gamboling.co.uk

I’ve known who Steve Jobs was for as long as I can remember.

And I’m going to miss him. He was a hero.

Some people have asked me about the lack of posts here… The answer is quite simple… Katherine has given birth to our wonderful daughter Nina…

She likes to do Woodlouse impressions, find out all of the details on http://andronovjr.com

For many years I have loved terrible jokes. I also like good jokes, but there is something about a terrible joke that I particularly admire. My favorite kind of terrible jokes are the ones that you have to painstakingly explain. I’m not saying these kinds of jokes are socially acceptable, of course they aren’t, but that’s just how I am.

There is however a particularly wonderful variant of these jokes that you have to explain – the ones that make immediate sense to a very small subset of people. Here’s one that I’ve known since I was a kid:

Why did the cat fall off the roof?
Because it lost its Mu.

Trust me, if you were an applied mathematics fan, or into physics, or engineering, you would be… well laughing is probably be a bit much… but you’d be having a good old groan.

The joke here relies on the fact that Mu is the way you pronounce this greek letter μ. And μ is the symbol in applied mathematics and engineering for Resistance or Friction. So if you lost your μ then you would have no frictional resistance so you would fall off a roof, and of course Mu sounds like Mew, the noise that a cat makes.

I made an applied mathematics teacher fall off his chair laughing at that one, but they don’t get out much. And as with all things in life, it’s the way you tell ‘em.

Here’s one I made up that only works for Harry Potter fans, which these days is a very wide audience, perhaps too wide an audience to really count but it still does divide audiences as to whether they get it or not…

Which company do Hogwarts use to deliver snakes?
Parselforce

Parseltongue is a name in the Harry Potter universe for the language of snakes, and in the UK there is a parcel delivery network called Parcelforce.

Now while the Harry Potter universe is now wide enough to mean that more people, in the world, have probably heard about Parseltongue than Parcelforce, it is still domain specific* enough to count, in my opinion, because it’s not something that everyone could work out. For the joke to work by this specific metric, it has to only work if you are a Harry Potter fan – you can’t just work it out.

But where is the line, and how does one cross it?

Why did the Belgian keep mixing up his definite articles?
Because he was Antwerp

Most people will understand this joke, the creator of this joke** has gone for widespread glory instead of domain specificity. However if he had made the joke this:

Why did the Belgian keep choosing the wrong articles?
Because he was Antwerp

It is more likely to only work for fanboys and girls of parts of speech. The use of the word definite in the first version mentally prepares you for the fact that it’s a parts of speech joke. But also because, at some point, almost everyone has had to learn the parts of speech, it is right on the line.

And right over the line, on the other side, are jokes where, while the joke is about a job, or area, it makes a play on words about something that everyone knows:

Why was the police officer sitting in the tree?
Special Branch

Everyone in the UK knows what that means even if it is a police term. What we’d be looking for, in a police officer joke, would be something that makes a pun about the forms that you have to fill in to arrest somebody or something.

Anyway… This is a call out for you. I love these kinds of jokes, so do you have any, can you make any up? Give it your best shot in the comments.

*Domain specificity is a fantastic concept in cognitive science which describes how infants seem able to very rapidly learn certain kinds of things like numeracy and how objects work as though these things are hard wired into us. I have stolen the name to make it be about how these certain jokes only work for certain groups of people.

**Bill Booth of Tottenham – Made up Jokes – Adam & Joe 6 music – 30th April 2011

If you talk to a group of men about clothes measurements, men will quickly let you know how pleased they are with our clothing measurement system.

Women have a completely crazy measurement system. They have sizes and they don’t really mean anything. And because they don’t really mean anything one can be one size in one shop and a completely different size in another.

Men have long pointed out how clever their system is because we use actual measurements. I have 32 inch legs. This can be proven by measuring my legs and then you can go and buy the trousers which have the corresponding length of leg.

And while there are large and manifest advantages to the men’s system over the ladies’ system (although we don’t have the option of blaming the shop when we’ve indulged a bit much at Christmas) there is a problem that needs fixing.

Waist measurements measure how long a piece of material you need to go around somebody’s waist, whereas leg measurements only measure half of the number because your legs go up and down or at least the material does. Although presumably it’s actually just two bits of material the right length sewn together, in which case the number is right and so… Well it comes back to the simple answer that ladies should really switch to the men’s system.

There’s a window opposite me, the curtains are open, and it is dark outside. Am I rebellious or foolish? My friend Nick told me once that one shouldn’t ever be afraid of curtains left open like this, that the more frightening thing would be to leave the slightest crack of curtain open. In that case, he reasoned, you could be seen and be unaware of being observed. I wonder what he got up to when I wasn’t there to see him?

I look at this open curtain, there is nobody there. All I can see is black, and a bit of a reflection of the room I am in.

On the other side of the window is our back garden. What would happen, and what would I do, if I suddenly saw a figure at the window? Would it depend on the figure? I don’t think so. Not now that I’ve been thinking about the window. Not now that I’ve been wondering about it.

There is a bunch of fake flowers in front of the window, the reflections of the fake flowers make an interesting shape when I move my head. I should probably not move my head.

But what would I do if I saw a face? What could they do? Logically? I mean the house is locked. They could look in, and I could close the curtains. But obviously I couldn’t leave it at that. I’d have to call the police. And then I would start wondering whether they were still there. I might try and peek through the curtains. But then I would be suffering from the same situation my friend talked about earlier. The narrow gap is suddenly more frightening.

