Probably neither

Darn it.

My beloved cracked.com stole my idea.

And expanded on it.
And made it funnier.

I don't know whether to applaud or sue.

"And then I dropped a stitch!"

Take two people who are intelligent, witty and outgoing. Both can tell an amusing story to a crowd with ease and have everyone laughing. Both can conjure up quips and one-liners on the run in a conversation by reading the situation and understanding the rules of humour and good timing.
One is male and one is female.

Why is the male then referred to, and remembered as, "a funny guy", and the female is always "Crazy!"?

I know the answer, it's a rhetorical question: it's because we still, as a society, fear and mistrust intelligent, outgoing females. Look at the etymology of the word "hysterical". Essentially, having a womb was thought to make you insane. This meant that hysterectomies were originally performed to treat female insanity - which itself was a very wide umbrella.

By the early 20th Century, women were allowed to use this word for "crazy" for occasions which were "funny". This was becoming necessary because as (white) women were slowly being allowed to vote and drive, this put them within earshot and they would, inevitably, do this "laughing" thing.
So "hysterical" needed to remain in broad use because it was difficult to tell whether a woman was laughing because she had heard a joke about about washing or embroidery or some such or if it was because she was just crazy as clown-shit and needed her womb removed.
Obviously, being too simple to actually be involved in the sophisticated world of adult male humour, women were not performing the same action as men when something was amusing. The very thought! Thus was the modern usage of "hysterical" born (there's some of that sophisticated male humour we were just discussing).

So remember girls, next time you're laughing at something, be careful, or you'll find yourself straight-jacketed and organ-robbed quicker than you can say 'bum-trumpet'.

And remember, everyone else: next time you think fondly about a female who you find witty and outgoing, are you thinking of her as "funny" or "just so crazy!"

Roll again

I have always played Trivial Pursuits. It's just one of those things we did as a family (after mum had been coerced into it); like going on holiday and reading books at the table. I always have quite fond memories of it because it was never too competitive and we always played it at Xmas with nice, family-friendly rules. For example: if no-one knew the answer to the question, then you got to have another one, and so on.

Subsequently, I'm a real drag to play with, because I'm either remembering answers from the last time I played or appearing condescending for trying to ask people a different question from the impossible one they've been confronted with. It's a curious game because it either makes you appear more knowledgeable than you are because you can remember which city hosted the 1972 Olympic Games, or makes you feel much dumber than you are because you didn't know which shoe Maxwell Smart used for his Shoe Phone, the left or right.

The game has players moving a piece around a board, landing on different coloured squares and being asked trivial questions from a stack of cards. The questions are related to the six different colours of the squares they land on (blue = geography, yellow = history, etc). When you land on a large square, one for each colour, and answer the question correctly, you are given a little plastic piece of pie which you slot into your piece. When you have collected all six pieces, you make your way to the centre of the board and are then asked a question of the opposition’s choosing from the next question card. Answer correctly, win the game.

Sit back and I’ll tell you a tale of deviousness and wrath.

My dear old grandfather is, like me, competitive. However, I’m competitive for fun and can’t really take the idea of winning all that seriously. This, I believe, is because the all consuming drive to crush and destroy has been diluted through generations. I sometimes wonder what great-grandad would have been like with a table-tennis bat in hand. Or a pistol.

One night Grandad, Grandma, my dad and an old family friend, Brian*, who lectures in psychology were playing Trivial Pursuits. The game went back and forth, wine was drunk, questions were asked and answered. Finally, Grandad collected all of his pies and made it to the centre of the board. Brian plucked a question card from the box and, together with Dad and Grandma, poured over the six choices of question to ask.

“He’ll know that one … he’ll know the one …” So goes the final question decision. Finally, they set upon a question that everyone was sure even Grandad, with his long life experience and passion for working things out, wouldn’t be able to answer. The question went like this (and I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of the question will be clear):

“What,” asked Brian in a friendly, encouraging manner “did John Smith drive across the United States in 17 days in 1919?”

