w.atching the w.orld unw.ind

Pay per view?

Radio announcer: “James Brown has been arrested for allegedly assaulting his wife. Here’s our Entertainment Reporter”

Black humour

A vicar’s “funeral confession”

Sally, a big Gracie Fields’ fan, was being cremated and her family asked for the song “Sally” (Sally, Sally, pride of our alley) to be played. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including the man operating the CD player. He forgot to turn it off when the song ended, so the coffin disappeared behind the curtain to the tune of “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye”

Poets day (II)

Off to Pompey for the annual pilgrimage to watch LOTR3, with our bestest friends.
I’ve a surprise for him, as I’ve set up a blog on his behalf, to store his recollections on.
If it’s of interest to others, I’ll promote it when there are some posts to read.

I’ve volunteered to be ‘interviewed’ by Tinka, whose “Dust from a distant sun” blog was the first I ever read.

Go over and see why I regularly visit …

The Idea: If you want to participate, leave a comment saying "interview me." I will respond by asking you five questions - each person's questions will be different. You will update your journal or blog with the answers to the questions. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
1. How do you perceive things? By touch, sight, sound or .. ?

If I had to be restricted to a single sensory perception, it would have to be “by sound”. If I lost my sense of hearing, I think I would be really distraught.

Why? I love music, the sound of a woman laughing (a regular occurrence with Mrs.D. but we won’t go into that), listening to people having earnest discussions. I think that, more than sight, it’s how you are aware of where you are in the world.

2. What does it take to maintain a good blog? What pitfalls have you discovered?

a) Regular (but not necessarily daily) postings, covering a wide variety of topics. “Last night’s TV” gets reviewed by too many blogs to be of much interest, unless you can hone in on a particular turn of phrase or theme, which can then spark your readers into commenting.

b) Visually, my site is abysmally derivative and formulaic. I’d love to be able to re-create it from scratch, but you seem to need either a good working knowledge of HTML or whatever, or an out-of-work programmer who can translate your vision for you. I have neither, so it’s a basic Blogger template with a bit of re-decoration slapped on.

But then, maybe it’s content which matters most, whether it is truly a personal diary, primarily for your own purposes, or a way of provoking interaction with others?

3. Desert Island book picks. Three volumes *only*

Nothing highbrow here – I’d be looking for entertainment, not enlightenment..

“Escape from Sobibor” by Richard Raschke. The triumph of determination to survive appalling human degradation would be a constant inspiration and provide hope of rescue.

“The Perfect Storm” by Sebastian Junger. As a sometime boating enthusiast and someone who loves the sea generally, I have a deep respect for its power. It’s why the RNLI is one of my main charities.

“The Lord of the Rings” – no link or explanation necessary. I re-read it every two or three years and never fail to find something I’ve missed or forgotten about. Sheer escapism from a marooning.

4. What can completely make your day?

Getting home from work on time (the M25 stands between work and home – nuff said) to find a lovely dinner prepared. It’s such a rare event, with Mrs.D. also working full-time. Plus a bottle of red wine breathing and the hi-fi playing a mix of my favourite music. A combination of events that, in fact, is so rare that I’m more likely to win the National Lottery.

5. And, finally, best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Listen to everyone, then do your own thing.

Right - your turn?

TV headline from last night's BBC1 schedule:

Perfect Holiday, 7pm (not N Ireland)

One of our first foreign holidays was to Portugal. The Communists had just taken control of government and the country was desperate for income, especially from tourism, so we were able to get a beautiful hotel for a song.

We were the only Brits among a largely American/German clientele and soon found that those customers weren’t particularly well-liked by the staff. And because the waiters were especially keen to improve their English (but without an American drawl) we were embarrassingly well-served throughout the fortnight.

One lunch-time, the sous-chef made one of his increasingly regular visits to our table.

