Funniest Fringe jokes – 2017 update

2018
Winner: Adam Rowe: “Working at the Jobcentre has to be a tense job – knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”

2017
Winner: Ken Cheng: “I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.”
My favourites:
Andy Field: “I like to imagine the guy who invented the umbrella was going to call it the ‘brella’. But he hesitated.”
Ed Byrne: “I have two boys, 5 and 6. We’re no good at naming things in our house.”
Alasdair Beckett-King: “Whenever someone says, ‘I don’t believe in coincidences’, I say, ‘Oh my God, me neither!'”

2016
Winner: Masai Graham: “My dad has suggested that I register for a donor card. He’s a man after my own heart.”
My favourites:
Stuart Mitchell: “Why is it old people say “there’s no place like home”, yet when you put them in one…”
Gary Delaney: “I often confuse Americans and Canadians. By using long words.”
Zoe Lyons: “I’ll tell you what’s unnatural in the eyes of God. Contact lenses.”

2015
Winner: Darren Walsh: “I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans free.”
My favourites:
Dave Green: “If I could take just one thing to a desert island I probably wouldn’t go.”
Ally Houston: “Let me tell you a little about myself. It’s a reflexive pronoun that means ‘me’.”
(Also from BBC readers’ comments, No 62: “People complain about autocorrect but it’s helpful 99% of the titties.”)

2014
Winner: Tim Vine: “I’ve decided to sell my Hoover… well, it was just collecting dust.”

2013
Winner: Rob Auton: “I heard a rumour that Cadbury is bringing out an oriental chocolate bar. Could be a Chinese Wispa.”
My favourites:
Alfie Moore: “I’m in a same-sex marriage… the sex is always the same.”
Tim Vine: “My friend told me he was going to a fancy dress party as an Italian island. I said to him ‘Don’t be Sicily’.”
Marcus Brigstocke: “You know you are fat when you hug a child and it gets lost.”

2012
Winner: Stewart Francis: “You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks.” (This doesn’t seem funny to me even after finding out on the Web who Posh and Beck are.)
My favourites:
Will Marsh: “I was raised as an only child, which really annoyed my sister.”
George Ryegold: “Pornography is often frowned upon, but that’s only because I’m concentrating.”

2011
Winner: Nick Helm: “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
My favourites:
Matt Kirshen: “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”
Alan Sharp: “I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.”
DeAnne Smith: “My friend died doing what he loved … Heroin.”
(But perhaps the joker of the year should have been a David Copp, a tourist complaining that his children, upon encountering crates od dead crabs and fish in the harbour of Ilfracombe, Devon, “were quite distressed by it”.)

2010
Winner: Tim Vine: “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”

2009
Winner: Dan Antopolski: “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”
My favourites:
Paddy Lennox: “I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: ‘This could be interesting’.”
Simon Brodkin: “I started so many fights at my school – I had that attention-deficit disorder. So I didn’t finish a lot of them.”

 

Some stuff is stronger

One character in Per Wahlöö’s Uppdraget says that for some people, cynicism is a prerequisite for existence. Generally I’m pretty good at it, but certain things are stronger than me.

Like The Wall by Pink Floyd. I’ve seen it for the first time when I was still in my teens, a few more times since then, but when I’ve watched it tonight after a couple of years, once again I couldn’t help getting highly emotional every now and then. When, for example, they sang

Hush now baby baby don’t you cry
Mama’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you
Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing
Mama’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm
Ooooh babe, ooooh babe, ooooh babe
Of course mama’s gonna help build the wall

I’ve almost drowned in self-pity. Still, a residue of cynicism reminded me that there must be (and must have been) lots of other people whose lives have been enormously damaged by too much parental love. And I watched the film through, despite several other successful attacks on my imperturbability. But I had to write this self-centered piece to shake the despair and anxiety off me.

I didn’t mean to say I regret having watched it again. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen, and after all, to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

 

Hunterian Art Gallery

What with one thing and another, I was getting stuck in a rut just like at the beginning of the previous year. But the spell is broken. One of my first shifts after the accident brought me to Tillicoultry and today I forced myself, instead of sitting at the laptop, to visit another place I had intended to see for months.

Call me a Philistine, but for all those Dutch masters, Whistlers, Scottish Colorists and so forth I liked best another Glasgow Boy painting. A fairly large one, which in reality looks much better than on a laptop screen.

James Paterson: Moniaive (1885).
© Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.

Not that there weren’t other good ones, for instance Alfred Sisley’s The Church of Moret-sur-Loing, Rainy Morning Weather; but only this Paterson forced me return and see it once again before I left. And it’s this Paterson I’ll be heading to if I find myself in the gallery again.

