Martin Fone's Blog, page 309
December 27, 2016
Christmas Crackers Of The Year (2)
More of the best cracker jokes of 2016 for your delectation:-
Why can’t the England football team play Yahtzee this Christmas? Because they got rid of Allardyce.
Why is Bob Dylan’s sleigh so quiet? Because it has Nobel.
Who might be cooking Christmas dinner at No 10 this year? Theresa May.
Why can’t Mary Berry eat turkey sandwiches? Paul Hollywood took all the bread.
Why doesn’t Sam Allardyce help load Santa#s sleigh. Because it took him 67 days to get the sack.
Why did the snowman pull out of Strictly? Because he got cold feet.
What does Nigel Farage do to the hall with boughs of holly? He Dexit.
What did Tim Peake get in his stocking this year? Galaxy and Milky Way.
Why did Ed Balls fail an audition to play one of Santa’s reindeer in a Christmas pantomime? Because he’s no Dancer.
What’s Donald Trump’s favourite type of ice cream? Wall’s.
Why’s Santa going around the world this Christmas Eve? He’s playing Pokemon Ho Ho Ho.
How do snowmen leave the EU? They trigger Icicle 50.
And finally, what is the best Christmas present in the world? A broken drum. You just can’t beat it.
Filed under: Humour Tagged: best one-liners, Christmas cracker jokes
December 26, 2016
Christmas Crackers Of The Year
To bring some post-Christmas cheer here is a selection of the best cracker jokes of 2016 for your delectation:-
How do you recognise a Christmas tree from BHS? All the branches have gone.
I bought my Mum Mary Berry’s cookbook for Christmas, I tried to get Paul Hollywood’s but he had sold out.
What is David Cameron’s favourite Christmas song? All I want for Christmas is EU.
Why has Hillary Clinton asked Santa for a 23-letter alphabet? Because she is sick of F-B-I.
Why didn’t Roy Hodgson go to visit Santa at the North Pole? He couldn’t get past Iceland.
Why are Jeremy Corbyn’s Christmas cards on the floor? His cabinet collapsed.
Prince Philip looked out of the window on Christmas Eve. “That’s some reindeer”, he says. The Queen replies, “63 years. Yes, that’s a lot”.
What’s the difference between the clementine in your Christmas stocking and Donald Trump? Nothing, they’re both a little orange.
What do you get if you cross Donald Trump with a Christmas carol? O Comb Over Ye Faithful.
What’s the best advice you can give at the UKIP Christmas Party? Avoid the punch.
Why did the three wise men only have frankincense and myrrh? Because Team GB took all the gold.
Which parent is likely to do the Christmas shop at Tesco this year? Dad might, Marmite not.
More tomorrow, if you can stand it!
Filed under: Humour Tagged: best one-liners, Christmas cracker jokes, low-brow humour
December 24, 2016
Round Up Of The Week
My lawyers have asked me to point out that my departure from the London work and social scene in late 2015 and London’s subsequent fall from first to second in the cocaine usage stakes – behind Antwerp, would you believe – is purely coincidental.
Our benighted Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, has just got into a spot of bother for “dooring” a cyclist, knocking one off their bike whilst opening a car door. Despite our local council spending a fortune introducing cycle ways – a pot of white paint and some bollards to bifurcate the footpath into a lane for cyclists and one for pedestrians – many still insist on using the road. I was nearly a victim of dooring a few weeks back. I was innocently opening the door of my car when I was descended upon by a pack of cyclists. My door, fortunately, was able to retract in time, otherwise, we might have seen an interesting example of the domino theory in play.
The Dutch, sensible people in most things, I find, other than politics, have the answer to the problem. They recommend that you open the door with the hand furthest away from it – a right-hand door with your left. This manoeuvre forces you to look backwards and spot any oncoming cyclist. Contact can be guaranteed every time rather than just leaving it to blind chance.
Best cracker joke of 2016 – what will be different about Christmas dinner after Brexit? No Brussels.
I would like to wish all my readers and followers a happy Christmas.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Antwerp cocaine usage capital, Chris Grayling, dooring, London no longer cocaine usage capital, the Dutch answer to dooring
December 23, 2016
What Is The Origin Of (109)?…
A man of straw
It is a long time, if I ever truly was, since I could have been described as a man of straw, a phrase we use to describe someone without any assets. It is often used in a judicial context when damages are being awarded against someone only for their lawyer to point out that they are a man of straw without two farthings to rub together.
