Mindless Facebook Quizzes and Why I Don't Want to be Pennsylvania

Has anyone taken that dumb quiz on Facebook that tells people what state they belong in? Basically you select things you like, such as fast food chains from a list and faces of babies (inexplicably) and you can find out whether you are the Union's finest or if you are Nebraska.

So it turned out I was a powerful leader type and I belonged in Pennsylvania. I was bemused that the quiz told me this in glowing terms. There was no button to say 'Dude. I don't want to be in Pennsylvania. I have been scarred for life by the gas station with the grey window panes and the largest number of men with missing teeth and rat tails I have ever seen in one place.' Somewhere on the desolate road to Erie I believe.

Why so pretty Pennsylvania?

Lots of people have ended up bemused by this quiz because they have posted things such as Wisconsin - WTF?

So why do we spend our precious time on such nonsense? Probably because we can and we are just curious.

Even now I am looking on my Facebook feed and seeing My iPersonic Personality Type: the Spontaneous Idealist posted by someone. On come on. You know who you are Ms. Spontaneous. You follow this blog.

I have to say I draw the line at some of these time wasters such as the "Which Star Wars Character Are You?" A few weeks ago Facebook friends were falling over themselves to do this, clearly not recalling that everybody did it four years ago. I was Yoda. I am fine with Yoda and don't want to be that hairy character.

But the worst test I have seen anybody doing was the "What Girl Scout Cookie Are you?" quiz. This is really tantamount to admitting you don't have a life and never will have one. It didn't stop some people posting excited updates on how they were macaroons and thin mints.

Mini rant over. Forget about blog for another week.

Re-Introducing Wayne and Waynetta Slob

I have an odd system of memory in that I can sometimes forget a task I have been reminded about half an hour earlier and yet then something odd and random can catch me unawares. This applies to British comedic characters. The U.S.seems to lack comedic characters and has to make do with real life ones like the hairy homophobic bloke from Duck Dysentry.

Anyhow I was somewhere the other day when I saw a couple and instantly thought of Wayne and Waynetta Slob from the Harry Enfield show back in the 90s. I may have said as much to my daughter, who looked at me blankly for obvious reasons. In fact, after a particularly adolescent type outburst a few days earlier I had suggested she was Kevin the Teenager from the same show, an allusion that again fell on deaf ears.

At times like this I wonder if I am frozen in the 90s - a decade my daughter describes as a "long time ago." I have been known to pull up Oasis on YouTube from time to time.

Wayne and Waynetta, in their own way are classics of British comedy, although not in the classic classic sense of Fawlty Towers. Still worth a watch. For some reason they appear with alarming regularity in my head every time I am lucky enough to find myself in Wal-Mart. Oh and having it off means ... well you know.

Snow in Virginia

Just when the kids were moaning about never being able to make a snowman the snow came to Virginia. Then a week later it returned. Of course south east Virginia could not cope. The schools have been closed for the best part of two weeks. The promises of snow plows ring as empty as the clang of shovels on the sidewalk.

For a while I was fooled by the snowmaggedon thing. To venture out would be to risk sudden death. By the time I reached the end of the street I would be like a soldier in the Grande Armee on its bedraggled retreat from Moscow, looking for horse flesh or worse.

Oddly enough after finally putting on my boots after two days of cabin fever, I made it to the store at the end of the street and it was open, even if the wine was unbearably sweet. By Friday I was driving on the slippery streets which were not so bad. It suddenly occurred to me that I had trampled through much snow back in those half forgotten days on the ski slopes and I had not lost any limbs to frost bite.

I have been on wooded paths edged with snow and relished the air as clear and clean as a bell. The words of Robert Frost came back to me and made me think of those places.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

A Teacher Fit for Justin Bieber

My scariest teacher back at school was called Clutson. Rumor had it he had been in a German Prisoner of War camp and had exported its methods to the classroom. Quite a lot of teachers at my primary school had been in the Second World War and a military ethos marched through the school. If Mr. Clutson had taken gym we would surely have dug an escape tunnel under the wooden horse.

