Monty Python rides again
I KNEW it. That recent Tailpiece about the petrol tank full of BP has loosened an avalanche of silly jokes involving the letters B and P. Gray Braatvedt, already one of the culprits, latches onto the mention of the albatross in Monty Python's Flying Circus to take matters further.
"You started it! Not only that, but now you have thrown Monty Python into the mix, we have to recite Eric the Half a Bee":
Half a bee, philosophically,
Must ipso facto half not be.
But can a bee be said to be,
Vis a vis its entity,
An entire bee or not a bee,
When half that bee is not a bee
Due to an ancient injury?
D'you see?
"Then of course it goes on into the Eric the Half a Bee song, which I am not going to go into because I can't type in A flat minor."
Oh, come on, Gray, why not? It starts: "Take it away, Eric the orchestra leader! A-one! A-two! A-one, a-two, a-three!"
Ha ha ha,
Hee hee hee,
Eric the Half a Bee.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G,
I love him carnally.
Chorus: Semi-carnally.
First voice-over: "Cyril Connolly?"
Second voice-over: "No, semi-carnally."
First voice-over: "Oh".
Chorus: Cyril Connolly.
Cyril Connolly was a leading Fleet Street writer at the time. Hey, them were the days. The Berlin Wall was standing but they hadn't heard of the debt ceiling.
Discipline
AT WHICH, if we were to follow the Monty Python idiom, an army major strolls on, swagger-stick under arm and says: "Too silly, too silly! Sergeant-major!"
"Sah!"
"Get some discipline into these chaps!"
"Right, sah! Now today we learn wot to do when someone attacks you wiv a banana …"
The major's right. Too silly, too silly.
Hapsburg thrush
READERS Perry Webb and Val and Ron Johnson assure me that the strange bird I saw in my birdbath the other day could only have been an olive thrush.
Well, that's what I thought also but this fellow had a definite hook on the end of his yellow-orange bill, much like the albatross. (Or, for that matter, the now-extinct Dodo which is seen only in Peter Pan, smoking a pipe and singing A Life On The Ocean Wave.)
I've looked at the illustrations in Roberts and the Sasol bird book and there the olive thrush has an absolutely straight bill, no hook at all.
Val and Ron say the hook could be an optical illusion, caused by the water or by shadow. Well, maybe. Or maybe he bent his beak by flying at great velocity into a window. Or maybe he is a miniature albatross after all.
Meanwhile, Mary Ann Grafetsberger, vervet monkey freedom fighter and sometime skinnydipper at Zinkwazi, suggests he might be an Indian mynah who's flown into a window and bent his beak.
No, definitely not a mynah. The coloration is completely different and this was a mannerly-looking bird, not a hooligan. An olive thrush it has to be – but that hook at the end of the beak is still a mystery.
Perhaps it's something like the famous Hapsburg Nose of European royalty. I entertain only the classiest thrushes in my birdbath.
Synchronicity
OVERHEARD in the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties: "Twenty-four hours in a day, 24 pints of beer in a case. Coincidence? I think not."
Poet returns
IAN GIBSON, poet laureate of Hillcrest has been away in Vancouver, Canada – a pleasant city peopled by friendly folk, he says. It's a jolt to have to listen to the threats against all and sundry of Julius Malema.
Perhaps it's the influence of North America, but Ian pens a few lines in the style of Ogden Nash.
I have a bone to pick with Julius,
Come here and tell us truly,
Do you really want to make us furious
And our whole country quite unruly?
Tailpiece
THEY'RE on honeymoon.
He: "Darling, I've a confession to make. I'm a golf addict. Our life together will consist of golf tournaments in all kinds of places."
She: "Me too with a confession. I'm a hooker."
He: "No problem. Just keep your head down and keep your arms straight."
Last word
I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.
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