Too Much Information

Twitter's funny, isn't it? Lots of people saying things. You can follow me, if you like (twitter.com/grahambandage).

I follow a number of celebrities and people whose work I admire and, in some cases, love to the point of tears. But I don't expect them to follow me.

And why should I? They have many thousands of followers. If I were to show up on their radar I would recommend that they have their radar checked out for excessive sensitivity by a qualified engineer. They literally don't have the time to consider the likes of me, to decide, "You know what? This chap Bandage is smashing, and I'm going to follow him in a reciprocal arrangement."

Or so I thought.

There's a little button to the right of your screen. I've marked it "I Know Where You Live." Every so often, I have a little look at my profile on StatCounter to see how many thousands of people have had a look at this blog*. And one day last week I saw it. Somebody, I'm not saying who, but it's somebody I admire and had recently started to follow on Twitter, had read my blog.

"Ooh," I thought, "Mr X [that's not his real name] has read my blog." And for a moment I was quietly pleased. "Now," I thought, "The big time is beckoning. It's diamond-studded iPhones and swimming pools in the shape of this blog all the way for me from here on in."

And then I had a look at the people he follows on Twitter. And I'm not one of them.

This man, this Mr X [that's not his real name], has done the necessary research and found me wanting. If only I hadn't had access to such a wealth of information, I would be living in blissful ignorance. It's all my own fault.

In a way, it's the worst review I've ever had, apart from when the recipient of my youthful longings told a go-between, "I'd rather f**k a penguin."

*Don't worry, I don't really know where you live. Also, I only know who this person is because he has his own domain. That's the size of big-shottedness which this man possesses.

Grrr. It Makes Me Moderately Cross

Regular readers of this blog, of which there are few, often ask me: "Graham, why haven't you been updating your blog? Is the world no longer lovely?"

The truth is, I've been busy. Very busy. About as busy as Grant Bovey's bodyguard on Beat The Crap Out Of An Idiot For Charity Day (May 7, in case you're interested).

But I told somebody important that I write an amusing blog, so I suppose I'd better keep up the pretense for a few weeks on the off-chance he checks. If you wouldn't mind keeping schtum on the subject, I'd be grateful.

I've been marginally frustrated by something lately. I won't go into details. This isn't one of those confessional blogs. I'm not going to be played by Billie Piper on ITV2 or anything like that. I'm not even sure I can tell you how much I've been frustrated.

Actually, I can. Remember trying to get the silver paper off an old-style Kit-Kat that had been just that little bit too close to your cup of tea? About that frustrating.

This is why there's so much knife crime. Youngsters today don't have the petty grief chaps like me had. They don't get the training in minor frustration.

They don't have the five-minute wait for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum game to load, followed by a crash right at the end.

If you wanted to see a woman's lady bumps in colour, you had to watch late-night BBC2 or Channel 4. Even now subtitles make me come over all peculiar. If I ever went deaf, I'd need a wheelchair.

But today it's all instant gratification. Oh, yes it is. Pick a random teenager off the street and tell him to his face that you had to rewind a video cassette before you watched it and they'll look at you as if you're mad. Have a go! Tell me I'm wrong. I've tried it with about 30 randomly selected teenagers on the street. Some of them were quite rude.

It's easy to blame the internet, but, of course, it's not a recent invention. It existed in medieval times, albeit considerably slower than the current version.

Monks would stand at the top of hills shouting "Zero! One! One! Zero," while a second monk would take note of these binary codes and convert them into characters which he would inscribe into a book. This monk was known as the browser monk, or Friar Fox.

Downloading a movie took ages. The browser monk would have to draw the scene described by the shouting monks in the corner of a book, and when, years later, the 'movie' was finished, he would flick through the pages, effecting a rudimentary animation.

And it was still quicker than Orange Broadband.

That's Personal

I saw this ad in the Metro.



LOCAL woman wants to meet with like-minded men.

I know what you're thinking. The first thing you're thinking is, "What sort of man is she looking for, because, on the surface, she isn't giving us many clues?"

And the second thing you're thinking is, "How can I apply the rules of algebra to solve this question?"

Well, let's take "like-minded men" to be the unknown, x, if you will. Then there must be enough information in the term "local woman" to help one work out what sort of mind she has.

Let's start with the woman part. Now, what distinguishes a woman from a man? She has a womb. She can give birth. She's going to find it tricky, at best, to find a man similarly equipped.

But wait! It says "like-minded," not "like-bodied." If one works back from the physical difference and examines how that affects the female psyche we see that women have an attraction to men for the purposes of copulation.

