A Random Survey

The WordPress daily post today was about how to add forms to your blog, so I thought I’d give it a go. So here is one of the most random and bizarre surveys you might ever be asked.

FORM REMOVED

Annoyingly, I can only do one survey. I tried adding a second, but it just edited the first, so I had to redo it. Some things about the form are annoying, like that you can only write short questions or labels, but not because it won’t let you write long ones, it just doesn’t display right if you do. Also I could not figure out a way to just have some text in there, like to ask the question answered by the check boxes, and I would have preferred that as a thing where you can only pick one of the three as well. It was actually really annoying getting it just right, for such a silly survey, so I hope someone actually does it, please, so my effort wasn’t totally wasted!

Please have fun with it, the sillier the responses the better 🙂 (but play nice).

EDIT: I have had to remove this survey as it kept generating spam. This is intensely annoying, especially as some of it has been very unpleasant. I have taken to simply deleting the notifications of answers to this survey from my email without even looking at them, but today I had about ten and decided it was time to delete it. I only made it in the first place at the urging of WP on their blog, and it has been more a source of trouble than amusement. I would certainly not want to make another. Dear WP, why can’t we have Akismet to remove the spam from forms as well as from posts? It does a very good job.

I have nothing to say today

So shall I just say nothing? Or shall I whiffle on about nothing of any import. I wonder how many words words I can write about this non-subject? Probably enough to bore both you and me, but I think I shall run out of steam before it gets very much worse.

It’s not been a bad day and I don’t feel too tired or ill, which is nice. So I don’t have a good excuse. I don’t mean to let you down by forcing you to read this drivel, but this is a somewhat inevitable consequence of blogging every day, or trying to.

Today I did some crochet, and some more crochet. Yesterday I went to the yarn shop, actually, to two yarn shops… but that would be more interesting if I had photos of the yarn I bought. I could take the photos, but I don’t feel like it. Sorry. Or maybe it’s a relief if you are not as excited by yarn as I am…

I seem to have developed a yarn addiction to add to my bibliophilia. What would that be called? Yarnophilia? And is there a word for cat cuddle addiction? Pebble, my tabby cat, is very cuddly.

Well, I seem to have blethered on for 200+ words, which is more than enough.

Please feel free to insult me in the comments for my pathetic inexcusable wasting of your time. But if you do, please try to use imaginative and different words instead of swear words 😉

Toilet Day!

For some reason today seems to be toilet day. First is discussion about the scrapping of public toilets here in England because we can’t afford them any more. Hmm, I’m not convinced that it will be any cheaper to clean up the inevitable mess that will result, to say nothing of the spread of disease potential.

Then not just one but two of the blogs I subscribe to picked today to blog about public toilets! So there you go, I’m just jumping on the bandwagon! (One with toilets on…)

I think there should be public toilets – free ones! I totally hate ones where you are expected to pay to pee. Not least because I don’t tend to carry a lot cash and most likely won’t have the right change. Also, those Belgian women who spend their whole lives sitting in toilets just so you can pay them – freaky! What a depressing way to spend your life.

I also totally hate ones where the flush is broken. If it doesn’t work, stick a sign on the door and fix it. Don’t just leave it to build up!

Flush flush

As an arthritis with feeble fingers, another of my pet hates with toilets is the flush flush button. My fingers are not strong enough to push this! Sadly, this is the kind of flush I have to live with in my home. I have to use a hairbrush to flush it!

Similarly, I also have problems with some kinds of taps.

And why do the doors have to open inwards??? Too often have I encountered a large room with a row of tiny cubicles whose doors open inwards so close to the toilet seat that you can barely squeeze in and out! So not logical!

I shall also spare a brief mention of the mirrors in ladies toilets obviously fitted by men. Tall men. I am short. What is the point of a mirror I can barely see my hairline in? I’m not especially short either, at 5 foot 4. Just as well I don’t wear make-up.

What else? Locks that don’t work; toilet paper that has run out and you don’t realise until it’s too late; noisy hand drying blowers; hand drying blowers that can’t see my hands so they cut out every three seconds; soap that smells nasty and lingers on my hands for hours. Oh and even worse – solid soap *shudder*! I can never forget the thing I saw on tv where they swabbed various surfaces and the solid soap had by far the most bacteria, way more than the toilet itself! Ugh.

And what about this one from Norway?

Norwegian toilet for people with veeeery loooong arms!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the toilet paper dispenser quite so far away from the seat! I took some before doing my business.

But at least all that is better than having nowhere to go at all. You can die of a burst bladder you know! No matter how bad they are, having public toilets is preferable to not having public toilets.

