In Which I Eat Elephant Ears

You may recall my post about elephant ears and what a disappointment (of sorts) it was to discover that they were not, in fact, mammoth trophies but were…well, if you don’t know, you’ll have to read the post for yourself.

Now I discover there is another kind of elephant ears: the kind you can eat! The best kind.

Don’t worry, I might not be vegetarian (shudder) but even I would balk at a pachyderm pot roast.

No, my lovely American friend Laurie, who blogs at laurieanichols, sent a surprise parcel in the post – a tin of elephant ears: homemade biscuits, so-called because of their shape.

Sadly, the Hub has just been diagnosed as diabetic, so he couldn’t have any; Spud doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, so he had a taste, approved of them, but declined to eat any more; Tory Boy lives elsewhere; and I watch my weight these days.  

I value my friendships more than my figure, however, so I manfully swallowed as many elephant ears as I could.

At the risk of offending all of my other friends who have fed me homemade biscuits before, I have to apologise and say: these were the best biscuits I have ever tasted.

I will always remember them fondly.  And so will my waist.  Thank you, Laurie!

Mothers, Don’t Try To Educate Your Children

I love to laugh but sometimes I can’t, like when I read this story over on Parentdish. 

A homeless woman living in a van used a friend’s address to enrol her six-year-old son in school.  She faces – wait for it – twenty years in jail.  Truly, wanting to educate your child despite your circumstances is a heinous crime.

But it’s understandable, as the Mayor tells us

McDowell is no angel, having been arrested last year for possession of marijuana and having served 18 months in prison for robbery and weapons charges.

“This is not a poor, picked-upon homeless person,” he tells the newspaper. “This is an ex-con, and somehow the city of Norwalk is made into the ogre in this. She has a checkered past at best.”

That’s okay then: she’s a bad person.  Forget that she has no record of child abuse or child abandonment and is trying to do the best for her son; lock her up for life, put her son into state care, and justice is served.

My dear readers, I am sure you are as appalled by this story as I am.  Please email Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia’s office and tell him so, and blog about it yourself.  A woman shouldn’t be imprisoned for doing her duty.

Here’s Norwalk’s website: http://www.norwalkct.org/index.aspx?nid=131

And the Mayor’s contact details:  http://www.norwalkct.org/forms.aspx?FID=90

Joke 20

Why Americans Are Tired; by an American.

For a couple years I’ve been blaming it on lack of sleep, not enough sunshine, too much pressure from my job, earwax build-up, poor blood, or anything else I could think of. But now I found out the real reason: I’m tired because I’m overworked. Here’s why: The population of this country is 300 million.

150 million are retired.

That leaves 150 million to do the work.

There are 95 million in school, which leaves 55 million to do the work.

Of this there are 30 million employed by the federal government, leaving 25 million to do the work.

3.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing vicious dictators. Which leaves 21.2 million to do the work.

Take from that total the 18,800,000 people who work for state and city governments, and that leaves 2.4 million to do the work.

At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals, leaving 2,212,000 to do the work.

Now, there are 2,211,998 people in prisons.

That leaves just two people to do the work. You and me. And there you are sitting, at your computer, reading jokes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Image via Wikipedia

I’m not American but I reckon that if we can import Trick or Treat and McCardboards, it wouldn’t hurt to say what we’re thankful for on one day a year, like our friends across the pond. 

Here’s my list:

1) My boys. 

                                                                                            2) My loving husband.

3) Indoor plumbing (for obvious reasons)

4) Modern dentistry, otherwise I’d look like this:

5) Maltesers (Number 4 refers)

What are you thankful for?

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American readers!

 

Ladies And Gentlemen, Please Be Upstanding For The National Anthem

I was looking for a You Tube clip of Steph on Over the Rainbow – I’m gutted she’s out; it’s my fault for not voting because I taped it and watched it the next day – when I came across this clip from the SABC, the broadcasting arm of the Rainbow Nation:

I love the South African national anthem; talk about a coalition: two minutes, two tunes, five of the eleven official languages.  It was an inspired piece of thinking from Nelson Mandela.  In case you don’t know the history, I’ve copied this from Wikipedia:

For decades during the apartheid regime it was considered by many to be the unofficial national anthem of South Africa, representing the suffering of the oppressed. In 1994 after the fall of apartheid, the new State President of  South Africa Nelson Mandela declared that both “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” and the previous national anthem, “Die Stem van Suid Afrika” (“The Voice of South Africa”) would be national anthems. While the inclusion of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” rejoiced in the newfound freedom of many South Africans, the fact that “Die Stem” was also kept as an anthem even after the fall of apartheid, signified to all that the new government under Mr Mandela respected all races and cultures and that an all-inclusive new era was dawning upon South Africa. In 1996, a shortened, combined version of the two anthems was released as the new South African National Anthem under the constitution of South Africa.

