Tag Archives: pun

Blogging Weekly

Sorry, everybody, I’ve done it again. Suddenly, a week has passed and I have not blogged, or read any blogs, or commented or replied. It’s strange how I was addicted to blogging at one time, and couldn’t settle unless I had posted something that day. I was, I admit, erratic, but addicted all the same.

I then made my delinquency worse by writing a post and, feeling it wasn’t good enough, putting it to one side to see to later. “Later” turned into three days and I’m still not sure it’s interesting enough to bother publishing. Any7thing in italics are todays additions to the draft from 3 days ago.

These days I have to almost force myself to make time amongst my busy schedule of procrastination and displacement activity. Well, not quite a schedule. That implies a degree of organisation that is way beyond me.

In a rare out break of self-discipline I have started cutting back on displacement activity – so no games, no and less browsing. It’s still not perfect, but I have been much more productive in the last few days. It’s the middle of the month now, and I really need to start writing poetry again, bearing in mind the large number of deadlines looming.

As I sit here I have three pages torn from a notebook. IT has 23 items on it. One won’t be done because I have temporarily mislaid the item it relates to. One is not possible and needs moving to another part of the list, where it will become possible. Several need me to go out and take photographs, several need more research and some simply need an email or a phone call. It’s going to be interesting to see what I have done by the end of the day.

I actually managed to do a good number of them – six fully and 3 partially – but after performing the one that said “Tidy desk, recycle paper” I lost the list so will have to start again with a new list.

The reason for this activity – I just wasted an entire day on low-level admin, playing games, browsing Wikipedia, going through auction lists and watching TV. The auction lists were probably the worst waste of time. I don’t deal these days and I don’t even go to places where I could pick up a bargain – so why am I checking the prices of vintage toys? Come to think of it, my budget is empty after recent car repairs and the washing machine, so why am I looking at anything? Time to wind my neck in and accumulate a little more cash.

We are doing some family history at the moment – one of Julia’s great uncles was hit by a bus and killed in the blackout. Tomorrow I will post a piece I wrote on carrots in WW2. Not sure if I have already done it, but brace yourself for more trivia. Or, if you have seen it before, prepare for more dull stuff.

The saddest bit is the report on the doings at the village show. Good news, we won’t be needing to move things round to accommodate an avalanche of rosettes and trophies. Bad news – most of the art prizes went to two people and most of the photographic prizes went to a different pair of people. It’s often the way with competitions, which is why I have mixed feelings about them. However, Julia had fun entering, and we enjoyed moaning about the results (good things won, but there wasn’t enough variety, was our conclusion). Next year, I am going to enter too. I may even enter the chutney competition and the baking.

And there you have it – a post that starts with a weak pun and fizzles out, crushed under an avalanche of dull trivia. This is my life.

Pi, Pie and Piglets

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I am home alone, abandoned by my wife, who has gone out for a meal with a group of people she used to work with. It is cold and there is little in the house to eat. So far I have kept body and soul together with a few crumpets I found hanging around and I am going to fry a few onions in a minute as we have a couple of finger rolls and some hot dog sausages left over from yesterday. It is, as repasts go, adequate.

Tomorrow we will have mushroom pilaff as a neighbour brought us a dish round, having made more than she needed. We will eat it with the last of the hot dog sausages. There are eight in a jar and only two of us. They are the big ones, about a foot long and doubtless crammed with more animal detritus than I would wish to know about. However, they are cheap and I like them. Eight for £2 and they last for 3 meals. At that price you don’t expect actual meat. I once spoke to a man who owned a food processing factory and he said the best ingredient for hot dog sausages was chicken skin. Well, it’s often the best bit of the roast chicken so why not use it?

He used to have a great line of pork pies too. They used chicken and pink food dye to produce the meat filling, but he had to stop using the recipe when picky politicians passed a law about having pork in pork pies.

And I can’t tell you about the cow head machine, or you’ll never eat a processed meat product again.

Header picture is a proper pork pie. Footer is a group of cute piglets, as they pause to smell the flowers on their journey towards a sausage skin.

Politics you say? Yes, there has been some politics, but I’m placing it exactly in the hierarchy where it deserves to be. First I will discuss poultry byproducts, then I will go and fry some onions. Maybe after that I will return and discuss politics. I may even discuss biproducts – they are not the same as byproducts but they don’t set off the spellchecker so care is needed. Fortunately I checked, as I was hazy on the spelling. A biproduct is a term used In category theory and its applications and as a result of my diversion I know that it is both a product and a coproduct and of no possible use to anyone but a mathematician.

I am not a mathematician and prefer my pies with an “e”. See what I did there? Mathematical pun. I’m on a roll tonight.

Piglets – like a pork pie but not as crusty

Sunday Salad

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I’m showing off now – three posts, and the final one is about salad. Can’t generally stand the stuff, which is for girls, rabbits and Liberals, but now and again I do feel like a salad, particularly as I have been filling up on stodge this week, so it was time for a salad to give my stomach a break.

It wasn’t too bad.I started with rocket, then added slices of pear, a scatter of red peppers, home-grown red and yellow tomatoes, shop-bought coleslaw (I was feeling lazy), a fig, crumbled Stilton and some sweet potato pakora (also bought).

I always feel guilty about shop-bought coleslaw, but do I really want to be elbow deep in sliced cabbage and grated carrot or do I want to pass over 85 pence?

I meant to add sliced mushrooms and balsamic vinegar but I forgot.

Looking at the picture, it seems that you can see a lot of plate through the salad, but I assure you, it was filling.

