Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

Hmm, let's play a little guessing game. Which blogger is most likely to send me the following message at 11.58 on a Saturday night?

I'm in Brighton. Not only have I seen more lesbians in the last 8 hours than in my entire life, this may be the only place in the world too gay for me!

Answers on the back of a postcard to Anyhoo at:
The Any Comments Section,
Hoo Blog Ltd.,
Spotcom Lane,
Slash,
Indexshire.
HT40 4TP

But I can't think of any suitably witty reply, so I'm going to go to bed so I can wake early tomorrow to torment the wandering blogger by painfully early text, as they try work out where exactly they are, and immediately after that wonder where exactly this place called Hove actually is (shortly followed by the first pun; it's almost as easy to do it with as Havant).

Utterly unrelated, but it was what I was looking at the out-gayed text came, here's an old clip from Neighbours with Desnie and Stewane.

Anyhoo,

---
Update - the following morning.

Can you tell who it is yet?

I suppose having the message repeated verbatim bar the fleshing out beyond the 140 text limit does rather give it away.

But then he isn't the only one to reuse good memes, as I awkwardly discovered talking to Noname earlier this week. I can't remember what the specifics were, but one problem with bunging near enough everything in here is that one can't bring blogged anecdotes into a conversation with a blogee without fear of being told that one has already told them that. An early speil "I know" can do dreadful things to one's facade of wit. And trying have a wide ranging conversation free of repetition, means the talk becomes like an icephobic* voyage of the Northwest Passage: full of hesitation and deviation. Instead of being the entertaining blogger, one becomes a dulled machine, all backfires and stripped teeth.

* Apparently pagophobia or cryophobia, said he filling the new words quota, although cryo+phobia isn't really new, and probably means fear of freezing or that which is frozen. I can find nothing which suggests the meaning of the prefix 'pago-', only the word as is. Another recent word is bantustan, which seemingly manages to mix continents in its creation, coming from bantu (the South and East Africa language group or native speakers in that group) and stan (Urdu or thereabouts word for land) and is used to mean a gerrymandered land, so one defined by an external authority without much heedance of existing conditions (think dead straight lines drawn across valleys and through towns regardless of affiliation), although it was used to mean purportedly self-governing homelands in apartheid South Africa.

But this wasn't supposed to be a whole new blog post, yet as I'm already typing, I suspect it might be. Friday evening saw a hurried visit to the Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate (hurrah I managed to remember to put both n's in, even if I still call it Kadinsky), which was a bit variable. It needed more time than we gave it, as abstract pictures can slowly evolve into things remarkably unabstract if gazed upon enough. Still no idea what the one with all the birds is about (think it was Black Spot [unfortunately not apparently the death-ticket meaning], and the blurb didn't seemed to have noticed the birds, but I've long since abandoned the idea that art gallery guides discuss what is in front of them).

After that we skimmy-dipping in the Thames. Yes, I did just make up that word, but what should one use to mean 'skimming, without much success'? I didn't help I was trying to teach someone who at best still carries an air of newborn quadruped, and thus had some difficulty with keeping the stone horizontal. And skimming stones into a dark Thames, lit but lights over the river is both quite infuriating and useful, as it means there are frequently stones that vanish into the flickering glare, and thus I can avoid having to stifle annoyance at yet another wasted stone flung by SG (although it's somewhat harder to ignore the obvious "plop!") while not knowing the fate of mine unless they're very good. Give me the sailing club beach with the muffled sounds of an escaped dance behind me, a high moon over the Isle of Wight, itself miraging ahead, or a bed of cloud to carry the glow from the other side of the hill, and it's much, much easier to see (until a fishing boat wrecks my night vision). And the Thames is dire for skimming stones. The entire thing is filled with ugly, misshapen stones, ill worn by the lack of storms. In the end I was hunting out tiles, glowing in the flood of orange light, although I did manage to find a broken chunk of marble counter, which bounced twice before the weight scuppered it.

And are you a discus thrower or a wrist flicker? As I think I managed to take a wrist flicker and leave her halfway in between, which wasn't entirely successful.

So then back, alarming jammed traffic on Waterloo Bridge, through Covent Garden, up into Soho and out again, down some dark alley (not that I was trying to show the timid SG that there's really nothing to be scared of even at quarter past eleven on a Friday night, although I heard definitive whimper at the sight of the crowds as we crossed Old Compton Street. She's an odd girl), and then the bus back. Followed by a realisation of yet another reason why England's nice. Because the weather is unpredictable, because it does rain on Bank Holiday weekends, because you can walk ignoring the spitting remains of the last shower, only to scurry onwards as the next comes, because you can break into a flat out run, outpacing local traffic, and can arrive home bouncing with energy and radiantly moist, enshrined in a hugging dampness that will soon evaporate away, just as the torrent outside will soon pass.

