Posh Outrage

You can imagine the scene, can’t you?

There I was, minding my own business, asking for a very simple birthday present when I was told, of all people, me, yes I know, that I wasn’t posh enough. The present in question was an afternoon with the very lovely Jeany Spark, an actress so lovely that I lost several pairs of eyes when watching her on my recent re-run of hilarious chortle-fest ‘Man Down’ because the loveliness overwhelmingly blinded me. I take eyes very seriously but I was willing to lose them for her.

So you can imagine my predicament, mainly because I have just explained the whole thing. I am not the kind of person who will take a glove slap in the face and walk away from it. With my trusty photographer in tow (that’ll be Master Reuben), I set out to show the world how posh I really am and when you see the results I expect you will know exactly what I mean.

Rather than clog the whole post up, I’ve used the modern facilities and supped the photos into an album which you should (should!) be able to view whenever you want.

Everything’s better (with an onion)

The world is pretty macked, you’ll note,
Sweet Petunia, help us turn the tide.
The simple truth that everything’s better
With an onion nestled by your side.

I faced a day of vigorous work,
I faced a mountain of calls and ‘mails,
An onion at home there, steady and strong,
A solution, yes, that never fails.

The doctor had some bad news for me,
He called me into his surgery,
Before he spoke, an onion in hand,
I threw it at his face so grand.
The onion won and he fell over,
Knocked out by my supernova,
A triumphant look amidst my brow,
I quipped so quick, “Who’s laughing now?”

Don’t feel too bad when you need to cook,
Don’t even give it a second look.
That onion is so glad to aide
When you need some bulk to your bolognaise.
It will titter up your stir-fry woes,
You’ll forget about your week-day lows.
Your arms will rise when you realise
The flavour it brings to your sad meat pies.

It’s the tonic you’ve been waiting for,
Your new best friend, your new amor,
The world is sweeter with an onion to hand,
Everything’s better and life is so grand.

Four Word Reviews: The Colour of My Love

Ah! Celine Dion. Sometimes the random albums that arrive on my doorstep are a bit of a mystery, but we all know Celine Dion. One of the most popular artists the world has ever known, shifting more than 200 million albums worldwide, she isn’t just one of the biggest selling English acts of all time (although, yes, she is), but she achieved that having only learned to speak English around the age of 20, four or five years before The Colour of My Love was released, and continued releasing French-language albums in between her English releases. She also speaks and performs songs in Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

What we have here is her second English language album, released in 1993, and the source of several of her biggest hits, The Colour of My Love.

Badvert

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Toffifee. It’s a sort of over-packaged nutty caramel confection that a distant relative might buy a grandparent for Christmas, or that might be the only product you recognise if you visit a German supermarket.

In a move common to all European confectionary when it’s advertised in the UK, Toffifee released a new TV advert a couple of months ago that has somehow made it on to the airwaves without anyone involved realising that it looks at least 30 years out of date. Presumably nobody involved in the entire campaign had any sense of irony.

This post isn’t really about anything other than my need to share with you just how naff the whole thing is.

A Breath of Fresh Beans: The hot deets.

The three of us have a podcast, it has a massive regular listenership of probably 4 people, us and Madge. But what do the stats say? Lets dig in and get all the important info on the podcasts thats literally taking up space on the internet…

How are people listening?

It seems that the most popular way people are enjoying the podcast is “Other”, with 5 listens in October, with the big hitters of ‘iTunes’, ‘Pocket Casts’ and ‘Overcast’ bringing up the rear. The ones that really stands out though are those people out there using all the modern tech to listen via ‘played in a new window’. Exciting stuff.

What are they listening to?

Well it appears that there are some classics in the line up that someone out there just cant get enough of. The run down of our “Top 10 Episodes of all time” reveals that our earlier (pre-Chris) episodes are the most popular, as are the last two ‘This way Ups’, which probably do feature Chris…

Episode	Listens
Episode 5: Bananarama Diorama	136
Episode 3: The Crystal Skulls	135
Episode 10: The trouble with wasps	130
Episode 11: Celebration Days	118
Episode 4: King William’s War	117
Episode 1: Your Mum Loves a Sexy Pony	116
Episode 2: Cheery Polar Bears	113
This Way Up: Episode 6	99
Episode 12: Queens	98
This Way Up: Episode 5	94

What else?

