gamboling.co.uk

Many years ago I came into possession of a signed picture of Terry Farrell. Terry played a character in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine. I had actually interviewed her on the telephone earlier that year and asked her such probing questions as, “What’s your favourite drink?”. It was Diet Coke, for reference.

But now I had this picture that clearly needed protecting. The best way to do that would be to frame it. But I had a problem, it was already 9 o’clock at night. What to do… Well actually it wasn’t that much of a problem, I lived right in central London. Zone 1 baby! Round the corner from my place was a 24-hour framers. Man, they have everything in London.

I headed out. And then I learned that the 24 hours represents how long the framing would take rather than the opening times. Honestly! Don’t they realise that people need things framing round the clock? We don’t want to wait!

An archive article at long last, we haven’t seen one of those in a while ironically. In these articles I take a look back at a thing from gamboling of yesteryear – this time Auto Antonyms.

Why different species can’t mate – https://gamboling.co.uk/2006/08/28/why-different-species-cant-mate/

When casting about for something to write for the site I tend to scan through my notebook. Today I was a bit surprised to find this nugget:

Optiplex superhero without superpowers except he can shoot yellow beams out of his eyes. Controlled experiment with eyepatch. Doesn’t light things up – useless in dark. Placebo effect.

I mean… What on earth is that about? I think an Optiplex is actually a kind of Dell computer. But beyond that? I’ve got no idea.

When I were a lad you didn’t have the internet… Well you might have if you were one of the five government scientists who were keeping it all locked up before they all decided to relax, chill out, let their hair down and distribute some of those lovely IP addresses. And in those days they used to have these things called newspapers. They were these things which had yesterday’s news written up and printed on them. Of course there was already news on the television and the radio so they still didn’t really report news live but sometimes you’d read about something in the newspaper you didn’t know about that had happened yesterday. But then the internet came along and they all died out. People said it was because the internet was free, but of course the real problem was that you had to cut down bamboo to make newspapers and that’s bad for pandas… Or what I’m trying to say is that it was because of the distribution model. It was always out of date once the internet was there. The best you could hope for was for it to be only half a day out of date by the time you read it.

Of course I have always loved reading, so I used to read newspapers until they died out. And even then they had realised that something was a bit wrong and so they kind of reduced the amount they focused on news. They really should have been renamed Opinionpapers but people would have got upset and written to the editor of the newspaper saying that it was ridiculous to just make up words and telling them that if they didn’t change it back to newspaper, they would cancel their subscription. They wouldn’t seem to notice that somebody had cancelled their sense of irony previously.