Day: June 8, 2020

Share Your World (8 June 2020)

Monday. Melanie over at Sparks From A Combustible Mind has released a fresh batch of Share Your World questions. This week, she asks:

How comfortable are you speaking in front of large groups of people?

Actually, I did this a few times. By large, I mean a few hundred. People said how well I did afterwards, and if truth be told, I enjoyed myself.

My first job in computing, the company wrote its programs, and had a few hundred international distributors. The company used to organise conferences for them every year or so…

I think the thing is to remember that in that room, you are the expert. So, preparation is everything – you have to become that expert, and that happens way before you utter a word. I was lucky in my scenarios – I’d led the development of these particular products, so knew what I was talking about inside out. It actually felt empowering, felt like maybe a cat toying with a mouse, even.

In that job, I also manned stands at computer fairs. I presume these things still happen. Not large audiences, but a constant stream of visitors, so you’d end up speaking to maybe a thousand people in the course of a day.

In later years, I spoke in smaller, more intimate settings, but the audience was often director-level. Again, they would maybe not know the answers, but would (the switched-on ones, at least) ask sensible questions, so you needed to know your stuff as much as possible. Having said that, “I don’t know” was always better-received than bullshit. Often, nobody knew, could know.

What would be the best thing you could reasonably expect to find in a cave?

Solitude.

What did you think was going to be amazing but turned out to be horrible?

Child-rearing.

What’s the silliest thing you’ve observed someone get upset about?

That time I slept with my wife’s sister.

I’m only joking, if she ever reads this.

I only ever dreamed about it. D’oh 🤣🤣🤣 *

Gratitude: 

Please feel free to share something that gave you an uplifted spirit during this past week.  (Optional)

My wife went out into the garden yesterday with a saw. She cut a branch off our magnolia tree which must’ve been four inches in diameter! Thank fuck she’s gone to work today!

* For the record, I will be forever grateful that the sister I married was the sane one, she’s just not a gardener!

Reblog: Oh, mercy……

I must admit, I almost pulled my SLS post yesterday, in favour of this one. It was nothing to do with the prompt, but I thought it was appropriate.

I kept it as it was in the end, but this is a blinding song/video, so I’ll share it now. I kinda figure that everybody that I interact with, everybody who reads my posts, everybody whose posts I read, we’re all decent people with decent values, so there is no point talking politics. Anything I could say, you’ve already thought it.

The thing that gets me about the situation over in the US is not this cop – he, and others like him, can hang for all I care, and good riddance. But are we being asked to believe that this guy had never before shown himself to be capable of killing? So it gets me about all the people who’ve turned a blind eye, who’ve let things slide, because this guy was presumably “one of us”.

You’ll know the song. I knew the song, from years ago, but I had never seen the images. Since I thought about re-presenting it for SLS, I did a bit of digging. First off, this song was written directly about the police’s brutality toward somebody – that’s why the lyrics fit so well. It was released in 1971 – fifty years ago! Marvin Gaye and his band were touring Berkerley, Ca, and one of the band members saw the incident. I guess he thought, being a musician, that his best avenue of expression was music, and the result is a collaboration between three band members. Thank heaven that Marvin was one of them.

Even if we don’t actually *do* anything, we’re doing something just by raising awareness of it. Enjoy Suze’s tune.

Fandango’s One Word Challenge (8 June 2020)

copyright: me 🙂

for Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC), landmark.

Start the Week

Yesterday, I was thinking about the one word challenge when I stumbled across a Tommy Cooper joke. I assume we’ve all heard of Tommy? If not… “What a good way to address the prompt”, I thought, and promptly went looking for other jokes that might be usable.

Now, I am useless at remembering jokes. I found a few pages with great lists of his material. Not to mention, there are countless other brilliant comedians. So, it became just an exercise in reading through each page and having a laugh. I thought I’d present this one, before I forget it.

A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet.

“My dog’s crosseyed, is there anything you can do for him?”

“Well,” says the vet, “let’s have a look at him”

So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth.

Finally, he says “I’m going to have to put him down.”

“What? Because he’s crosseyed? “

“No, because he’s really heavy”

Tommy Cooper

Must look up some more comedians