ROFL, PMSL & LMAO

Okay, remember yesterday when I said 'Just don't get me started on 'LMAO', 'ROFL' or 'PMSL''? Well, someone did.

M'colleague, Rachael, who's also my dealer, didn't know what ROFL, PMSL and LMAO meant, so I had to explain. And then we had a discussion about the order in which these acronyms should be used - you know, which is the more extreme reaction and so on.

This is what we came up with:




<-- LOW ------------- HIGH -->
LOL ROFL PMSL LMAO


Now, I realise that placing LMAO at the top of the scale might be controversial, as it is commonly used as a relatively tame reaction to humour, however, I believe it should be much higher.  I have illustrated each phrase. I think you'll see why once you've seen them (as usual, you can click on each picture for a larger version):

This is a standard LOL or Laugh Out Loud.  Nothing dodgy here, just a laugh along the lines of 'ho ho ho',  'har de har' or somesuch.

Next up is a ROFL, or Roll On Floor Laughing.  Again, nothing particularly extreme.  Just a laugh that's so good that my legs have buckled out from underneath me and I'm having a good old roll on the floor.

This is here it starts to get a bit icky.  PMSL, or Pissed Myself Laughing.  I mean, yuck.  Loss of bladder control.  Who does that?  Someone who needs clean trousers, that's who!

Are you disgusted by this one?  Appalled? Hmm? You should be.  In this picture I have LMAOed, or Laughed My Arse Off.  The consequences of laughing one's arse off are twofold:  Shit and gore.  Never laugh this much, I beg of you!

And that is why LMAO is clearly the worst one.

Finally, a little ironic anecdote:  Dr K and I were at the local shopping Mall to eat chicken and we popped into a shop.  In that shop was a jumper, which Dr K tried on especially for your entertainment:

LOL

In general I wouldn't type a word or turn of phrase that I wouldn't use aloud.

The major exception to this rule is the word 'negligible' which I can't say aloud properly, no matter how hard I try. It's a ridiculous word. It's also a very useful word, though, so I use it every now and again in written form, but hardly ever in speech.

So, to the eponymous* word: 'LOL'. It's actually a pretty useful word, too. It fills a spot for which there is no other single word in the English language. In normal use, it acknowledges that a humorous statement or event has occurred and indicates approval of said humorous statement or event.

So in general, I have no issues with the word. 'LOL'.

Well... Okay. I do have a teeny tiny, itsy bitsy problem with it.

You see, it's actually an acronym for the phrase 'Laugh Out Loud'. And, more often than not, the humorous statement or event did not actually induce laughter of an 'out loud' type. Most of the time, I would suggest it induces an 'Internal Appreciation Of The Humorous Statement Or Event' (IAOTHSOE) or, at best a 'Small Chuckle' (SC).

My good pal, Mr Berry once told me a short anecdote about a guy ( I don't know his name, so lets call him Eugene) who sat at the next desk in his office, to whom he forwarded an amusing email. Eugene responded with an email that consisted of the word 'LOL' and nothing else.

Mr Berry would not have had a problem with this, except that he was sitting right next to Eugene and knew that he had not laughed out loud. In fact Eugene had shown no physical signs of amusement at all. Which meant that his 'LOL' was a dirty, stinking and outrageous LIE!

How can you trust someone that is prepared to lie outrageously to you, hmm?

Anyway, it's probably society's fault. Either that or Eugene's parents, Bartholomew and Gertude**.

So anyway, although I have my reservations about it, I'm prepared to accept that 'LOL' does not mean that I've induced fits of laughter but that someone has noticed that I made a funny. (Just don't get me started on 'LMAO', 'ROFL' or 'PMSL'.)

I wonder what would happen if I started saying 'LOL' out loud. I suspect I would get some pretty strange looks. Stranger than normal, I mean!

Those excellent gags were supplied by Dr K, by the way!

While writing this post, I began to wonder what people around the world use instead of 'LOL'. I checked with my only properly foreign friend, the Fish Lady, who told me that in Poland, they use 'LOL' as well, although a direct translation of 'Laugh Out Loud' would be 'Umierac Ze Sheichu' which would be 'UZS'. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

In France it might be 'Mort De Rire', which would be 'MDR', which is a little close to 'Murder' for my tastes...