Maybe Clutson had PTSD. Or maybe he was plain weird. He had perfected a technique in which he placed his thumbs on a student's neck and twisted as hard as he could. His favorite victim was Witts. I'm not sure if it;s accurate to describe Witts as a victim as he would purposely goad Clutson into getting his neck twisted to get some kind of bizarre pain fix.

The last thing I heard of Witts he was en route to jail for trying to place explosives in the gas tank of the caretaker at his secondary school.


Clutson would rather adeptly apply the pain and inform the hapless Witts: "Witts. I'm going to turn you off at the mains. Witts, I'm going to twist your head around so as when your mother sees you, she will say 'Witts why is your head facing your back?"

I seriously doubt if Witts had a mother; rather he seemed to have been spawned by a couple of mutant toads over at the sewage works. We are not Facebook friends.

I don't know what happened to Clutson, a small and rather disturbed looking man with beetle brows. I recall one day when he had a blazing fight with Mr. D, one of the school's other unrelenting disciplinarians on the playing field when the air turned blue with f words; always a good example to set to impressionable youth.


I'd like to say we went on to fill the ranks of the civil service, Parliament and successful business owners but most of my fellow students ended up walking around with placards or pushing supermarket carts, which are known as trolleys in England, with the exception of odd parts of northern England where trolleys are underpants. I'm not knocking it. It takes skill to hitch together 20 carts and push them around a parking lot without hitting anybody else's car.


The education system has a place for most kinds of teachers but I would like to think there is no place for teachers like Clutson. Then again there may well be. I'm sure Justin Bieber is in need of some re-education and I know just the teacher for the job.

Bad British NFL Commentary Goes Viral

I was pleased as punch when Bad British NFL commentary picked up 3.6 million views on YouTube; mainly because Bad British commentary is so good.

It's exactly the short of commentary I would provide, although funnier. In my time in the U.S. I have stubbornly refused to get excited about funny football played by men in motorcycle helmets and '80s style shoulder pads. I watched one Super Bowl and gave up because it was too long and it wasn't that one where Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction.

This is another puzzling term for Brits because wardrobe is a big wooden cabinet - never the most elegant of things to bring along for a singing performance.

Bad British NFL commentary involves a commentary on Alabama v. Notre Dame playing "robot rugby league". The commentator is impressed that Alabama are playing a French team.

"wow a French team, good luck to them."

The commentary describes how a full back "runs a bit, catches a bit, falls over."
Another player is "caught by 83 like a dog with a Frisbee."


The commentator says Alabama’s full back "has a handkerchief in his pocket. He must have a cold but he’s pressing on regardless."

Then when some description of an official show up, the commentator says: "A man from prison has come onto the field."

Blimey, wallop, Mother Goose, crikey - it's really better if you watch it.

I heard The hunchback had a good game too.

The Folks I Bump Into At 7-Eleven

I have a slight 7-Eleven dilemma. I'm about to go to a marketing social event thing but need an Altoid fix from a day of cussing and office breath. The good news is the 7-Eleven has a batter caliber of people than the one near my home ie. nobody has throw up on their construction boots and you aren't very likely to be carjacked or end up in a grisly gang initiation behind a dumpster.

The downside is a keep backing into people. I don't mean with my butt either ; rather that big ol' backside of my SUV because I'm not paying attention (what was I saying?) Either that or the parking lot is undersized, yes clearly that is it. Yes officer - the parking lot is too bijou. It's the Napoleon of 7-Eleven parking lots and it wants to swallow Russia.

The first time the lady very kindly waved away my efforts to give her $5 as she drove away on her three remaining good wheels.

The second time was more problematic. The guy was driving a BMW. Admittedly it wasn't a very good one. After the crunch I jumped out immediately to find him examining what looked like a rather obvious scratch. I offered him my insurance details and he hummed and hawed in an embarrassed way. Finally he agreed to take my business card but he seemed more interested in my accent.

When he found out I was from London he became animated and told me all about his business trips there. He seemed to totally forget about his scratch. I thought of asking him for a beer but thought that might be pushing it.

