Half a sec...

We were gathered around the kitchen table as a family, playing a game called Articulate. The objective of the game is to describe as many words as possible to your team members before the 30 second timer runs out.

The words are printed on cards that you pull from a pack. It's a bit like Trivial Pursuits. The words fall into six categories: object, nature, action, world, person and random, so they are mainly proper nouns.

As my daughter was quite young, we were giving her a few hints to help things along. You will understand the need for this when I tell you that one of the words that came up was: "secretary bird".

At six years old, my daughter probably had little idea of what a secretarial job involved, let alone knowing about secretary birds.

I should have begun with defining this word as 'a flapping animal'. That might have made things simpler. Instead, I began by the secretary part...

"Every boss has one of these..." I said, optimistically.

She looked at me blankly. Seconds passed... She shook her head, time was running out.

I started to hint: "Okay, it's a sec... a sec..."

She looked up brightly. "A second wife?"

Science Cocktails

Have you tried one of the new science cocktails?


Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years by Jared M. Diamond (Vintage).


The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony (Princeton University Press).


Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William F. Ruddiman (Princeton University Press).


Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past by Chris Turney (Palgrave Macmillan).


Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened by Chris Turney (Palgrave Macmillan).


Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science's Taboos Confronted by M. Stebbins (Palgrave).


Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism by S. Watts (Yale University Press).


Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life by Nick Lane (OUP Oxford).


Enough already? Here are a few I mixed myself...


Mud, Wheels and Power: How Imperial Roadside Maintenance Shaped the Modern World by Dan R. Lane (Countrywide).


Sex, Plagues and Language: the origin of communication taboos by Watt Nansens (IOU).


Horses, Germs and Stars: How Ringworm shaped Hollywood and American Culture in the 1940s by A. Paul Lynn (Corporation Press).


Ice, Guns and DNA: All that Science Left of the World by Anne X. Pert (Oxbridge).




Bottoms Up!

Care for your Pets

Picking up their shared Nintendogs, a small pink console that barks, elder daughter has just discovered that younger daughter has, in the last hour, spent $822 on 57 bags of dogfood. When interrogated as to why she had done this, younger daughter says: "I didn't want the puppies to die."

Key of the Door, When You're 84...

Today, my parents-in-law will attend the 21st birthday party of an 84 year old man. If you're wondering how this is possible, check the date.

Funnies

The other day, my daughter looked at me very seriously over the dinner table.

"Daddy," she said, "We have to move house."

"Why's that sweety-pie?" I asked.

"Because the video's broken".

+++++

Fairly often, I fly down to the town of Pau in the south of France on business.

The stewards/stewardesses on the flight serve a drink and a snack which is always either a little packet of biscuits referred to as 'sucré' (sweet) or a little packet of strangely flavoured snacks referred to as 'salé' (salty).

They come down the aisle handing out drinks and then ask: 'sucré ou salé?'

I have long since understood and perfected my responses. No more am I asked grinningly: "Une bier, monsieur? Une bier?"

But on the flight the other day, a tragic foreigner sat next to me who asked for a glass of lemonade. The french say 'limonade'. The word 'lemonade' looks similar, but apparently sounds completely different to French ears.

Realising the man spoke English, the steward switched seamlessly into queen's english: "You would like lemon, monsieur? No, we have no lemon."

"And to eat. Would you like sweaty or salty?"

Disorientated

Despite modern navigation equipment, flying in dense cloud can sometimes get the better of pilots...

Sarkozy In, Blair Out

The other day I watched a jolly little home video on YouTube snappily entitled: Tony Blair félicite Nicolas Sarkozy de sa victoire aux éléctions françaises (en français).

En français? Mais bien sûr. Tony, in relaxed mode, congratulates his opposite number (+1) on a video that looks as if it was shot on his personal web cam but which, in reality, no doubt required the presence of a film crew, make up artist, script writer and French pronunciation advisor (who should be fired by the way). Plus a specialist (14 years old) in the uploading of video clips to YouTube.

Surprisingly, Blair doesn't wish Sarkozy "Bonnes Vacances" knowing (thanks to MI5) that he is, even then, on board the luxury yacht of a French millionaire pal floating off the coast of Malta. This, of course, being exactly the sort of "posh" holiday the Blairs enjoy.

Shortly after uploading to YouTube, Tony dashes off an e-mail to Nicolas' hotmail address to let him know he has uploaded "a little something to the web". Nicolas has a lot of things to do, what with choosing the members of his next government, but excitedly he launches Firefox (via a link which also releases a nasty virus, shortly afterwards sending his millionaire friend's borrowed computer into terminal decline) and watches Tony's offering.

