Mind Playing Tricks On Me
I Ain't Trying To Play You Man
I've been perusing my old BH quizzes, what with the Brits fast approaching an'all, and not only was I shocked at the sheer bloody great volume of questions I wrote in the initial 15 or something months of the blog, in some whirling, blinded frenzy where sanity and time never really mattered too much and the days went so very supersonic and the questions sometimes began to spiral into mini-essay after mini-treatise, but it also seems that I was careless enough to repeat several questions AND EVEN STICK SOME in my new BEEEEG EMAIL QUIZZES, almost word-for-word (though, you probably wouldn't notice and wouldn't use the search function to trivia-Fisk me. I trust you aren't that bothered). But still, for hyperbolic shame and the taint of boredom and the need to write something that doesn't constantly end in a question mark asking for an answer a bit further down the page, I apologise. 'Tis the brazen behaviour of an unthinking quiz-writing charlatan.
Why Repitition is Bad: A True Story
I don't want my miniscule albeit apparently devoted readership (according to my Sitemeter stats) to be disappointed and positively peeved the way I was when I saw Lucy Porter do a stand-up gig at uni for the second consecutive year. She might be as cute as a pixie's button, but that was no excuse for doing the same set and repeating her schtick about making anagrams from the porcelain legend that is 'Armitage Shanks' whilst puking in a union bar bog and catching bubonic plague off some student she copped off with in a halls of residence after one of her shows. Despite being students, were we not worthy of any new material? Or were we no better than distracted ragged street urchins who begged barely enough pennies every day to feed our gin habits and dull our pain?
Truth is, the sequel was further dulled, dulled beyond all measure no less, because the first time round she latched on to an acquaintance of mine sitting in the front row called Martin - think a confident-voiced, burly Clive James-like figure of entertainingly smarmy wit who never took off his leather jacket - who I used to do a late night radio show with that basically involved half a dozen of us sitting round a table talking rollocks for two, possibly three hours and eating cheap pizza and making up weird competitions that involved us throwing projectiles at random targets around the studio. Oh such bliss it was to be in student radio: playing Replacements/Big Star/Gram Parsons classic triple headers and getting John Peel to do my show idents (I kid you not).
But I digress.
Back to the first comedy show: Porter proceeded to make Martin shut up, quite possibly for the first time in his entire life, in a very amusing manner by making all sorts of dazzling, faux-flirtatious innuendo and constantly calling him "Sex-Beast" (they were more innocent times for such currently incendiary sobriquets) and so on. There was sexual chemistry, but of the humiliating kind and it was damned funny. But for the sequel, almost a year to the day it was, there was no Sex-Beast for her to bounce off. It was like Speed 2 without Keanu. Or even worse, so much worse, like the Back to the Future sequels without Crispin Glover. You know his middle name is Hellion? That's a fact.
Unless, of course, Porter was having some sort of Groundhog Day or Month or Year even, which involved having promiscuous sex with diseased teenagers in between the odd Roman shower. Though I doubt it, for her sake. And the parameters of reality.
Three Years Later...
Mind you that didn't stop me from assailing her at a Pontins ATP. Not so I could rant off about her making Pam Ayres look like Lenny Bruce. No. Instead I went all pleasant and nice. To the max. Grinning like a nutter; gleeful eyes popping out like Arnie doing his Martian roll-around at the end of Total Recall, I complimented her on the astoundingly gag-packed display of the comedian's art, which I had witnessed not once, but twice at my alma mater. Naturally, the moment I walked away the self-loathing started to kick in: into my groin, my shins, my face. All the really sensitive areas. I mean: what a complete bum-lick twatty-thing to do! Why did I do it? That is, not only horribly patronise her but, more shamefully, LIE MY ARSE OFF and betray, yes, the groaning spirits of Lenny, Bill, Sam, Richard, George and maybe even Rodney Dangerfield (even if some of them hadn't yet died at that particular time) with a barrage of flummery so voluminous and excruciating even I had started giving myself extreme evils in whatever reflective surfaces happened to be in the amusement arcade before the helpless gushing stopped.
Why? Well, because, at a basic atomic biological hee-hee level, she looked adorable - patronising her yet again (sorry). And when struck by the realisation that she really was still as cute as a pixie's button, and that she too was spending the weekend watching the weirdobscure indie-likes of Lightning Bolt, came further thoughts highlighting her being a clever and accomplished comedian, something that demands a load more respect when set face-to-face rather than peformer-to-audience member brewing up needlessly malicious and illogical opinions several safe metres away. A bad old default male-mechanism kicks in that makes you forget all that petty, insignificant nitpicking about stuff like her friendliness and charm covering up the fact that she may not be capable of delivering the kind of meaningful throughline that makes comics really special.