In 1823 John Bee defined a man of straw in his Dictionary of the Turf as “a bill acceptor, without property – no assets”. Gambling which is the natural concomitant of horse racing is prone to leave the unsuccessful punter financially embarrassed and it is not too fanciful to think of it as bookies’ argot for someone who hasn’t the assets to back his wager. In the 17th century there was a proverb which contrasted straw with gold – “a man of straw is worth a woman of gold” – a tad sexist for sure but the sense surely is linking straw with a lack of assets. Quite how it gravitated into the court room is anyone’s guess – perhaps some lawyers or judges were patrons of the race course and adopted this colourful phrase for their own purposes.
For farmers one of the perennial battles is keeping birds and other predators from their seeds and a popular device over the ages to achieve this is to erect a scarecrow in the field which had a vaguely human form and was often stuffed with straw. Inevitably, a straw man became a synonym for a decoy or a dummy or a sham. The Return of Parnassus, the third of three plays performed in London as part of the Christmas festivities of St John’s, Cambridge and dating from between 1598 and 1602, has this marvellous line, “he braggs…of his liberalitie to schollers..but indeed he is a meere man of strawe, a great lump of drousie earth”.
Another sense soon developed, that of an artificial construct for the purposes of refuting the arguments and enhancing the power and brilliance of your own logic. In 1624 T Gataker wrote in A Discussion of the Popish Discussion of Transubstantiation “to skirmish with a man of straw of his owne making”. In Advice to the Men of Shaftesbury, printed for John Smith in 1681, we find “I rather suppose the Some that say so never were men of God’s making but mere men of straw set up by Master Bencher, for a Tryal of his own Skill in Confutation”. In describing the format of the Socratic dialogues T DeQuincey wrote in 1859 “in fact, Socrates and some man of straw or good humoured nine-pin set up to be bowled down as a matter of course”.
The phase spawned a variant, particularly common across the pond, straw man which was used to suggest an artificial opponent as in this usage in The Philosophical Review of 1858, “or, better, against a straw-man which he constructs himself…” In more recent popular culture the most famous straw man quote appeared in the film, the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy slaps the paw of the Cowardly Lion, saying “It’s bad enough picking on a straw man, but when you go picking on poor little dogs.” Of course, the straw man refers to a scarecrow and is not used metaphorically.
More recently, the phrase is increasingly used as a compound adjective as in straw-man device or technique or issue, to describe something which has been floated to be tested and, if necessary, knocked down, a variant of our Aunt Sally.
So now we know!
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Dictionary of the Turf, Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, John Bee, origin of aunt sally, origin of man of straw, origin of straw man, scarecrows, the Wizard of Oz
December 22, 2016
Gin o’Clock – Part Eighteen
The Scots may be losing out in the whisky stakes to the Japanese but they are putting in a spirited performance with their premium gins. In my exploration of the ginaissance some of my favourites to date have been distilled north of the border. Perhaps this is not too surprising because in the mid to late 18th century the city of Edinburgh was a hub of distilling expertise. In 1777 there were eight licensed distilleries in the city and Port Leith area as well as upwards of 400 illegal stills.
In the early 19th century John Haig took over Leith’s first legal distillery, the Leith distillery, and the port area was soon established as a centre for rectifying and distilling as well as exporting rectified grain spirit to the distillers in the English capital. In 1823 duties on Scottish spirit were halved which meant that better quality spirit in larger volumes could be sent south of the border. The English distillers were soon up in arms and Parliament rescinded the tax break. This ostensible set back only fuelled Scottish ingenuity. By 1826 Robert Stein had invented a new method of continuous distillation – a process further improved by the Irish distiller, Aeneas Coffey – which speeded up the process and allowed the use of cheaper grains rather than the more expensive malt barley.
The result was that inexpensive, lighter, neutral grain spirit was available to the London distillers by the gallon, leading many of them to move away from the sweeter Old Tom gin and to develop the London Dry. London Dry as a style has ruled the roost pretty much ever since.