Maybe I will risk going to the 7-Eleven for an emergency mint stop. I end up bumping into the nicest people there.

Dark Dreams of the Fens

I have a recurring dream I am back in the Fens. The road is straight and the black earth rolls away from me for mile upon mile. Even the nearest hedgerow is leagues away. Only icy culverts break up the monotony and given the flatness that pains my eyes, the sky takes on a new brooding force, exposing all under its withering glare.

I came here so many years ago to apply for a job in King's Lynn of all places. I had no perception of King's Lynn but the monstrous gran silo in the middle of the town unnerved me. I hadn't expected it to feel so remote - so end of the line. The people who interviewed me in the beaten up office unnerved me too with their great hooked noses that were like aberrations. Was this what happened at the end of the line? Your features grew to resemble the gargoyles on the great churches that towered over the lands, as you withered away in obscurity.

King's Lynn

I didn't get the job. But the man with the hooked nose offered me another one in Norwich. The favored candidate's mother had died so he could not take the position. Norwich was the end of the line too but compared to the Fens it felt like the great city.

Over the next few years I got to drive across the Fens on many occasions. I hung on lonely roads beside long silver canals that ran to the horizons. I followed the power lines. One time I tried to find The Wash, the indistinct and muddy sea where King John lost the crown jewels back in 1216. There's a story that he was poisoned by a renegade monk soon after and the hapless king died days later.

Wisbech

There's much about the Fens that suggest an end game. I never found The Wash - just giant pylons and windmill stumps that ran away into the North Sea. But I found Wisbech once, a place that made Lynn look cosmopolitan where heads and bulging eyes swiveled and a hush fell on the bar when I walked in. The bleakness of such places appealed to my restless soul. I drove through the tulip fields of Lincolnshire and south to Ely, a city named after the eels that squirm in these waterways, where a great cathedral with a glittering lantern rises from the Fens.

Ely

Graham Swift set Waterland here, a brooding tale of incest and dark practices in the marshes. The book is perhaps better then the film, but the film stars Jeremy Irons which makes up for any deficiencies. The book draws hard on the history of this isolated and reclaimed land.

Today the Fens with its vast industrial fields and over sparse horizons is a world apart from the fog and mist bound fens of Medieval times where people feared to tread because of swamp spirits. Only in preserved places such as Wicken Fen can we catch a glimpse of the mysterious marshes of yesteryear.

Wicken Fen

Still the landscape haunts me. It creeps up on me at night and I have that odd feeling that I am back in the Fens and sky is too big and the iron bound cold of the place in winter is back with me.

Miley, Phil Everly and an Apology for Outrageous Behavior

After a long period of deep soul-searching, amounting to at least 20 seconds over coffee this morning, I have been feeling contrite about that picture of Miley Cyrus' tongue in my last blog post.

Yes it was gross and disgusting. It may have put you off breakfast, lunch and dinner and was possibly linked to the execution of someone's uncle in North Korea.

I could very happily go the rest of the year, not to mention the next 20 years, without ever seeing Miley's tongue again.

Unfortunately, Miley seems to be a fad of our age in the same way as the Black Death was the in vogue trend of 1398. Miley's new song Adore You (ick we don't) has almost 35 million views on YouTube in a week and features her writhing around semi-naked for an utter change. Call in the originality consultants.

In contrast All I Have to Dream by the Everly Brothers has 530,000 views, is a fresher and more memorable sound that may move you, even though it's been around for four decades.

Sadly Phil Everly, half of the duo died this week. In their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Everly Brothers were labelled "the most important vocal duo in rock," having influenced the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel and many other acts.

And they did it without sticking their tongues out at anybody...

The Most Enduring Image of 2013

Please don't tell me it's so. But can you think of anything else apart from death and destruction in diverse places and Boston? I hate to admit it but the enduring image of 2013 appears to be Smiley Virus's tongue. Is it just me or does she resemble a demented gerbil?

OK now I'm off to feel queasy in a dark place and to dream hopeless thoughts of a Miley free 2014. Happy New Year...

