Blog Archives
The Costa Nostra
Yesterday everything got a bit serious on Epicurienne, with an Irate Reader making an Irate Comment about my views on Sicily, Sicilians and the influence of the Mafia là-bas.
To lighten the mood, here’s a Newsbiscuit story from the Wise Woman of Wandsworth. Made me snort all over my keyboard. Again. Now where are those anti-Swine ‘Flu wipes?
Kissmekwik cards
An Epic trick for getting out of a dark funk on a rainy, grey day when people are losing their jobs and heads all around is to visit a greetings card store where the selection is filled with humourous one-liners. I’ve been known to giggle into a fit of teary laughter doing this before.
WARNING: If you are easily offended I would suggest you DO NOT click on the following link. Seriously.
One of the best UK ranges of greetings cards for this purpose is by kissmekwik. They seem to have taken the photos from 1960s fashion mags or knitting patterns, adding a caustic caption that can be so wrong at times that it would be understandable if you snorted mucous all over the (a) card/s or (b) computer. The more religious among us may feel the need for an emergency confession and a lot of prayer after checking out this range. Anyhoo, if you want to save some cash in these crunchie times, order online. You’ll save at least 50p per card and you’ll be able to stock up your Martha Stewart gift cupboard at the same time.
To give you an example of just how naughty these cards can be, here’s a brief selection:
Some of my friends would say this one is me as a child.
Just like the woman who turned up at Chelsea & Westminster A&E with a broken nail one busy Saturday night when a doctor friend was interning. Perhaps that was Mary, too?
Yes, well, enough said. At least we can’t see her knickers. Then again, perhaps that’s a clue.
The hills are alive with the sound of prozac, apparently.
I once stood in line behind a woman at Dean & Delucca in New York and her order was strangely similar to this one.
This multi-use card is for those of us with a bad case of Indecision.
The link between nutrition and heart disease…
Here’s a foodie joke that popped into my in-box this morning. I like it…
THE FINAL WORD ON NUTRITION
After an exhaustive review of the research literature, here’s the final word on nutrition and health.:
1. Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.
2. Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.
3. Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.
4.. Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.
5. Germans drink beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.
6. The French eat foie-gras, full fat cheese and drink red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us
The Joker’s CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
Epic’s conclusion: stock up the cellar, eat more foie gras, go to Wahaca more and book for 2009 Oktoberfest.
Credit Crunchies
I was surfing You Tube last night (as you do) when, by chance, I stumbled across a Credit Crunch song. On the drop down menu to the right of the screen there was a whole list of songs about the Credit Crunch, so I started to watch them. There was about 5% of me that thought this might be a bit wrong; to make fun of something so serious, but you know what? A bit of laughter can’t hurt, especially as it’s pretty certain that things are going to get much worse before they get better. We should laugh while we still can! So this week I’m going to post some Credit Crunchies – things to make us smile while the world economy crumbles. Perhaps that’s why they called it the Credit Crunch…
Here are a couple of the better songs. (Be warned: if you go onto You Tube and type in Credit Crunch, you will find some really dire stuff. Dire with a capital D.)
PS I couldn’t work out exactly who created these vids, so if you know, please leave a comment so I can give credit.
Meet The Awesome Squad
Hey there Awesome Readers,
I’m pleased to say that I’ve been invited to contribute to a new joint blog called The Awesome Squad.
Considering we contributors only really started contributing posts on Saturday, it’s already got a lot of weird, whacky and giggly content. Considering that we are in the midst of a Credit Crunch which sounds like a chocolate bar but is actually causing a lot of stress and job loss around the place, I figure we need somewhere to go and let our marbles loose. We may not be everyone’s cup of darjeeling, but at least we’re not a set of graphs or statistics that will make you tear out your hair, suck your thumb for the first time since you were three years old or sit rocking in the corner. No, siree. We are The Awesome Squad, a bunch of friendly nutcases with a different agenda, even if we do call Sigmund Freud a friend.
Click on the link up above or on my blogroll to see how nutty we are, and how much potential we might have to get much, much worse.