Imagine going up to the window and looking through the crack. What would you want to see? Would you want to see the face still there? No, the face that close to you with the cold breath steaming up the glass would be terrifying. But what if it’s not there? Where has it gone? What’s that noise? Is that them coming in at the other end of the house?

About six months ago I was sitting in a pub writing up some notes for my novel. Several people had, very kindly, read an early draft for me and I had interviewed each of them to get their feedback. This had created lots of notes and I was trying to pull them together into some kind of document.

I was therefore sitting in the pub with the notes to one side of my laptop and was typing them up. I touch type and so I can look around while I type. This can be rather disconcerting for people, but usually I don’t use my touch typing just to do this, most usefully I can concentrate on the notes I am typing up which makes the copying of them much faster. This is one of the main places where you really see how much faster touch typists are than those who hunt and peck.

So as I was working away, a group of guys wandered into the pub. They didn’t seem like Londoners and I was slightly distracted by their boisterousness. They were a bunch of about 10 guys and I was trying to work out what the connection between them was. They were all wearing jackets, the younger guys from the group were wearing jeans, the older guys were wearing chinos. I realised that some of them didn’t know each other and were being introduced. Some seemed to know each other well but hadn’t seen each other for a while. The younger guys, who were in their twenties, all seemed to be sons of a couple of the older guys.

I couldn’t work it out, so I put my head down and started doing some more typing. While I was concentrating on my typing, I wasn’t looking at them but clearly I was causing a bit of a stir. They were obviously trying to play the same game with me – what was I doing? Eventually one of them came over to me and said, “Excuse me?”.

“Yes, hello,” I replied.
“Can I ask what you do?,” one of the parents asked.
“Pardon?”
“Sorry, it’s just that we noticed you typing at… Well typing pretty bloody fast and we were trying to work out what you were doing.”
“Ah, I’m a writer.”
“Right okay, thanks. Sorry to disturb.”

I kind of tried to look back down and get back to work but I couldn’t help but overhear them discussing me.

“He said he’s a waiter”, said the guy who had come over to me.
“He’s only a waiter. Told you, Will,” said another parent addressing his son. “Everybody can type properly nowadays, not just secretaries.”
“He said ‘writer’ not ‘waiter’,” Will replied, “Bob’s as deaf as you Dad.”

Bob shuffled back towards me.

“Excuse me, sorry to disturb, did you say you were a waiter?”
“No, sorry,” I replied, “I’m a writer.”
“Well that would explain the fast typing.”
“I suppose it would. I do type a lot.”
“Well thank you for your time.”

Bob made to head back to his group, but before he left I wanted to get a question in.

“What do you fellows do?”
“Ah, well we’re all farmers. I’m a Potato farmer myself.”
“Farmers eh…”
“Yes, well in the main. Steven and his son over there,” he pointed over to Will and his dad, “are leek farmers.”
“I could make a soup with you two.”
“Absolutely, and it would be bloody lovely, here’s my card. Steven where’s your card.”

Steven strode over and suddenly I had the business cards of a potato farmer and a leek farmer.

Steven turned to Bob and said, “What’s he want with our cards?”
Bob said, “I’m going to get him to put us in his book,” then he turned back to me and said, “now what’s your name and while you’re telling me that, let me buy you a pint.”

The other day I posted a short story here called Airborne. If you haven’t read it then you may want to go back and take a look, it’s only short, and the rest of this won’t really make sense otherwise. Here it is: https://gamboling.co.uk/2011/02/08/airborne/

After reading the article on the site, my friend Fourstar let me know what he thought about it offline. One of the things he said was that he wasn’t sure the story needed the last line:

“Well, um, well… Honestly, I thought I had been dreaming, but…”

It’s an interesting point and something I thought about before I pressed ‘publish’. Without that line, the story has a very formal ending. If you imagine it like an episode of the Twilight Zone, this would be the moment that the opening title sequence kicks in with some music and the cheesy graphics.

The problem, for me, is that removing that line makes the story the main character is telling emphatically true to the reader. Ending it on that line would fit so much into the pattern that it would make the whole situation true. But is it true? Did he really see what he thought he saw? That’s what I was aiming at.

Perhaps shorter isn’t the way to go either? If, after where the story currently ends, there were an extra line, it would probably have involved the air stewardess looking at him unbelievingly. Then she’d probably say something about how she would just have to keep looking and our character would realise that both he and the stewardess are looking at his empty vodka and tonic glass.

Now if I had added that, it would have been more deliberately ambiguous. I tried to have my cake and eat it by stopping half-way between these two normal places to end. I probably overthink these things (this story was first written in October), and in this case it probably means that it satisfies neither set of reader (the ones who want it to be true and the ones who suspect it was a dream).

When writing this kind of short story, you are trying to arm a slingshot. What I always want to do when writing these very short mysterious stories is to set you up so that you can finish the story. Getting the last line correct is key to this. I’m always trying to find a good way to get you to wonder, ‘what happened next?’. I want to store up kinetic energy of plot and character in your head and then with the last line pull the trigger for you to continue the story yourself.

So I’m always wary of ending the story too formally because then you don’t get that effect. I think that if I had stopped a line earlier it would probably have been a better story. I think on balance I probably should have written more and made you deliberately question if he saw the man or was dreaming or drunk. That might have set you all going more. But I don’t know, what do you think?

Please do let me know, remember Fourstar mentioned what he thought and that might make the story better. I’d love to hear your comments, whatever they are.