Emoji tales #1
Poor kettle manoeuvres in the dark
Trying to make a coffee in a small house at 5am without waking anyone is like trying to make a series of loud clattering noises in a small house at 5am without waking anyone.
Horse joke #4
A horse walks into a bar and gets terribly drunk the night before an important racing carnival. The next day the horse is judged unfit to race and is executed. The barman is found guilty of serving alcohol to a visibly intoxicated horse, and is executed.
Horse joke #3
A horse walks into a bar. The barman says “Why the long face?”. (He’s never seen a horse before and doesn’t realise that horses, distinctively, have long faces.)
Horse joke #2
A horse walks into a bar. The barman calls the local agency responsible for the collection and temporary protection of lost livestock.
Several days later the barman hears that the horse has been returned to the property from which it had wandered.
Fancy that, though — a horse walking into a bar!
Horse joke #1
A horse with a lung on its face walks into a bar. The barman says “Why the lung face?”.
(It turns out the horse is a method actor preparing for its lead role in the motion picture biography of Lung-Face, The Alcoholic Horse.)
A short lavatorial farce (in three acts)
Two Players: a parent, and child
Act I
First Player: “I intend to make use of the lavatory. Dost thou wish to make use of same, afore?”
Second Player (offstage): “No.”
Act II
(First Player embarks upon stated assignment.)
Act III
(Pause, sufficient for first Player to have gained admittance to lavatory and made necessary preparations for stated assignment.)
(Pause, sufficient for first Player to have partially achieved stated assignment.)
(Pause. [Brief.])
Second Player (offstage): “I need to do a poo!”
Curtain
Scat’s too bad
I finally tried to watch that ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’ video, but it was so cruel and exploitative that I just couldn’t stomach it. Let the second girl have her own cup, for goodness sake.
What’s pink and round and wobbly and has an enormous crack?
Salmon, a ball, jelly, a noisy duck.
I’ve been waking up in a pool of sweat
It’s because I’ve got a lot of worries on my mind at the moment. My biggest worry is that one day I might sleepwalk right into our neighbour’s new below-ground “sweat pool”.
Are you going to have another child?
People often ask me this, but I find I’m not usually that hungry after a starter plate of fingers and toes so I just order like a salad or something.
Knock knock something something bum
My daughter has discovered ‘knock knock’ jokes.
I forget jokes quickly, even ‘knock knock’ jokes, but some quick thinking on my part recently meant I was able to entertain my daughter with some rapidly transcribed entries into the canon. For example: ‘Ifor. I forgot my keys’ and ‘Fixyour. Fix your doorbell, I’m tired of knocking’.
No, not exactly Oscar Wilde, but enough to start my daughter thinking beyond the format of:
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“[Name of ordinary household object within direct sight, eg. curtains, Lego, sock]”
“[Ordinary household object] who?”
“[Repeat original response and append the word ‘bum’, before throwing back head and laughing uproariously]”.
In fact, no sooner had I broadened her horizons with a little meta-humour (“Knock knock” “Who’s there?” “Who.” “Who who?” “What what?”) than she was ready to take flight with something a little more sophisticated of her own.
“Knock knock,” she challenged. Her look said ‘I’m throwing away the rulebook here, and the rulebook is called Caution, and what I’m throwing it into is the effing wind’. But there was something else: uncertainty, fear at her own aspirations, a flicker of hesitation in her eyes. Had she gone too far, too soon? Whatever her punchline was going to be, was it too late to figure out a way of adding ‘bum’ to the end of it?
“Who’s there?” I answered, betraying no sign that I had detected any flaw in her mettle.
“Knock,” she declared, surer now of the strength of her material, a smirk playing at the corner of her mouth as she sensed the full magnitude of the psycholinguistic victory she was about to enjoy over me.
“Knock… who?” I quavered, as though suddenly and hideously aware of the scale of my impending defeat.
“Knock… KNOCK!” she answered.
And she threw back her head and laughed, and so did I, because she had turned the joke upon itself, you see, made it infinitely recursive, twisting it into the form of a pretzel that has been swallowed by a snake that, remaining peckish, then eats its own tail, and nobody had needed to append the word ‘bum’ to anything, and then I immediately dashed to my computer to write down her joke so that I didn’t forget it, which brings us back to my original point about not being able to remember jokes very well; again, somewhat like the pretzel-eating ouroubouros I mentioned earlier.
And that is how ‘knock knock’ jokes are made, always and forever.
‘Scouting For Boys’ (or, ideally, ‘Scouting: For Boys’)
Punctuation, leading and contrasting type can help prevent awkward typographical misunderstandings.
“An ever-present part of many people’s childhoods”
Yesterday I spoke to ABC 666 Canberra about the death of Elisabeth Sladen, who played legendary companion Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who. You can hear the interview below. (Note: you may think you hear the presenter calling me ‘Chris Smith’ at the end, but you’d be wrong.)
“You were my Doctor”
David Tennant: not shy about his obsession with the Fifth Doctor. I’m starting to get a bit worried.
From Brontë’s Inferno
So was I in the midst of that dark land /
Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed
Computer science fugitives
- Osama Bit Laden
- The Apache Web Server Kid
- The Symbian Platform Liberation Army
- “Batch” Cassidy and the Sun Microsystems Kid
- Botnet and Clyde
- The Dirty DOSen
- Boolean Assange
Zukoleaks
“Stranded in exile
Branded… a threat
He leaked state secrets
On the internet…”
Locust dream, 4:59am
The refrigerator had been moved from its usual place, and I was vacuuming up great banks of dust from the space that had been underneath, worried about whether the dust would fit inside the vacuum, and I noticed the kitchen floor had crumbled away in parts, revealing an enormous, humid cavern beneath the house, where conical mounds rose from the muggy depths, and to the sides of these mounds clung hundreds of larvae that looked like bright green beans, writhing in some advanced stage of development, and I feared that a swarm of locusts was breeding beneath the house, and then I saw perched on one of the mounds what must have been the queen, she was huge and steel-grey in colour as though plated in metal, and at the moment I observed her I saw her wings twitch and she rose from her station, and I reached for a can of insect spray which I knew to my distress to be only half-full, and surely not enough to repel an insect overgrown to such a scale, but I shot a jet of spray into the air as she buzzed toward me, and the bright green larvae twitched and curled as the spray rained down upon them, and the queen of the locust-things twisted her body in bitter distaste as the cloud of spray enveloped her, and I was safe.
Corkboard gremlin
I put the kettle on the stove without realising that this cork mat was stuck beneath it.