( * 'Eponymous' is much easier to say aloud than 'negligible'. )

( ** I didn't know their names either, so I made them up. )

9 Things I Have Not Enjoyed Recently

A five day week.  I've managed to get away without doing a full week at work almost all summer, what with booked holidays and Freaky Fridays.  I had to do a full on this week though.  Man, it was hard.

Rochester's bad breath.  Awesome though he is, my cat is an old man, now and his breath smells like a badger shat in his mouth and then died in it's own excrement.  Yuck.

Bridge Valley Road.  This road has been closed for 18 months.  Since it's been closed, the traffic flow in and out of Bristol has been brilliant.  It opened again about 2 weeks ago.  Chaos.  Shit.

Updates.  Everything wants to update.  All the time.  My phone, my computers, my PlayStation.  Even the damn TV.

Own Brand Muesli.  I bought the wrong muesli.  I should have bought Alpen, but instead I bought Tesco's own. It's like someone was sweeping the floor and decided to mix the contents of the dustpan with some hard raisins (that could be rabbit poos) and extra dust.  I expect Dr K would love it.

Off milk.  It keeps trying to trick me into drinking it.  It succeeds about once a week.

This headache. I've had it for three days.

Getting up at stupid o'clock the other morning to take Dr K to the station for a 5am train. That sucked a big one.

Writing this post.  It was actually much harder than I anticipated, considering it was supposed to be a filler.  The other one was easy. Things I liked we just spilling out of me like an unholy tide.  Apparently I enjoy more things than not.

9 Things I Have Enjoyed Recently

Rochester.  After a long absence, my cat has started sleeping on the bed again.  It's nice to have him back.  Mostly he's sleeping on Dr K's head, which is nice.


Many, many episodes of How I Met Your Mother:  What a great show this is.  It has Barney Stinson in it.  He's legen...  wait for it...*

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson: This turned out to be a rather excellent book, contrary to all my expectations.

Curry with Dr K, Mr Berry and The Fish Lady:  Yum.  And I don't just mean the curry.  Mr Berry is a very handsome man.

Curry with Dr K's Workmates.  Yum.  I mean the curry this time.

Curry with Jo and Kinger.  Yum.  All of it.  I've had a lot of curry in the last week or so!

My new iPhone.  Yeah, I keep falling out with Siri, but it' part of why I love it! I hurled a bunch of abuse at it.  Then it sounded upset so I felt the need to apologise to it.  It accepted my apology.  I still feel bad.  But I feel good about feeling bad about it.  Then I remember it's just a phone.

Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.  It's an album by My Chemical Romance, who I used to thing was a load of emo tosh.  Lots of it still is, but this album is kinda awesome.  Also, one of my literary heroes, Grant Morrison, has a recurring cameo in their music videos.  Killjoys: MAKE SOME NOISE!

DC: The New 52.  DC Comics recently rebooted their entire comic line.  I was skeptical, but there's a whole ton of really great new comics!

( * ...dary! )

Butter Up

I have noticed a disturbing trend in the catering industry. Dinner ladies are skimping on butter (or spread).

For example, when I ask for a bacon sarnie in the canteen, it is assumed that I do not require butter (or spread) on my bun.

A bacon sandwich without butter (or spread) is a dry, disappointing travesty.

After five years of frequenting the same canteen, I have just about trained the dinner ladies to butter (or spread) my sarnie. If however, I do not properly supervise the buttering (or spreading), I end up with a stingy micron thick scraping of butter (or spread) on just one side of the sandwich. Not even enough to taste.

I have therefore decided that some sort of formula is needed for the discerning dinner lady so she can calculate of the optimum thickness of butter (or spread) to put on a given slice of bread.

Obviously, any guide should be backed up with complicated mathematics. (I should point out that before I started this process, Dr K declared off hand that the butter (or spread) should be about half a millimetre thick and that all this effort was unnecessary, however in order to support my endeavour she was happy to assist me and, afterward, eat the bread and butter).

With a little bit of help from Dr K, I came up with this formula (you can click on it for a larger version):



Complicated stuff, huh? Who'd have thought algebra would come in handy? Fortunately, quite a lot of this data is available to us.

I started by calculating the weight of the optimum amount of butter (or spread).

Here's the bread before the butter (or spread):



And here it is afterward. It's not perfectly spread, I know. I am not a trained professional!



As you can see, the difference, and therefore the weight of the butter (or spread) is 8 grams.

According to my good friend Wikipedia, the density of butter (or spread) is 0.959 grams per cubic centimetre.

The bread is 13cm long and 12cm wide.

Let's populate that formula, shall we?



