…they love Doctor Who so much, they now have time travel school!
As seen on a bus on Friday July 3, 2015.
At least that was Peo’s explanation for this ad we saw last Friday that boasts “cutting edge” education from at least three years ago.
We figure it’s in a partnership with the Klingon School of Danger / Evil Sharknado Lab to form a Campus of Awesomeness all over Cambridge. I mean, other than the usual one. We have nominated Playmobil Man as the first Dean.
OMG.
YOU GUIZE.
SRSLY.
The house next to the Klingon School of Danger (or as Peo calls it, the Evil Sharknado Lab) is for sale!
See? The red door is the School of Danger/Evil Sharknado Lab! You can see the sign beside it. Of course the sign actually says something about a dance studio, but that’s hardly as much fun.
I said to Peo, “We should totally buy that house. It’s probably only like a million pounds.”
I was close:
It’s actually three separate apartments inside. That means more victims for the bat’leth testing and/or shark tanks.
Peo replied, “But who would want to live next to a Klingon School of Danger?!”
I said, “Klingons would, duh! Especially if they were students of the school. Think of the convenience!”
Peo rolled her eyes at me and asked, “Okay but what humans would want to live there?”
Perhaps humans who want to live across from beautiful parks and gardens like this.
I suggested, “Well maybe someone who prefers it as a sharknado lab would like to live there.”
She said, “That still seems kind of dangerous, don’t you think?”
I shrugged and said, “Either beats living next to a dance school unless the walls are really thick.”
Peo then went on to explain that a School of Danger would be louder, but that’s because she’s never had to suffer a really strict dance teacher.
In other news, we walked past the house with the Playmobil figure again (which is right around the corner) and he keeps moving. Sometimes his arms are up. On this day, his head was facing a different direction than my last post:
Don’t blink. He can’t. He doesn’t have eyelids.
Peo says she wants to live on that street and have those people for neighbours.
I want all of Cambridge to be my neighbourhood.
It’s well known that the UK has a dessert named “spotted dick” and that it’s funny. They know it, I knew it growing up in Canada, and I’m pretty sure Americans and other English-speaking nations know it. It’s a joke so overdone that it’s fairly boring.
But what I wasn’t prepared for was how weird other food and grocery store items would be here in the UK. I have posted before about Tesco offering strange substitutions and I’m always glad when the bad substitutions they’ve brought me have never been a whole, loose octopus in lieu of walnut bread. Truth be told I’m rather terrified to ever order walnut bread from Tesco given our family’s constant issues with sharknadoes.
Still, avoiding the sea-life-inducing nutty pastries hasn’t kept me safe from stumbling across all manner of weirdness on the Tesco site. For instance, they offer romantic drug pairings:
I suppose it’s better than recommending a nice chianti to go with your fava beans and MAOIs.
They can only sell you two of them because UK law prevents non-pharmacies from selling larger quantities of over-the-counter drugs. Also, because allowing paracetamol-ibuprofen combo parties to rage all night long would be inappropriate in a nation that has historically been corked to the gills by a respectable bedtime.
Then again, you might need multiple kinds of pain killers if you had to deal with jerks all day long and were required for some reason to glue them together:
Or maybe this is something we’re supposed to slather on Steve Martin?
And yes of course I understand what it actually is. Just be glad I didn’t make a much more disgusting joke about it.
Not that anyone could make a disgusting joke or three about putting toads in one’s holes on a daily basis:
Don’t you value toads in your hole every day?
Or even leaving such strangeness to your poor aunt:
Aunt Bessie is apparently looking for a reason to have an all-night paracetamol-ibuprofen party.
No doubt there are Brits out there right now ready to rail at me about the deliciousness of “toad in the hole” and okay, fair enough, hot dogs on a bready base is probably quite tasty. I’ve been meaning to try making some, especially since our rental house here has no smoke alarms (!!!) so the whole bit about super-heating oil in a pan first at least won’t be as loud here as it would back in our Austin house.
But sometimes when you’re browsing Tesco’s website you stumble across something even more disturbing than imagining your aunt with large amphibians in her orifices.
Sometimes there’s this:
* mic drop *
Back in the US I shop at Goodwill a lot, especially for kids’ clothes. They grow through them so fast and boutique prices are insane, but you can get the high-quality boutique stuff for dirt cheap at Goodwill. In addition to saving money, there’s a huge environmental boon to reusing clothes instead of always buying new. Plus if you have a hard-to-fit kid like I do with Peo, having lots of brands in one place makes it more likely that something will fit. And that variety often lends itself to really great finds of rare, weird clothing and other good stuff.