 

David Jones in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Sometimes it’s hard to argue with gay marriage opponents because their logic, if so it may be called, is simply incomprehensible. An outstanding example from the recent months is the approach of David Jones, the Secretary of State for Wales. According to the BBC, he told the ITV “I regard marriage as an institution […] for the provision of a warm and safe environment for the upbringing of children, which is clearly something that two same-sex partners can’t do.” That would be a legitimate opinion, if the programme wasn’t followed by his statement “I did not say in the interview that same-sex partners should not adopt children and that is not my view.” In other words, Mr Hatter Jones has no problem with a gay couple bringing children up in an unsafe environment, as long as their union isn’t called a “marriage”. Go figure.

 

Facebook II

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog explaining why, despite spending almost all my spare time on the Net, I didn’t have a Facebook account and didn’t intend to create one. My arguments were that (1) I believed it was really all about using people’s data for marketing, (2) it didn’t have a single feature I couldn’t get in better quality elsewhere, (3) it was too pervasive and too dominant with all the dangers this entailed and (4) I didn’t have time to follow yet another website.

The pervasiveness means I can’t avoid coming across its being mentioned every now and then; usually something reinforcing my conviction that as far as I’m concerned, Facebook simply sucks. For instance the Rushdie affair, disclosing their determination to decide what should people call themselves. Or, contrarily, the Instagram scandal, showing that they wouldn’t mind selling your photos to somebody else for advertising. And so on.

Recently they unveiled a software sort of turning an Android phone into a Facebook one. I don’t think the privacy worries are well grounded: you’re already sacrificing your privacy by having a smartphone and being on Facebook to such an extent that their combination can hardly do much more damage. But it’s just another proof that they and I live in different universes. I simply don’t see how is the application supposed to be useful to anybody – except those for whom food is synonymous with McDonald’s and Internet with Facebook.

 

À propos of minimum pricing

“Just look at the figures. In the 1960s, we were drinking 160 litres each a year and weren’t taking any pills. Today we consume 80 million packets of anti-depressants, and wine sales are collapsing. Wine is the subtlest, most civilised, most noble of anti-depressants. But look at our villages. The village bar has gone, replaced by a pharmacy.”

Denis Saverot, editor, La Revue des Vins de France
(source: BBC)

 

Spelling reforms

It’s no secret that the English orthography is complicated and full of inconsistencies. This leads to occasional calls for its reform: some would like to see it more phonetic, others would like the rules loosened to permit more alternative spellings. They usually sound tolerably reasonable until they start giving examples, after which it is easy for those in favour of keeping the status quo to pick up a handful of the most objectionable ones and use these to deride the whole concept.

Both sides are driven by laziness. Supporters of a spelling reform are motivated by being too lazy (or accepting others as too lazy) to learn those complicated rules and inconsistencies. Opponents are motivated by being too lazy to unlearn them and learn a large new set instead.

In the meantime, a spelling reform or even revolution is quietly happening with the help of information technology. You may be a stickler yourself, but you can hardly avoid noticing the multitudes of people who can’t spell “properly”, and of those who obviously don’t even bother to try. Some entirely ignore punctuation (except for smileys), some treat apostrophes more like an ornamental than an orthographic feature, some naïvely rely on spellcheckers and so on. Some even obviously misspell intentionally because it makes them feel they are “cool”. Sticklers are naturally horrified.

But that’s the way of a living language. Just like some spoken words and grammatical structures become obsolete, others change, yet others survive unchanged and new ones appear, so do spellings. The more so nowadays, when even people who would, twenty years ago, only read their tabloid and maybe write a few Christmas postcards, happily mail, text, post, comment, tweet… Which is the basic problem for any spelling reform: whatever it proposes, for most people it would either go too far or not enough. And they would ignore it as best they could.

 

Invalid

It is often hard to remember a word if you have no reason to use it; once the concept the word describes becomes relevant to your life, it gets stuck in your memory quite effortlessly. Take ‘clavicle’, for example…

When I found a new job in December, one of its perks was that it involved travelling all over Scotland: in less than two months I visited and revisited places I otherwise wouldn’t get to any time soon, if ever. Everything comes at a price, though…

I love this country. Sometimes, however, it seems as though it is testing how strong my love for it is. As if it maintained that all life is in balance and if I want to get more out it, I must likewise pay more…

Sometimes being underprivileged may be a blessing in disguise: it can help you to put up with troubles more easily, because in a sense you are used to having to put up with things. Used to gritting your teeth and counting your blessings…

There are several ways to write this blog. The cold facts remain the same: last Friday, dozing off in the company van carrying me back from a job we had in Aberdeen, I was suddenly awoken by the vehicle’s swerving to and fro before it ended up on its side next to the A90 somewhere near Forfar. My memories of these few seconds are not too clear; what I do know is that there was certainly no film of my life reeling before my eyes; I simply thought “only not death, please, I can cope with anything else”. Oddly, I don’t think I was much afraid of death; my mind probably didn’t have enough time to really accept the possibility.