Blog Disaffection and those Writers I Met on the Road in 2013

I have noticed an interesting trend recently in which many bloggers I have followed for many years are seldom blogging anymore or are just disappearing off the face of the earth. This is disturbing on a number of levels because it raises nagging questions such as:

1 Have they found a life?
2 Have they found a new technology which makes blogging oh sooo 2011?

The blogging road is long with many a winding turn

Its also make you think of those fabulous new friends you found in the first week of college who you hung around with day and night. Then suddenly, two years later they have found more fabulous new friends and when you say hi on the campus you can tell they are trying really hard not to roll their eyes.

I've hit a fair degree of blog ennui as well. I don't have a lot of time to blog anymore and when I do it's fast and on the fly. I have less time to comment on other people's blogs which is meant to be the golden rule of interaction. A blogger with zillions of followers told me a while back she spent three hours a day responding to comments and commenting on other people's blogs. That's like 21 hours a week, more than 80 hours a month. I'm lucky to have three minutes a day to comment sometimes these days. Is there a comment app that will automatically say how great a blog post is? Then again that may look like spam and I don't want to really be saying 'what a wonderful post' on the blog of that creepy guy who is recommending the best way to stone cats.

Sometimes I look at blog stats but they don't make a lot of sense. On some months when I have neglected my blog, I'm getting 400 visits a day. I even wrote a post about the death of my blog, only to see the number of hits rally the next month. Right now it's free falling to 150 but it's not a numbers game. The interactions are more important.

I have to bear that in mind on the days when I feel my blog is like a Gremlin. It seemed a cute idea at the time but now it's after midnight and it's growling in the corner, demanding to be fed. It's not always easy to feed it. I know there are some bloggers out there who feel they have just run out of things to write.

On the positive side I met some great new bloggers along the road in 2013 who have struck with me notwithstanding my periods of blog and commenting neglect. Dee at Deecoded's post 7 Lessons I Learned about Blogging is drop dead useful and great to read if, like me, you have wondered of late where your blog is going.

Thanks too to 2013 followers Patricia Lynne and Jean at Discarded Darlings, as well as Yolanda Renee and Jules Smith who is always good for a chuckle, if not a fully fledged belly laugh on occasions.

It has occurred to me to refocus my blog in 2014. Make it more focused - oh that word again. Follow some edgy writers. Make it more useful for foreigners who are cast adrift in this large place called America bereft of decent tea. Maybe I'll give it more thought - happy 2014.

Elf on the Shelf - Be Very Afraid

A new Christmas tradition this year was Elf on the Shelf. Basically the elf, who was later named Stuart, arrived on December 24 and you are supposed to put it in various places to scare the crap out of the kids before hiding it until next year.

That would be because as soon as he hears Santa's sleigh bells he's taken off to Lapland, Greenland, Detroit or whatever Godforsaken place Santa hangs out for the rest of the year as he bangs away on new toys with his elvish helpers, and bemoans the fact kids no longer want the sort of toys that require banging away on with elves.

Stu missed the boat, or at least the sleigh and hung around. It suited purposes to depict Stu as some kind of sinister spy, like Santa's KGB or the NSA. Every time a kid misbehaves, which is about every two minutes, a grave finger is pointed at Stu who is looking and listening and reporting back in a small mental elf blotter whose scribbles add up to Santa delivering a pile of steaming horse manure next year.

It amazes me that even a 9-year-old can believe Stu actually moves; even more so when I happen to be standing next to him and he's moved to a window ledge close to my hand. I have almost been caught in the act and his infernal hat has fallen off and I'm hiding it under a shoe.

Of course, Stu can do much more. He can appear in bathrooms and make sure kids are using the body wash - hence policing the scenario and mitigating against the curious fact kids can spend an hour in the bath or shower and still emerge greasy.

Policing is a good word for Stu. He's humorless and unbending. If he had a favorite country it would be North Korea where people make a big show of executing relatives. If you misbehave Stu is bad for your elf. Personally I fear Stu's rigidity may make him good material for the therapist's couch but he's better off on the couch in the living room. Looks like he may have to hang around all year until Santa waddles this way again.