In the meantime, please forgive my irregular posts. I, too, am stuck in redundancy-ville, only for the moment, I am the schmuck trying to help people accept the fact that they don’t have a job tomorrow. Life’s rough. It’s emotional. I’m seeing grown men and women cry. I hate it. That’s why The Awesome Squad couldn’t have come at a better time. I may have Blogger’s Block, but sharing a laugh is precious therapy.
Epic hair… again
Thanks to Danish Doll, I’ve found a new internet toy called Yearbook Yourself. All you have to do is upload a photo and follow the prompts to view yourself (or a victim) in different hairstyles through the ages. Here’s one I did earlier: (I didn’t suit the afro…) I suggest you give it a go. Giggles aplenty!
Friday fun – Geeky Hair
Good morning people and welcome to the Friday Fun Post. Today is all about hair. Why hair? you may ask, how does hair relate to travel, food and blogging? The answer is that tonight I’m on a mission with my London Bloggers Meetup mates, Cathy (of the Jog Blog) and Tracey (of the year-long Free Alcohol Challenge), to tidy ourselves up and bond over conditioners, serums and glasses of bubbly. Yes, people, the salon we’re going to serves bubbly, but more about that AFTER the chop.
My hair and I have our moments. There have been issues; a lifetime of them in fact. Early on I learnt that a fringe does not work on me, so we don’t do fringes now. Then I went short and short worked for a while until my mother booked me in for a pampering cut after a tough week at work and I walked out looking like Sheena Easton.
I’d tried to stop the hairdresser from shearing the crown. She even acknowledged my increasingly desperate requests to leave the top long, but she was one of those hairdressers who lives for gossip and her chopping became more angry and frantic as she told me about another customer’s husband’s affair. The end result was horrible. Longish in the front but so short at the crown that a big circle of my hair sprouted vertically from my scalp. Then came the dreaded blow drying with a canful of moose and a lot of scrunching. Biting my lip until was a safe distance from the shop, I then burst into tears. I admit it. It was a veritable hairstyle Disaster (note the capital D). Thank heavens for my baseball cap collection which saved me from looking like a complete eighties retro loser. I wore one every day (colour coordinated, of course) for two weeks. Only then could I go out and safely bare my hair. Following that experience, we don’t do short anymore.
There have been a couple of interesting dye situations. My hair bleaches naturally in the sun so I get the odd light brown/ vaguely blonde streak. Then bright spark here thought a burgundy hair colour was a good idea, but I emerged from the bathroom with bright pink streaks where my hair was lighter. Given that I had a lovely linen jacket for work that was lemon yellow, I looked particularly colourful that summer. Oh well, I was never a punk so this part-way made up for it.
When I think about the worst haircuts in the world, here’s what I come up with: the mullet. Short sides, long on top and really unattractive long curly bits at the neck. In fact, with a proper mullet, you can’t see the neck at all. It’s Billy Ray Cyrus of the nineties and has no place in the 21st century.
While we’re on the subject, if you google ‘mullet’, you’ll find some interesting examples of the human species (oooh, Baby!):
And if you crave a mullet but don’t want to wait the time required to grow one, you can buy a mullet wig:
So what will tonight’s haircut involve? Hopefully, a blunt cut bob, all one length, thank you very much and no arguments, although most hairdressers want to do something more ‘interesting’ with my hair than a blunt cut bob . Yes, a multi-layered highlighted cut of the moment might make the hairdresser’s workday more interesting but with stubborn hair like mine, it will only ever look good for about two hours and those two hours are directly following the cut.
Given that Tracey and Cathy go to London Girl Geek dinners and I’m now signed up to join them, it’s possible we’ll end up walking out like a trio of Microserf Geeks:
wearing microchip hairclips:
(Hey, where can you buy those things, anyway?)
Then again, perhaps not. I’m just looking forward to an evening with the girls where we can talk to each other about the benefits of RSS feeds and how to raise reader stats in one breath and which hair treatment suits us best in another, all girl-geeks together. As for Monsieur, when I told him I’d be getting my hair cut with a couple of bloggers, he looked at me really hard, was quiet for a moment, then said:
“Going for a hair cut WITH people? Hmmm. It must be a girl thing.”
Friday is Fun Day
Friday is Fun Day. It’s ‘I-can-wear-jeans-to-work’ day. It’s a day to share jokes, look forward to the weekend and wind down after a week at full velocity. At least, that’s what I aim for on Fridays. It doesn’t always pan out.