“I can work it out,” said Grandad. The thing that’s worth knowing about Trivial Pursuits is that many of the questions aren’t just random pieces of information plucked from encyclopedias and books of sporting statistics. Sometimes it is possible to make an educated guess and be correct. A question with a seemingly impossible numeric answer, eg. ‘How many kinds of blood platelets does a caterpillar have?’ won’t have any answer higher than 2 because no-one could be expected to be a caterpillar expert and so the obvious, easy answer will often be the actual answer. These questions are designed to be guessed at like this, so that when the guesser (and often the asker) gets over the initial puzzlement brought about by such a strange question, there is a great deal of satisfaction in saying “I dunno … 1?” and being absolutely correct.

Some questions, however, are beyond this kind of reasoning and require you to actually know what Babe Ruth’s real first name was (George) or when the Berlin Wall came down (1989).

“I can work it out,” repeated Grandad, after the other three pointed out that they sincerely doubted that he could and should just give up in the face of such a tricky question.

“No! It must be something like a mode of transport at that time …” and away he went, Brian acting as a sounding board for his musings and calculations.

“Okay, so it could have been a steam train, they had those in 1919 … but he wouldn’t have gotten one all the way across the states …”

“That’s true,” Brian would reply, glancing discreetly at the answer in his palm so as not to put Grandad off.

“Not a car, too obvious … a bike’s too quick … a bicycle too slow …”

“A skateboard?” Brian would suggest.

“No, too early,” mused Grandad.

After a while the booing and calls for time-up grew in volume, but Grandad would not be swayed. He could get this. If everyone would just keep quiet and let him think.

“You’re not gonna get it, Dad,” moaned my father.

“Give it up!” cried Grandma.

He ignored those and many other calls as the evening wore on. Victory was at both hand and stake. Everyone could bloody well keep their mouths shut. Even Brian stopped ‘helping’ after that.

Finally, after a good thirty or so minutes of solid thought, determination and abuse, he had narrowed it down to two things: In 1919, John Smith had driven across America either a) steam-powered car (as a stunt) or b) a hot air balloon (because, with the right wind, 17 days seemed about the correct time).

“Which is it?” asked Brian, encouragingly tapping the real answer on the thin rectangle of cardboard still in his hand.

Grandad furrowed his much-furrowed brow. “It’s not a hot air balloon, because, technically, you don’t drive them.”

“Really?”

“Yep. It’s a steam-powered car!” Victory!

Brian looked at the card. Dad and Grandma watched.

“Nope.”

“What? It’s gotta be!”

“Nope. Wrong.”

“Well what is it then?”

“A golf ball.”

And that is why I do enjoy Trivial Pursuits.

***

GTH - Point to neil for wishful thinking.

I would be so proud if I turned out like my dad.

Do you really think I would have asked for a 12-inch pianist?

Team Franzy: Another cry for help. I am compiling a joke book for children 12 and under. I require 300 (yes, three HUNDRED) suitable jokes. Having looked through much of the literature surrounding the topic (ie. my old joke books) I have discovered that 12-year-olds don't really have a lot of jokes published in them with swearing, sexual references or whimsy based around various moral and ethical crimes. These are the only jokes that my brain seems to retain. Observe:

What's Salmon Rushdie's next book going to be called?
Buddha, You Fat Fuck!

The others I can't even bear to type out (however, meet me in person and I will regale you with them all! The 28-year-old joke, the sushi joke, the baby jokes and the famous Feminist Light Bulb zinger!)

So, I call to you, dearest readers, friends and weirdos coming across this page by entering "what is anchovies fishthesis proposal" and "marbles tombolla" into various search engines, tell me your jokes. Tell me them all. Dredge your memories and drill your dads. The best joke will win a copy of the joke book when/if it gets published (looking good at this stage).