So all we have to do is work out the value of X. Easy peasy!

It's just over 0.05cm, by the way. That's half a millimetre.

And let's have it in a more scientific sounding measurement: the butter (or spread) should be 500 microns thick!

So, now we know how to order a bacon butty:




(Dr K whipped the bread and butter (or spread) off the scales the moment I finished weighing them. It was gone in moments!)




UPDATE 14/10/2011: I brought up the formula and the required amount of butter (or spread) with Carol the Dinner Lady in the canteen this morning whilst ordering my bacon bun.


'You'll get what you're given,' she declared, sternly. 'And you'll be grateful.'


I did.  And I was.

Adventures In Updating

Regular readers of my blog will know about my special relationship with Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.


Well, today was update day and they seemed determined to continue their campaign against me!

I got home from work eager to go out for the curry that Dr K had promised me.

Knowing that it would take a couple of hours to download, I got ready to connect my iPhone into my laptop ready to get it's shiny new update from Apple. As I was about to plug it in, however, I noticed that Bill was pestering me about urgent updates to windows. He was threatening to restart my computer at any moment.

'Aha,' I thought to myself. 'I don't want to fuck everything up by letting my computer shut down mid-update. I shall let Bill do his thing now, so I don't have to worry about it.'

So I allowed my laptop to restart.

Unfortunately, it appeared to be an important update to the startup functionality on my laptop. Specifically, it added an exciting new error message to the usual routine:


How frustrating. And that is how it remained until it was time to go out.

I had a delicious curry. Murg Jalali, I think it was called. Quite hot and very tasty. Band yes, I did bring home the naan bread.

Anyway, by the time I returned home my laptop had completed it's thrilling journey around cock-upsville and it was time to download my update.

That was two hours ago.

This is now.


See, Bill had his fun with me and then tossed me to Steve like sloppy seconds.


(It's a Star Wars joke. The cool kids will get it!)

The Relative Horribleness Of Foreign Sweets #19: France

Ahh...  France.  The strange country that lies just south of the British Isles.  Based on my sweet haul so far, it seems to be a really popular holiday destination.

First up are two very similar packages from my brother and my boss respectively:

These are the ubiquitous generic bags of sweets that often come back from overseas vacations.  They're quite nice in and of themselves, but not enough to raise a country's score to the revered green status.  I won't review the individual sweets, except to say that they're a mixture of fruity boiled and chewy sweets with a few 'milky' ones thrown in for good measure.

What really makes France stand out, though, are these gorgeous little beauties:

Nutty chocolate always goes down well.  And when it's the size of a golf ball, it goes down even better!

So...  for it's delicious golf-ball sized chocolates, France gets a solid 5 out of 5 and an emerald hue!

Well done.

I'm slowly getting through my backlog of sweets.  Hopefully, now the summer's over, people will stop going on holiday!

The Big Long Post That Dr K Forced Me To Write

Dr K has forced me to write a big long post because she feels that if I just post a few pictures or knock out a foreign sweet review, I'm just cheating.

So, even though I need an early night because I'm getting up at obscenely early o'clock in the morning in order to drive Dr K to the station for a 5am train, I'm having to sit here and write this big long post instead of a quick, concise little post that would allow me to spend a good portion of what little evening I have left to me watching telly, reading a book* or playing video games.

I like doing those things.  Mostly because they involve sitting down.  Sitting down is one of my favourite things.  Tea is another of my favourite things.  I've had 1615 cups of tea so far this year.  I've been counting.

What?  I'm getting off topic?  Tough noogies.  This is what you get when I'm forced to write a big long post against my better judgement.  You get steam of conciousness nonsense that goes on for ages.  Rambling gibberish.

I was having real trouble coming up with a decent topic to write about today.  I'm just not inspired.  I thought about it really hard for nine whole minutes before settling on this passive-aggressive topic.  You can't blame me though.  I voted against it. I knew it would be a bad idea.  It's all Dr K's fault.  I wanted to post a picture of me doing jazz hands and maybe write a few amusing sentences underneath it.  But Dr K wanted a big long post, so this is what you get instead.

I wonder if people actually want to see a picture of me doing jazz hands. I think my jazz hands are pretty good.  Tell you what, if you want to see a picture of me doing jazz hands, post in the comments below.  I could collect a bunch of pictures of me doing jazz hands in a bunch of different places.  It would be awesome.