What are your thoughts on public toilets? Is it OK for England to get rid of them or totally disgusting and extremely uncivilised?

Sarcastic Fringehead

This is a fish. A real actual fish called the sarcastic fringehead. I just think this is a fantastic name for a fish, totally random and bizarre.

I don’t have any special knowledge of this fish that is worthy of a blog post, I just like the name. I googled it to see if there were any cool factoids or images I could add to enhance this post from the basic, hey did you know there’s a fish with a really cool random name to something at least vaguely informative.

There is speculation that the name comes from the Greek, where it meant flesh tearing rather a cutting remark, which makes sense as it’s a vicious little beastie.

I’d like to be able to add a photo, but I don’t have any and am too tired to trawl through Google images to find one with no copyright. They are shockingly ugly with huge bug eyes though, so a quick look might be fun!

Short and weird today!

What’s your favourite weirdly named thing?

The Plastic-Bag Nesting Dog-Poo Bird

I have begun to notice the nests of this peculiar creature as I perambulate the countryside. It seems to like nesting in bushes, choosing a range of different colour nesting materials, but always favouring the neatly tied plastic bag. Some prefer the bag to be sufficiently thin and translucent that the eggs may be observed without disturbing them by opening the bag.

The Bush-Nesting Egg-Watching Dog-Poo Bird

Others are more secretive in nature, favouring the opaque nest.

The Bush-Nesting Secretive Dog-Poo Bird

Other species seem to prefer crevices in rocks, such as dry stone walls.

The Secretive Wall-Nesting Poo-Bird

If a crevice is unavailable, they may huddle beside a solitary rock, half buried in the soil.

The Frustrated Wall-Nester

How much better it would be if these were indeed the natural life-cycle processes of relatively innocuous, if rather unpleasantly named, little birds. Why can’t dog owners realise that this does not count!

OK the poo is in a bag. Big Deal! If you don’t actually put it in a bin as well, it lingers like this for goodness knows how long, prevented from biodegrading back into the soil, festering foully.

If you can be bothered to put the thing in a bag, why stop there? The little nests of the dog-poo bird are not pretty little adornments of the countryside, they are ugly pollution! Please put them in the bin where they belong.

The Ideal Home for the Dog-Poo Bird, a few hundred yards, if that, away from the Frustrated Wall-Nest. Poor little bird, it was so near, yet so far from where it would have been happiest.

I have never observed the birds laying these little brown eggs. I believe them to be secretive creatures, who might be shamed into finding a better home for their eggs were they to be noticed.

Have you seen any?

Some jokes

So I’m tired again and it’s time to blog. I could have blogged earlier when I was less tired, but I failed. Partly because I’ve been having fun reading random blogs 🙂

This one said it was worth writing if you make one person smile, or laugh, somewhere in the world. So instead of me trying to dredge up something coherent while I’m tired, here are some of my favourite jokes.

(Disclaimer – I did not invent these jokes. I make no guarantee of the quality of these jokes. Warning: some of the jokes may make you groan. Or not. They are clean and safe, apart from a little toilet humour. Some of them are very old. I mean really old.)

 

Patient: Doctor, doctor, my family thinks I’m mad!

Doctor: Why?

P: Because I like sausages.

D: But I like sausages too.

P: You do? You must come and see my collection – I have thousands!

(I always picture the sausages pinned to boards under glass like butterflies, or neatly labelled in drawers, by category…)

 

How many ears did Billy the Kid have?

Three – a left ear, a right ear and a wild frontier!

(Again, my visual brain pictures a wildly wriggling ear on the front of the man’s forehead. This image usually has me in stitches, even when I tell the joke myself. I am laughing now.)

 

What’s brown and sounds like a bell?

Dunggggg!

 

What’s brown and sticky?

A stick!

 

What’s green and has ten thousand legs?

Grass.

I lied about the legs.

 

What red and lies upside down in the gutter?

A dead bus.

 

My favourite Tudor joke (yes, a genuine 16th century joke!):

Which animal is it which hath her tail between her eyes?

That is a cat, as she licketh her arse!

 

My favourite Anglo-Saxon riddle (paraphrased):

I have one eye, one nose, one mouth,

One neck, one back, one belly,

Two arms, two shoulders, two legs

And a hundred heads.

What am I?

A one-eyed seller of garlic!

 

I know some shaggy dog stories as well, but I think that’s enough for one day!

What’s your favourite joke? Please only leave clean jokes with no cruelty to animals!

Wibble

Today I feel wibble.

Wibble.

