Showing posts with label Odd stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Odd stories. Show all posts

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Reminiscences (Apropos Nothing)

English: Organic bread rolls in Brugge, Belgiu...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So we are taken from gin pahits to fags to reminiscing in general. It's been a strange week all round.

This memory hit me today as I chatted with the feared Grey Havens Gang - the first such convo in a while, actually...

For a long time, I worked with a deeply eccentric person, something of a savage genius.

Highly-strung, he was suing his dentist because of a bothersome crown cap and was at the time constantly fiddling with little wads of crown fixative, a latex-gel sort of substance. (He was highly litigious, as I'm sure we'll learn if he ever stumbles across this post).

We took an important client out to expensive lunch and our hero was portentously pontificating about the parlous state of technology in Saudi Arabia or some such when he stopped dead in mid-flow and turned puce, glaring at us as if he had just been hit in the groin by a high speed sea urchin. One of the spiny ones.

As we watched in horrified fascination, he slid down the banquette and disappeared under the table.

A short while later, as we were still gawping at each other, a pale hand flopped onto the other side of the table, a little like a scene from the film 'The Hand', if you've ever seen that. It clawed around for a time, eventually snared the client's bread basket, and whipped it away.

There was absolute silence during this entire performance. With much huffing and puffing, our man restored himself to his seat, looked around at the wide-eyed assembly and cheerily said, "Well! Dessert?"

It was only later we learned the errant tooth had flown out under the pressure of his oratory and landed square in the client's bread rolls.

(Channeling Somerset Maugham, the gin pahit* man, and so squaring the circle.)

*I find the fastest way to add links to the gin pahit post is to Google 'Gin pahit fake' which phrase I now Own The Internet for. As Frankie tells us: Search. Huh. What is it good for? ...

Sunday, 26 February 2012

Speed - Emirati Style

Film poster for Speed 2: Cruise Control
Image via Wikipedia
Gulf News today reports on the story of an Emirati motorist who was rescued by Abu Dhabi police after the cruise control on his Japanese 4WD jammed on the Al Ain Highway. He'd set the control at 160kph and called emergency after realising that it had not only jammed but also jammed the brakes. Three patrol cars from Abu Dhabi police surrounded him, one in front to clear the road and one either side of him in case he lost control. Meanwhile police operations tried to keep him calm and talk him around to a solution which was, eventually, to apply the handbrake to bring the speeding car to a halt.

Apparently one piece of help the police were able to give him was to tell him to secure his seatbelt. I'd have fined him for that one, for starters...

It took 45 minutes in all to bring the situation under control.

The GN report is all very breathless, but as usual fails to answer the one BIG question that any mildy questing reader would surely ask.

Why didn't he just turn the ignition off and coast to a stop under manual steering and braking?
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From The Dungeons

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber . This is perfectly natural, it's my latest...