Enough about the jazz hands.  They're distracting me from my real purpose, which is to write a big long post about absolutely nothing at all to spite Dr K.  The jazz hands are too specific.  If I go on too much about jazz hands, then everyone will remember this as the post in which I went on about jazz hands rather than the big long passive aggressive post that I'm being forced to write by Dr K who specifically doesn't want me to write about (or illustrate) jazz hands.  And that won't do at all.

(Incidentally, whilst typing those last two paragraphs, I accidentally typed 'i' instead of 'a' in the word 'jazz' more than once.  That bring a whole new image to mind.  I probably shouldn't have mentioned that, huh?)

Here's a dull, space filling fact for you.  Up until this point >.<, I have written 487 words.  And I did it with 2572 characters.

It's probably taken you just over two minutes to read this far.  I just read it back while timing myself and it took two minutes and seventeen seconds (although I did correct a typo along the way.  Can you guess which one?)  Anyway the point is that you just wasted a little bit more than two minutes reading this big long post, when you could have spent 10 seconds looking at a picture of me doing jazz hands.  That's two minutes you're never going to get beck.

Imagine the things you could have done with those two minutes.  You could have ordered a pizza, boiled the kettle, read nearly 500 words of a better blog, gone for a wee, washed up a few plates, pleasured a woman or transformed my Optimus Prime toy from a robot into a truck.  Basically, all of those things, even the washing up, would have been a better use of your time.

I'm going to stop soon, because I worry about you getting brain damage from to much exposure to my unfiltered brain excretions.  They're starting to take a bizzare turn for the worse, unless, of course you want to hear about Optimus Prime riding Grimlock like a little pony or which part of my body is itching right now.

No?

Right, I'm off to bed then.  Bye.

...jazz hands...


( * who am I kidding?  I read comics, not books.  Comics with Spiderman or Batman in them.  Because Spiderman and Batman are the best superheroes. )

A Wholemeal Post

Dr K has a thing about wholemeal.

If there's a wholemeal alternative to a product, then she's drawn to it like a moth to a lightbulb. Wholemeal bread, wholemeal pasta, wholemeal muffins. Hell, if there was a wholemeal iPhone available, that's the one she'd pick.

The problem is that 'wholemeal' appears to be a code word for 'horrible'. In fact I think it may be a label that food manufacturers put on food in which they have replaced the nice, tasty ingredients with dust.

Yuck.

I suspect, although I can't be sure, that whenever Dr K guffs, she lets out a little cloud of dust. That would explain the little dusty patches in her spot on the sofa...

A Field Guide To Dazza's Expressions

Sometimes it's really hard to work out what people are feeling. One person's screwed up face could mean disgust while another's means concentration or maybe they're half way through a massive coronary.

At least I know what my face means. Here's a guide for the rest of you:


Poor Dazza. Doesn't this photo make you feel sorry for him? Look at that bottom lip. This is a face he might pull when a close friend dies, or someone refuses to make him a cuppa. It could also indicate extreme disappointment in the quality of a recent fart.


If Dazza is making this face at you, he probably doesn't care what you're saying to him. Or more likely doesn't understand. You can get rid of this face by waving something shiny in front of him. Of course, it may also mean that someone has farted and he's holding his breath so he doesn't have to smell it.


So here's a face that often comes out when you wave something shiny in front of Dazza. Or suggest that you might like to take him out for a curry. Or offer him tea. It's cute isn't it? Or is it the precursor to a really loud seam splitter?


You probably see this one a lot. Dazza isn't the sharpest rock in the box, so the things you say to him will probably just go over his head and, while he thinks about it, he'll pull this face. Either that or he's trying to figure out how which a tiny little guff smells so bad!


On the rare occasion that Dazza is lucky enough to be right, he might pull this face at you. It's supposed to be a smug contemptuous sneer, but it mostly looks like he's smelling something. Like a fart, maybe.


Oh, no. Dazza's really cross now. Did you take his tea away? Or his curry? Or is he just trying really really hard to squeeze out a fart? Just hope that he never follows up this face with surprise.


Sometimes Dazza is surprised and this is the face he pulls. It's equally possible that he just followed through. Oops.


Did you just give him a cup of tea? Or a curry? Because this is the face he reserves for cups of tea and curry. Oh, and really brilliant farts!

So there you have it. There are a few other expressions, but these are the ones you need to worry about.

It might be a bit tricky to refer to this blog every time you have to speak to him, so here's a cut out card that you can print and keep in your pocket: