Thoughts for a Thursday Evening #7

ITEM: Today’s spam comes from the rather alarmingly named ‘Penis Growth Sample’, which is bad enough, but they then give their email the Subject line ‘Scare people with your tool today’.

I have a sneaking suspicion the guys who send these out never get laid.

ITEM: Staying with the penis theme (yes, it’s going to be that sort of post), the other evening a friend was telling me about a television programme she’d seen in which elephants mated, and she was mightily impressed with the male’s thingie.

Friend: Man, they say hung like a horse. They should say hung like an elephant. It was huge. So long you expected the end to come out of the female’s mouth.

Me: Really?

Friend: It had a kink in it, a bend so that the tip didn’t drag on the ground and get dirty.

Me: Okay, are you sure you’re not getting confused with the trunk?

ITEM: Saturday morning, like a good brother, I was out sweeping the snow from my sister’s pathway. I was wrapped up in several layers of clothing, had gloves and a woolly hat on, but was still feeling slightly chilly.

Then the neighbour’s daughter blithely waltzed out to the bin in her jimjams.

I hate teenagers.

ITEM: Note to self – if it’s been snowing all day and The Imaginary Girlfriend phones to ask ‘How many inches do you have?’, this is a trick question, there is no correct answer, at least not one that won’t get you either laughed at or dismissed as an innuendo loving fathead.

ITEM: Here in Norfolk the cold snap caught the authorities by surprise, with the usual travel disruption and chaos in a winter wonderland. If they’d thought to ask me, I could have told them it was coming: sure sign of the impending snowpocalypse – in the week beforehand, two power companies rang me up to enquire if I’d like to transfer my business and allow them to take care of my energy requirements.

It was all perfectly amicable, and they had nothing more in mind than to save me money. So why, despite the cold, did I feel like somebody staked out in the middle of the desert and with vultures circling patiently overhead?

ITEM: My own power company have recently written to inform me that they’ll shortly be putting their prices up as ‘they can’t continue to protect me from global price rises’.

Oh, is that what they were doing? How altruistic of them! I thought they were keeping their prices low in the hope of winning customers away from their rivals, and that I temporarily benefited was simply a side effect of that.

Corporate speak often uses language to turn a fail into a win. For example, the recent announcement by Camelot that weekday lottery draws would now be shown ‘exclusively’ on their website. The word ‘exclusively’ makes it sound like a positive thing, when the probable reality is that the draw no longer attracted enough viewers to make it worth the BBC’s air time.

And, in the world of the small/indie press, calling a book a limited edition sounds so much more upbeat than saying ‘there isn’t a big print run as we don’t expect to sell many copies’.

ITEM: Earlier today I was browsing Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, as you do of a Thursday afternoon when you need to work up an appetite for your tea, and it occurred to me that the thundering denunciation with which he closes the book would be every bit as apposite if you replaced ‘Christian Church’ with ‘Tory Party’, possibly even more so:-

“I call the Tory Party the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,–I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race…”

Yep, that’s about the sum of it, though I do hope they don’t prove to be immortal. That’s more than I could bear.