Happy New Year everybody! Let’s make the best of it. It could be even happier without Brexit, Afwerki, Al Bashir, Al Assad, Ali Khamenei, Biya, Castro, Déby, Duterte, Erdogan, Hun Sen, Kabila, Kim Jong Un, Lukashenko, Maduro, MBS, Mnangagwa, Museveni, Nazarbeyev, Netanyahu, Nguesso, Obiang, Orban, Ortega, Putin, Rahmon, Sisi, Trump, Xi, and many others. I live in (not very great) hope.

Here are some extracts from my Commonplace Book for 2018. I hope they make you smile, or think, or both.

New Yorker cartoon caption competition: Spacemen examining beamed-up dog: “Results are still preliminary, but all indications suggest he is a good boy.”

Where is the port of Krambatangi?
Venezuela / Papua New Guinea / Faroe Islands / Indonesia
Guess before looking it up.
Were you right?

“We had a brief fumble but the baps are back in the bread bin now.” — Victoria Wood

I saw my first folly when I was five years old. As Philip Hamburger wrote of his discovery of Oscar Hammerstein, I consider the preceding years of my life a total loss.

Turkish Word of the Day: Dipçiklemek: To beat to the ground with rifle butts.

There is a planet in our universe which is entirely inhabited by robots. It’s called Mars.

The difference between English rugby and Welsh rugby is this: the English play in prose, the Welsh play in poetry.

“We dream in order to forget.” — Graeme Mitchison & Francis Crick

“It’ll all be alright in the end.”
“And what if it’s not?”
“Then it’s not the end.”
— Abi Morgan, The Split

Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in, writing is breathing out. — Pam Allyn

I heard a cyclist freewheeling down Granville Road N4 having a Doppler effect argument on a hands-free phone: “Shaddup. Shaddup. Shaddup. Shaddup. Shaddup.”

There was a young fellow from Brighton
Who said “Blimey, girl, you gotta tight ‘un!”
She said “You poor soul!
You’re in the wrong hole!
There’s plenty of room in the right ‘un!” — Sir Michael Palin

Godelureau (s. m.): Familièrement et par dénigrement, jeune homme d’une conduite étourdie, qui fait le joli coeur auprès des femmes. = skirt-chaser

Sigisbée: a galant, a céladon, a gigolo

beleidigte Leberwurst: Someone who is very easily offended. (Literal meaning: “insulted liver sausage”.) Hör’ jetzt endlich auf die beleidigte Leberwurst zu spielen. — thanks to Marcus Clapham

The Greeks had a word for it: Sebastian Coe is an agonothete — an official charged with the organisation of the public games.

The Quattro Canti of Slane, Ireland

Skeuomorph: a physical ornament or design on an object made to resemble another material or technique, like the Amplitube app on the iPhone.

Ymenwaedu (Welsh): to circumcise oneself

Egnatius Melletus took a cudgel and beat his wife to death because she had drunk some wine. — Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds & Sayings, C1 AD.

The fasces is carved above the entrance to the Friends Meeting House in Euston Road. Does that make Quakers fascists?

In 1629 three North African pirate ships attacked the Faroe Islands. 30 women and children were taken away to be sold as slaves in North Africa. A collection was organised to raise enough money to buy back the people. This was not successful, and the people never returned to the islands.

Anna Wintour: dressed crab?

cataclasm: A break or disruption.

flagitious: Of persons: Guilty of or addicted to atrocious crimes; deeply criminal, extremely wicked.

hecatomb: a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen.

rastaquouère: A person (esp. one from a Mediterranean or South American country) regarded as a social interloper and frequently considered to be nouveau riche or excessively ostentatious in manners or dress; a foreign upstart. You know the type: pencil moustache, 9 inch hips, two-tone shoes.

Tibetan saying: To give a green answer to a blue question. (As in politicians evading a question).

BBC Radio 4 PM programme, 20180227
Eddie Mair: “How do you personally tell the difference between a fake beggar and someone who is genuinely homeless?”
Ashley John Simms, Torbay businessman: “We got ways of actually confirming through confidential resources.”
Eddie Mair: “That doesn’t mean anything.”

Horlicks — such a racy name for such a bland drink.

When you touch something you think you feel it. But you don’t. Whatever you touch simply stops your hand moving further. it’s only when you start moving your hand on the material that you actually feel it: touch plus the added dimension of time equals texture.

“It’s a good working principle to prefer the hypothesis of a single origin for a correlated set of phenomena to that of the fortuitous coincidence of two or more”, said the Chief Constable. — Cyril Hare, The Wind Blows Death

“I walked down Cat Hill in Barnsley where Sir Percival Cresacre, on his way back from the Crusades, was set on by a wild cat which jumped at him and killed him — his body then fell on the cat and killed it.” — Ian McMillan, Real Barnsley.

I just saw a dyslexic Yorkshireman walk past wearing a cat flap. He had his sycophantic Irish chum with him, Seamlus O’Flattery.

“This day I enter into my eighty-eighth year. For above eighty-six years, I found none of the infirmities of old age: my eyes did not wax dim, neither was my natural strength abated. But last August, I found almost a sudden change. My eyes were so dim that no glasses would help me. My strength likewise now quite forsook me and probably will not return in this world.” — John Wesley

8:43:38, 9:49:05, 10:54:33, and 12:00:00 are the only times when the hour and the minute hands meet.

“Because its density is so similar to that of gold (only 0.36% less dense), tungsten can be used in the counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold, or taking an existing gold bar, drilling holes, and replacing the removed gold with tungsten rods. The densities are not exactly the same, and other properties of gold and tungsten differ, but gold-plated tungsten will pass superficial tests.
“Gold-plated tungsten is available commercially from China (the main source of tungsten), both in jewellery and as bars.”
To what end, other than criminal?

“No howling on the bus, darling, try not to howl.” — Middle-class mum on the 144 to Muswell Hill.

There was a young lady named Alice
Who used dynamite sticks as a phallus
They found her vagina
In South Carolina
And bits of her tits down in Dallas. — Sir Michael Palin

“You should pay your workers before the sweat has dried on their brows.” — Arab proverb

Would the contestants for the yodelling competition please line up in an orderlyorderlyorderlyorderly queue?