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I'll drink to that ...

5/16/2017

AN expression that always irked me as a reporter was that a picture is worth a thousand words. The very cheek of it. However, in this case, it really is true. The photograph of this bar sign appeared on the Facebook page of Spotted In Yorkshire and hit such a communal nerve it has been shared hundreds of times.
Let's be honest, these days people are so hooked on using mobile phones they can be a danger to pedestrians and motorists as the attention of users is diverted to the latest social media posting, Twitter message or football score.
It's not just the younger generation who are susceptible to the lure of the small screen either. In any pub or club you'll find all generations involved: couples on a date standing side by side with their Samsungs out, a crowd of lads exchanging gags by text rather than telling them, and a clique of pensioners watching YouTube or showing each other holiday snaps rather than talking to each other.
It's amazing how far the technology to kill social intercourse has come in such a short time. I have a chum who, if he gets bored with the way the conversation is going, plays Sugar Smash on his phone.
“Am I boring you?”
“Yes.”
He doesn't shy away from the truth.
All this has happened in the last 44 years. The first mobile in 1973 was built as sturdily as the walkie talkies carried in the D-Day landings. Only used car salesmen and chaps out to impress humped those around.
Thankfully they slimmed down to the Nokia everyone remembers with affection.
Internet connection was not added commercially to mobile phones until 1996 which is when the world went mad. Since then, phones have become ever slimmer, neater and easier to use with large touch screens. Mobile internet use now exceeds desktop computer use.
They have indisputably brought benefits but can be a pain in a social setting. There will be many who agree with the sentiment of that bar sign: let's talk to each other and pretend it's 1995. Now if only the beer prices matched.

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Speak up, I may be going deaf ...

5/8/2017

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MAYBE I'm going a little deaf in my old age but I often have to ask my wife Maria to repeat what she says. “You're going deaf,” she says. “Pardon?” I say.
I think she sometimes does it on purpose and mutters rather than enunciates, like method actors in television dramas. Have you noticed how half the dialogue goes missing when moody thespians opt for what they call a natural way of mumbling rather than speaking clearly.
Sam Riley in SS-GB sounded like he'd been smoking 40 Woodbines a day to get into the character of a whispering detective in a post-war England ruled by Nazis. And Tom Hardy rollocked his way through the streets of Georgian London in Taboo with authentic muck under his fingernails whilst delivering verbals as if chewing a dead rat.
There have been so many complaints about muffled speech that experts staged an experiment at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford for groups of pensioners and young people and discovered TV sound problems were not confined to the elderly: the younger generation couldn't hear either.
Last year I blamed my flat TV set and bought a modestly priced sound system but couldn't make it work. Instead I've left it propped by the screen like a threat but the TV continues to ignore both me and the threat and still projects dramatic moments as if delivered by Norman Collier on a faulty microphone.
People have suggested the sound from a flat screen TV is not as good as the sound produced on the old chunky box set. TV makers say that's not true. The test audiences at the Science and Media Museum listened to the sound from those old box sets that had a back as long as a station wagon and said yes, it was far superior. Trouble is, if you wanted one with a 50 inch screen it would be so big you would have to house it in a shed in the back garden and watch it through the window.
My wife and I enjoy a lot of subtitled drama from Europe and the strange thing is I even turn the sound up on that so I can get a sense of the dialogue, so maybe I am going deaf. I said maybe I am going deaf. Admittedly I haven't a clue in Swedish or Icelandic but I'm chuffed when I understand some of the French and tell my wife the subtitle is wrong.
Perhaps I should try using subtitles on English programmes as well, although that would be so bizarre my wife might think I've gone barmy if she spots them on Happy Valley.
“Subtitles? For Sarah Lancashire?”
“Half past nine.”

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Jon Snow and Kilroy were both in Pompeii ...

5/3/2017

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Actor Kit Harington (Jon Snow of Game of Thrones) set Pompeii alight in the 2014 film.

A TOURIST from Ecuador has been arrested for scrawling the names of his son and wife on the walls of the Colosseum. Rome's mayor Virginia Raggi said: “Whoever harms the Colosseum harms all Romans who love the city.” Similar cases have seen fines imposed up to £17,000. Quite right, too.
How dare they. How very dare they write on those ancient walls. Except that people have been doing so since the 2000 year old ampitheatre was built, creating layers of their own history. Unfortunately, much of it is so over-written as to be indecipherable and not particularly interesting anyway. Kilroy was always there.
Fifty years ago my wife Maria and I read the graffiti on Stonehenge. There was no entrance fee, no attendants and no protective fence. We parked by the side of the road and wandered round the ancient stones one misty day in November with no one else in sight.
The graffiti was not over-whelming but it did stretch back over the centuries. It first appeared as carved axe heads about 3,500 years ago, 1,000 years after it was built. More recent additions include names and dates. Shame on John Louis De Ferre (17th century), W Skeat 1814, Tom Senior 1817 and H Bridger of Chichester 1866.
Actually much more damage was done by the 19th century practice of hiring a chisel and hacking off a piece of stone to take away as a souvenir.
Those wanting to immortalise their name often choose historic locations, but the place to find the most complete, abusive and amusing ancient everyday graffiti is in the streets, homes, brothels and bars of Pompeii, all preserved by the volcanic ash that destroyed the city in 79AD.
Up Pompeii the graffiti was cruder than a Frankie Howerd script.
On a brothel wall is: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” By the door of the Bar Athictus: “I screwed the barmaid.” And on a tavern wall: “Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates.”
There are declarations such as “Marcus loves Spendusa” and “Atimetus got me pregnant” to the boastful “Celadus the Thracian gladiator is the delight of all the girls”. They include the vindictive: “Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than they ever have before;” and the explanatory at a boarding house: “We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done wrong. If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot.”
An omission that would probably have earned the establishment only three stars out of five on Tripadvisor.
Found in the Basilica, the commercial and judicial centre of the city, was a particularly apt observation: “O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin.” They did: soon after, when Vesuvius erupted.
In the latrine of one of the most luxurious houses of the city was: “Secundus defecated here” written three time on one wall. He was obviously a frequent visitor with little imagination.
Inevitably, the early Kilroy was also out and about. On the wall of a house was carved: “Aufidius was here.” His name is still there, 2000 years later.

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I'll drink to that ...

Speak up, I may be going deaf ...

Jon Snow and Kilroy were both in Pompeii ...

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