With this heritage it is perhaps it is surprising to discover that there is only one gin distillery currently operating in the centre of Edinburgh, in Rutland Place in EH1 to be precise, and that only since 2014, a claim that The Spencerfield Spirit Company went to court to prove when Pickering’s Gin made the claim on their website. A prickly lot are the Scottish gin distillers, for sure.
Our featured gin this month, Edinburgh Gin, supplied by the ever reliable 31Dover.com, comes from the Spencerfield stable. Ironically, it started life out in 2010 in England at the Langley Distillery in Birmingham, although a 200 year old Scottish copper pot boasting the sobriquet of Jenny was used in the process. Using finest Scottish grain spirit together with juniper, coriander, citrus peel, angelica and orris root the spirit was then shipped up to Edinburgh where locally sourced botanicals such as heather, milk thistle, pine and juniper berries were added. It was only in 2014 that the whole process was migrated up to Edinburgh.
The bottle has an art deco feel about it using black and grey shades against a white background on the labelling. Edinburgh Gin is embossed in the glass and the stopper is synthetic. To the nose the gin which has an ABV of 43% has a piney and spicey aroma. To the taste the crystal clear spirit is very junipery with spices coming through with a creamy texture. The aftertaste is predominantly one of pepper and pine. Tasted neat and with the obligatory Fever-Tree mixed it had a very pleasing warm and smooth feel to it. A definite hit.
Until the next time, cheers!
Filed under: Gin Tagged: 31Dover.com, Edinburgh Gin, Edinburgh's gin distilling history, Fever-Tree premium Indian Tonic water, ginaissance, Old Tom gin, Pickering's Gin, Robert Stein and continuous distillation process, Spencerfield Spirit Company
December 21, 2016
Book Corner – December 2016 (2)
The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny – Ian Davidson
Rather like the First and Second World Wars you would think that the last thing the world needs is another book raking over the coals of the French Revolution. But this book gives a refreshingly clear and thought provoking account of the seismic events that gripped la belle France without the usual Dantonist or Robespierrist guillotines being ground. Some of the themes that Davidson focuses on are remarkably relevant today.
Although the popular conception of the revolution centres around the storming of the Bastille, the execution of Louis XVI and the Terror or, as Robespierre styled it, the despotism of liberty, Davidson is at pains to show that the genesis of the revolution was from the bourgeoisie, frustrated by the glass ceiling imposed by the aristocrats and clergy and endorsed by the monarchy that prevented their advancement. Their aim was to build a better state and one of their first acts was to draw up a Declaration of the Rights of Man upon which many that are in existence today are based. They also introduced a form of elected local administration in France which is still used today. The revolutionaries were respecters of and felt bound by the law.
Davidson points out that the period was a time of revolutionary ferment across many parts of Europe but mostly the upstarts were successfully resisted by the monarchs and aristocrats of those counties. In France, however, Louis just caved in. And this caused the Revolutionaries no end of problems – what to do with him but, more importantly, what to replace him with. They never really solved this problem leaving a power vacuum that allowed factionalism to run rife and the unscrupulous to seize control.
Economics played a major role in the fortunes of the revolution. The assignats, bonds issued by the National Assembly from 1789 and underwritten by the sale of the newly nationalised properties of the church, were a piece of financial engineering that the Bulls of Wall Street would have been proud of and caused, inevitably, rampant inflation.. This in turn meant that the living conditions of the lower classes – variably in my edition described as sans culottes, sans-culottes and sansculotes – some editorial consistency on so vital a term would not have gone amiss – were unbearable. Attempts to control prices of basic foodstuffs failed miserably.
The lumpen prole was there for the unscrupulous politicians to manipulate – resonances of the EU Referendum if there ever were ones – and the pressure from the bottom together with the factionalism that the power vacuum had created meant that the enlightened principles of the early part of the revolution went out of the window. Instead, violence, waves of unspeakable barbarity and mob rule backed by the absence of the rule of law took centre stage.
It is remarkable that the revolution lasted as long as it did and no surprise that it was replaced by the dictatorship of Bonaparte who had worked his way up the greasy pole as one of the butchers of the reign of terror.
The book is full of fascinating insights. The Assembly chamber was narrow and wide and the radicals sat on the left of the chair and the moderates to the right, giving us the left and right political short-hand we use to this day.
An engaging read and if you really feel the need to understand the French Revolution, this is the book to go to.
