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This Monday, the inaugural World Restaurant Awards will take place in Paris. Among the prizes being handed out that night will be Trolley of the Year. At last! Recognition for this most unsung hero of the vehicular tribe.
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Last year, OxfordDictionaries.com published a list of the 10 most misspelled words found during the compilation of its New Words Corpus. It contained the usual suspects: accommodate, separate, definitely… though no broccoli, surprisingly, especially as Pharaoh was in at No.2. Apparently Pharaoh is spelt incorrectly more frequently than it is spelt correctly. By who, I wonder.
If you’re shivering in your car right now, ruing the fact that you didn’t pack the Thermos and still haven’t got round to buying those snow chains, spare a thought for the residents of Telfer, Australia. Not only is this remote mining community about as far from anywhere as it’s possible to get, the temperature today hit 45˚C, according to whereisthehottestplaceonearthrightnow.com.
Chopper, the bass player in our band, is suffering with tennis elbow, which means that whenever we reach the incendiary climax of our set and he swings his instrument through the front of his speaker cabinet, it hurts.
Apparently today is National Thesaurus Day. You’d think they could have come up with a better name for it. According to NationalDayCalendar.com, NTD is celebrated every year on 18th January. Really? Since when? By who? And how? Is there a Synonym Society somewhere who spend the day running around shouting euphemisms at one another? My God, I bet there is!
In fact, I think I’ve just defined Parliament.
Where would we be without balls? England would never have won the World Cup. (I’m trying to ignore your tittering). Cinderella would never have met Prince Charming. And, on the grander scale, Christopher Columbus would have sailed off the edge of the Earth. From atoms and molecules to planets and stars, everything tends towards the spherical. Even time. No really. It’s no accident that history repeats itself.
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So the Chinese have landed a space craft on the Dark Side of the Moon. I was never a fan of prog rock myself, but that seems a bit over the top. Ah, please yourselves. This week’s space exploration news, coming 50 years after Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’, has raised several questions about our natural satellite, the first being why has it take so long for mankind to find our way to the other side?
Are you hanging up your stocking on the wall?
Are you stocking up in case we crash out of the EU with no deal at aaaall?
Are you wondering if the two words
Are connected in some way?
Are you asking yourself whether, had they gone with these lyrics, it would have been such a perennial Christmas hit for Slaaaaaade?
So here it is Merry Christmas everybody’s having fun…
Before I move on to verse two, let me clear up the stocking question. It begins, as most things do, with football.
A few weeks ago the Word of the Week was Bugbear, which naturally led on to an investigation of bears. I’ve always regarded the investigation of bears as something that’s best done from the other side of a TV screen, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that they’re planning on releasing a bunch of brown bears into the woods just down the road near Bristol. (more…)
We keep hearing worrying predictions about the death of the high street. I’m very fond of high streets, so on Black Friday I decided to do my bit, bunk off writing Word of the Week and go to a high street to do some shopping. (more…)