rhino what you mean

A couple of further notes following the last three book posts: firstly while I'd had The Pope's Rhinoceros knocking around on my shelves for a decade or so (I don't specifically remember where I got hold of it but it may well have been on one of my strictly rationed trips to Hay-on-Wye), I first became aware of its existence some years earlier, during my participation in a truck safari in southern Africa in early 2000, something I see I mentioned towards the end of this 2008 post and even made reference to my travelling companions' selected reading matter. Well, while I'm pretty sure I recall working through several, the only book I specifically remember reading during the trip was John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces, something that earned me some hipster points with the two young American guys who were also on the truck.

There was also a compartment on the truck containing quite a few other paperback books, presumably partly populated by discarded offerings from previous travellers and offered up for the entertainment of current ones, on the understanding that you'd put your chosen book back when you'd finished with it. One of the books in here was an imposing tome called The Pope's Rhinoceros (the same paperback edition that I have) and I recall a conversation ensued about whether anyone had read it and whether someone might have a crack at it during the trip. Since it is literally impossible that I would embark on a trip such as this and fail to bring enough books, I passed at the time.

Back to the two young American guys, who were called Mike and Andy (no surnames for reasons which will become apparent in a minute) - during the last phase of our three-week trip which comprised a few nights in Victoria Falls they decided to cap the trip off by purchasing a load of assorted drugs. They'd managed to get hold of some LSD, and deeming just dropping it in the truck or while gazing on the thunderous watery magnificence of Victoria Falls from the usual viewing platforms to be a bit tame, decided to drop it so that it kicked in just as they were doing a bungee jump off the Victoria Falls Bridge which connects Zimbabwe and Zambia. I recall being in a local restaurant for a communal meal that evening and Andy, still evidently experiencing some after-effects, spending most of the meal under the table having a whispered conversation with a small carved wooden hippopotamus. 

They also managed to get hold of some weed, and since they had a plane to catch a day before ours, and since we'd partaken of some the night before, the stash ended up in the side pocket of my day-pack in order for us to make use of it round the campfire the following night. It was only on arrival at Victoria Falls airport to catch a plane to Harare that I remembered I still had the remains in my rucksack, whereupon I did a frantic dash for a secluded dustbin to empty it out and blow into the pocket to try and clear any last few telltale seeds and leaf fragments. There is of course a Sliding Doors-style alternate version of my subsequent life where I forgot to do this, got nabbed by the sniffer dogs once we encountered the less lax security regime at Harare airport, and was either summarily shot or spent the next 21 years in a Zimbabwean prison.

Secondly. an odd occurrence relating to the next book on the list, No Great Mischief. In a seemingly unrelated sequence of events, I first became aware of the existence of Canadian comic Norm MacDonald only about six months ago after following some random series of YouTube links. He was one of those guys who was extremely well-regarded by his peers, the sort of guy who'd be described as "the comedian's comedian" or something like that, which basically translates as: not as rich and famous as many of his contemporaries. Many of the YouTube clips (and there are a lot) feature him either being comically disruptive or spinning lengthy shaggy-dog stories on various late-night US talk shows, this being a loosely-structured format that seemed to suit him pretty well, a bit like his UK contemporary Sean Lock. Another thing MacDonald and Lock have in common is that they died this year, both relatively young (Lock was 58, MacDonald 61).

Needless to say after his five minutes of fond remembrance Norm MacDonald has subsequently been Milkshake Duck-ed. I'm certainly not dismissing the allegations, but I guess (just as with To Have And Have Not) you have to find a way of acknowledging that stuff without tipping someone's entire oeuvre down the memory hole. You would certainly have to say, for instance, that he seems to have taken a consistently dim view of female comedians and comedy writers. But, and I don't want to lay a heavy CANCEL CULTURE trip on you here, people contain multitudes, and it would be a shame to only admit to the public sphere those who have never expressed a single thought that deviated from current acceptable cultural norms (pun sort of intended). 