Filed under: Books, Culture, History Tagged: assignats, Danton, Ian Davidson, origin of left and right in politics, Robespierre, sans culottes, the French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Terror
December 20, 2016
Double Your Money – Part Thirteen
The Panama Canal Scandal (1892)
The Panama Canal is a 48 mile man-made waterway which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and when it opened in 1914 it substantially reduced journey times and avoided the necessity of sailing the treacherous seas around Cape Horn. But its construction was far from plain sailing and was only completed when the Americans acquired the rights from the French.
The original French project was the brainchild of Ferdinand de Lesseps who on the back of his success with the Suez Canal was able to raise substantial amounts of money to fund the construction work which began on 1st January 1881. Many of the investors were private individuals, some 800,000 in total of whom 15,000 were single women, and over the course of nine stock issues a total of 1.8 billion gold francs was raised.
The project was bedevilled by poor planning and hostile terrain. The jungle through which the canal was to be cut was rife with venomous snakes and mosquitos who could not resist the temptation of fresh blood. Yellow fever, malaria and other tropical diseases made inroads into the workforce. In 1884 the death rate was over 200 a month. Obviously, the high death-toll made it difficult to recruit and retain experienced engineers. Much of the machinery, state-of-the-art steel shovels and diggers rusted quickly due to the damp, humid climate.
De Lesseps kept raising money through share issues but the project was eating cash and not making the projected progress. The inevitable happened and on 4th February 1889 the Tribunal Civil de la Seine ordered the winding up of the Canal Company which had spent $287m on a project which had cost some 22,000 lives. But the French government were reluctant to liquidate the company for fear of the impact on the investors and tried desperately to interest American companies in taking over the operation.
The extent of the scandal became apparent in 1892 when French nationalists accused a large number of ministers of accepting bribes from de Lesseps in 1888 to permit the last stock issue, even though it was obvious to those in the know that the company’s finances were perilous. Some 510 members of parliament were accused of receiving bribes from the Company to conceal its financial position from the public. De Lesseps, his son, Charles, the chief engineer Gustave Eiffel – heard of him? – and other members of the management were tried and sentenced to five year imprisonment, although this was later annulled.
One of the ministers, Bethaut, was sentenced to five years, of which he served three, and the main agent for the bribes, Baron Reinach, committed suicide. Some fled to England while de Lesseps slipped the mortal coil in 1894.
All of this was little consolation to the 800,000 investors who had lost their chemise as a result of the over optimistic promises of a speculator and the avarice of their legislators. The consequences were that there was a period of political instability and public trust in politicians was severely dented. Some commentators suggest that as two of the prominent characters in the scandal – Baron Reinach and Cornelius Herz – were Jewish it helped stoke up the nascent French antisemitism movement.
In 1894 a new French company was set up to continue the work on a smaller scale and eventually in November 1903 under the Hay-Bunau-Vanilla Treaty the United States took over its lease, shares and assets.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Baron Reinach, consequences of Panama financial scandal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Gustave Eiffel, Hay-Bunau-Vanilla Treaty, Panama canal, Panama canal financial scandal
December 19, 2016
I Don’t Want To Belong To Any Club That Will Accept People Like Me As A Member – Part Thirty
Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen
The start of the 17th century saw the development of associations of like-minded men who met regularly at designated taverns to eat, drink and engage in animated conversation, what we would now call clubs. The antiquary, John Aubrey, claimed that the word club was derived from the wooden sticks the groups used to carry to protect them from footpads and the like as they wandered the streets of the capital.
One such club, the Sireniacs, met on the first Friday of the month at the Mermaid Tavern – their name was a pun on the French word for mermaid, sirene – at Bread Street. It is also said to have been situated in Friday Street and in Cheapside and, like as not, it had entrances on each of these thoroughfares. If you went there you would come across many of the leading literary figures of the age including Ben Jonson, John Donne, the Welsh poet, Hugh Holland, and dramatist, Francis Beaumont to name just a few. Legend has it that the club was founded in 1603 by Sir Walter Raleigh but as he was imprisoned in the Tower of London from that year until 1616 it is probably unlikely that he did.