In Portuguese Accent: “Tomorrow, we have big bird for dinner”
Us: “Turkey?”
IPA: “No, is bigger”
Us: “Goose”
IPA: “No, is many bigger – with long white bendy neck”
Us (horrified): “Not swan?”
IPA: “Yes, yes, I show you now”

He hurried back from the kitchen, bearing a bowl with a large scoop of ice cream, into which had been inserted two wafer ‘wings’ and a white chocolate straw for the neck.

Damn foreigners’ English was clearly better than they’d been letting on.

Casting around for a career, I once attended a weekend induction at Biggin Hill, to see if the RAF might like to make use of me.

At 7.00 a.m., I was being interviewed by three fierce-looking officers:

“Well, Mr.D., how would you feel if you were ordered to bomb somewhere with the definite likelihood of loss of life?”

Looking back, I still don’t know what the job-winning answer could or should have been.

What would you have said?

Crash Test Dummies - MMM MMM MMM MMmy dentures are stuck.

Every couple of years, I seem to damage my back muscles and am in pain for several days. This time round, I have absolutely no idea how it happened.

It takes a full minute to get up from a seated position and I then stalk around like I've kacked myself. Kneeling, as for shoelaces and cupboards, is like being slowly knighted!

And, praise the gods, I've now got a cough, so each bark sends spasms around my waist, as if my belt's on fire.

Clearly I'm not currently the happiest buck in the warren and as every action has a reaction, those around me aren't getting the usual genial me either.

Bet you can smell the Deep Heat from there, can't you? Can't you?

Some of the blogs that I read regularly are clearly constructed with great love and detail, whether for public entertainment or personal pride. Others (and I include this site in the category) seem to be just thrown together like a snack taken on the run. No less diverting, y’understand, just less ‘crafted’.

But however much time and effort is put in, the ephemeral nature of the medium sees all postings relegated into the space at the bottom of your screen in a very short time. They’re all out there somewhere, safely stored in cyberspace, but like the stuff in your attic, they’re unlikely to ever make a worthwhile reappearance again.

The emotional value or content makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

So listening (disgracefully, for the first time) to the actual lyrics of Freda Payne’s classic, I was struck by the immediacy of the outpouring of feelings of rejection and humiliation – whether contrived or not - for the purpose of knocking out a pop song:

“Last night, on our honeymoon
We stayed in sep’rate rooms”

I wondered whether Freda ever imagined that her expose would live on for ever, if only by becoming the stuff of karaoke, or if she thought it would quickly disappear into the transient pop equivalent of the blogosphere.

Maybe my Comments box will provide a clue?

When we first moved to this town, the local council stated categorically that, although we lived just inside the boundary of a nearby village, on no account were we to use the village's name in our address.

Did we care? Did we buffalo. Because of work commitments, we'd lived apart for over ten months and were only concerned with all being under one roof again.

Now this same village is so up its own alimentary canal, I'm surprised it hasnt got the Judiths *

The Parish Council once demanded that the local rag print a retraction of an allegation that a drug dealer was murdered in the village "because the body was, in fact, discovered over the border"!

As further evidence of its staggeringly collective pomposity, they now want their very own postcode and have therefore had to define the precise catchment area. And guess what – we've been invited into the clique.

Now my first reaction was to suggest they stick the offer "ou le soleil ne brille pas", but as it's likely to add several grand to our resale value, I'm taking the mercenary route and omitting the village's name from my GPO address until we come to flog.

* Judith Chalmers = Farmers, Farmer Giles = Piles

On GMTV this morning, the editor of a magazine aimed at teenagers was defending her media's use of 'thin' role models and how that encouraged anorexia (she was also sat next to an ex-anorexic, for good measure).

"But we have pictures of Pink and Kelly Osbourne, and they're not thin, by any stretch".

I couldn't decide whether I was more stunned by the back-handed compliment (god help her at the next photo-shoot involving either of those two) or the graphic use of the word "stretch", bearing in mind the skeletal girl sharing the couch with her..