Guess Who? (2)

The results to the Prejudice Guess Who poll are in, and I’m happy to report that the results vindicate my view in all three cases, although not necessarily by the margin I expected.

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Charles, by a majority of 54 per cent, would confront a burglar rather than hide and wait for the police.

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Albert, by a majority of 80 per cent, prefers vinyl to digital as a medium for listening to music.

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And Sally, by a majority of  76 per cent, says “Byeee!” in a high-pitched voice at the end of phone calls.

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The result for Albert is jolly heartening, and the one for Sally far more clear cut than I dared hope, but my moment of trousers-down-buttock-slapping triumph has been marred by a gallingly narrow victory for Charles.

Not only would he confront a burglar, I maintain, he would do so with a walking stick and a shout of: “I didn’t down five Messerschmitts to have my house burgled by the likes of you.” He would beat the hapless burglar, possibly to death, and the local press would run a picture of him with his medals under the headline: “War hero gives youth stick.”

Some friends have claimed that his sad eyes suggest a pensioner too weary to put up a fight, but I would contend that this is more than offset by his moustache, and that any antipathy towards violence would be immediately quashed upon sight of his quasi-antique carriage clock in the hands of some hoodie.

Still, the people have spoken, and I accept the result because to reject it would turn the game from Prejudicial Guess Who into Bigoted Guess Who. And, besides, the majority still agreed with me. Hah.

Horseplay

I may have mistranscribed some of this, but here is what was written as the second story on the front of today’s Evening Standard:

Gordon Brown today vowed to “get tough” on equestrianism as he insisted the Government was right to sack a scientist who said horse riding was as dangerous as ecstasy. The Prime Minister warned against the danger of giving “mixed messages” to young people targeted by dealers. Mr Brown said: “A tough policy on equestrianism is essential and it is what the public want. I’ve seen the damage that equestriansim can do and people can see it in estates in London.”

This is almost exactly what it said, although I may have mixed up the word “drugs” with “equestrianism”. Still, they’re as dangerous as each other, statistcially, so it probably doesn’t make any difference.

Guess Who?

A worthwhile variant on Guess Who, the venerable board game that involves asking questions to determine which of 24 people’s faces your opponent has in front of him, is the unofficial Prejudicial Guess Who, in which questions must be about personality rather than appearance.

The challenge is to come up with questions that, based solely on players’ prejudices about the characters, allow you to whittle down the field with confidence. For example:

1. Has this person ever rung a sex chatline late at night?

2. When this person sees a plane, does he or she stop and point at it?

3. Does this person use, without irony, the exclamation: “Poppycock”?

The trick is to be sufficiently decisive to eliminate people rapidly without generalising so much that one accidentally excludes the actual candidate.

The other important thing, I discovered today, is not to play with someone who has wildly different prejudices. It was impossible to win against my friend T, for example, because he made judgements that I don’t think anyone else would. To see if I’m right or not, I’d like to conduct a little survey. It won’t be very scientific, I imagine, because unless my fanbase magically increases then the sample size will be too small. Furthermore, T is one of the few people who does read this blog, and so he may try to influence it, but let’s have a go.

I’ll post again in a week or two to say what answers I expected.

Bat and balls

It’s a somewhat minor personal triumph, but I have just shattered my personal best in the bat-and-ball game that comes free on a BlackBerry. Did I want to upload my score to the overall rankings, it asked. Hell, yes, I said, quietly, to myself. What if I’m some sort of bat-and-ball prodigy? What if, by a chain of unlikely events, proficiency in bat-and-ball games equates to some urgently needed skill, such as repelling an invading force of alien spacecraft? I’ve seen The Last Starfighter. (For anyone who hasn’t, it concerns a teenager who is selected to save the earth from extra-terrestrial hostility after achieving the highest score on a Government-monitored arcade game.)

It turns out I am about 682,000th.

I’m having trouble interpreting this. How many people are there behind me? And does it matter? After all, those who haven’t played the game probably aren’t going to be very good, so presumably I’m 682,000th out of the world population of 6.7 billion (ie in the top one hundredth of a per cent).