I like a good national anthem.  My favourites are the South African; the British (naturally): 

 The American:

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And the French:

 

I find it amusing that three of my favourites celebrate republicanism and the fourth monarchy.  I guess it’s all down to their rousing tunes, which is the point of a national anthem, after all: they are a rallying cry set to music. 

I had a quick look at the different lyrics.  It was inevitable, I suppose, that the French anthem would ramble on for five minutes, but they are complaining about bad soldiers slitting their throats so we’ll forgive them that.  Their anthem says

…that the impure blood
Should water the furrows of our fields.

The Americans thunder about 

…the rockets’ red glare
The bombs bursting in air. 

Before peace descended on South Africa, Afrikaaners

…always, always say yes:
To live, to die.

And the British?  Why, we

confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks.

That told ’em! 

I guess it’s why we have a constitutional monarchy system that still works; we are far too polite to change it.  Even our radical new political system is just two groups agreeing to disagree on a few points and rub along on the rest.

An interesting fact about Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika: it is also the national anthem of Tanzania and Zambia and was formerly the anthem of Zimbabwe and Namibia.  It was written in 1897 as a Methodist hymn.  The title means God bless Africa.  A nice little irony is that it was the rallying cry of the exiled and Communist-supported ANC.

The reason for the SABC video of the national anthem is to teach the South African population the words in time for the World Cup.  Not everyone speaks five languages, though most South Africans speak at least two and often three.  As the host nation, it would be embarrassing if the people didn’t know the words to their own national anthem; just ask the British: our footballers all speak the same language, but most of them lip synch like a bad dubbing at international fixtures.  Still, we don’t pay them obscene amounts of money to be literate, do we?  Just as well, really.

 

 

 

 

 

More Questions Than Answers

Big news for Britain, if you weren’t paying attention: a general election has been called for May 6th.  But it’s not news in the sense of real news, of course, because the press pack had already moved into London over the Easter weekend, waiting to hear the worst-kept secret in Britain.  Our polling cards arrived in the post this morning which means they must have been printed last week at the earliest.  Rumour has it that ITV, SKY and the BBC have been trawling for audience members for the big debates, so they must have had an idea when the election was to be called.  The phony war is over: let the campaigning begin.

If you are eligible, will you vote?  It depresses me, the apathy for politics in this country.  Was it Lenin who said politics affects everything?  I’m not sure that it was, but when I Googled it I did discover that he said, ‘The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.’  Labour & Conservative could both use that as a campaign slogan: Labour to keep the militants on side and the Conservatives to attract the rest of the country, who should be scared witless by now that Labour could conceivably win a <shudder> fourth term.

It’s no secret which way I swing but I was prepared to give Labour a fair hearing for all of five minutes, until I heard Mr Brown tell us just how ‘middle class’ he is.  If we live in a country where race, gender, inclination, nationality, etc. are irrelevant, then why is class permitted as an issue?  Why is it wrong to judge a person on the foreign accent with which they speak but okay to judge a person for having a posh accent?  That smacks of double standards to me.  If we shouldn’t blame the former for an accident of birth, why should we blame the latter?  I don’t accuse Mr Brown for being Scots so why should he be allowed to accuse Mr Cameron for being upper class?  Is Mr Brown saying that he is better than Mr Cameron simply because he is middle class?  And if so, and we are obviously working the system backwards these days, does that mean we shouldn’t vote for Mr Brown because he is not working class, which, by his logic, is the best class of all?  It also begs the question, why no working class leader of the party that is championing the cause of the working wo/man? Is this how the election is going to be run?  On class lines?  Is that because Labour have no viable policies with which to tempt us?

