The Cheerful Insanity of Me

The Internet is an endless stream of useless information, whatever you want as long as it's utterly pointless it's bound to be on there.

Therefore, this morning when I suddenly found myself in need of a Welsh translation of "My hovercraft is full of eels" (as you do), I had absolutely no doubt that some sad lonely individual would have created a page with various obscure translations including Welsh, and hey presto here's one.

Nice to know the internet is there for a purpose.

This is one of those memes that seems to have gone around a lot for years now and I've so far avoid it. Well until I somehow managed to ask ladyofastolat to pick 5 things from my interests for me to talk about.

Oh well, here goes:

Blue string pudding (English seems inappropriate for this one) whistle whistle-whistle whiiiiistle whistle-whistle-whistle whistle. Whistle whistle whistle whistle-whistle whiiistle whiiiiistle whistle-whistle whistle. Whistle-whistle whistle whistle-whistle-whistle-whistle whistle whistle. Whistle whistle whistle. Whistle-whistle whiiiiistle whistle whiiistle whistle-whistle-whistle whiiiistle. (hope you got that, because that's all the explanation your going to get)

Coathangers This is about the only explanation I can give for this one (it's not my coathanger or my wall, but it is my, rather poorly taken, photograph)


Neil Gaiman I discovered Neil Gaiman when Neverwhere came on TV when I was at school. I bought the book of it shortly after when it came out and have worked my way through most of his other books since. I like the way he manages to ground the fantastic into real life situations, particularly in Neverwhere and American Gods. Rather than creating a whole new reality to talk about, he generally seems to just twist the one we've got to his own ends. Not really looked at the comics much though, as I never really was a big one for comics in general.

Real Ale You can't go around with morris dancers and other real ale drinkers without developing a taste for the stuff, especially when a lot of the other stuff pubs serve drink-wise is fairly tasteless and uninteresting. I therefore fell down that slippery slope. I wouldn't say I've got any particular favourites though, I'll generally go for the ones I know less well, because they might be more of a surprise.

The Goons Here I was, freshly run over with my bagpipes irreparably flattened, and without a remedy. The weight of the steamroller had made a lasting impression on me. I was now two inches thick and twenty-four feet wide. This- this was very awkward. People kept opening and shutting me. Then I discovered the goons had had a very similar storyline and radio 7 was repeating them on a Monday morning. Started listening to them on listen again as I didn't have digital when I first discovered this until I moved back to London and was able to listen to them before going to work (falling in the water is a very good way to wake up on a Monday morning). The rotten swines have deaded them now though :-(

Yesterday evening, I went to see The Pantaloons production of Romeo and Juliet at The Scoop.

It was one of the more unusual versions of the play I've seen, being somewhat like a crossing between Shakespear and Pantomime, but they pulled it off really well. However, in spite of what I said in my last post there were no silly hats.

What really impressed me was how they seemed to smoothly switch into and out of the Shakespearean dialogue. For example, towards the beginning two members of the cast had an argument about whether they should have any more audience participation once they've done the opening lines of the actual play, which led to one of them biting their thumb and all of a sudden you're back on the original script again.

All in all it was utterly amazing and you should all go and see it now, especially if you like "health and safety concious, heavily cheorographed sword fights with cricket bats" or you want to know how you get a custard pie into a Shakespearean tragedy.

It's being performed at the scoop over the weekend and then continues its tour around the country until late August.

They're also touring with Twelfth Night over the summer.

Having not been for a while, thethirdvoice and I went to the Dana Centre twice this month. The first time we saw a stand up comic talking about man's journeys into space.

On Tuesday we went back for a talk on gadgets. A bit of a big subject really and as such the talk ended up a bit woolly, especially as one of the speaker's spent the whole time promoting his book every other sentance.

There ended up being an interesting discussion on environmental issues, as the speaker who had come to focus on this part was a bit more vocal in her views than any of the others. However, she didn't really get her points across very well.

All in all, it was an interesting evening, but I don't think I learned any thing new.