Bumps

My 12-year-old Norwegian niece explains why she doesn’t ever want to go to the States: “Because of all the bumps.”

“... Bombs?” my mother guesses.

“Bumps,” my niece insists defensively, but it turns out she actually does mean bombs.

“Which bombs?” I ask. “I mean, they have lots of bombs, but normally they drop them on other countries.”

“What about...” My niece fumbles for the word. We let her; she’ll almost certainly find it without any prompting. Her English is impressive, light years ahead of, for example, my Norwegian. My attempts to speak it usually provoke unstifleable giggles, my accent acceptable but my unsteady grasp of grammar and syntax leaving me sounding like a three-year-old with a thyroid problem. “... the flights?”

“Oh, that,” I say after a moment, and suddenly find myself talking about 11 September in terms I never would have thought possible at the time: “Well, look, it only happened once. It doesn’t go on all the time.” (A potential slogan there for the New York tourist authority.)

She won’t be swayed, though. America is apparently full of people flying themselves into buildings and blowing stuff up, and she wants no part of it.

Minister in models row

Independent, 14 April

This didn’t seem to be online anywhere, and it deserved preserving.

Incredulou-quiz

One day your partner says to you, “Watch the news tonight. I did something.” You do so and discover that they, together with a friend, have shot dead seven staff at a fast food restaurant where your partner used to work and stolen a couple of grand, stopping only to slit the throat of one of the owners.
[Poll #967369]

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Also, a special mention for the BBC News hack’s choice of phrase in the same story:

Judge Vincent Gaughan is going to be a busy man. He is also due to preside over the sexual misconduct case of R‘n’B star R Kelly, which will be sandwiched between the two murder trials.

The wonder of nature

As we came back from Eat Club (at the Bombay Bicycle Club) the other night, ruudboy stopped suddenly under some trees. “I think I’ve just been shat on,” he said, and he was right: down the front of his shirt, some on his jacket and just a dab on his forehead. “I feel sick,” he said. “I can’t… Can someone…” Somehow it’s always easier to deal with unpleasant stuff if someone else is slightly freaking out about it, so I got the worst of it off him with a tissue, while offensive_mango was barely able to speak with laughter and took the occasional photo.

What was odd was that the stuff didn’t look like any birdshit we had ever seen. It was (and I apologise for the too much information here) a long turd that was an eerie shade of khaki and had obviously been curled off. Plus it didn’t seem to have come from too great a height; most of it had survived the drop and was perched jauntily on ruudboy’s stomach. We all, including rainsinger, agreed that it didn’t look as if it had emanated from any bird, news that ruudboy took badly. “Then what the hell was it?” he demanded. “A squirrel?” Which set offensive_mango off all over again.

Have squirrels ever been known to decorate passers-by? Exactly what was responsible for what I wiped off ruudboy the other night? Crucially, is there a website that can answer that last question? [EDIT: No, but there's this book.]

( Picture hidden under the cut for readers afflicted by squeam )