» Black Sheep

Dear god this is a depressing question!
Mine goes back quite a few years - sometime before WW1.

A relative of mine in Australia discovered his wife was having an affair. Apparrently, the Judge would have been willing to accept that hacking her to death with a hatchet was a crime of passion had he not returned a little later to set fire to the remains. This was considered to be going a little too far, and so intead of imprisonment he was hanged.

Every time I tell that story I think back to a "family history" session in high school, and can still see the look of dawning horror my teacher's face! Ahh, memories!
(Fri 14th Jan 2005, 21:59, More)

» Messing with the Dark Side

I was a teenage poltergeist...
Back in High School I was in some sort of school play as a circus member, my terrible acting skills compensated for by the fact I already had all my own equipment* for juggling, meaning that my involvement saved a few pounds of the play's meagre budget.

Anyway, come the night of the play we spent time between scenes following the time-honoured tradition of scaring the bowels out of young girls by passing on a few of our school's ghost stories. The best known of these involved a student hanging herself in the music room, where she could still be seen wondering about and heard playing the piano.

Enter Pete, who was working backstage that night and therefore dressed entirely in black. Pete was a seriously talented pianist, and - luckily for me - very skinny. After a painstaking half hour I finally persuaded the trembling girls to venture upstairs to the pitch black music floor in order to commune with the dead bint's spirit. While the girls were huddled in a corner near the door, Pete reached out of his cupboard and softly began to play... cue many girlish screams and flapping-of-hands. When we decided they'd had enough of this, pete stopped playing and the girls exited past the piano into the corridor to the stairs.

It was at this point the poor girls were introduced to my newest and favorite prop, which made a loud *thud* *BANG* *thud* as my glow in the dark bounce ball flew past them, banged noisily off a metal cupboard five yards away and ricoched back to my hiding place.

Although I now feel sorry for these girls, I take some satisfaction in the knowlege that their second set of screams was loud enough to be heard over the noise of the show in progress on a different floor at the other end of the school.

Weirdly, as I lay in bed that night laughing about the whole thing I was disturbed by a snatch of piano music before about a dozen books fell off the shelves onto my floor. Laugh? I almost shat myself...

As it turned out, we had a very minor earthquake during the night which was cushioned by my bed but toppled precariously-balanced things all over the village. After a bit more investigation, the music turned out to be from an ice-cream van Harold Bishop was driving through the night on a quest to find out what the f*ck "Web 2.0" is...

*tee hee

Gravitas (who was raised religious and has therefore spend hundreds of hours in churches and graveyards, often alone and at various times of night and day but has never once seen anything even slightly odd there. I have, however, studied hypnosis and am constantly amazed by what people can make themselves believe they saw or heard given the right environment or suggestion.)

length/girth/appalling body odour
(Sat 22nd Apr 2006, 22:30, More)

» Pure Ignorance

Dieting fads...
Most "revolutionary new diets" are completly ludicrous, and I still can't quite believe people use Atkins - it works BECAUSE YOU'RE STARVING YOURSELF! Forget the constipation and bad breath from eating so much protein, it does odd things to your health and hormone cycles. Anyway, I digress:

But heard in the queue for a baguette shop in Uni yesterday:

Girl 1: ...Oh, they've stopped serving salads and I'm not allowed bread! I hate detoxing!
Girl 2: It's ok, it's brown bread so it soaks up the poisons...

Odd, but not tragic. They then stated discussing the fact that Girl 2 is on a diet where she can eat just as much as normal, but she can't eat carbs and protein at the same time - apparrently she has carbs first (eg chips), then waits an hour before eating her protein (sausages for example) "because that way you don't put on weight".

Also you can't eat fruit after a meal "otherwise it ends up getting digested". I was overcome with an odd mixture of laughter and dispair.
(Fri 7th Jan 2005, 23:33, More)

» I'm an expert

Hmm...
I just finished a research project into a totally unimportant mutant virus strain which no-one in the world will ever care about, making me the world's leading expert in it!

Hopefully on my way to becoming an expert in selectively replicating adenoviruses acting as a theraputic platform for cancer treatment (PhD starting soon).

Most importantly of all, I know more about the Muppets than anyone should ever admit to.

EDIT:
I can also tell you within a few seconds the plot and key quotations from any episode of star trek, Family Guy, Simpsons, Futurama, Friends or any other damn program I've ever seen. Why can I remember this but not the names of the people I spent this afternoon with?
(Fri 24th Jun 2005, 2:08, More)

» Pure Ignorance

Apeloverage
I think you're missing an important distinction. Yes, insulting someone by calling someone gay (or nigger or whatever) does insult all the members of whatever group you're comparing your victim to. As - obviously - it's not true that any group of this sort is fundamentally stupid/evil/otherwise unfluffy, it's wrong to imply that they are by using the as an insult. I agree with the point of your post (if I understood correctly) that doing so is bigotry.

However, chav is a descriptive term meaning something like "someone who gets on the bus reeking of beer and hash, sits behind me, pokes me in the back of the head and asks me to 'Check ra nick! Dis yer ma still dress ye, ya pure brainboax?" while "wear[ing] bright white tracksuits and three kilos of gold jewellery". It's a description of someone's behaviour and personality which has nothing to do with how riches, race, orientation or anyother factors outside of their control. People don't dislike chavs becaude they're associated with an unfairly disliked group, or through blind prejudice. One can only gain the label of chav by being consistantly rude, often agressive and refusing to engage the (sometimes excellent) brains they're blessed with. Insulting someone because of prejudice is detestable. Insulting someone because of easily changed antisocial behaviour may be unpalatable, but it's not even in the same league.
/rant

Overheard stuff:

In the wing of Windsor castle that was gutted by fire there was (and possibly still is) a moleste display covering the walls of a room showing extensive pictures and information about the fire and the subsequent restoration work. When I went there, the only way to access a particularly impressive restored hall in this wing was by spending about ten minutes queueing along these eight-foot-high display boards with their moleste brightly coloured photos and headlines.

Inside the hall, an american tourist was proudly telling his family that he didn't reckon this was the original plasterwork, and that the tourist office's plan to decieve people by passing it off as antique was disgraceful.

This in turn reminded me of another (American again) tourist at Stonehenge, who reckoned that because we'd let the stones get so tatty we should take them down and put up new ones. We should build it better than last time because "it hasn't lasted well", and while we're at it she didn't think much of the pattern. That's us told, eh?

lenghth/girth etc...
(Wed 12th Jan 2005, 11:42, More)