Author: James Aylett

James Casey has the answer.

Somewhat insane, but great. [Via JWZ.]

Makes you wonder what Ummagumma would have been like if the original idea had come off.

If you haven’t already seen it, go directly to the announcement of the DVD release of The Invasion. (Okay, if you hate classic Doctor Who, go somewhere else instead.)

I just got spam from someone called Rusty Bishop. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

Ministry of Sound, having spent over two weeks being silent and not shipping my order, finally bothered (once I kicked them via email) to send out … a completely different model. Which costs less than the one I paid for.

To make matters worse, when I tried to email them just now, the email bounced, with no indicated reason. Just: “Failed”.

I’m consequently now very anti-MoS, which is a shame because about a month ago I was very pro- them. Idiots.

Early last month, in an effort to cheer me up, one of my friends sent me a card, inside which was written:

I asked the boys at work what to get for a man in the circumstances under which you would get a girl flowers/chocolates/pampering stuff.

They helpfully suggested a stripper.

I thought the next best thing was a butternut squash and some dead budgies. Well, it was that or the backside of a pig.

Anyway, Jack and I think you are fantastic, and he sends his love also, though he is a little sad about the budgies.

The front of the card has some pears clustered around murdered budgies, and a glowering butternut squash looking at them. The caption is: “The boss walked into the meeting room and reiterated that budgets must be slashed…”.

Which did, indeed, cheer me up (although I bet a stripper would have done, too).

But that wasn’t the end. A couple of days later I got a small package through the letterbox that turned out to contain a miniature pot of jam, with a note saying “in continuation of not getting you a stripper, here is some jam we stole from a hotel”.

This was swiftly followed by another package, with a Lily O’Briens chocolate crispy heart inside (“originally I stole two of these for you, but then I ate one”). It was around this time that I felt more cheered up than a stripper would ever have managed.

Finally (just before watching Mission: Impossible 3), she gave me a pair of Twinings fruit teabags, and … a fork. It was around this time that I started worrying for her sanity, and wondered if I should send her a stripper.

In the absence of a real entry from me (due to tiredness brought on by eviscerating my garden – although no actual viscera, unlike last time when I discovered a dead bird in amongst the undergrowth), check out some Internet art.

People who grew up in the 80s might also like to shudder at Los 80s – someone has too much time on their hands, but for once it isn’t me.

I heard a joke on TV recently – I can’t remember where, and it might have been Dead Ringers – that went something like this:

While controversy surrounds Victoria Beckham over having a tattoo on her wrist of the date she first had sex with her husband, David says he can’t understand it as he’s had a tattoo of that for years. Friends then pointed out to him that that was a watch.

It might have been a tattoo of the time he’d first done something else, I can’t remember. That doesn’t really matter.

Now I don’t want to go all Jane Espenson on you, but the joke doesn’t work, for the following reason: even David Beckham isn’t stupid enough not to notice that his watch tells a different time every so often. The joke is that he’s a little bit less stupid than that, but it’s completely masked by the listener response of “but the time would change“.

Let’s try the joke again, without that problem (while we’re here we can fix the last sentence to flow better; I can’t remember for certain that the original phrasing was as above, but it was pretty close):

While controversy surrounds Victoria Beckham over having a tattoo on her wrist of the date she first had sex with her husband, David says he can’t understand it as he’s had a tattoo of when he last thought of having sex with Victoria there for years. He’s since been told that that is a watch.

It’s still not perfect, but it now makes sense, and there’s an important point here: the funniest joke in the world will only get luke-warm reception if it’s packaged so that people listening to it start thinking of an incongruity just before they laugh. (Unless the incongruity is the joke.) It usually doesn’t take much to fix, although sometimes to sort this kind of problem out means saying more, which is then difficult to get punchy enough to be funny, although (and this isn’t said enough to writers, in my opinion) if you trust your actors they’ll usually find a way of coping.

Normal service resumes…

Currently listening to: Black Cat Bone by Laika.

Laura Branigan: Solitaire. Vive les 80s! Any recommendations for more music from that decade more than welcome. I don’t think I’m likely to say this again, but: someone suggest some more Diane Warren…

Have just watched the David Lynch short in Lumière and Company, and was completely blown away by it. If you haven’t seen it already, do so right now. (If you ask nicely you can borrow my copy, although I haven’t watched all the others yet.)