Protip: if you can find inexpensive used plates at Goodwill – especially holiday-themed ones – you can use those to give out holiday cookies to teachers, colleagues, friends, etc. They’re sturdier so you won’t risk collapses as can happen with cheap, disposable trays, they look nicer, and the recipient can either reuse the plate, give it back to you if they wish (make it clear to them that they don’t have to), or regift it forward. Major environmental win, nicer presentation, everyone’s happy.
Peo and I went on a quest to get some used dishes at the charity shops here in Cambridge in November so we could use them for cookies we were going to sell for a Christmas charity bake sale. There isn’t one big umbrella organization like Goodwill running the shops; instead, you have to go to a bunch of different itty-bitty shops for different charities like the Heart Foundation, Oxfam, Cancer Charities, RSPCA, and others.
Each of these shops has its own style in terms of what they carry, and the prices can vary significantly. But what they do have in common is the rare, weird stuff, and some of them have it more than others.
We didn’t find individual dishes as readily as we’re used to with Goodwill – the shops here tend instead to sell complete sets and we didn’t need that many – so we failed on that account. But boy howdy did we find some weird stuff!
We also had one great find: a giant tub of about 100 solid wooden blocks for Robin for Christmas for only £3.50 which now double as burglar-deterrent-caltrops all over the living room floor.
And in that same store was this gem:
It barfs sauce at you. I almost bought it just to put pea soup in it and call it a Python-Exorcist crossover. Nobody expects the Spanish Expectoration. Nobody.
You have to understand, this scene in The Meaning of Life horrifies my husband to the point of him not wanting to watch the film, despite liking the rest of the film. So I took this photo mostly so I could show it to him when we got home and say, “Do you see how much I love you because I totally didn’t buy this to vomit sauce at you?”
He was duly appreciative.
Anyway, you’d think that’d be the strangest thing we saw on our charity shop journey, but you’d be wrong. See, that’s just a bit of slightly disgusting Python silliness, which is pretty much what they’re known for and thus, by extension, what England is known for. That’s right, Brits…all Americans think you’re a nation lethal to parrots and that it’s easy to catch a train from Bolton to Notlob. Totes truth. Yes.
This is also why Peo and I almost lose it every time Robin’s music teacher here brings out the coconut shells to simulate a horse.*
But moving on to the Oxfam shop, Peo and I entered a world of weirdness that even our Python-filled brains were not ready to grasp.
First we found this, and would have bought it except that Robin would have eaten the pieces on account of her having no respect for invading aliens whatsoever.
I am horribly disappointed that they didn’t rename this version OPERATE!
But that’s not really so odd. I don’t think there’s a store in this country that doesn’t have at least some kind of Doctor Who paraphernalia in it. It’s pretty much a mandatory national industry at this point.
Where it got weird was with the naked bodies.
Yes, I said naked bodies.
Because if you’re going to have a mannequin in your home, why wouldn’t you decoupage it with comics and then ensure it had hooks for hands, navel, and nipples?
So. This is a Thing.
And if you’re going to have that Thing, I guess it should have these things. For…hats? Small paintings? Teacups? Probably teacups. This is probably how you’re supposed to hang your teacups in the UK, all dainty-like.
O.o
And if I said, “Hey, look over there, I see a Barbie mirror!” you’d assume I meant something like this:
And not this:
The zip ties on some of the legs really sell the horror, don’t you think?
Suddenly the Daleks’ strategy seems a lot less terrifying. They just want to exterminate you, not affix your still-smiling naked corpse to a vanity device.
o.O
* Waiting for the sharkreados on this one.
England, let’s chat.
I know you’re an island nation with a rich naval history. You’ve been Queen of the seas longer than other nations have even existed. We’re all duly impressed with your historical mastery of the waves, I assure you.
But while we understand your love affair with boats, having stone boats randomly protruding from buildings is just slightly odd.
Not one, but two boats. On a building. Nowhere near the river.
Because it’d make sense to have boats decorating buildings alongside the river, especially the many boat sheds. But this building is on Hobson Street, nearly a half mile from the closest points on the river.
And it’s definitely the prow of a boat. It even has stone ropes and everything.
Maybe this building was originally boat-related. Maybe it’s just a random decoration. Maybe Weeping Angels are coming through and if we all stop watching, they’ll sail through the building and destroy us all.
The damned thing is even smiling.