In other podcast news, I freshened up the feeds, with proper graphics and new names… names you say? Yes, because ‘This Way Up’ now has its own feed and graphic, at least on iTunes. You can find it be searching for… yes, you guessed it ‘This way up’. I know nobody will, and even we have already heard them all, but you know neatness and all that.

Down

There’s a button labelled “down”, but it’s not a lift. In fact the button appears to be attached to some sort of horn or flange.

Pressing the button must, therefore, do something down related using the flangehorn.

I concluded that a push of the button would result in large amounts of feathery duck down being sprayed out of the hornhole into my face.

I declined to push the button.

New Job: Font Specialist

A little birdy, or a small nest of birdies, told me that a good way to make money was not to embrace pyramid and get rich quick schemes but to design things called fonts and sell them for big bucks.

What are fonts though you may ask? It’s a good job I looked it up so you don’t have to because otherwise we’d both be here all day.

‘Fonts’ are the things that people use to show words on computers so when you’re reading it doesn’t look like a book and smell like an old person. Your eyes need books on a screen (i.e. the world net web) in order to cope with the modern world. Fonts are futuristic and sexy, they’re everywhere too. Look around you: check that shampoo bottle, whip out that business card from the tramp you met on the Underground, peruse the label of those trousers that don’t fit well and make you sit like Buster Keaton. They’re all there staring back at you. In fact by reading this post you have some font looking through your eyes and deep into your soul. This font is… *checks* bouncy. I’m not sure what it’s called. Arthur maybe?

So who makes these fonts then? You can’t make them in a factory like biscuits. It would be handy if you could ask some eggheads to whip up a fresh batch in a laboratory yet that still isn’t right. The only way you can create them is with a pen and paper.

I have been working all five minutes and have come up with three excellent examples of new fonts that will be available to purchase shortly after the unveiling of this post for the rather princely sum of £50,000.00 each. Let’s see what will be up for grabs:

Old Man Jones – have you ever wanted to write like an old giffer? Does your handwriting look too neat and young? What you need is Old Man Jones. It turns your typing into a lower-case, simplified version that practically everybody can read.
Doctor Scrawl – I was once told that my writing looked like a long squiggly line with some dots above it. With this in mind, and the notoriety of illegible words on doctor’s prescriptions, it was easy to mash the two together to make everything you write one long line of, “Eh?”
Future Robot Blim – the future is coming and it wants your fonts. Blast off into the distant year 2022 with this highly effective and high-tech biro-stolen-from-the-branch-of-your-local-bank look with a dash of pomposity and a sprinkle of cyberpunk finesse.

Thank you tiny avian friends for dropping this idea into my brain tub and filling my bank with delicious money.

Lending a Paw

If you’re going to do something nice you best do it standing like a titan.

After helping the doggos earlier on this year with my walk around my flat, which sounds about as strenuous as a trip to Waitrose, I have decided to further the cause and lend a paw to someone who needs my help.

This is Sunshine and he is a star in waiting.

For a blind breed of unknown origin, he has a whole lot of charisma at his disposal. Sunshine or “the Moose” as he has affectionately come to be known (nobody can remember who gave him the nickname although I am still adamant that it was me) claims to not be able to see out of either eye, a fact that still has not been proven. I have asked him several times and he refuses to answer the question.

With all this potential it seemed like a waste to let him hide in the shadows of obscurity so despite handing the task to Reuben over the summer holidays, the task of raising his social media profile has been passed to me. I have begun this with his own Twitter account for “hilarious” posts about doggo things and photos of him looking like a dog, something the internet goes CRAZY for I am reliably informed.

Comments such as, “you really need to get a girlfriend, Ian” and, “what are you doing with photos of my dog?” have been ignored because currently only I can see the greatness that has been under everyone’s noses.

I also feel obliged because, in a way, the Moose is my spirit animal in that he eats just as fast as I do and is forever looking for more things to eat. Who am I to ignore a fellow gluttonous brother? I have promised to myself not to let any of my horrendous toxic masculinity leak into his cheery disposition, nor any of the wonderful photos of his viso/volto. Trying to keep it under wraps has been very difficult especially with the sheer volume of packets of sugar that I keep downing all at the same time.

I gave him a swish Twitter handle and Twitter responded by giving us a pretty generic name. You can follow Sunshine at @TheMoos90645566 for all the moosing around you (that’s YOU) can handle.