Anyway, the next thing I remember clearly is sitting on a window inside the overturned van with my elbows on my knees and my head hanging down. Unless I tried to move my left arm I felt hardly any pain, but breathing was a bit hard and my blood pressure was low. In fact, it felt like many a morning in the past when going into withdrawal after a proper booze-up. Once more my brain seemed to focus on imagining how nice it would be if I could get something to drink, preferably a dram of Scotch and a glass of water to chase it down, and reassuring itself that after so many cold turkeys I would be able to get by again.

People kept asking me whether I was all right and telling me that the ambulance was on the way. I felt a bit ashamed by so much attention, supposing I just had to rest for a while until my blood pressure rose again. At the moment I had no idea that the few drops of blood I saw on my shoes didn’t come from some superficial scratch but from a bleeding wound on my scalp which would later demand five stitches. When some five or ten minutes later the ambulance arrived, I was even able to stand up and walk out of the van’s tailgate by myself, helped by the claustrophobic fear that the alternative was waiting until they somehow took the van to pieces.

They sat me to the ambulance, did some first aid examination and treatment, so that I learned that the pain seemingly in my left arm or shoulder was actually a broken or dislocated collarbone, and drove me to Dundee’s Ninewells hospital, there to be presently joined by a workmate who had been sitting in front of me in the van. Bit by bit I had my scalp stitched, my trunk X-rayed, which confirmed the broken collarbone (or as the slip said clavicle) and discovered a small pneumotorax, had my left hand treated with plasters and steristrips and most of the blood washed away. Later they moved me to an adjacent ward, gave me a better meal than I’m used to preparing for myself, two or three coffees and some more painkillers.

I slept fairly well, considering, and after another X-ray in the morning they decided I was dischargeable. The company sent another van to pick me up, which was mighty convenient: I was positive I was bodily able to make it by train, but my jacket was torn so badly that I didn’t fancy using public transport wearing it. (My workmate had to undergo plastic surgery and to spend there another night, though in the long term he was luckier as all his organs stayed fully functional.)

One thing which kept surprising me was how easy it was to endure the waiting without getting impatient – and I couldn’t even smoke. Maybe I was, without realizing it, a bit in a shock to begin with, and later on in the ward the habit of always carrying my Kindle with me proved more provident than could have been previsaged. On the other hand, finding out I had lost my mobile was a bit dispiriting. Used as I am to loneliness, at that particular time I would have liked very much to text or even call Rob or Tòmas. (I thought up some really funny opening lines but couldn’t use them.) So it would seem only natural that when I finally got home, almost the first thing to do was to email the latter and after he took a photo of me, sling, scabs and all, attach it to an email to the former.

And so here I am one week later, slowly getting better, stuffing myself with painkillers, rather inconvenienced by being virtually one-handed, somewhat uncertain about financial matters, but all in all counting my blessings: I’m alive, there was nothing more serious than a broken bone and a partly deflated lung – and I’ve learned a new word or two. Which latest, nevertheless, I hope I won’t need to use too often in the future.

 

2012/13

What with one thing and another, I haven’t been posting much lately. Not being the New Year resolution type, I won’t even predict how much I’m going to post in the coming year. But in case anybody still does have this address RSS-ed, let me wish you a successful year 2013 – whatever goes for “successful” to you. Let’s hope the weather will be better than what it was in 2012; that we’ll see less attacks on freedom of speech, whether coming from the US, from the UK or anywhere else; that Catholics and others won’t suceed in their attacks against religious freedom for Quakers and others; indeed, that all kinds of Big Brothers will be reined in when attempting to trespass on human liberties.

Och, I’m not so naïve as not to realize that there will be, to quote an old Joan Baez song, “little victories and big defeats”. Yet that shouldn’t stop us from hoping and, when possible, trying for the best.

Bliadhna Mhath Ùr!

 

Kavanagh’s gd map of Alba

I have to admit that I’m a wee bit disappointed with some of the translations he apparently invented. There are indications that Ruchill comes from rough hill, while Kavanagh came up with An Ruadh Choille; I’m used from gd-wiki to Kelvin being Ceilbhinn, something Akerbeltz didn’t disagree with, while Kavanagh calls it Caol-Abhainn; Firhill isn’t there at all, which is understandable – but I would like it there. He also fails to place Cambuslang railway station between Rutherglen and Newton, having it on the “southern” line instead.

