Banana-skin humour
YOU'RE standing in a shopping mall. A woman across the way is walking along, sending a text message on her cellphone. Totally engrossed, she trips over a low wall and – kerplash! – she falls into the ornamental fountain.
Do you laugh? You bet you do. Is she hurt? Not at all, just sopping wet. Do you tell your mates about it over beers later that evening? You bet. You all have a good laugh.
But where a security guard in the Berkshire Mall shopping centre in Massachusetts went wrong is that he had access to the CCTV footage. He found the incident so hilarious he put a video on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, to share it with the whole world. It's proved hugely popular.
Now the shopping centre is being sued by the victim, Cathy Cruz Marrero, for making her a national laughing stock. The security guard (unnamed) has been fired.
Until Miss Marrero took legal action, nobody knew who she was. So has she not made herself a national laughing stock?
Humour is a serious business.
Banshees, dervishes
THE LAST ball of the India cricket tour has been bowled, but has the last dervish whirled? Last week a reader complained about the way the Supersport camera has taken to zooming in on spectators, encouraging them to pull faces and howl like banshees.
Others agree. "Cricket coverage has become ridiculous," says Peter Bartlett. "More time is being spent on the crowds than on the cricket and on close ups of the players, so that you can count the blackheads on the bowler's nose, rather than appreciate the broad canvas of a cricket match in which field settings and interactions between players are missed.
"To compound the problem, the camera switching between bowler and batsman at the point of delivery completely messes up the action as you are unable to see the batsman's preparation and cannot focus on the actual shot-making."
Ian Gibson, poet laureate of Hillcrest, is so exercised he writes in prose: "You are spot-on about the Supersport camera work. Remember the horrible banshee shots during the IPL Twenty20s in India last year? It's now copied by Supersport. With advertising breaks and now banshee shots, quiet reflection on the state of play is brutally interrupted."
Raymond Silson says over-use of the zoom in filming a shot spoils the effect.
"For example, a bowler delivers and the batsman hits a six. A frequent problem is the overzealous use of the zoom button to have the batsman virtually fill the screen when he hits the ball, with the correspondingly negative result that an excessively fast zooming-out or excessively fast pan-to-the-left or pan-to-the-right is necessary, to try to recapture the ball as it travels. But even if this recapturing is achieved, it's not seen subjectively by the viewer because his reaction time has been exceeded by far.
"A sufficiently panoramic view should be maintained to enable the TV viewer to see all relative players at the same time."
Ron Coppin says the "screaming, waving dervish idiots" are highly irritating.
"The TV authorities should give consideration to the thousands of home viewers, not the handful of families hoping to glimpse their kin on the screen."
Does anyone have a different view?
What about whisky?
MURDER and horror on the Aussie beaches … some friends have just returned from a visit Down Under, bringing with them a newspaper with the front page headline: "It's blue murder."
The report is about an invasion of bluebottles at Manly beach, Sydney, where 2 000 bathers required first aid treatment. That is a pretty serious bluebottle invasion, but it's also about the most alarming piece of news in that issue of The Manly Daily, a suburban newspaper.
An expert is quoted saying the best treatment for bluebottle stings is immersion in hot water – 45 degrees - for 20 minutes, or alternatively ice.
Huh? I can understand that in Oz they perhaps don't have those dune shrubs with the fleshy triangular leaves, whose juice neutralises bluebottle stings. But haven't they heard of whisky?
Whisky is the great antidote to bluebottle stings. Also to sunburn and various other shoreline maladies.
As I say, officer, this is purely medicinal.
Tailpiece
"I'LL HAVE steak and kidley pie, please."
"You mean steak and kidney, sir?"
"That's what I said, diddle I?"
Last word
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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