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Like popping bubble wrap? Check this out!

It’s one of life’s guilty pleasures. We can’t remember when we first did it, but we do it every time.

Popping bubble wrap.

We find it everywhere, protecting our Amazon orders, wrapping Mum’s vase, safe-guarding Granny’s pictures. How often have we eagerly opened a parcel to find that the bubble wrap is more entertaining than the item contained therein?

Most of us don’t know that bubble wrap was a failed 3D wallpaper design. And yes, it really was created by two blokes in a garage – Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes. They were clearly very talented chaps but with absolutely no idea about interior design. Seriously, how could anyone have ever thought that using bubble wrap was a good idea? Can you imagine Osborne & Little suggesting you use it on the walls of your living room? (Yes, okay, perhaps in this age of austerity you can.)

Creative sorts have attempted to rehabilitate its DIY origins and suggest using it for insulation. Bubble wrap has been given its own special day – Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (the last Monday in January as I am sure you all know).

However, it is for that satisfying popping sound and the sensation of a mini-explosion that we cause just by squeezing our fingers that we love the stuff. So much so that we even recognise its therapeutic qualities. The ever-inventive Japanese have even designed a take-anywhere everlasting bubble wrap-popping keyfob to simulate the experience.

Step forward Comedy Imaginator Eric Buss. He has taken the bubble wrap-popping experience to a whole new level. Look at this video and tell me you don’t want a go!

And finally, for those stuck in front of their computers without any bubble wrap to hand, there is always this.

Ahhhh…

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Daft dog love… I love cats, but yeah, just maybe

Free-Psychology-Cartoons-by-Mental-Health-Humor-clip-art-1So I’ve always liked my cats.

Cool, aloof, ego-centric, vicious, schizophrenic. There’s something dangerous and unpredictable about a cat.

They also have an uncanny knack for mind-control. Mine currently exercises this by opening the inside door and then staring at me in a manner worthy of a dodgy 50s B-Movie until I open the front door and let him out. This is, of course, simply sheer bloody-mindedness on his part as he is still perfectly capable of using the cat flap and jumping over the wall. Owner-control is simply more fun and it is often an engaging battle of wits. When I get bored of that, he loses the battle of the boots.

However, despite my fondness for four-legged feline fiends, even I can’t resist this wonderful short video which shows you a side to dogs that you’ll never see in cats.

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Making a public statement in the Internet age

There are plenty of ways to get your opinion out there on the ‘net in this day and age. This generally means throwing your opinions out there for the world to see on Twitter, blogs and Facebook. However, some cunning folks have realised the potential for making more targeted, localised statements, by renaming their WiFi.

I am not sure how I missed this phenomena, but it seems there are even sites given over to helping you name your wifi.

Some of the best can be found on WiFi LOL. My favourite is probably this one. Who knew that flamingos could cause such neighbour strife?

For my part, I think my own network, currently – and poetically – named ‘Requiem’ is about to become ‘getyoursoddingkidsoffmylawnok’.

 

 

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A patient, publicity-shy (and patronising!) puss

There’s something amusingly patronising about the way this cat handles its owner, determined to make the point that it rather wishes to be left alone. You can just imagine what’s going through its mind. Jim Davis’s Garfield probably captures it…

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The perils of GPS… In Belgium

I don’t drive but am fairly confident that, if I did, I would avoid this particular mistake. Even with a GPS…

Flanders News reports the rather amusing/alarming/entertaining case of a Belgian who, wanting to drive to Brussels, programmed her GPS and ended up in Zagreb:

The woman identified by Het Nieuwsblad as the 67-year-old Sabine Moureau told the paper: “I was absent-minded so I kept on putting my foot down.”

Sabine started her journey in Erquelinnes on the morning of last Saturday week. “I was going to pick up my friend in the Brussels North Station” she told the paper.

The journey should have taken just over an hour, but she ended up 1,450 km from her starting point.

Sabine continues her tale: “I switched on the GPS and punched in the address. Then I started out. My GPS seemed a bit wonky. It sent me on several diversions and that’s where it must have gone wrong.”

“I saw tons of different signposts, first in French, later in German, but I kept on driving.”

Sabine had to fill up twice and slept a few hours by the wayside, but claims she never really caught on to the fact that she might be on the wrong track.

“It was only when I ended up in Zagreb that I realised I was no longer in Belgium.”

Oops!

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Bob Newhart on the origins of tobacco

“Bob” Newhart, born George Robert Newhart in Austin, Chicago in 1929, is an American actor and comedian with a fascinating and varied career. I first came across him guesting on Desperate Housewives.

In awarding him a Peabody Award for the Bob Newhart Show in 1961, the board said:

… a person whose gentle satire and wry and irreverent wit waft a breath of fresh and bracing air through the stale and stuffy electronic corridors. A merry marauder, who looks less like St. George than a choirboy, Newhart has wounded, if not slain, many of the dragons that stalk our society. In a troubled and apprehensive world, Newhart has proved once again that laughter is the best medicine.

His routines are characterised by a deadpan delivery and one of his classics is entitled “Introducing Tobacco To Civilisation”, performing a very funny riff on how we started smoking.

Sometimes humour stays fresh across the decades.

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Words we (I) hate

Marist Poll, the polling organisation that works out of Marist College, has released details of its survey of the most irritating words in the English language. Obviously, this has a US slant, though it’s surprising how they actually tick a box on this side of the Atlantic, too (perhaps because some are clearly American):

  1. Whatever
  2. Like
  3. You know
  4. Just sayin’
  5. Twitterverse
  6. Gotcha
  7. Unsure

I’d like to chuck in the following words/phrases:

  1. Aks (the word is “ask” – and no, you don’t sound “street”)
  2. Lulz (it’s not a word – it’s derived from the text speak acronym “lol” and you sound a prat)
  3. Fleg (don’t even go there)
  4. I personally (grrr)
  5. Shouldn’t of (have!)
  6. Absolutely (yes…)
  7. Sick (it does NOT mean good – it is what happens after you’ve been a dick and drunk too much – or caught the norovirus)

Please feel free to add your own pet hates.

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Man attaches camera to trombone: funny and fascinating

The GoPro is marketed as the world’s most versatile camera.

It’s certainly led me to put five words together in a sentence that, until today, had never occurred to me could possibly belong together: man attaches camera to trombone.

Go on. Take a look.

And I want one, please. A GoPro, that is. Not a trombone. Not that I have the foggiest idea what I would do with it.

Attach it to the cat and see where he disappears to in the day? Now there’s an idea…