Anyway, back to the book link: in the course of the Jacques de Gautier/Jacques de Gatineau/baby dolphin story MacDonald mentioned his fluidly-named protagonist being from "Timiskaming, Quebec". His rambling, off-the-cuff style of delivery makes it sound as if that was a name he'd just made up on the spot, but not only is it a real place, it coincidentally features in a passage towards the end of No Great Mischief that I read no more than a day or two after first seeing the clip. 

here you go. coincidence? OR IS IT?!!???! the answer, as always, is yes pic.twitter.com/NHWu5EpE4T

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 15, 2021

anatomy of a (joke) murder

As I'm sure most of you know, Twitter, in addition to being a hive of scum and villainy, has its own little unwritten rules and points of etiquette that change and mutate every few minutes, so that however constantly plugged-in you are, you'll always be a few steps behind. Well, I say "unwritten", but of course someone somewhere is probably documenting them (pointlessly, since it'll be instantly out of date) in an epic multi-tweet thread right now.

Anyway, my specific point here is this: those of us who tweet tweet about lots of different things, from HEYYYY HOW ABOUT THAT LOCAL SPORTS TEAM to OMG TRUMP IS GOING TO LITERALLY INCINERATE US ALL to HERE ARE SOME CUTE CAT GIFS. Also, from time to time we might want to share a joke of our own devising, in a throwaway sort of way, as if tossing out a witticism down the pub. Trouble is, a throwaway gag down the pub floats away on the ether and is gone, whereas unless you've got some very specific account settings on the go (or go around specifically deleting individual tweets) your tweet is going to be hanging around FOR EVER, or at least until Donald Trump gets us all incinerated and we revert to bashing each others' heads in with rocks for entertainment.

So let's say that there's a thing going on in the news, and you think to yourself: if we were discussing this in the pub I'd lob a gag in here, cos I've just thought of one. But I'm sitting at my desk in my pants, so perhaps a tweet will be more appropriate. But should I check to see if it's an original joke? I don't want to be accused of joke-theft; similarly while I don't expect to be immediately given my own radio show on the basis of a single tweet I don't want everyone moaning about me being LIKE THE GAZILLIONTH PERSON to do that gag this morning. But, equally, you don't want to spend an hour obsessively Googling to see if anyone's done the gag, because a) that's an hour that could be spent doing other stuff and it is JUST A JOKE after all and b) you'll inevitably find at the end of that process that you would have been first if you'd just bashed a tweet straight out, but now that you've spent an hour fannying about LIKE A GAZILLION PEOPLE have done it.

Case in point: the rather humorous lettuce shortage this week that everyone who pretends to like salad pretended to give two shits about before waddling out and picking up a KFC. The idea of it being Europe-wide triggered a synaptic thing in my gagular cortex, and I tweeted the following:

the Europe-wide #lettuce crisis reminds us how much we have in common with our EU neighbours. That's why I voted Romaine. #boomtish #euref

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2017

I immediately followed this up with a bit of faux-nonchalant weaselly arse-covering, as follows:

I expect it's been done. the secret, as always, is not to bother checking. #twitskillz

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2017

I thought no more of it until someone re-tweeted the following a bit later the same day:

THIS EUROPEAN LETTUCE SHORTAGE IS EXACTLY WHY I VOTED ROMAINE

— Castaignede (@Castaignede) February 3, 2017

So I thought: I wonder how many other people had the same idea? Turns out there were quite a few, most of them earlier than me, with the caveat that Twitter's time-stamping of tweets is a bit confusing.

This wouldn't have happed if people voted romaine #lettucecrisis #lettuce

— Burgonista (@CorbynFactCheck) February 3, 2017

Shortage of lettuce driving prices up in supermarkets. If only we'd voted Romaine

— Louise J (@Lweez_J) February 3, 2017

#lettuce rationing?
This is why I voted romaine

— Tommy Ettling (@maldoror84) February 3, 2017

Maybe there wouldn't be a shortage of iceberg lettuce in the UK if we'd voted ROMAINE.. #Lettuce. #VegCrisis. pic.twitter.com/6PFWcnH1TO

— Jamie Hough (@jmehough) February 3, 2017

All of these people can go fuck themselves, though, as they're as guilty of plagiarising stale jokes as I am. Check out these tweets from during the EU referendum campaign back in May and June 2016.