***

GTH - River steals the point from Jono with the beautiful (and well-guessed) metaphor for my painful yoking to the desk of research. Neil gets a raised eyebrow for the hairy nipple/lumpy breast.
The photo is of me (of course) on holiday in Cairns. It was taken about an hour or so after a long Blue Bottle jellyfish tentacle wrapped itself around my neck while I was snorkelling. THE single most painful experience of my life. Flaming razor-blades across the throat most accurately describes the sensation. But I would still take that over a year of stressing out about my proposal. There's no steroid cream for the research heeby-jeebies.

That reminds me of the time ....

A while ago Audrey tagged me in a meme that asked you to think of ten things that you hate about people. Not being a particularly hateful person, I found it reasonably difficult and petered out after five.
Well, I've thought of a new one:

6. Bad storytellers.
I'm pretty tired, so I'll probably regret writing this, but there it is. My secret shame. And it's not getting better with age. I thought I could hold this one in and prevent causing awkwardness among pretty much everyone who knows me who might have a story to tell me in the future (don't worry - I've got some soothing words for you folks later), but I've just read a published young adult novel that I am to review that was literally the worst book I have ever read. Laughably, hysterically awful. And that got me angry about storytelling in general. There are a few things that steam my hams* about bad storytelling, and here they are:
The Number One bad story telling sin is when the punchline is "And it was so funny!" If you told the story, minus that last bit, and your audience isn't laughing, it wasn't funny and you're a liar. You know when you tell a joke, and then have to explain it? Same principle. I used to go out with this girl, most of whose stories ended with: "And it was just fantastic," followed by a reassuring nod. Rest assured that the just-related experience founded none of my dumbness.
Number Two is when stories are too fucking long. When the story turns into a biography, just finish the page you're on and pass the conversation stick to the next person.
Number Three is best illustrated by the surprisingly-lacklustre-of-late Toothpaste for Dinner.

I think this little cartoon shows a story-telling situation that is almost on par with possibly the worst story telling crime out there: recounting your dreams. At least with drug stories, there is the possibility that the person you're talking to will remember the happier times they've had on drugs and will be able to recall them while you explain in great detail how you thought the bean bag was hugging you with ants. Telling someone your dreams, however, is just as useful to everybody's further meaningful existence as stopping a complete stranger in the street and reciting a random string of letters at them.
Number Four on Franzy's Whining List of Storytelling Sins are the words "He/She/They then proceeded to..." followed by some vaguely foolish activity. This is a technique usually employed by people not used to public speaking, but who have been forced to recount an episode that was whimsical at the time and to people who were present or familiar with those present in front of a large gathering of people of varying dispositions and tolerances for the words 'penis', 'urinate' and 'raunchy'. It's actually not a bad thing, but it gets up my toff nose.

I am guilty of all of the above offences. I've encouraged people to react in appropriate ways when I've finished telling a story that didn't gain a reaction. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I carry on stories until the last person has fallen asleep. I've told meaningful, heart-felt, hilarious, life-changing drug stories and, being a dreamer of epic dreams, I've recounted entire hallucinatory journeys to whoever was around. I have then proceeded to stand up in front of a large crowd of people I only half know and attempt to win them over with pseudo-courtroom-speak.

Cue soothing words: And you should as well. Tell your stories. Don't be afraid. If it's interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone, eventually. The point is to practise. Tell them over again, in different ways to different people. Emphasise the bits that people like and skip the bits where they start sending "Get me outta here" texts to their friends in front of you.
Maybe ease up on the dream reports, though.

*reference?

***
GTH - The points to the last entry go to Deadly Trently who correctly identified the place, the various timbers, the world's coolest shirt brand, its place of purchase and the settings of the watch. Well done, Hop-a-long.

New competition on this post's GTH: The winner is whoever guesses the most book titles in the picture.

Only a gig ... that poor little mite

I know it's el Crappo to basically just lift web content straight off of other sites like boingboing and The Age, but this video is worth a bit of a post.



This one, however, I found all by myself