Of this if you're happy and you know it stance could be because it's finally remembered that it is August, and so it's sunny with artistic little white clouds added to alleviate the boredom of an unceasing blue dome (and because from this position I can see very little which isn't tree or sky). It only took a month of leaden skies, followed by last night's shopping, timed for 8, delayed by rain, and then out into the dark, wet and crabby world of a joyless Saturday night, where I managed to have 3 cars studiously overlook zebra crossings, as they obviously though I was a one man Beatles tribute band. The Merc who choose to slalom between people on the crossing did earn a thump as he passed, because I'd had enough and didn't have a large set of keys, spray can or hammer in my hand at the time. And of course he did it just to sit at the queue for the lights 10 yards down the road, where he sat until I overtook him and turned off. I did consider dancing the can-can on his roof, but I wasn't wearing the right trousers. I need to go back to the days with I carried chemistry tomes in a bag with cut sheet steel buckles on it. That was excellent for the badly driven and inconsiderately parked.

Oh, and does anyone know where sells Fructis shampoo or Ecover washing powder? Because one my flatmates has helpfully decided to use the last of my shampoo, so I've run out, although he did kindly fill it back up to the same level with water*, which is somewhat reminiscent to what my uncle did when young[ish] to my grandfather's scotch. My uncle did it because once my grandfather noticed the dropping level, he started making easily overlooked marks on the bottle to show the level. My mother on the other hand used to rub out the mark, drink some, and then redraw it at the new level. It's one way to teach one's children to problem solve.

* I did consider replacing it with either bleach or Immac (but the shampoo is clear in a clear bottle), but I'd not sure it would stay in his hair long enough to have an effect, and anyway, he's not going to use it now he knows it's water.

But the lack of Ecover surprises me, given the area. So instead I opted for Persil's confusing new gel tablet things, because they were on offer, and I couldn't find the old just-tablets tablets, nor anything as archaic as powder, and because Persil is one of the few washing powders not to take my skin off (he said hopefully). So no more will I have an air of eco-er-than-thou* and lingering suggestion of damp clay.

* Snowclone City. Google turns up the following before the search sting gets too long (I've added a few alternative spellings and synonyms, Ghits follow):
Holier than thou 1,280,000
Holyer than thou [sic] 6,910
Hollier than thou [sic as there's no 'ivyer'] 11,200
Niftier than thou 20,100
Geekier than thou 13,800
Geeker than thou 145
Hipper than thou 66,200
Hippier than thou 710
Indier than thou 18,700
Gother than thou 898
Gothier than thou 838
Trendier than thou 15,900
Furrier than thou 212
Heavier than thou 959
Foxholier than thou 747
Nerdier than thou 893
Unholier than thou 562
Mightier than thou 15,200 [Along with 'greater' this benefits from the smitey texts of the Bible, so probably isn't all snowclones]
Cooler than thou 45,900
Coolier than thou 10,800
Countrier than thou 2,810
Thinner than thou 9,570
Skinnier than thou 416
Greener than thou 910
Smarter than thou 14,600
Smartier than thou 387
Lefter than thou 1,460
Leftier than thou 750
Assholier than thou 2,360 [Arseholier ~30]
Blacker than thou 742
Prolier than thou 2,260 [Proler ~37]
Punker than thou 528
Punkier than thou 279
1337er than thou 282
Gayer than thou 1,120
Surlier than thou 21,400
Smarmier than thou 213
Better than thou 47,400 [again some cod-Biblical unsnowcloned results]
Crisper than thou 2,440 [Crispier ~15]
Sweeter than thou 1,960
Crazier than thou 1,170

Plus the high-browier than thou: Shellier than thou and Moliere than thou. There are many more which have less than 100 results, such as sweatier, spunkier, quirkier but this list obviously isn't exhaustive. There's even people using zanier than thou

I'm waiting for some headline writer to come up something on the cult of suicide bombers along the lines of "Matyr than thou", or possibly some pun on the Latin -ia, so "Anglia than thou" for overt anglophiles, or an American to write something on rampant nationalism or statism using something like "India than thou" or "California than thou" (although this wouldn't outside the US, as the rest of the world would want to that to be "Californian than thou", which breaks the pun. "California than thou" has already been coined, but only in spamsite nonsense and the nearby words are 'swaddlingclothes', 'wert' and 'unto').

But this has sprawled into much more than I intended, so better stop.

Anyhoo,