-beating penguin.
This is a soap opera masquerading as a documentary, much like the penguin is a bird masquerading as a fish. However, while the penguin pulls this off with admirable aplomb, the docu-soap is atrocious.
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Another simplistic joke
I saw a stationery coup the other day. Apparently they were going to overthrow the ruler. Of course, with a coup, there's no margin for error.
Shush, I'm funny, okay. I get it, you're laughing WITH me. Good.
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Victorian Pharmacy
In a week dominated by the past in the form of a Take That reunion which finally incorporated Robbie Williams, you may remember, between tear-soaked heartbreak of Take That's initial collapse, and the pure ecstacy they surely brought to your life, that in the dark and distant past, I wrote about the spectacular "Victorian Farm Christmas". Well, if you're sitting there eager with delight, going "I love that show, but I'm not sure how much more we can examine the farming process from the Victorian era, having covered hay to the fullest possible extent", I have some tremendous news for you! There's a spin-off show, "Victorian Farm..acy", about, surprisingly, a Victorian Pharmacy.
This show follows the adventures of, and I fear you may have leapt ahead of me and worked out what this is already, but in the interests of stragglers, I'll continue. It's about a Victorian pharmacy, opened by Patrick Stewart lookalike and sometime television presenter Professor of pharmacology, Nick Barber, and his able and willing assistant, Tom Quick. Also featuring loosely is someone called Ruth, whom, I must admit, I took a pretty bitter dislike to after about ten seconds, pretty much solely for her love of inane chitter chatter. Thus, I spent the whole show making callous jokes about her appearance to myself, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and all that malarkey. But you're pondering to yourself, pontificating as follows, no doubt "The name Ruth rings a very faint bell somewhere in the deepest recesses of my nightmares. Ruth...Ruth...Good LORD!" you exclaim internally, only letting a single gasp indicate your true emotion to the world at large. "Could this be the very same Ruth from the initial Victorian Farm, brought in to make the change utterly seamless?" you doubtless wonder. Well, I have some simply stellar news for you, curiously avid Ruth-fans, she's back!
I jest, of course, there's no way you could possibly remember Ruth from that long ago, but perhaps, just PERHAPS, you're thinking "What I really loved about Victorian Farm was that everyone, regardless of location or pifflingly tiny role in the show, was fully clad in period dress. I think the show as a whole would suffer if they were to even let the facade that this were not reality fall for even the briefest of moments, and the magical element of suspense would surely have been cast asunder like a wax-plaster stuck to an elderly gentleman's chest". You may possibly be reminiscing about those great times of elaborate outfits. Luckily, they're still consistently in place, so you may stop reminiscing and savour their glory in televisual magnificence once more.
Anyways, onto the actual documentary element of the show, which seemed to focus on "Person A comes into shop exhibiting symptoms. Pharmacist recommends treatment, but then says "We can't use that, obviously, because it has opium in it". Interesting alternative treatment is made up on camera. It is given to the patient. The patient is then largely unhealed at the end of the show.", which was repeated for four people, all with varying degrees of cough. What I really ended up with in terms of knowledge from the show was "Victorians all had coughs, and as a cure, they all took opium. Also, they thought cold water was good for you".
That said, I alarmingly really enjoyed it. Perhaps it was Ruth having cold water poured down her back by a delightfully malicious old man, who was practically giggling as he did it. Maybe it was the vague seeping in of weird little facts and knowledge (Worcester Sauce is fermented and was initially a medicine, for example) that I now have in my head for Victorian-era medicine based dinner party anecdotes. "That's a funny story about Leeches, Dave, but you know they were used as medicine in the 19th century? So was Worcester sauce! No, really!" and, from there, inevitably, the dinner party is a roaring success.
Anyways, drink from the bowl of documentaries. It might taste horrible, but unlike most of the medicines on display in the show, it really is good for you.
This show follows the adventures of, and I fear you may have leapt ahead of me and worked out what this is already, but in the interests of stragglers, I'll continue. It's about a Victorian pharmacy, opened by Patrick Stewart lookalike and sometime television presenter Professor of pharmacology, Nick Barber, and his able and willing assistant, Tom Quick. Also featuring loosely is someone called Ruth, whom, I must admit, I took a pretty bitter dislike to after about ten seconds, pretty much solely for her love of inane chitter chatter. Thus, I spent the whole show making callous jokes about her appearance to myself, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and all that malarkey. But you're pondering to yourself, pontificating as follows, no doubt "The name Ruth rings a very faint bell somewhere in the deepest recesses of my nightmares. Ruth...Ruth...Good LORD!" you exclaim internally, only letting a single gasp indicate your true emotion to the world at large. "Could this be the very same Ruth from the initial Victorian Farm, brought in to make the change utterly seamless?" you doubtless wonder. Well, I have some simply stellar news for you, curiously avid Ruth-fans, she's back!
I jest, of course, there's no way you could possibly remember Ruth from that long ago, but perhaps, just PERHAPS, you're thinking "What I really loved about Victorian Farm was that everyone, regardless of location or pifflingly tiny role in the show, was fully clad in period dress. I think the show as a whole would suffer if they were to even let the facade that this were not reality fall for even the briefest of moments, and the magical element of suspense would surely have been cast asunder like a wax-plaster stuck to an elderly gentleman's chest". You may possibly be reminiscing about those great times of elaborate outfits. Luckily, they're still consistently in place, so you may stop reminiscing and savour their glory in televisual magnificence once more.
Anyways, onto the actual documentary element of the show, which seemed to focus on "Person A comes into shop exhibiting symptoms. Pharmacist recommends treatment, but then says "We can't use that, obviously, because it has opium in it". Interesting alternative treatment is made up on camera. It is given to the patient. The patient is then largely unhealed at the end of the show.", which was repeated for four people, all with varying degrees of cough. What I really ended up with in terms of knowledge from the show was "Victorians all had coughs, and as a cure, they all took opium. Also, they thought cold water was good for you".
That said, I alarmingly really enjoyed it. Perhaps it was Ruth having cold water poured down her back by a delightfully malicious old man, who was practically giggling as he did it. Maybe it was the vague seeping in of weird little facts and knowledge (Worcester Sauce is fermented and was initially a medicine, for example) that I now have in my head for Victorian-era medicine based dinner party anecdotes. "That's a funny story about Leeches, Dave, but you know they were used as medicine in the 19th century? So was Worcester sauce! No, really!" and, from there, inevitably, the dinner party is a roaring success.
Anyways, drink from the bowl of documentaries. It might taste horrible, but unlike most of the medicines on display in the show, it really is good for you.
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Caterpillars
All caterpillars start out on the straight and narrow, but fall into bad ways and develop a cocoon habit.
A great pun for David Attenborough to use in his next documentary, no doubt. Okay, fine, I like it though, so he can take it or leave it. Probably leave it to be honest. It's up to you, David (I assume he searches the internet for puns based around possibly feature animals. He's got to think outside the fox. Another one for him.
A great pun for David Attenborough to use in his next documentary, no doubt. Okay, fine, I like it though, so he can take it or leave it. Probably leave it to be honest. It's up to you, David (I assume he searches the internet for puns based around possibly feature animals. He's got to think outside the fox. Another one for him.
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