If skill at bat and ball is closely aligned to alien repulsion, will I still be needed? I imagine that in the event of attack it will be all hands to the pump, but how many pumps will there be?

So, to summarise, I am left with a list of questions:
a) What crossover is there between bat and ball, on the one hand, and world-saving duties, on the other?
b) Are there more than 682,000 places for planetary defenders in the event of an attack?
c) Will defenders have to be almost suicidally brave?

If the answers to these are “none”, “no” and “yes”, then I may have to devote my time to doing something more useful.

Churchill unedited

The unexpurgated version of Winston Churchill’s “The End of the Beginning” speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, on November 10, 1942:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
It is not the middle of the end, nor the end of the end.
It is not the beginning of the middle, nor the end of the middle, nor the middle of the middle.
It is not the middle of the beginning, and certainly not the beginning of the beginning, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Act like you know, Rico

This week in lyrics analysis corner it is my pleasure to welcome one of the few successful pop songs sung by someone named Cecil: Here Comes the Hotstepper, the solitary hit of the artist best known by his stage name Ini Kamoze.

There are two schools of thought on the meaning of Cecil Campbell’s ode to a murderous thug. The most common interpretation is that the narrator is a gang member patrolling the streets with his crew, partaking in gang warfare and generally letting blood as if juicing strawberries.

A more in-depth study, however, suggests that Cecil has spent an unsatisfactory evening at the opera with his crew, whom he has found loitering “in A-D area” of the auditorium. He boasts that anyone testing him will “hear the fat lady sing”, suggesting that he is able to emulate the leading lady’s performance note for note.  Having admonished his friends Rico and Bo for failing to  follow the plot (“Act like you know, Rico / I know what Bo don’t know”), he announces his intention to buy a strawberry-flavoured (“Juice like a strawberry”) ice cream in the interval from an usherette with his spare change (“Ch-ch-chang-chang”). However, learning that the ice cream is £4 for a very small tub, he murders the vendor, noting that the price is “extraordinary” and asking whether she thinks he has “money to burn”. Flushed with regret, he entreats appalled opera-goers to “dial the emergency number”, possibly to call the policeman he accidentally bumped into on the way into the performance (“Excuse me Mr Officer”).

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Pick up the crew in-a de area, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer

No, no, we don’t die
Yes, we multiply
Anyone test will hear the fat lady sing
Act like you know, Rico
I know what Bo don’t know
Touch them up and go, uh-oh
Ch-ch-chang-chang

(chorus)

Extraordinary
Juice like a strawberry
Money to burn baby, all of the time
Cut to fade is me
Fade to cut is she
Come juggle with me, I say every time

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Dial emergency number, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer

Top 5 unexploited film sequels to Brief Encounter

It seems odd to me that no one has adequately exploited the popularity of Brief Encounter by making a sequel. Or, indeed, several sequels, preferably along the lines of the Die Hard franchise, viz:

Brief Encounter 2: Briefer Encounter
Dr Alec Harvey returns from Johannesburg for a conference on respiratory diseases among miners, but only meets Laura Jesson for a few seconds while changing trains on his way to the Winter Gardens in Blackpool.

Brief Encounter with a Vengeance
Fred Jesson discovers the truth about his wife’s clandestine cinema visits with Dr Alec Harvey and contrives to restore his pride by poisoning a scone destined for Harvey, who is due to visit the railway station tea shop on his return journey from Blackpool. The assassination attempt is foiled, however, when Dolly Messiter, the chatterbox who interrupted Harvey and Mrs Jesson’s farewell at the end of the first film, intercepts the lethal scone and dies noisily, pulling the tablecloth to the floor and upsetting a dish of Banbury cakes. 