And that's all there is to say about it. Except that personal encounters with the objects of your highly exaggerated critical ire will lay waste to your notions of integrity and possessing a backbone, just before that smiley human touch completely obliterates any trace of dignity you had previously laid claim to. Also, hypocrisy can roil up and consume me at any given moment and I am starting to believe that I have grown so weak-willed with age that I will only ever say what people want to hear. And only so long as it makes them smile. I am your docile non-opinionated puppet.
So the moral of the story is: don't write and publish the same quiz question twice. Plus, I think Lucy Porter is great, so long as she doesn't make anymore jokes about students in front of me ever again. (And, hey!, I didn't used the 'a' word again, though I almost came out with a 'lo..')
What was that about? Back to the pointless
I am going back to rectify certain reptitions right now and replace the sneaky offenders (yeah, sneaking up on me and my leaky memory, thinking they can wheedle their way into a repeat showing, like another execrable My Family rerun) with some brand new ones, or ones I believe to be brand new. It seems that I just can't trust myself. In the meantime, here is another bitesize FE quiz, for all time's sake.
FE:XXXVII
1 Regarded by many to be the founder of modern Afghanistan and called 'Bab' or 'father' by the Pashtuns, which man, aka Ahmad Shah Abdali, founded an eponymous "Empire" in 1747 with its capital at Kandahar, having become the Amir of Khorasan after the assassination of Nader Shah Afshar?
2 Used extensively during WW1 and WW2, the highly explosive material Amatol was made from a mixture of which two chemical compounds?
3 What is the largest ethnolinguistic category of Angola with an estimated 37 per cent of the population, it being located in the west-central area of the country, south of Mbundu-inhabited regions?
4 One of the greatest players in the history of table tennis, which Chinese player won the first of her six singles world titles in 1991 and won Olympic golds medal in both the singles and doubles at the 1992 Games, repeating the feat at the 1996 Olympics before retiring at the age of 24 having won more titles than anyone else in the sport, to begin an university education that included doing a master's at Nottingham University and a PhD in Land Economy at Jesus College, Cambridge?
5 Which "People's Democratic Republic" is the second largest country on the African continent?
S
O
N
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S
I
N
T
H
E
K
E
Y
O
F
S
T
R
I
F
E
Answers to FE:XXXVII
1 Ahmad Shah Durrani, as in the Durrani Empire 2 TNT & ammonium nitrate 3 Ovimbundu 4 Deng Yaping 5 Algeria
I've been perusing my old BH quizzes, what with the Brits fast approaching an'all, and not only was I shocked at the sheer bloody great volume of questions I wrote in the initial 15 or something months of the blog, in some whirling, blinded frenzy where sanity and time never really mattered too much and the days went so very supersonic and the questions sometimes began to spiral into mini-essay after mini-treatise, but it also seems that I was careless enough to repeat several questions AND EVEN STICK SOME in my new BEEEEG EMAIL QUIZZES, almost word-for-word (though, you probably wouldn't notice and wouldn't use the search function to trivia-Fisk me. I trust you aren't that bothered). But still, for hyperbolic shame and the taint of boredom and the need to write something that doesn't constantly end in a question mark asking for an answer a bit further down the page, I apologise. 'Tis the brazen behaviour of an unthinking quiz-writing charlatan.
Why Repitition is Bad: A True Story
I don't want my miniscule albeit apparently devoted readership (according to my Sitemeter stats) to be disappointed and positively peeved the way I was when I saw Lucy Porter do a stand-up gig at uni for the second consecutive year. She might be as cute as a pixie's button, but that was no excuse for doing the same set and repeating her schtick about making anagrams from the porcelain legend that is 'Armitage Shanks' whilst puking in a union bar bog and catching bubonic plague off some student she copped off with in a halls of residence after one of her shows. Despite being students, were we not worthy of any new material? Or were we no better than distracted ragged street urchins who begged barely enough pennies every day to feed our gin habits and dull our pain?
Truth is, the sequel was further dulled, dulled beyond all measure no less, because the first time round she latched on to an acquaintance of mine sitting in the front row called Martin - think a confident-voiced, burly Clive James-like figure of entertainingly smarmy wit who never took off his leather jacket - who I used to do a late night radio show with that basically involved half a dozen of us sitting round a table talking rollocks for two, possibly three hours and eating cheap pizza and making up weird competitions that involved us throwing projectiles at random targets around the studio. Oh such bliss it was to be in student radio: playing Replacements/Big Star/Gram Parsons classic triple headers and getting John Peel to do my show idents (I kid you not).
But I digress.