Either way I’m pretty sure “sailing on the high seas” doesn’t mean “from the first storey of an apartment building on Hobson Street”.
As we were driving yesterday Peo suddenly exclaimed, “Ooo, a hypermarket!”
I said, “No. You have more than enough hyper already.”
I don’t know what a hypermarket actually is but as a parent I’m utterly terrified of the concept.
(Okay I looked it up but I swear I’ve never heard the term before.)
I’ve been very busy with travels and a small cake competition entry for the last week or so, so I haven’t had time to finish any of the lengthy posts I’ve started writing for this blog.
I have, however, been amassing a collection of odd/funny things I see as we travel around, so I’m starting a series of quick posts called “In England…” in which I will share these photos, sometimes deliberately misinterpreted for comedic effect, or sometimes posted as-is for general amusement. Usually a mixture of both.
Here are some pedestrian crossing signals near the Wellington Arch in London. Note the absence of an actual human pedestrian…
Whoa!
Giddyap! Also: self-driving bicycles. All humans must be mounted on horses, as shown in The Brochure. Centaurs allowed with appropriate licensing.
It’s a well-known fact that the British love their roundabouts and that most Americans don’t know how to use them. There’s one by the Costco in South Austin and the number of people who simply don’t understand the yielding procedure makes it a miracle every time we get out of there unscathed.
Because I do have some experience with them I thought I could probably deal with roundabouts while we’re over here, although granted not in those first few days when I was ridiculously exhausted and still coming to terms with the other-side-of-the-road thing.
That’s why Corran drove from Cambridge to Milton Keynes so we could go to IKEA and get some much-needed furniture and home items. See, he grew up and learned to drive in Australia, which drives on the same side of the road as the UK and also has plenty of roundabouts. So he figured he’d be just fine.
Yeah.
He was fatigued too so the first few roundabouts on the route were kind of hairy, especially since the GPS on his phone kept snarking at him to take the nth exit but it wasn’t always clear where it started the counting, so more than once we took the wrong exit.
(Sidenote: it’s funny that my car’s GPS back in the US was default set to an irate British lady who constantly gives me passive-aggressive scolding in the form of “ROUTE RECALCULATION” whereas the default voice on Corran’s phone here in the UK is a mildly snarky American lady who wreaks her vengeance upon us by firing out her commands and road numbers so fast that it’d take someone with a PhD in math to figure out what she’s saying except Corran has a PhD in math and still kept going off on the wrong exits.)
Anyway, we were plodding along well enough until we came to this piece of work:
No, that’s not an alien reproductive diagram, it’s a traffic sign. Now imagine you’re passing this sign for the first time in your life at highway speed after having flown across the ocean the day before. O.o
Corran and I actually screamed. As in, a real, “AAAUUGGGHHHH!” type scream. In unison. Nothing brings a marriage together like shared terror.
Here’s what this torture device looks like on a map:
Corran is particularly furious that one of those only goes to a short offshoot road. I see the whole thing as a war on people who have to drive tiered cakes anywhere.
Worse, none of the folks who live around here even knew what Corran and I were talking about when we referred to the horrific triple roundabout near Milton Keynes. It was hard to Google because we couldn’t remember the names from the sign (again, we were screaming in aghast dismay when we should have been reading the sign, which is probably kind of like what happens to people who see signs from gods and probably why all of those people are too loopy to fit into polite society ever again, and now I’m thinking that “loopy like a triple roundabout” should be a new vaguely insulting descriptor for people who have lost their minds due to divine interference and/or British roads). And when I Googled various terms about scary roundabouts, this monstrosity is what kept coming up:
Someone built this shit. On purpose. (Image via BBC)
That’s the so-called Magic Roundabout of Swindon and the very name gives the game away: this was clearly designed to fuck with foreigners and despite it having been built in 1972, they knew one day it’d be part of the general British brochure that children here go to schools to learn magic and you need a god-damned flying car to survive both the Whomping Willow and this swirling miasma of The Traffic Engineer Who Shall Not Be Named.
O.o
Let’s go on a magical journey of imagination, shall we?
Imagine you’re a mom to an eight year old and a one year old, and you’re going to go from the USA to England for a year where you’ll be homeschooling the eight year old at myriad museums and historical sites while trying to prevent the one year old from licking the displays. You need to pack up everything you own – and did I mention you and your husband are both hopeless packrats? – from your Austin, TX home into storage, and you’re behind because the eight year old hasn’t been getting her own packing done and the one year old has decided sleep is for the weak.