But all in all I don’t regret the buying. It’s good to know that when I want to look a gd placename on a map I can, it’s good to see Shetland where it is – and I hope that over time it’ll help me get some of the names stuck in my memory.

 

Mike Perham: Sailing the Dream (2)

Reading it the first time I was mostly interested in the story (all those happenings I had missed when following, sometimes not too carefully, his blog while he was still sailing), pleasantly surprised by the fact we in fact did have one thing in common (the “no immense problem but always some new minor bother” principle), fascinated by the motto (I still see Mike as one of the key people giving me a helpful prod to try and live my dream), towards the end somewhat disgusted by so much “positive thinking” – and I didn’t have the time and patience for attempting to make out what all those technical expressions meant.

This time round, having some idea about what I could expect, I was neither so amazed nor so vexed. I just enjoyed it as I would a letter from a friend, with all the inevitable imperfections. For my part, I persevered in diligently checking the nautical jargon, so except for a very few sentences or paragraphs I was able to make out what he was talking about even when describing some sailing procedure. I hope I’ll manage to put the glossary I was handwriting into an alphabetical text file and print it for… for when I read it for the third time. And yes, I should learn the most basic words by heart.

 

ETA 18/11/12: Forgot to proceed quotations last night. The news ones which made it:

It was raining, dark, cold and pretty miserable but I didn’t give a damn; it was my home and I loved it.

And of course the one I have written (following Vonnegut’s “fart-around” and Åkesson’s “Jomsvikings” ones) on the A4 sheet on the noticeboard above my desk even before finishing the book:

‘Yes, this is tough,’ I thought, ‘but I am tougher.’

 

Walter Scott: Quentin Durward

Apart from this very book read in a translation edited for children and/or youngsters, a translation of Ivanhoe which I began but soon put aside for good, and a translation of The Bride of Lammermoor I hardly remember anything about except reading it in a train, I had so far read by him Waverley, which I had to begin three times or more to finish it for the first time, and Rob Roy, which was so long-winded I was sometimes losing track of what’s going on at all. So it’s a bit of a surprise that I enjoyed this one – and enjoyed it for the “novel” rather than the “historical” aspect of it. The biggest surprise was that Scott occasionally tried to be humorous – and succeeded. It’s not good enough for reading again some day, but I did enjoy reading it once. And as a consequence I began reading Ivanhoe for the second time, this time in the original.

 

Translating personal names

Another example why “translating” people’s names should be avoided (unless there’s a very good reason for it, like themselves using two variants according to the context) has appeared in a recent BBC article. Talking about Jamie McGrigor, the title of the article translates the surname to an Griogarach and the body of the text as MacGriogair. Of course, both ways are usual in Gaelic, but using them for the same person in the same article looks like talking about a Seumas MacGilleAnndrais under the title Anderson’s request then stating “the question was raised by Seumas MacAndrew”.

 

Manach Albannach

Walking across the Uddingston railway bridge this morning in charming dark and fog reminding me of Robert Macaulay Stevenson it suddenly struck me that the way I’m blogging is a waste of time. All the interminable recycling of old posts into new summaries nobody probably reads anyway is just an immense waste of time.
And so are the frustrating (because never satisfactory) attempts at recording my current life with as much detail as I might later find useful yet at the same time without giving away too much to an accidental reader.
So I decided, on the spur of the moment, to start afresh (ay, yet again) and create a new blog. A private one, basically a journal, but with neither those perfunctory entries and details of entirely ordinary days nor the need to think about how much I can reveal.
I had the whole shift [7-3, scampi] to think about it and the decision holds. Starting on Friday, the first anniversary of my arrival in Glasgow, I’ll begin my journal here. (Up till then I’ll continue Leabhar manaich). I’ll keep In search of a thistle in case I wanted to post something publicly again, but don’t expect to do that too often, at least in the foreseeable future.
As regards the “auldies but goldies” I’m simply loathe to lose, the idea is to create yet another blog and repost them chronologically – but that blog will be private as well and the posts will go there from RTFs &c with only minimal editing of format and none of the texts. I certainly expect to be done with it in less than a year, hopefully much less than that.
Once set upon this train of thought I also resolved to drastically prune other laptop-related areas like emails, hard disk files &c.
In the end, the general idea has grown into this: my first year in Scotland was about getting settled here, in the most basic terms. The second year would be about significantly weakening my ties to the virtual world.
This should do. Any more detailed plans would probably turn out differently anyway.