I had to face an unpalatable fact this afternoon, and I don’t mean the salad. I’m just not very good at writing fact-filled posts. I spent several hours researching a post and trying to write it and so far, have come up with six hundred works of seriously soporific pap. It’s fortunate I’m not in full alliteration mode…

Sometimes I get it right, but more often than not I end up droning on with increasing pomposity as I cull facts from Wikipedia.

I’m much better at lightweight pieces about salad, or talking about my plums.

Or making puerile plum puns with potentially perplexing polysemy.

(Apologies if polysemy isn’t quite the right word, but I needed something beginning with p, knew that poly was a promising start and Googled the rest. If I’m wrong I will have to endure the vilification of lexicographers, but I can’t see that being much of a problem).

Like a Stork, I have a Big Bill

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No parcels today, no coins, no postcards of dubious taste.

The car is in for its annual MOT test, plus a service and an examination of a coolant problem. Or a “no coolant” problem, to be precise: it’s using nearly as much water as diesel. Fortunately it seems to be ending up under the car so should be easy enough to fix.

On top of that, one of the tyres looked a bit flat on Sunday, and triggered the tyre pressure warning light. The sidelight warning light has been going on and off for months, though the sidelight is still working, and I suppose under the new rules this will cost me money too.

I can’t help thinking that my last VW did a quarter of a million miles without leaking and had no warning lights to go wrong.

To fill my carless day I am performing a study of daytime TV. I started with Quincy ME and have now moved on to Storage Hunters – UK. The have brought couple of the American regulars across because we don’t seem to have enough homegrown idiots.

I’m currently watching Combat Dealers. It’s an antiques programme, but with some unusual stock.

After that I may need a cup of tea, as TV watching can be quite onerous.

Later…

I had the tea. Then, just before lunch, the garage rang.

The water leak is likely to require a new water pump, which is not going to be cheap. The tyre has a screw through it and needs repair. The warning light, of course, needs attention. Warning lights, it seems to me, are always going wrong and needing expensive attention. It’s almost as if they have been there to cost motorists money.

Imagine a big sigh here.

Apart from the money, they will need to have the car for another day, though I’m hoping that will be next week.

At least it gives me a chance for a postcard and a pun about a big bill.

It’s 12.16 now and I feel like I’ve done enough. Blog, TV research, pun. This afternoon I may try a limerick and a nap before the quiz programmes start.

For now, lunch calls.

This is a picture of tomatoes in the Mencap garden, I feel in need of a peaceful picture.

A Pun for Punks

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We saw this nicely laid hedge while we were at Carsington Water, I’d been looking for a good example for a couple of weeks because I wanted to use the “Punk” setting on the camera. Here it is.

Punk Hedge

I thought a nice punky picture of a laid hedge would be a good chance for a pun, as in Never Mind the Billhooks.

For those of you unfamiliar with hedge laying tools and punk rock here are the links. This probably indicates that it’s not really strong enough as a pun, but it’s a slow day.

What we did next

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So, what have we been doing apart from egg-based humour?

Well, we ate doughnuts, made Halloween masks, and I tried to take a photo of a green woodpecker through dirty triple glazing. The doughnuts and masks were successful. The photographs weren’t, as the glazing and dirt mess with the autofocus. When I went out to try for some clearer photos the woodpecker (a) hid and (b) flew away.

Julia and Emma looking scary

Group photo with Halloween masks

Aaron, Alasdair and Dave (who is old enough to know better)

Green Woodpecker feeding on ants

Green Woodpecker

Green Woodpecker feeding on the floor

later I saw a kestrel perching on the brush shaft of the hooded youth statue. I got my camera, I switched it on…

…and got the Battery Empty message.

So I swapped batteries…

…and got the same result.

I then remembered that I hadn’t recharged them, because they’d run out late one day – too late to recharge at work and too stupid to remember once I got home. Bah!

Can’t really complain though, as we got great views of kestrels and a buzzard perching by the roadside on the way to work. The buzzard was on a fence post along the new A46, perching at about eye level. We couldn’t have asked for a better view.

Later in the afternoon we cleared some beds, played a Dracula-themed snakes and ladders game (Julia kept winning) and finished off Monday’s biscuits. They had kept well, and we really should have left them a few days longer, but you know how it is.

I can vouch for most of my biscuit recipes lasting three days. If you ever find me vouching for them lasting longer, ask yourself why they are still not eaten.

At least, having seen two small falcons today, Julia was able to make a quip about the coming of night and the fact that we would be having Orkestrel Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Pop music puns can be tricky as they are sensitive to the age of those listening, but for those of us who remember the band, it’s a quality pun.

Running out of titles

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We’ve had The Goat Escape and we’ve had ‘scapegoats so I’m running out of goat-related escape references.

That’s the trouble with goats, they can escape quicker than I can think of new puns. I’m thinking of Kidnapped and Do Androids Dream of Electric Fences? but neither of them are quite right.

We were on the way home last night. I stopped and looked left to check it was safe to drive out and…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

…I was close to driving off, but my conscience got the better of me. At 7 pm I have better things to do than round up livestock for farmers who can’t keep their fences in order. On the other hand it isn’t fair on the goats or passing drivers to let livestock wander free.

Once we got them trapped and moving they went back in the field without too much trouble, which was good because they had escaped via a neighbour’s orchard and it could have been complicated to get them back. Instead we just got them moving in the right direction and waved a few branches (broken from nearby hedges) at them. They love eating hedges so they just followed Julia back to the field to chew on the branches.

It’s simple when you know how.

I’ve included a couple of pictures of the village pinfold. Under the 1959 Highways Act it is still lawful to detain an animal in the pinfold if it is found wandering on the road. This happened to us once – we had a phone call to say there was a goat on the road but couldn’t find it. When we did track it down someone had shut it in the pinfold, where it was busily chomping its way through the floral display. We were multiply unpopular after that.