Now imagine it’s the day of the flight to England. You haven’t packed everything, the air conditioning has been going out most of this week in 41°C/105°F weather, and you’re in the position of deciding what stuff you love enough to make it in the last car run to the storage unit or to be shoved into the garden shed before rushing to the airport. You’ve had less than two hours sleep per night for a week and most of that has been on a broken, lopsided air mattress beside the baby’s crib. Oh, and all of the dust you’ve kicked up has necessitated being on allergy meds that knock you out so you’re completely loopy and you’ve upped the ante to declare that lungs are for the weak.
Now imagine you’re on the flight – which at least is direct since you paid an extra $300 per person to not have to transfer through Newark, NJ in the middle of the night with a baby – and while everyone else has gone to sleep, including the baby, you can’t sleep because your brain is madly going through what you left at home for the cleaners to throw out and you’re wondering just how much you can suck up to your friend with whom you left a key to cram some more stuff into the shed for you.
Now imagine you get to Heathrow, your husband gets the rental car, you all pile in, and you’re driving through the countryside trying to spot the castles and other romantic buildings you’re sure England must be stuffed with because that’s how it looks in all of the brochures, but mostly you just see a highway that is freaking you out because it’s on the wrong side of the road. You drift off a bit, but your brain is still wondering if it was worth it to sacrifice the vacuum back in Austin, not because it was a particularly great vacuum but it will cost a few hundred dollars to replace and the budget is already blown by the discovery of more mold in the front hall closet despite the $4000 you spent two years ago supposedly fixing the mold problem for good. So even though you drift off, you’re not really sleeping so much as experimenting with fun new ways to get neck cramps.
Now imagine you finally get to the Cambridge house you’re renting – which you’ve only seen in a couple of photos from an ad listing – and the landlord is showing you around, speaking what seems like a thousand words a minute because you’re utterly shattered from fatigue and stress and he doesn’t even have the decency to be closed-captioned like all the British people are when you watch Downton Abbey, and the baby is running shrieking through the house because THERE ARE SO MANY NEW THINGS TO LICK, and there’s something about putting salt and rinse aid into the dishwasher and the eight year old is stomping on the loud floor and the car is parked illegally outside and then you turn and see this:
The toilet sees you too.
And you want to ask about the monkey toilet, because it’s a god-damned monkey toilet and there are just so many questions, but you can’t because you have to run after the one year old and the landlord is going upstairs to talk about the weird electric shower and you haven’t slept and you have strange rashes popping up all over your body from all of the stress but there’s a god-damned monkey toilet.
So you go off and do some shopping so the baby has a safe place to sleep and there’s some basic food in the house but every time you come back into the house and go to the kitchen you have to pass the door that leads to the god-damned monkey toilet.
Then the eight year old announces, “I LIKE TO PEE IN THE MONKEY’S FACE.”
And in that instant you know deep in your heart – in that certain way that bypasses all neurological space because your neurons aren’t really functioning properly anymore anyway – that one day there will be a knock at the door and it will be Jane Goodall come to beat the living crap out of you.
So, naturally, you post that to the internet.
Thankfully, none of your friends bother to point out that Jane Goodall works with apes, not monkeys, because then you’d have to punch them (your friends, not the apes or monkeys, because apes and monkeys are really fucking strong and you don’t want to pick a fight with them, especially when you already know at some point you’re going to be answering for the part of the monkey toilet that has the hole blasted through the monkey face which you’ll be punching with your ass for the next year) because you can’t name an actual monkey researcher and besides, Jane Goodall is sweet and adorable so the idea of her maniacally wielding a machete through your house because of a toilet you didn’t even choose is awesome.
Plus, your friends are too busy to be pedantic at you about specific fields of research because they’re laughing at your exhausted rambling and sending you private messages about visiting you so you they too can rack up points in the coming Ultimate Zombie Dian Fossey Death Match between hordes of primates coming to wreak vengeance upon you for daring to shit through a monkey face toilet seat use the monkey loo.
Meanwhile as the first few days of your England adventure pass, you still can’t sleep because you keep mentally going through the Austin house wondering what you’ve lost, sending your poor friend driving down all the way from Pfucking Pflugerville to rescue items for you, and you keep finding the weirdest shit everywhere in this country you always thought of as an ancestral motherland, so somewhere amidst the fear and the fury and the fucking monkey toilet you announce, “I AM GOING TO START A NEW BLOG AND NAME IT AFTER THE LOO.”
And suddenly, it all makes sense. So here it is.