Back to the first comedy show: Porter proceeded to make Martin shut up, quite possibly for the first time in his entire life, in a very amusing manner by making all sorts of dazzling, faux-flirtatious innuendo and constantly calling him "Sex-Beast" (they were more innocent times for such currently incendiary sobriquets) and so on. There was sexual chemistry, but of the humiliating kind and it was damned funny. But for the sequel, almost a year to the day it was, there was no Sex-Beast for her to bounce off. It was like Speed 2 without Keanu. Or even worse, so much worse, like the Back to the Future sequels without Crispin Glover. You know his middle name is Hellion? That's a fact.
Unless, of course, Porter was having some sort of Groundhog Day or Month or Year even, which involved having promiscuous sex with diseased teenagers in between the odd Roman shower. Though I doubt it, for her sake. And the parameters of reality.
Three Years Later...
Mind you that didn't stop me from assailing her at a Pontins ATP. Not so I could rant off about her making Pam Ayres look like Lenny Bruce. No. Instead I went all pleasant and nice. To the max. Grinning like a nutter; gleeful eyes popping out like Arnie doing his Martian roll-around at the end of Total Recall, I complimented her on the astoundingly gag-packed display of the comedian's art, which I had witnessed not once, but twice at my alma mater. Naturally, the moment I walked away the self-loathing started to kick in: into my groin, my shins, my face. All the really sensitive areas. I mean: what a complete bum-lick twatty-thing to do! Why did I do it? That is, not only horribly patronise her but, more shamefully, LIE MY ARSE OFF and betray, yes, the groaning spirits of Lenny, Bill, Sam, Richard, George and maybe even Rodney Dangerfield (even if some of them hadn't yet died at that particular time) with a barrage of flummery so voluminous and excruciating even I had started giving myself extreme evils in whatever reflective surfaces happened to be in the amusement arcade before the helpless gushing stopped.
Why? Well, because, at a basic atomic biological hee-hee level, she looked adorable - patronising her yet again (sorry). And when struck by the realisation that she really was still as cute as a pixie's button, and that she too was spending the weekend watching the weirdobscure indie-likes of Lightning Bolt, came further thoughts highlighting her being a clever and accomplished comedian, something that demands a load more respect when set face-to-face rather than peformer-to-audience member brewing up needlessly malicious and illogical opinions several safe metres away. A bad old default male-mechanism kicks in that makes you forget all that petty, insignificant nitpicking about stuff like her friendliness and charm covering up the fact that she may not be capable of delivering the kind of meaningful throughline that makes comics really special.
And that's all there is to say about it. Except that personal encounters with the objects of your highly exaggerated critical ire will lay waste to your notions of integrity and possessing a backbone, just before that smiley human touch completely obliterates any trace of dignity you had previously laid claim to. Also, hypocrisy can roil up and consume me at any given moment and I am starting to believe that I have grown so weak-willed with age that I will only ever say what people want to hear. And only so long as it makes them smile. I am your docile non-opinionated puppet.
So the moral of the story is: don't write and publish the same quiz question twice. Plus, I think Lucy Porter is great, so long as she doesn't make anymore jokes about students in front of me ever again. (And, hey!, I didn't used the 'a' word again, though I almost came out with a 'lo..')
What was that about? Back to the pointless
I am going back to rectify certain reptitions right now and replace the sneaky offenders (yeah, sneaking up on me and my leaky memory, thinking they can wheedle their way into a repeat showing, like another execrable My Family rerun) with some brand new ones, or ones I believe to be brand new. It seems that I just can't trust myself. In the meantime, here is another bitesize FE quiz, for all time's sake.
FE:XXXVII
1 Regarded by many to be the founder of modern Afghanistan and called 'Bab' or 'father' by the Pashtuns, which man, aka Ahmad Shah Abdali, founded an eponymous "Empire" in 1747 with its capital at Kandahar, having become the Amir of Khorasan after the assassination of Nader Shah Afshar?
2 Used extensively during WW1 and WW2, the highly explosive material Amatol was made from a mixture of which two chemical compounds?
3 What is the largest ethnolinguistic category of Angola with an estimated 37 per cent of the population, it being located in the west-central area of the country, south of Mbundu-inhabited regions?
4 One of the greatest players in the history of table tennis, which Chinese player won the first of her six singles world titles in 1991 and won Olympic golds medal in both the singles and doubles at the 1992 Games, repeating the feat at the 1996 Olympics before retiring at the age of 24 having won more titles than anyone else in the sport, to begin an university education that included doing a master's at Nottingham University and a PhD in Land Economy at Jesus College, Cambridge?
5 Which "People's Democratic Republic" is the second largest country on the African continent?
S
O
N
G
S
I
N
T
H
E
K
E
Y
O
F
S
T
R
I
F
E
Answers to FE:XXXVII
1 Ahmad Shah Durrani, as in the Durrani Empire 2 TNT & ammonium nitrate 3 Ovimbundu 4 Deng Yaping 5 Algeria
posted by That Quiz Guy at 2:11 PM
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