After sixty seconds of strange facial gestures and garbled French he hears: "Nous sommes deux vielles nations, de taille comparable..." Sarkozy cheers. "Eh bien, super, if va aborder la fusion que j'ai proposé!"

But, shortly afterwards, Nicolas realises he's been misled. He loses interest in the message, puts his mirror glasses back on and leans back with a creak in the black leather sofa. There's a half-realised thought nagging at the back of his brain... What is it? What is it? Suddenly he realises. "Mon Dieu!" he yells, "J'ai compris! Le roastbeef cherche une poste!"

Aunt Ooh-ah

We just finished having lunch: baked beans on toast topped off by pink-iced 'Bob the Builder' Muffins cooked by the girls.

The Bob the Builder Muffins were absolutely foul, so I went and got the box to read what was in them. The usual list of chemicals and preservatives.

On the packet it said: 'Suitable for Vegetarians'. "That's a bad sign already", I said, as I walked off into the kitchen to put the box back in the recycling.

My wife, taking my comment far too seriously said: "the cake's we normally make are suitable for vegetarians."

Being in the kitchen, I couldn't hear what she had said properly. I meant to ask her: "Aren't or are?" But it came out in a French-English language jumble: "Aren't ou are?"

Quickly, my eldest daughter piped up:

Aunt Ooh-ah
went to the Spar...

That's as far as she got, but I'll help her to finish her little song off:

Aunt Ooh-ah
went to the Spar
to buy some Bob the Builder cakes.

But when she got there
the shelf was bare
and so she had a lucky escape.

Joke

I was just looking at the results on the 'Extreme Tracking' link on my blog to see how many people had visited this site. Amazingly, 25 people had arrived in quick succession. This is a record probably.

I shouted through to my wife: "My site's really going!"

"Well, what do you expect if you stare at the computer so much" she yelled back.

Great Uncle Louis

Great Uncle Louis is staying with us at the moment. He brings news of England where a plague among the toads is causing them to explode. He finds them on the lawn next to the little pond in his garden.

I asked him if it was something wrong with their digestive systems? No, he said, he thought the gas was being trapped beneath their skins. Last year it was the frogs, this year the toads...

Mix Ups

We are back in the UK at the moment, staying with my parents-in-law. About a year ago my father-in-law had a stroke and he is slowly recovering his capacity of speech. It is a frustrating business for him. He doesn't find it very easy to understand the TV any more and conversation is hard work. However, he still enjoys doing puzzles, as he always did, particularly if they involve calculations.

Today, I had to drive down to Burford to rendezvous with my parents who were on their way to my brother's house and who wanted to exchange some presents for the children. I invited my father-in-law to drive down with me as an opportunity to practice his conversation. His wife is not very patient with him and often says that it is like having a child around the house. I have always enjoyed chatting with him. he is a gentle, good-natured chap and if you give him time you can have a proper conversation with him.

Occasionally he mixes up words and sometimes these mistakes are truely worthy of the name malapropism.

Before we set off, we were all sitting around in the kitchen, drinking cups of tea. My father-in-law was looking through the Christmas post, noting the dates on the postmarks to see how long the letters had taken to arrive. Suddenly, he spluttered and held one of the letters up. "Look at this." he said. "This card has taken fifteen days to arrive, and it was sent by first crap post!"

We headed off to Burford, driving through the wintery Oxfordshire landscape of large fields with tumbledown dry stone walls. We were talking about the children of my wife's sister and I asked him whether they has started school yet. "Yes," he said "she takes them to the mercenary every morning."

We had just passed Stow-on-the-Wold and were descending a long hill with large trees lining either side of the road. Indicating the gaps between some of the trees with his finger, he said "Last Christmas, a strong gay knocked down a lot of trees along this road."

A bit later, we were talking about his therapy following the stroke. By this time, I was getting quite interested in the processes that were going on in his head! He told me that he had a woman therapist. He recounted the story of someone he knew who had had a much worse stroke than his. The only thing he was able to say afterwards was: "Here, you remember you promised to tell me about..." and that was it. He couldn't remember what it was that anyone had promised to tell him about, but he knew there was a lot of things that people should have been telling him. In fact one of them concerned his own therapist, who was a man. Every time he treated the afflicted patient he would bid farewell and then go upstairs to continue the affair that had developed with the man's wife.

My father-in-law's therapist, however, is a woman and very helpful. He told me he has: "an hour long session with his spirit every week".