Lettuce consider the #EUref. Vote leaf or romaine? pic.twitter.com/vq1fP5vUku

— James Doeser (@jamesdoeser) May 18, 2016

Don’t lettuce leaf the EU. VOTE ROMAINE! #voteremain #EUreferendum #remain #Romaine pic.twitter.com/5JXQiB2LIt

— Common (@common_bar) June 22, 2016

Romaine leaves. The entire EU referendum debate in a lettuce. pic.twitter.com/YoLJFZH5l6

— Tom Hamilton (@thhamilton) May 22, 2016

Is that the first time that particular joke was done? Well, in relation to the UK possibly leaving the EU, very possibly. But in a more general sense, the Remain/Romaine pun must have been done countless times before. Really this is a more general variation on the old non-Twitter-specific conundrum: who makes up jokes? We all know lots, but how many of those did we make up? Probably none. I suppose there's some value here in distinguishing between one-off punnery and properly-constructed jokes, though as always there's not a bright and well-defined line separating the two concepts. In fact this (i.e. where do non-groany/punny jokes come from) is essentially the premise of the Isaac Asimov short story Jokester, which I have in the early-1970s collection Earth Is Room Enough (as also mentioned here).

As always when talking about jokes it's worth repeating the old one about how deconstructing jokes is a bit like deconstructing your cat: you might learn something of interest but the cat will never be quite the same afterwards. As if to illustrate the point, I've no idea who thought that one up either.

and a beaver biryani for the wife

This came through the door while we were away earlier in the week. I promise you I have not digitally manipulated this image in any way - well, beyond a bit of cropping and resizing anyway.

Now the word "Tarka" may well have some meaning I'm not aware of - Google Translate offers no assistance in any of the obvious languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu. Historically most Indian restaurants in the UK have been run by people from Sylhet, which is in what is now Bangladesh, and Google Translate doesn't specifically offer a Sylheti option, but it's apparently quite similar to Bengali, so it probably wouldn't have helped anyway.

If you're labouring through this in a fug of bafflement, let me help you out: the reason this is funny is that there is a well-known joke that goes as follows:

Waiter (imagine something a bit like this): And what can I get you sir?
Customer: I'd like a Chicken Tarka, please.
Waiter: Chicken.....Tarka?
Customer: Chicken Tarka.
Waiter: So.....Chicken Tarka.
Customer: Yes.
Waiter: So....Chicken Tarka. Chicken Tarka?
Customer: Chicken Tarka.
[Note that you can continue in this vein for as long as you think your audience will put up with it before proceeding to the punchline]
Waiter: So, just to recap: Chicken Tarka.
Customer: That's right.
Waiter: Are you sure you don't mean Chicken Tikka, sir?
Customer: Ah, no, you see, it's like Chicken Tikka, but it's a little otter.

Boom and indeed tish. There is even a recipe for Chicken Tarka online, which is doubly delicious, firstly because it all looks very nice, and secondly because the blog author seems to have missed the joke entirely. The answer to your next question is yes, they do appear to be American.

Just to spoil the joke a bit, it is of course true that there is a dish known as Tarka Dhal, and indeed it appears on the Tarka's menu just as it does on pretty much every other Indian restaurant's. This interesting Guardian article reckons that the "tarka" bit is "a mix of spices fried in oil or ghee until sizzling and aromatic". Which to be fair, sounds nicer than eating an otter anyway.

ja, beyerhund das oder die flipperwaldt gershput

Sure enough, after my previous partial Pythonic recollection, here it is. Click to enlarge, if you need to. It's from the second book, and the "it" in question is the much-hyped Page 71.

Obviously I can't mention Python and Nazis in the same blog post without linking to the North Minehead by-election sketch, or indeed the World's Funniest Joke sketch.

what do you call an Irish double-glazing salesman?

Here are two jokes. I'd like you to give me your opinion on them. First, joke number 1:

Q: What do you call an Indian cloakroom attendant?
A: Mahatma Coat

You can probably see where this is going. Now, joke number 2:

Q: What do you call a Scottish cloakroom attendant?
A: Angus McCoatup

Now, what I'd like you to do is to explain which of those jokes is racist. Take your time. Your options are:

a) joke 1
b) joke 2
c) both
d) neither

Of course this isn't something I've just plucked out of the air; joke 1 (with a small variation which I'll come to in a minute) is the one that recently got David Jason into trouble after he told it on Christian O'Connell's radio show.