Let me state for the record that, while I dislike Mr Brown, I am not enamoured of Mr Cameron: he’s a little too much of a Blue Blair for my liking.  However, I have been watching him over the last couple of years and he’s growing on me.  I won’t be voting for him, but for the party which he leads because they are in my ideological corner.  At least I’ll be voting; will you?  Have you even bothered to register?  If you are a woman, remember it was less than a hundred years ago that we were given the vote at all.  I stood in line alongside thousands of newly enfranchised men and women in South Africa in 1994 and felt privileged to be a tiny part of history.  Wars are fought (were you invited to the Boston Tea Party?) and people die for the right to vote, even today, and you can’t be bothered to turn out?  Shame on you. 

I am not saying you should vote my way, but that you should vote.  You should stand up and be counted or this blog may descend into an orgy of  clichés and I will drown in a pile of platitudes.  You wouldn’t want that to happen, now would you?  They say the people get the government they deserve: if Labour get in again, I know who to blame.

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Yesterday’s prompt was to give your poetry a name and write about it.   I am not satisfied with my effort and I will probably re-write it at some point.

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My Name Is Discovery

.

Shuttling from pen to page to pc,

my endeavour is the sonnet, the pun,

the couplet – heroic or otherwise –

the clever epigram: an odyssey

that begins in an empty head.

.

Each rhetorical enterprise

leaves me spent; until the next time:

blank space becomes word

becomes poem becomes a thing

that it did not set out to be. 

.

I am challenger, agitator, explorer.

Erupting from mind and heart and hand,

discarding, destroying, discovering. 

I was not, once; and now I am.

.

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This Is Not An April Fool

I have taken the pledge.  April is National Poetry Writing Month in the States; as a (fairly new) member of (a soon to be defunct) ReadWritePoem, I have pledged to write a poem a day and post it on my blog.  Before you leave in your drove, dear reader, let me assure you that I will put the daily poem at the end of each day’s post so you can ignore it if poetry is not your thing. 

I don’t promise you good poetry, exciting poetry, fun poetry or interesting poetry; merely the promise that I will try to write something.

Here’s my first effort:

Modern Politics

Expanding quangocracy
makes utter mockery
of British Democracy.

 

 

 

 

America, Please Enlighten Me

This is something that has puzzled me for years: are there no electric kettles in the USA?

Watch American movies and tv carefully: whenever a cup of tea or coffee is made, the character fills a kettle and puts it on the stove. No-one ever plugs a kettle into the wall. Why is this? I mention it because I was reading WendyUsuallyWanders this morning and she had an interesting virtual tour of her kitchen, and I noticed there was no kettle. I asked her the same question and she was a little helpful: she doesn’t drink tea or coffee herself but she has seen electric kettles in other homes. But that doesn’t tell me why they never appear on tv. Is there a ban on their use in the media, like there is for cigarettes? Does the American Government know and is not telling us that electric kettles cause lung cancer?

There is also the question of tea: why do Americans drink tea with the bag still in the cup? I know this is so because the string and label always hang over the side. The tea must be stewed by the time they get to the bottom of it. No wonder there are so many hairy people in the States. And don’t get me started on how they drink it the minute the boiling water is poured in – do they all have asbestos lips? My own theory is that America has traditionally been a nation of coffee drinkers and directors want to show their characters’ individuality by making it obvious that they are tea drinkers: maverick detective with hirsute trout pout clears name by killing seventy-three queuing assailants with six bullets, and rounds off the day with a nice cup of Earl Grey. Or it could just be a matter of product placement. But that still doesn’t explain the weird absence of electric kettles.

‘Queuing’ came from last night’s writing class, where we discussed the fact that there are no new stories, then segued into movie clichés: the baddies always take turns fighting the hero instead of rushing him en masse. It’s usually a him. He might have – in fact, he will have – a gorgeous female sidekick and she will have a fabulous name and these days can kick butt as well as him, but she will inevitably be captured and be reduced to ‘the girl’: ‘Let the girl go/just give me the girl/blow up the Isle of Man or the girl gets it.’ If I am ever captured and the Hub rescues me and I hear him say, ‘Let the girl go,’ the first thing I will do after my grateful smooch will be to kick his butt and leave him for a dentist. It annoys me.

