ITEM: Occasionally I get mocked on account of my preference for cheap and cheerful food from Iceland, and so last weekend while out shopping with my sister I gave in to temptation and purchased some ‘upmarket’ beefburgers. And very nice they looked too, if the pictures on the box were to be believed.
Also on the box were statements like ‘Suitable for home freezing’ and ‘Cook from frozen’. However there wasn’t anything to the effect that, once frozen you need a crowbar to get the bloody things apart.
I banged them on the plate, and the plate broke. I tried to force a knife between them so that they could be pried apart, and the knife slipped and cut my thumb. Still frozen together I placed them in the frying pan on the theory that once heated a bit they’d be easy to separate, but when I tried they still clung tenaciously together until eventually breaking up into unsightly pink clumps.
Disgusted, I threw them in the bin and had a tuna fish salad instead.
You don’t have to deal with this sort of nonsense when you shop at Iceland and so in future I shall stick with what I know and love, and if anybody has the temerity to give me grief about it then I still have two boulder burgers that I can chuck at their head.
ITEM: Staying with the shopping theme, I really don’t care all that much about clothes and see fashion as an attempt to make us buy stuff we don’t actually want. If I find something I like then I tend to ‘buy in bulk’, hence raptures upon discovering in QD four t-shirts for £5. Contrarily, a lady friend was distraught at the possibility that people might think I was wearing the same clobber each and every day.
Is this, I wonder, peculiar to my friend and I, or a more general man/woman thing?
ITEM: So, fess up, who’s read and/or enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey?
I haven’t myself and probably not going to, but I’m left wondering why a book that just about everybody agrees is badly written has enjoyed such phenomenal success while it’s eluded titles that deal with similar material in a more literary manner such as Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire, 3 by Julie Hilden, Vox and The Fermata by Nicholson Baker (all highly recommended, especially the last one). PR, hype, fortunate timing, or is it that sometimes literary merit is an impediment to popular acclaim?
Regardless of the book’s virtues, or lack thereof, I love this spoof video:-
ITEM: Staying with the erotica/bad writing theme, earlier today I was delighted to discover a typo in an Amazon review referencing ‘carnival knowledge’.
I wonder if it involves dressing up as a clown for sex – if nothing else, for some of us it would take the sting out of being laughed at.
ITEM: I had a dream in which I visited an amusement park with the actress Jessica Biel, and I was following her around like a little puppy on a lead, just staring at JB’s rather splendid butt and not really paying any attention to where we were going, which was how I ended up perched on the end of a ladder that seemed to be several hundred feet up in the air. To take the ride, you had to leave the ladder and crawl out onto a narrow metal platform then squeeze into a log canoe. Jessica had accomplished this with ease, but I was frozen with terror, and then the ladder started to come away from the metal frame to which it was attached, which was when I woke up. Probably just as well in the circumstances.
ITEM: I’m deeply depressed by the absence of anything that might conceivably answer to the epithet ‘summer’. Here in Norfolk, all we get is rain, rain and more rain, and I understand the rest of the country is in a similar, if not worse, predicament.
Apparently this is all down to the Gulf Stream being in the wrong place and as a result not blowing in the hot air that we would customarily receive at this time of year.
An absence of hot air, you say.
Obviously Dave needs to call a snap General Election. That’ll put things to rights.
ITEM: Mysteries of science – never mind all this Higg’s Boson malarkey. What I want to know is why, when you put it in the freezer, milk turns the colour of urine?
If you can’t tell me that Mr Stephen Hawking, with all your degrees and your high IQ, then I’m afraid you’re not a lot of good to me.
Hi, Pete. Love the confusion of “carnival knowledge.” This sort of mix-up always suggests to me language from a charming alternate universe. A woman who used to work for Mary told her once about a man she had been attracted to, but it hadn’t worked out: “We were like two sheep passing in the night.”
Hi Rob. Years ago when I worked at an insurance company we used to keep a list of goofs like this. My moment of greatest ignominy, when talking about somebody who’d joined the police force, was ‘he’s training in the use of fireworks’.
Samuel Delany in his “Neveryon” series referenced an alien book that had been translated, only they weren’t quite sure of some words, and so it had an entirely different meaning depending which options you went with.
I’d like to see somebody attempt something similar with a story – one where the typos tell a different, but still valid, story to the ‘correct’ text. I’m not sure it could be done, or at least done well, and unfortunately I’m just too damned lazy to attempt it myself
I shop at Asda thus I have no right to mock your Iceland burgers. (Plus I never duck in time)
Carnival knowledge! I love it. Well, not literally.
Cate, even if you do mock, you’re relatively safe from thrown burgers – I can throw hard and I can throw accurately, but never both at the same time (my darts career came to an untimely end in my teens when I put an arrow in somebody’s foot).
And, having dwelled on the subject rather more than is healthy for me, I’m wondering if carnival knowledge is something a coulrophiliac would have.