Generally deconstructing humour to see how it works is a pretty pointless exercise. It's very much like deconstructing your cat to see how it works - you might learn something useful, but that particular cat will never be quite the same again. However, I think it's worth pursuing a bit here, at least to the extent of observing that both of the jokes above work in exactly the same way, i.e. by making a fairly facile pun out of what an outsider might deem to be a typical name for someone from the country in question.

Back to the pop quiz above - clearly c) and d) are logically consistent positions to hold. I suspect b) is an opinion that would be held by very few except the odd rabid Scottish nationalist. If you're going to go for a) you've got three options open to you as I see it, and they are:

• argue that David Jason's mis-telling of the joke by using the word "Pakistani" instead of "Indian" (Mahatma being a Sanskrit word denoting a figure of great veneration and respect, like, most famously, Gandhi) is indicative of an unthinking racism of the "they all look the same to me" variety - the implication therefore being that the version as written above would not be considered racist
• argue that the apparent misuse of "Mahatma" as a given name rather than a title is indicative of racism - the implication being that everyone who refers to "Mahatma Gandhi" in that way is guilty of the same thing, however respectful the context
• argue that although the two jokes are identically structured, the background context of abuse, colonial occupation and repression of Asian countries by Westerners makes it unacceptable to apply it in this way; again, McGlashan might disagree

My preference is for option d), and for everyone to just chill out a bit.

For further deconstruction of quasi-humorous material as presented by David Jason, here's Stewart Lee (from the excellent new series Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle) with a lengthy rant on the subject of the Del Boy falling through the bar clip from Only Fools And Horses.

And if you haven't already heard the joke referenced in the title of this blog post, the punchline is: Paddy O'Doors. Yes, you've rumbled me - I am a racist. You bog-trotting shamrock-munching toothless ginger kneecapping terrorist bastards.

commandment #11: thou shalt not take the piss

Firstly: no reading this until you've ploughed through the tedious ranting in my last post. Promise now? OK.

After all that you'll be wanting some entertainment - well, you'll be glad to hear there are plenty of amusing internet-based cartoons available that don't conflict with your unswerving and monomaniacal commitment to radical atheism.


There you go. That was pretty good, wasn't it? More in similar vein available here, including some from the brilliant Jesus And Mo, which is well worth a permanent sidebar link, I think. Try this one for size:

the web site you seek; cannot be located but; countless more exist

See what you miss if you don't pay attention?

Haiku have a 5-7-5 structure, in terms of syllables per line - most people know that, myself included. But have you ever considered the metric structure of a limerick? Assuming that you're going to exclude the smart-arsed mucking around with the form of ones like this:

There was a young man from Peru
Whose limericks stopped at line two

- or its counterpart:

There was a young man from Verdun

- then your orthodox limerick has an 8-8-5-5-8 structure. That's 34 syllables. Skip back to the top and count the syllables in a haiku. That's right, 17. So one has twice the syllables of the other. Take that idea to its logical conclusion and you get this. Genius. On such leaps of intuition and creative thinking is modern civilisation built.

On an unconnected topic, I ordered a couple of bike accessories from the excellent people at Wiggle the other day. Now there may be a time in a Briton's life where the American usage of the word "fanny" ceases to be a source of sniggering amusement, but I certainly haven't reached it yet, and frankly I hope I never do. Click the image for a bigger version (of the word "fanny", among other things), as always.

And finally, while we're sniggering away to ourselves, here's those filthy haiku and limericks you were wanting.

he's short, he's fat, he's got a spotty back, Jeffrey Archer

Here's the internet as a force for good again. Yes, I know, there's still an awful lot of naked women doing all manner of eye-watering things with root vegetables, but still. Actually, I say "awful" - in fact some of it's fantastic. But anyway.

Time was if you wanted to construct a completely fictitious past for yourself, you could probably get away with it if you were brass-necked and brazen enough about it all, just because of the sheer time and effort involved in anyone checking up on you. Fat insane fraudster and loony religion-inventor L. Ron Hubbard is a good example. Jeffrey Archer is a more recent one - it was only when he started getting involved in juicy liaisons with prostitutes that people (Michael Crick, most persistently) started checking up on all the other stuff like whether he'd actually been to Oxford University and various other stuff.

Trouble is, in this age of mass media and the internet, anyone can check up on pretty much anything, relatively easily. So if you're inclined to make something up, especially if you're in the public eye, think carefully. Advice that Heather Mills would have been well advised to heed before concocting various bullshit stories about being kidnapped as a child and being recommended for a peerage by a mysterious "Lord MacDonald", not to mention omitting to mention her former career as a nude model in, hem hem, "educational" videos. Did she really think nobody would check? The brief but highly entertaining hatchet-job McCartney v McCartney: The Ex Files on ITV1 the other night told the full sorry tale. I have to confess to a certain amount of sympathy for Heather Mills - in a divorce dispute with everyone's favourite cuddly mop-top multimillionaire professional Scouser there was no mystery as to whose side the public would be on - but she does seem to have lost her marbles a bit lately.

Hillary Clinton finds herself in a similar position at the moment - I have no idea what posessed her to go off on a tangent about dodging sniper bullets on a trip to Bosnia in 1996, but she surely can't have imagined that no-one would dig up some film, or at the very least some contemporary newspaper articles, to show that she'd made the whole thing up. I suspect Bill taught her everything she knows.

As I always say, honesty really is the best policy. Not particularly for moral reasons (though obviously there is that aspect too) but just for purely lazy and utilitarian reasons. If you lie you instantly have to maintain two versions of reality in your head, and remember which one you've fed to which people. Not only that but someone, somewhere, will check up on you. Obviously if you can avoid committing share fraud, having numerous affairs, consorting with prostitutes and persuading people to lie about it for you in court, that helps as well. To recycle an old Archer joke: I saw Jeffrey Archer lying in the street yesterday. Well, he was in the street, I just assume he was lying. Boom boom.

One corollary of all this is that it would be almost impossible for someone like Frank Abagnale (subject of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, also on TV a few nights ago) to get away with what he did even once, let alone repeatedly for five years. Which isn't to say there are no longer opportunities for fraud, just that your fraudster is more likely to be sitting in his bedroom fiddling with a computer than jetting around the world on Pan Am getting serviced by stewardesses.

Just so I'm not accused of being less than even-handed in my treatment of the Democratic presidential candidates, here's the Hitch getting a good head of steam up about Barack Obama's nutty religious mentor.

bangin' 'toons

I'm mildly suspicious of grown men (and women, though, let's be honest, it is almost exclusively men) who read comic books, however adult-themed these books might claim to be, and however hysterically they might clamour to be categorised as "graphic novels" instead. So it's no use getting all Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman on my ass, it's not going to change my mind. I have similar sentiments regarding adults reading Harry Potter books as well, but I'll skip over that topic for a moment, mainly as I'm trying to keep this post relatively short and rambling-free as it's a sunny day outside and I want to get out in it.

My point, such as it is, is that while I disdain the cartoon form as a medium for great literary works, it is perfect for making short sharp satirical points. That's why most newspapers carry single-frame political cartoons on their leader pages, plus the odd multi-frame series like Steve Bell's If... (which I've never really "got") and Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury.

It's reassuring that these still have the power to cause shock and outrage, as Dave Brown of the Independent did a couple of years ago with his cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies. Not to mention the storm in the Islamic community over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad (which I choose not to reproduce here partly out of a craven desire not to be fatwah-ed, but mainly because they're just not particularly funny - the greatest cartoon crime of all).

If any of these people ever saw Tim Kreider's work, specifically the series The Pain, When Will It End?, they might very well have some sort of seizure. And they should see it, because if there were any justice in the world, this guy would be the most famous cartoonist out there. He's a firm believer that no subject should be off-limits to humour and satire, a sentiment with which I profoundly agree. This means plenty of cartoons on such diverse subjects as sex, religion, Nazism, science, religion, the Holocaust, body piercing, and the cartoonist's own secret fantasies. Oh, and the ex-planet Pluto. It really is all tremendous stuff, and illustrates an important truth - stupid people are just depressing, while highly articulate and intelligent people (please do read the comments after the cartoons) pretending to be dumb are funny. It's not fair, but there it is. I also like the way Kreider caricatures himself (possibly unintentionally) as Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons after a radical haircut.

the Tao without a gherkin on top is not the true Tao

Joke of the day: a Buddhist monk goes into a burger shop and says: "Make me one with everything."

Well I like it.