 

Young swans

Saw for the first time (in Firhill Basin of course) swans turning from brown youngs to white adults, so that they were about half-white-half-brown: looked like a natural colouring (well it was natural but you know what I mean).

 

A’ choire

O chionn ghoirid, bha e a’ fàs na bu dhorra a’ choire dhealain san fhlat a chur air agus sa mhadainn seo, cha b’ urrainn dhomh an t-suidse a chur air idir. Ge-tà, chaidh mi dhan oifis cho tràth ‘s a thill mi as dèidh obair agus air an fheasgar bha coire ùr sa chidsin mu thràth. ‘S e tè airson dìreach aon liotair, seach 1.7L mar a bha againn roimhe, ach tha mi gu math riaraichte leamsa, oir bliadhna no dhà air ais, dh’fhanainn gus an dèanadh cuideigin eile rudeigin mu dheidhinn sin – theagamh a-chaoidh.

 

Dunkeld & Hermitage

I no longer remember what brought my attention to the existence of a place near Dunkeld called Hermitage, but as I intended to revisit the Cathedral in autumn anyway, it looked as a good idea to see them both – and it was.

As usual, I was postponing writing about the trip for so long (I went on Wed 19 Sep, more than a month ago) that the initial intention of mentioning every minor feature of the day ebbed away. Which is possibly just as well, because otherwise these blogs would probably usually take a week to write and an hour to read. Still, there are things I can’t let go unrecorded, if only for the fear of forgetting them if I do.

The first tree putting on autumn colours I noticed this year at Dunkeld Station. Down the staircase at the Dunkeld Bridge toll house to the tourist path. Touching the Tay, probably for the first time ever. Following the Braan to the A9 and the path among the pines. A fag on a bench near Black Linn Falls watching the clouds. The Falls from the bridge and from Ossian’s Hall of Mirrors. The Hermitage itself (ay, folly is a good word). The path over the field or meadow between the two gates and then the road to Rumbling Bridge. Back to Dunkeld Bridge and further up to Birnam Oak (& sycamore). Finally across the bridge to Atholl Park and the Cathedral.
 

A’ Chathair-eaglais thairis air an Tatha.

 
Where I sat for a while in the same last pew as I had two years ago, deciding I would immigrate, and one year ago, reporting I have and making an appointment with myself which I was fulfilling just now. I made another: preferably earlier but surely before becoming eligible for citizenship.

Some more time on a bench on the lawn between the kirk and the river. Back and past Birnam Hotel. Birnam Tower Buildings, fittingly occupied by an architectural firm. As far as St Mary’s Episcopal Church. A moment in Beatrix Potter Garden. Past the station into the woods and up to the bench there (breathing heavier this year) before returning to wait for my train back.
 

Sealladh-tìre Thaobh Thatha.

 
I had a splendid day. Tayside is the part of Scotland whose countryside I like the best, the weather was quite favourable, my favourite season was beginning, I was both visiting new places and revisiting old ones, I was meeting only as many people as to be able to soliloquize if I wanted to, there was a bit of a symbolic undertone to the trip… I can hardly imagine anything which could have made me enjoy it even more than I did. (Perhaps a companion, but that would be asking too much.)

And yes, as usual I wasted too much time taking photographs which it later took several hours to prune, title and upload to Flickr – but mostly I was just looking around and savouring it all.

 

LearnGaelic videos

I was pleased to find out that unlike with the 2-minute BBC Naidheachdan radio summaries, read so quickly that I can usually only follow the transcript with my eyes without having time to get the meaning of it, I could generally follow and understand these news videos even without switching on the English translation.

There’s one thing I rather miss on those pages though: an RSS button. Well, nothing is ever absolutely perfect.

 

Edinburgh Agreement

At night finally found the time to read what exactly Salmond and Cameron signed on Monday. Didn’t think it would be mentioned there at all, but it is, virtually settled: “9. [….] Both governments agree that all those entitled to vote in Scottish Parliamentary and local government elections should be able to vote in the referendum.” with a footnote stating for avoidance of doubt “The Scottish Parliamentary franchise enables British, Irish, qualifying Commonwealth citizens and European Union citizens resident in Scotland to vote.” I’m fucking voting man!

 

Clove oil

On Monday my right molars ached again; next day they forced me to visit an Uddingston pharmacy to buy some painkilling pills. Surprisingly, I was recommended a vial of “clove oil” instead. It turned out to be clove as in the dried spice rather than a clove of garlic (which latter is seen as a kind of panacea where I come from). Anyway, it worked: next day there was less pain and today virtually none. In addition, maybe this time I at last won’t presently forget when to use clove and when clover.