When I worked for The Auction House, I used to send all my friends a special Friday e-mail. Now I think I might have to resurrect that tradition in the form of a Fun Friday post, just to make sure we remember that life isn’t all about envelopes with windows, deadlines and overtime.
Recently, I was talking to Stationery Guy whose son likes saying “I ain’t goin’ in no plane!”, just like Mr T’s alter ego, B A Baracus. Remember him? Big, black and scary with a mohawk and lots of man-bling. The terrifying thing for those of us who remember it from the first time around is that the A Team is having a revival. It’s on Sky TV in the UK and if you’re bored with your current look you might consider buying Mr T disguise sets from all the party stores. Here’s one I found earlier:
Then Wise Woman told me about a friend of hers whose friends dressed him up as Mr T for his stag night. Apparently there was a lot of “I ain’t walkin’ down no aisle!” going on. He did, however, walk down an aisle shortly thereafter, so all that talk did no lasting damage.
The A Team is even influencing fashion. The other day, a trendy guy who works in our building was wearing a tee shirt with a line-up of the four A-Team characters in cartoon form. It was seriously cool, only I was so busy staring at the tee-shirt that I can’t remember which guy he is. I’m now waiting until he wears it again so I can ask where he got it.
For the techies, there are avatars aplenty if you google for them…
But most importantly, there’s the A-Team theme!
In case you still haven’t had enough, you could try a Mr T in your pocket.
Someone has even shown us what happens when Mr T meets a teapot. That must make him Mr Tea. Yes? No? Shut up, foo’…
Berocca’s Bloggers Relief Packs – update
Recently, I wrote about Berocca and their Bloggers Relief Packs. Here’s the update:
I was really excited about getting a Bloggers Relief Pack but frustrated by the stupid delivery company who only wanted to deliver to me at home during the hours I work at work. In order to receive my package of nicknacks for the stressed-out blogger I would now have to go to a gloomy and lonely industrial estate street that lay between a prison and a cemetery. I almost went. I considered its interest as a blog post, WITH action photos of prisoners jumping over walls and mortal vampires lurking behind tombstones. Then I thought the better of it and asked a neighbour who works from home to sign for the package for me, instead.
Oooh, excitement! To come home and find a big box addressed to Epicurienne! Here’s a picture of the pack:
I was pleasantly surprised to see everything presented in a Berocca-branded Bloggers Relief Pack carry bag, with a friendly letter enclosed from the Berocca marketeers. That’s what we call brand-conscious. Naturally, there were Berocca goodies inside – a glass for your Berocca tablets to fizz in, the Berocca tablets themselves, a Berocca pen and Berocca-green stress ball. I have a collection of stress balls that are sent to me at work by various companies who must think my job is stressful (I wonder why), so this will be joining the existing group.
The fun part of the pack is the gadgets. First up, there’s a bubble wrap keyring which is supposed to pop like bubble wrap when you press its bubbles, but which isn’t really loud enough to be wholly satisfactory. On the back of the pack it says that at random intervals the keyring will make other sounds, like that of a dog barking. My thumbs are tiring from pressing the bubbles waiting for the dog to bark. I’ve given up. For the moment, anyway. If I ever manage to make it bark, I promise to write about it.
Then there’s the USB panic button which you plug into your laptop or hard drive and press when you are stressed. I have yet to fully test this, but can say that the various options of screensaver activated by the button are both funny (boss’s head exploding) and useful (excel spreadsheet when you need to hide evidence that you weren’t using the computer for strictly work purposes when someone important lurks up behind you or instant blackout screen) with the addition of a countdown screen. I haven’t tried that one yet so will have to report back later.
My favourite gadget by far is the Dead Fred pen holder, for stabbing your new, green Berocca pen into in times of angst. It reminds me of the Ex Knife Block
and the Voodoo toothpick holder, as seen recently on Evolution of a Foodie.
Do you think the designers of these items have a wicked sense of humour, or are they sitting at home decapitating dolls? Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
In the relief pack letter, the Berocca people mentioned their continued interest in the Blogosphere… I’m dying (just like Fred the penholder) to see what they come up with next.
