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Caught red-handed

Uuuurrghhhh.... annoyance!  I was starting a blog entry that my wife (and others) would have found very witty and clever.  She appeared in the study and I purposely flicked away from the web-browser, to what I was supposed to be doing.  I prefer her to read these things when complete...

Only I didn't flick away - I hit Alt-F4 instead of Alt-Tab.  Duh.

After ten minutes of fiddling with what I was suposed to be working on, I cannot for the life of me remember what it was I was blogging about. 

Tourists driving through Wales

Two tourists were driving through Wales. At Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch they stopped for lunch and one of them asked the waitress, "Before we order, could you please settle an argument for us. Would you please pronounce where we are, very slowly."

The blonde waitress leaned over and said... "Burrrrr-guuurrrrr-Kiinnnngggg"

Out comes the tooth

Regular readers will know about my wife's sore tooth, first visit to the dentist in years (she hates them) and antibiotics he prescribed.  No, she's not a minger with bad teeth - they are actually quite good - however a wisdom tooth making an appearance has caused a few problems.

The heart of the problem - wisdom tooth from below rubbing against wisdom tooth from on high.  

The solution - remove the top one.  

The wonder of it all - in go pliers, dentist gives a wiggle, tooth is out. All over in five seconds.  Not at all like the episode of Huckleberry Finn and Friends where someone has a string joined to a tooth at one end and a door at the other.

The on-going dilemma though, is how should she remove seeds, etc., from her hole? 

Schoolkids speaking Klingon

One of the more peculiar things I notice in school is the interests some of the students have.  We have the usual suspects- football, fishing, farming, dancing, and so on.

There are a few teach-yourself language people - Japanese being the main one.  However, in the past ten minutes I overheard a row in...... Klingon.

That's the made-up language of Star Trek, that even most Trekkies don't bother with because it's way-off their scale of nerdiness.

Weird... still, at least they aren't smashing up phone boxes.

Books for a desert island.

If you were stuck on a desert island, what book would you bring?  If you can't be bothered to read my thoughts, please comment below anyway, with your choice.

A work colleague (hi, I know you are reading) has asked us this, in connection with World Book Day. In keeping with Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespere are supplied. Alas, we don't get to choose six records.

So the book - well, how do I choose? My wife would suggest any one of the dozens of unread volumes on my shelves - but I'd prefer to choose something I know I will enjoy, rather than something I get two pages into and toss aside (which I did last summer, with something I had for five or six years - my father in law managed a few pages more of the same book and gave up also).

First dilemma then - the fixed choices. Presumambly the original radio programme intended the 1612 Authorised Version of the Bible, with all the Thees, Thous and Begattings. Likewise, Shakespere in his original form is a triffle difficult to read imho, so, unless we can update the wording of those my optional extra will be a good dictionary. I'd actually look forward to this pair - reading the Bible in its proper order would be useful and I've never read Shakespere, apart from having him forced on me at school.

As for the other books... well, there's the enduring modern classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Though I'd maybe rather be greedy and go for a combined single-volume edition of all five in the trilogy. If I can have combined-volume works then maybe all dozen Poldarks would be an option: I'm on number five, and enjoying tremendously.

Then again, there's Carl Sagan's Contact, which I am looking forward to re-reading (probably this summer). If you saw the movie on TV recently, I have to tell you the book is far superior. Sagan is a genius at explaining really difficult things to the layman - I know there's no point trying to be as clever as him as it won't happen. It has so many interesting ideas, starting with our first high-powered TV broadcast and therefore first message to anyone on other planets, being the madman Hitler at the 1936 Olympics.

Or Bruchko? An often-read (by me, anyway) biography of a single white male, all alone in the jungle against stupidly large odds, convinced God wants him there. A stone-age tribe turn out to be expecting him and they are converted to Christ and western medicine. Or there's the Time Traveler's Wife - the wonderfully told and wonderfully original story of Henry who jumps around in time when stressed out and his beloved Clare who must wait for him. An Accident Waiting to Happen (Adrian White) was superb as well - mother goes AWOL, leaving small son and her recently-acquired boyfriend to look after each other.

There's a book of Alistair Cook's Letter to America transcripts I keep hopping in and out of, as is the book of sermons Preach the Word. I'm still reading the God Delusion and would recommend the response to Dawkin's earlier work - Dawkin's God - by Alister McGrath. A good encyclopaedia would be interesting - a 26 volume one would keep me happy while waiting for ships to pass by.

Oh the dilemma. Maybe I can have a 'luxury', as in the radio version. If John Major can have Lords' Cricket Ground, maybe I could have the British Library?

So, what would you bring?

Let me introduce you to Claire and Henry.

Today, for Henry, Claire is starts at 28 years old.  Later, she wil be 12 years old.
Henry is 30.

"Huh?" you say.  If you are saying "Huh?" you have obviously not read the Time Traveller's Wife (a Christmas present to me).  Lovely story, well told (though a bit sexy).

The basic premise is a young boy (Henry) wakes up to find himself in the future, for a couple of hours, then returns from whence he came.  At other points in the story, he jumps backwards.  He is a 'Chrono-Displaced Person' - a disability that throws him around in time.  As an adult, he gets to meet his long-dead mother and his not-yet-born teenage daughter.

This means for Clare, he first meets his wife when he is a grown man (standing naked in a field - his clothes don't go with him) and she is 9.  For him, he has known her adult self for ages at this stage.

It's a truly weird love story.  Henry bounces round in time, spending a lot of it with Clare who has to find him clothes from her parents' house.  When he turns up away from Clare, he has to beg, borrow, steal or simply mug people for clothes (they usually deserve it).  At their wedding, Henry leaps away (he can't help it - stress gives some people hives, while it him to leave his place in time).  Thankfully, an older Henry leaps backwards to the church, just in time.

Poor Henry.  Great read though.

Tony tax-mad Blair

As an 'environmental' measure, I have just recieved an email letting me know our holidays, outside the EU will now cost an extra £80 in flight-tax.

I have two words I'd like to say to Tony Blair, the second one being 'off'.

How will back-dating tax stop me flying?  Get the troops out of Iraq, then the treasury black-hole that needs these taxes might go away.  Hitting innocent families like this just makes me want to scream. 

Thank heavens we haven't a load of youngsters (at an extra £20 each way).

Current mood: Angry


I can't get no sleep...

Last night, around 1am.

Me: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Wife: are you sleeping?
Me: not now
Wife: ok
Me: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I awake a while later to blue moving lights

Me: what are you doing?
Wife: Using my phone to record you snoring
Phone: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Me: huh? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Wife: Do you want toast?
Me: What?!
Wife: I'm hungry
Me: Shut up
Wife: I don't know what's wrong
Me: Go to sleep
Wife: I can't
Me: JUST SLEEP
Wife: Don't be narky!
Me: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Wife: Can I read?
Me: go to the back room
Wife: can I read to get to sleep?
Me: if you go somewhere else and shut up
Wife: you're no fun
Me: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz