Saturday, February 8, 2014

Keep The Comma: Great Grammar and Great Granddad and Let's Eat ...And woman and man




Drop the comma - this week's silly suggestion.  What would happen?
Let's eat Grandma. Not the same as
Let's eat, Grandma.

Another old favourite is:

Woman, without her, man is nothing. Different meaning with different commas:
Woman, without her man, is nothing.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Odd Socks - Getting Even

Socks from Wikipedia on socks.




I have odd socks. I am not the only one. Or the only twenty-one. Or the only sixty one. To have odd socks. The bad news is, it does not get better as you get older. When I was a child I never had odd socks. My mother saw that I wore neat little pairs of socks. I outgrew them and needed new ones. As a teenager I wore tights. Tights are really two socks joined together like gloves on a piece of elastic.             Tights are for people who are tired of odd socks. That's why men are more bothered about odd socks. They were more socks - than tights - not individually, but taking a thousand men, half a dozen wear tights, the rest wear socks. Some of them have odd socks. Do they wear odd socks.

  Have you ever tried to wear odd socks? When I worked in an office I would never have worn odd socks. The odd socks went into a drawer neatly labelled odd socks.
Now I work at home I wear odd socks. Not because I need to be somewhere in a hurry. Actually, yes. I suddenly need to go out to a meeting and I need to get dressed. I am too mean. Or  as aI prefer to say, too keen on recycling, to throw away odd socks.
How do you hide odd socks? How many of you wear odd socks. You wear a pair under low boots, or high boots, or under tights. You hope you won't go to a house where the hostess or householder asks you if you mind removing your shoes.
What excuses. I have cold feed. Then wear socks.
Do you need to hide odd socks?
No, they hide themselves.

   Supermarkets try to sell you sets of coloured trainer socks. I pair of red, one pair of blue, one pair of green. Why is it that a year later I had one of each. A matching pair of a left blue sock and a right green sock, and an odd red sock.
If only colour was the problem, or rather if colour was the only problem.
  What about height? I start by matching socks by length. Nothing feels odder than a trainer sock matched with an over the knew sock, even if they are both black, or red. I worry. What would somebody say. Supposing I went into hospital. They'd put me in the wrong ward. With the Alzheimers patients. Or the psychiatric department.
   Doctors would ask me, "Do you know what day it is?"
   "No, I never know what day it is."
   "Do you know you are wearing odd socks?"
    "Yes, doctor. Of course I do. I always wear odd socks."
    A commercial company has produced odd socks. Three matching pairs of odd socks. They mix up stripes and dots in six different patterns. You buy matching unmatching socks. Same colours, different combinations of patterns. You can look odd all the time.

Serious Humour About A USA Earthquake and My Uncle Ronnie



I would like to be serious about humour. I have tried many times to write comedy but nobody laughed. However, my two most serious stories made everybody laugh. 

The first was a short story about an earthquake survivor. I based it on a true story. I described how a girl in an earthquake held onto her friend hand. In the morning she was rescued and the rescuers found nobody was attached to the hand. 

First somebody had to tell her. Then she had to deal with it.

 My short store followed two other comic pieces. However, mine was the one which had everybody in hysterics. 

Later that week I met a fellow writer (the late Karl Blau) in the street. He told me how much he had enjoyed my comic piece.

 I confessed it was based on the truth. What happened in the USA bombing. I thought everybody else would have read the story and already know it. 

When Karl hear it was a true story, he did not look cross or unimpressed, he laughed even more. I still don't know why.




    The second strange piece of unintended humour was about my beloved Uncle Ronnie. I wrote what I thought was a very sad true dramatisation of how he was in dispute with his mother. 

He was a vegetarian. She was a Jewish mother who tried to make people eat. 

He was colour blind. He could not see flowers. My grandparents loved gardening and flowers. 

My audience was falling about laughing. My reading of the piece, exaggerating the two characters, helped.