Why 31?

Woy Hodgson's in the dock

For the space monkey joke half time team talk. Here's a monkey joke that may not offend anyone, and as the whole premise is barking mad, I find it funny from the word go.

Scientists decide to perform an experiment to see what happens if an elephant is constipated for a long time. To simulate the effect of long term constipation, before thinking it through, they shove a bung up an elephant's arse. After a few weeks, they start the “who's going to remove the bung” debate. Time passes. Years later, they decide to train a monkey to do the job, as no one will take the risk. Eventually, they have a trained chimp ready to go, and the big day arrives. They're at a safe distance, one armed with a mobile to give the signal to the monkey and one with binoculars. They give the go-ahead and out comes the cork and there's a sufficiently huge tidal wave of elephant shit to bring into question their safe distance calculation. Soon it's up to their ankles, their knees, their waists, then their necks, and then the one with the binoculars starts laughing.

“We're up to our necks in elephant crap and there's plenty more on the way, what's so funny?”

“I'm watching the monkey try to stick the cork back in.”

There Woy. Next time try that. A safe(-ish) monkey joke.¹

These boots were made for...

...walking, and holding water, it seems. The good news is they're still waterproof and leak-free. The bad news was the freezing cold, deep rainwater, and that my socks now smell like that carpet did yesterday.

The beautiful game

A great goal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrzhcw6sXqE

There's no need to be an Arsenal or even a football fan to appreciate this. It is absolutely unstoppable, irresistable. Put yourself in the boots of one of those defenders in the green and yellow shirts. What could you do to avoid conceding that goal? At the end of a real-time run-through, look at the four Norwich defenders standing stock-still. It's as if they're about to scratch their heads and have bit of a “what the hell happened there?” conflab.

31 Songs

I read the book a while ago, but couldn't put my hands on a collection of the songs, and wasn't nerdy / anorak-y / anal enough to gather them myself. Now I've found the collection, do you think I can put my hands on the book? What's troubling me is the numbers. Why twenty six chapters about thirty one songs?

It's way less than that on Desert Island disks.

1I know a chimp is an ape and not a monkey, but it's a joke. Just a joke. It does not have to be zoologically accurate. Look, the whole elephant-arse bung thing's pretty far-fetched, isn't it? Why would anyone think that's a worthwhile bit of reasearch anyway?