Wibblewibblewibble.

Wib.

That’s all today.

 

Nothing

Today I have no inspiration for what to write here. Sorry. I shall try to write something anyway, just for the discipline of it.

Strictly speaking then it is not nothing, so the title is not entirely correct. Maybe I ought to change it to nothing much. But I can’t be arsed, sorry again.

Aaaargh! This must be one of those days. For no apparent reason, WordPress just logged me out in the middle of writing this post. How tedious!

Actually, that felt good, screaming, albeit virtually.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!

That’s just about as long a scream as I can manage on this blog. I did a longer one first, but it just went off the screen.

I’m still not back to normal, whatever normal is. Not back to my normal self. Hmm, again, whatever that is as it shifts over time. The normal self I was last year is not the same as the normal self I was twenty years ago.

I hope this is not my new normal though. I don’t like it. It is very unproductive. And I’m not the most marvellously productive person at the best of times.

At least my creativity is beginning to dribble back, a little at a time. I had a new story idea last night, that might make a better screenplay. And another one this morning, in a totally different genre. But after I wrote them down, with some ideas of how they could be developed, I got discouraged.

I hope writing becomes fun again soon!

Oh well, at least I have written a blog post now, even if it’s not much good.

Do you ever feel like screaming? I prefer screaming online, it doesn’t give me a sore throat! Feel free to scream here on the comments if it helps.

Farctate

I was just wondering what to blog about when I saw the prompt for the day: what is your favourite word?

I love words, so it’s always a tough one. But for me, ever since I found this word mouldering away in a rarely visited corner of the big old blue dictionary, there are not many to beat:

Farctate.

I even like the way the meaning was phrased and memorised that too.

Farctate = “filled to capacity; without vacuities”

It’s almost poetry.

I think it originated as a biological term referring to the state of plant cells, but I like to use it to refer to how I feel after I have eaten too much.

It is both the meaning and the sound, and the combination of sound and meaning, and also the obscurity of this word which I enjoy so much.

Although I would not object if it were to emerge from obscurity either. Especially if I could have some hand in its rehabilitation. I do try to use it and spread it. I have sort of adopted it. Please feel free to do the same 😀

The prompt also asks for your least favourite word. That is even harder, but I am going to go with metastasise. It’s an awkward sounding word, with a wretched meaning.

Moving on, because I don’t want to linger on such a word, they also want to know a word I feel entirely neutral about.

I have to say, that is the hardest of all! I have just thought of lots of words and I can’t come up with any that I don’t feel anything at all about. Even little structural words like ‘of’ and ‘the’ I tend to like because they work hard without much notice.

So I’m going to give up on that.

But for an extra bonus I’m going to share some other words I like.

The Middle English word ‘drasty’ used by Chaucer in his ‘Canterbury Tales’ – he has one of the pilgrims say of the spoof doggerel his own character spouts “thy drasty rhyming is nat woorth a toord” (“your crappy rhyming is not worth a turd”).

My favourite word when I’m drunk, usually trotted out to prove I’m not really all that drunk, which as a result kind of misses the point, is:

Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic.

And then I offer to spell it. All 52 letters of it. And yes, that was typed by hand, from memory, not copied and pasted from an online dictionary or anything.

The fact that I did have to struggle a bit with remembering it all proves I’m not actually drunk right now, and further, that it has been a while since I was drunk enough to try and dredge it up. It’s gone a bit rusty. Which, if true, ought to add a ‘-ferro-‘ in there somewhere as well…

Oh yes, it is describing the spa waters at Bath, if you were wondering.

Hmm, I think that is enough words for today!

What is your favourite word? What do you think of mine?

Rearranging things

I feel the need to rearrange my daily blog schedule. I haven’t done it yet, but there are some days which work better than others. Some topics are just hard, and that doesn’t mean I plan to give up on them. Others are just on the wrong day for me.

It was a good idea to just make a schedule and plunge in, otherwise I’d just have vacillated. But now I have a better idea of how I feel on different days. I’ll let you when I’ve figured out the changes. They won’t be drastic though.

Also I really must get round to writing some spare posts for when I’m tired, like now.

I’m not tired in a blah way, thank God, just tired because we went out and had a jolly 🙂 But I don’t feel like writing a great long blog post and I don’t feel like writing about runology, even though I love it.

Hopefully tomorrow’s post will be better. I’m not sure posting every day is the best thing for me. I like the idea of it, but the practicality is that some days it feels more like a chore than a hobby.

What is worse for you as readers of my blog – the occasional off-topic post because I’m too tired to make a better one, or posting less frequently?