Could there be men who are attracted to other men for these purposes? I believe such men exist, but we'll come back to this.

So, this woman has a limited number of words in which to describe herself. Does she choose to identify as warm, wise, compassionate, intelligent, or even, dare I say it, sexy?

No. She's taken a long hard look at herself and decided that what she is, the sine qua non of her being, is local. So proud is she of the city in which she lives she allows her love of it to define herself. I think that's beautiful.

So, x, we can finally establish, equals a homosexual who is fiercely proud of his Liverpudlian roots.


The answer is Pete Price.


Unless she's a lesbian.

A Boss Sets An Example To His Staff

Today's Guardian front page:




















But wait! Who's got the prime front page byline, reporting from Washington DC on this historic occasion?





















Hats off to Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, here exemplifying the mantra of the successful boss: "Never ask your staff to do something you wouldn't be prepared to do yourself."

Fruit

Who invented the names of fruit? I have often wondered.

I imagine there was a Fruit Naming Board. And here I am, imagining it...

INT. FRUIT NAMING BOARD - DAY

BOSS:
Right, what have we got next?

LACKEY:
There's this one, Clive. This round, orange thing.

BOSS:
Skin's a bit tough.

LACKEY:
Yeah, you peel it off. And if you squeeze it, I reckon you could sell the juice in tiny bottles in pubs for a fortune.

BOSS:
Right. So it's round, and it's orange... I think a name suggests itself. We'll call it ... a round.

LACKEY:
Won't that cause confusion in pubs, Clive?

BOSS:
All right, an orange, then. What's next?

LACKEY:
Bit of bad news on the grape front.

BOSS:
What?

LACKEY:
Swindon's already claimed it for those little round ones that come in bunches.

BOSS:
Ah, bollocks! All right, we'll call it a yellow.

LACKEY:Clive, you can't just name fruits after their colour all the time. Besides, I think Swindon's got first dibs on that for the long curved thing they found.

BOSS:
Oh, this is just stupid. I know! I know the very thing that will stop the confusion. We'll call ours a grape-fruit.

LACKEY:
What? To distinguish it from the other sort of grape that's also a fruit?

BOSS:
Ian, who's the boss here? Next?

LACKEY:
We've got this peach. It's sweet as nectar, but, and here's the thing, it's got smooth skin.

BOSS:
What? It's got no fur and it's sweet as nectar, Ian? Nectar, Ian... Hmm, I know! An alo-peach-ia!

I bet that's exactly how it happened.

Perpetual Motion Invention

I think I may have accidentally invented a perpetual motion machine.

I was testing the veracity of various rules of Sod's Law, specifically the contentions that cats always land on their feet and that toast always lands buttered side down.

Experiment to test Sod's First and Second Laws of Motion

1 Take a slice of buttered toast.

2 Take a cat (male or female).

3 Strap the toast, buttered side up, to the back of the cat.

4 Drop the cat from a two-metre height.

The opposing Sod's Law forces suspended the cat and toast one metre from the ground in perpetual rotation.

Now, all I have to do is find a way of harnessing the energy created and I'm quids in. I suspect after they read this, Exxon, BP and Shell will be getting into the cat and toast market. This may push the price of thick-sliced bread and cat food up a bit, but you can't have everything.

Lettuce Spray

Who actually likes lettuce? Who sees lettuce on their plate and thinks, "Ooh, lettuce! ... I'm saving that till last?"

Or "Ooh, I just fancy a bit of lettuce. I haven't had any lettuce for ages?"

Or "I used to love the way my mum did lettuce ... on a plate, on its own. Cold?"

Lettuce is just there to make you feel better when you go to McDonald's. That's all it's for. To make you think you're having a balanced diet. "I'm balancing a quarter-pound of beef, processed cheese, bacon, ketchup and mayonnaise with a bit of lettuce. And a slice of gherkin."

Robert Mugabe is a despot responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of thousands of people. He balances that with the ability to make a nice cup of tea. That's the sort of balance we're talking about here.

Did you know McDonald's invented the chicken nugget? Well, they also invented lettuce, back in 1956. Look it up on Wikipedia, it's true. You find any book from before then and you'll find no mention of lettuce. After 1956, it's another story.

It's not always tasteless, though. That's because the boffins were sitting in their lab one day, scoffing some smokey bacon crisps, and one of them thought, "I know - flavoured lettuce."

So they tried lots of different flavours - prawn cocktail, Worcestershire sauce, pickled onion... And what did they pick in the end? Earwax.