William Shakespeare had links with a number of the Sireniacs – the landlord of the Mermaid, William Johnson, was named as a trustee for the mortgage the Bard raised to buy the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613 and Hugh Holland wrote a commendatory poem that prefaced Will’s First Folio of plays – and so it is fanciful to think that he may have attended the meetings. Victorian sources, always ones unable to resist the siren call of a good yarn, claim that the Mermaid was the venue for battles of wit between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson was the cleverer but had the habit of going off at tangents and having a ponderous debating style which made it easier for Shakespeare to win round the audience. John Faed even went to the trouble of painting a picture of such an encounter in 1851.
Whether these set-tos occurred or not it is clear that the club was a venue for conversation and coruscating wit as this extract from a poem that Francis Beaumont penned to and for Jonson, “what things we have seen/ done at the Mermaid? Heard words that have been/ so nimble, and so full of subtle flame/ as if that everyone from whom they came/ had meant to put his whole wit in a jest/ and had resolved to live a fool the rest/ of his dull life..” Keats, a couple of centuries later in Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, picked up the theme, “souls of poets dead and gone/ what Elysium have ye known/ happy field or mossy cavern/ choicer than the Mermaid Tavern”.
But the membership was not restricted to literary types. Lawyers, parliamentarians and members of the Royal court could be found there imbibing the drink of choice which was Canary wine, a sweet, white wine with a yellowish tint imported from the Canary Islands. It must have been fine stuff because it is wistfully recalled by Beaumont who has to endure plonk of an inferior quality out in the country. In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, published in 1614, John Littlewit refers pejoratively to canary-drinking wits who keep company at the Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid. It may be that these other pubs, in the vicinity of the Mermaid, hosted the Syreniacs.
Alas the Mermaid Tavern was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 but the club seems to have petered out before then.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Ben Jonson, Canary wine, Francis Beaumont, Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen, John Keats,
December 18, 2016
Christmas Tip Of The Week (2)
The acronym of the year has to be JAM, the just about managing. The irony of its origin is presumably lost on those who bandy it around; the White Queen’s admonition to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass that you can have jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but not today, in turn a reference to the usage of iam and nunc in Latin.
Still, many are on fixed budgets and Christmas is a time when we feel the pinch and so the question on everyone’s lips is how cheaply can you cook a Christmas meal. Well, according to blogger, Miguel Barclay, I learned this week, the answer is 92.1p. The trick is to dispense with turkey and replace it with a chicken leg, priced at 50p – a pack of 4 costs £2. For the stuffing mix, use 10ml of cranberry sauce (3,2p), stale bread and half an onion (5p). Next up is pigs in blankets which will set you back 13.5p – 6p for 30g of dried stuffing mix and 7p for a rasher of streaky bacon.
For the vegetables you will have to make do with 200g of spuds for 9.4p and 30g of sprouts at 6p, topped off with one teaspoon full of gravy granules at 5p.
Barclay, whose blog is onepoundmeals on Instagram, claims to be serving it up for his family. Think I will give it a miss.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Miguel Barclay, onepoundmeals, origin of jam tomorrow, the sub one pound Christmas dinner, the White Queen, Through The Looking Glass
December 17, 2016
Bank Notes Of The Week
Love ‘em or hate ‘em – and some vegans have objected to the use of animal fat in their production – the new £5 plastic note jobbies are here to stay.
A micro-engineer from Birmingham, Graham Short, has made a modification to the design, however, I learned this week, by engraving a 5mm portrait of Jane Austen in the transparent part of four of the notes – serial numbers AM 32 885551 to 4, if you are interested – and including a different quote from her oeuvre on each note. They have an insurance value of £50,000, so are worth looking out for.
Doubtless to piss vegans off further, Short has spent them in a café in Caerphilly, a pork pie shop in Melton Mowbray, a bakery in Kelso and is due to get rid of the last one in Northern Ireland. If you find one, and at least the one spent in Melton Mowbray is in circulation, you are urged to contact the Tony Huggins-Haig gallery in Kelso who have sponsored the caper.
Ever ones to pour a bucket of cold water on a jape like this, the Bank of England warn that it is an offence under the Currency and Banknotes Act of 1928 to deface a note of the realm.
Bah humbug, I say, Happy hunting!
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: fivers engraved with picture of Jane Austen, Graham Short, the new British £5 note, Tony Huggins-Haig Gallery, vegans object to £5 note