Brief Encounter 4.0: Live Free or Encounter Briefly
(directed by Joel Schumacher)
Dr Alec Harvey, who has been suspended from the medical profession after the shock of Dolly Messiter’s death caused him to seek solace at the bottom of a whisky bottle, learns from autopsy reports that her demise was no accident. He returns to the station to confront Fred Jesson, but is met instead by Jesson’s hired goons, who force him to take refuge behind the counter in the station cafe during a 15-minute shoot-out sequence. Harvey overcomes Jesson’s thugs, defeats Jesson in hand-to-hand combat armed only with a stethoscope and episiotomy scissors, and rescues Laura Jesson from certain death by untying her from the railway tracks just before the delayed arrival of the 4.15pm to Crewe.

Brief Encounter Begins
A reboot of the franchise, in which Dr Alec Harvey emerges as a character stricken with guilt over his inability, as a child, to cure his twin brother’s conjunctivitis. To atone for his failure, he frequents station cafes in a tireless quest to remove coal dust from passengers’ eyes. He begins to find solace after rescuing Laura Jesson from certain blindness in one eye, but his happiness is thwarted by the return of his brother, whose bitterness over his condition has caused him to reinvent himself as the villainous Partially-Sighted Man. Harvey emerges victorious from their fight to the death (after Partially-Sighted Man gets coal dust in his other eye and stumbles into the coke furnace aboard the Penzance Express) but alienates Mrs Jesson, who realises that Harvey’s mission to save sight is more important than their relationship.

Brief Encounter Actually
Richard Curtis reimagines Brief Encounter as a five-act rom-com in which Dr Alec Harvey (Hugh Grant) and Laura Jesson (Keira Knightley) overcome their awkward social situation and get married after Fred Jesson (Bill Nighy) confesses his deep-seated passion for Dolly Messiter (Emma Thompson), who is equally smitten. Beryl Walters (Renee Zellweger), the cafe assistant, dies, but the solemnity of her funeral is broken when Albert Godby (Rowan Atkinson), the ticket inspector, uses the occasion to consumate his relationship with Myrtle Bagot (Martine McCutcheon), the longstanding object of his flirtatious banter. All six lovers are married in a joint ceremony in the station cafe at Christmas, during which it snows.

Bum note (2)

It strikes me that since the advent of digital cameras there must be a much higher proportion of people who know what their own anus looks like. Or the proportion may be the same, but there has been a sharp decline in the sales of complicated systems of mirrors.

Dustman lost in translation

I’m an enormous fan of online translation machines, so much so that I once used one to give an interview, by e-mail, to a Brazilian academic who spoke only Portuguese. When finished, I tried to work out how accurate the machine had been by translating my words into Portuguese and using the same machine to translate them back. It was absolutely incomprehensible.

Here, for example, is one machine’s attempt to translate the chorus to My Old Man’s a Dustman into German:

Mein alter Mann ist ein Müllabfuhrmann, trägt er die Schutzkappe eines Müllabfuhrmannes, trägt er Gottvorhang ich Hose, und er lebt in einer Wohnung des Rates.

And here is the machine’s attempt to translate it back again:

My old man is a garbage disposal man, carries he the protective cap of a garbage disposal man, carries he for God curtain I trousers, and he lives in a dwelling of the advice.

I did try to help by translating the idiom “cor blimey” into its original meaning, “God blind me”, but it didn’t help much. If Lonnie Donegan had recorded the song with those lyrics he might have been stuck in a dwelling of the advice for life.

Top 5 superior song lyrics to woop, woop

“Woop, woop,” is, according to the rapper KRS-One, the sound of the police.

Is it, though? I’ve heard the police, and it was definitely more: “Mee-maw, mee-maw.”

Now I think about it, that was probably the police car rather than the police themselves. I suggest to KRS-One, if that’s his real name, that he revise his song to one of the following:

1. Would you mind breathing into this bag, sir? That’s the sound of the police.

2. ‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, that’s the sound of the police.

3. We are appealing for witnesses to come forward, that’s the sound of the police.

4. A 32-year-old man is helping us with our inquiries, that’s the sound of the police.

5. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court, that’s the sound of the police.