Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The best one of the year

Two announcements. Firstly, this is the last post here; there are no posts newer than 28th March 2007 on this blog and there won't be any in future. I've merged AE with my work weblog Cloud Street and moved to Wordpress; the result is The Gaping Silence.

Secondly, here's a book:



I'm in it. Jonny's in it. Harry's in it. Clare's in it. Justin's in it. (My son started quoting Chicken Yoghurt to me the other day, which isn't a sentence I ever thought I'd write.) Lots of people I've never even heard of are in it. It's good.

More specifically, it's funny. I'm not going to tell you it's all funny, because that wouldn't be very convincing. I mean, when you've got something like 101 different contributors with subtly different styles of humour and ideas of what's funny, the result of their intersection with any one reader's idea of the funny is going to be a pretty wide range of funniness (or, as we academics say, humorosivity). So for me to tell you it was all equally funny would be prima facie unconvincing. But to maintain the less extreme position that it was all merely funny would actually risk a similar error, as this would imply that my personal range of humorosivity values for the collection uniformly exceeded zero. Which would be nice, but it's rather a lot to hope for - I mean, 101 is a lot of discrete humorosivity values.

Where was I? That's right, it's not all funny. But some, nay most of it is, and some of it's very funny indeed.
“How can Amundsen be a Close as well as Scott?” I rage. “And it’s not even as though Amundsen Close is further south than Scott Close – that would have at least made some sense.”

My girlfriend phones our friends to explain that we are back by the shops and we may be some time.

Self-harmers
Who could fail to be cheered out of their depression by the oh-so-cute antics of a kitten? And if you're not, at last you'll have a much better reason for having arms covered in scratches.

Student: Do you have that blue book my tutor recommended?
Bad librarian: Yes, we do. It’s kept with all the other blue books in the blue room, between the green and purple rooms. Once you get to the room, you’ll find them arranged in order by how much the tutors like them, with books written by members of staff at the very beginning.

If none of that made you laugh, all I can say that your idea of the funny (and your consequent derived range of humorosivity values) differs from mine. But in that case something else in here almost certainly will make you laugh, even if it didn't have that effect on me. You see how this works?

It's available for a very reasonable price from Lulu.com, who will print a copy for you personally on receipt of your order, which is rather clever. A large proportion of the said price goes to Comic Relief, which is good. And I'm in it, which is nice. And Mike Atkinson of Troubled Diva put the whole thing together in a week flat, which is frankly amazing. Yay Mike, as I believe the young folk say.

Go on, buy one. Buy two, why don't you. Ideal Easter gift.

PS Quite a lot of it really is quite funny.

PPS I'm in it.

PPPS Now go to The Gaping Silence. Go on, get on with you. Shoo!

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My son started quoting Chicken Yoghurt to me...

Hell fire. I'm so sorry, Phil. I trust you're getting him the necessary help?

29/3/07 12:51  
Blogger Phil said...

Heh. The nice thing is, it was a particularly good line he quoted (Indy, my friend. I can no longer help...

29/3/07 12:59  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

11/4/07 18:01  

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