Then there is the matter of coffee drinkers: we see them in their homes, loading their stove-top kettles or their coffee machines. Next scene: a cardboard cup of coffee in their hands, bought from Starbucks on the way to fight crime. What’s that about? Are the stove-top kettles decoys? Or a subliminal message…if it ain’t from a street vendor you’re killing the planet?

One final question: do I spend too much time watching tv and worrying about inanities?

Quite Interesting

I was watching QI recently and I learned two interesting facts:

1. The Netherlands now has its own version.  I first typed ‘Holland’ but luckily I remembered that an episode of QI explained why that is incorrect.  I’m not going to bother telling you why it is, because I’ve forgotten. 

I checked out the QI website and I don’t think it’s that helpful for the kind of information I was looking for – which other countries have their own version?  But it did steer me towards the QI entry in Wikipedia , the first time I have known that to happen, and this in spite of QI’s regular mockery of the veracity of Wikipedia’s entries.  The answer was The Netherlands only.  (Wikipedia cleverly avoided the Holland trap by saying ‘The Dutch’.)  The only reason it hasn’t been picked up by other countries, apparently, is the issue of copyright of the images broadcast.

It took me so long to type that, I’ve forgotten what number 2 is.  How annoying.

Took a chocolate break and it came flooding back; chocolate is clearly brain food – how else do you explain the number of degrees given out each year to 21 year-olds who believe that three years of eating crisps, chocolate, pizza and Coke constitutes a balanced diet? 

There is – allegedly – a website in America called seeitrot.com, where you can buy a webcam for a coffin and watched your loved one moulder to dust away.  I say ‘allegedly’ because of course I had to check it out, and nothing came up except lots of laments about rotten food, and advice on protecting your boat because salt water will otherwise kill it off.  Didn’t know that either.  This self-educating business is fun.

I found the seeitrot.com thing interesting because of my Mum.  I hasten to assure you I had no desire to watch her rot away – it would have been kind of dull, anyway, because she’s a pile of ash – but she had a phobia of being buried or burned alive in her coffin and  I’m sure she’d have insisted I sign up if she’d known about it.  She made everyone she knew swear to stick a pin in her when the time came, to confirm she was truly dead.  Everyone agreed to do it – well, you have to placate crazies, don’t you? – but only the Hub and I followed through.  Just as well, really as, with that many holes in her, the pall bearers would have had embalming fluid stains on their suit shoulders at the funeral.  Now that would have been interesting.

God Bless The NHS

Today’s original heading was It Doesn’t Happen Often, But I Actually Find I Am Outraged Today (snappy, eh?).  I am a Yankophile and would probably vote Republican if I was an American citizen, but I came across an alert that said, Vote Republican: Together, we can Prevent access to healthcare, and I felt my blood boil for the first time since British Gas tried to lure me back as a customer; the same British Gas who charged me three times as much as any other utility supplier has ever done and treated me appallingly for the privilege. 

I had marshalled a stern retort to the offender and written my own post exposing the nastiness of American politics, before I had even had time to click the mouse on the offending blog.  When I did, all I got was this picture.  I tried to find somewhere to comment and it was then I realised I was on a sales website and the logo was a pig, not an elephant.  Looking closer, I realised it was a cushion with a satirical message.  It gave me a good laugh. 

http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+sick_pig_throw_pillow,287271298

It has done its job because it set me thinking about my own situation.  Without access to free healthcare I could, quite literally, have died last week.  I had a nasty infection that floored me even with two sets of antibiotics.  We have no spare cash; I could not have afforded those antibiotics if I had needed to pay for them.  The infection could quite easily have turned to septicemia without antibiotics.  I can go back further: I had my wisdom tooth out because I have had two infections in the past two years caused by its awkward position in my gum; I can’t afford to pay for dental treatment.  This blog might never have existed and my children would have been motherless today if I had not had access to free treatment for the infections. 

I don’t believe I am being melodramatic: people die from septicemia every day.  I once worked with a man whose sister died after giving birth because she had needed dental treatment while pregnant and refused it because she didn’t want to harm her baby.  It was too late for her by the time she delivered.  It was tragic but, in her case, she had the option of treatment.  Millions of people around the world don’t have that option, including in America.  I sincerely hope President Obama succeeds in his reforms despite the opposition.  I know there were similar arguments against our own NHS before 1948, but I am so glad they didn’t win that fight, and I have the healthy gums to prove it.