The UK has been obliterated and replaced with nothing but fog! The Doctor didn’t save us!
Either that, or this globe at a fairly new installation in a Cambridge area museum probably needs to be replaced with a more robust model.
“Honey, can you find where we live on this globe?”
“Sure Mum, it’s right…HEY!”
…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.
…houses are so small that one Playmobil figure takes up an entire window.
They warn you when coming over from North America to expect smaller houses, but you’re never fully prepared for the scale.
Don’t blink…it’s opening the window a bit more every time you do.
See? Brits live in tiny little dollhouses. Totes legit.
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.
The rain made the windows of the bus foggy today. As the bus went downtown I said to Peo, “We’re passing the Klingon School of Danger right now.”
Peo said, “But with the fogged windows, I can’t read the sign!”
So I replied, “That’s okay, because it just means the sign says whatever you want it to say.”
She thought about that for a moment and then asked, “Can it say, ‘EVIL SHARKNADO LAB’?”
I said, “Yes. Yes it can.”
This made her very, very happy.
At dinner when we recounted this to Corran and he wanted there to be a “Good Sharknado Lab” to offset the evil, I pointed out that there could simply be a string of ever more evil labs.
Then Peo asked, “Do you have to put a goatee on the bottom of the building so you can tell which one is the real evil one?”
Nerd parenting. We haz that.
Do you ever see a sign or other text in passing very quickly and then your brain tries to fill in what it thought it read, only to realize a moment later that there’s no way in hell that sign/text said that?
This happens to me all the time. I asked my G+ friends what this phenomenon is called and nobody knew, so we made up our own terms. We’re the Internet. We totally get to do that.
The consensus was that the formal or clinical term should be “misparsing”, since “malapropism”, “Mondegreen”, and “paronym” are all more about speaking or hearing versus visual input gone awry.
Further, it was pointed out that if mistyping is colloquially known as a “typo” then misreading should be a “reado”, which I wanted to misread as “sharkreado” in keeping with the overall and inexplicable sharknado theme to this blog (which really ought to be a monkeynado theme but that brings up visions of the monkeyloo having a tornado in it which I’m fairly certain would use up our entire security deposit on the rental house so let’s never speak of monkeynadoes again). Therefore the consensus was that “sharkreado” ought to be the colloquial version of “misparsing”.
And further still – because if it’s possible to push things too far, this blog remains blissfully unaware of such limitations – I realized that part of my particular problem with misparsing is that my brain fills in the nerdiest possible interpretation regardless of what actual nerdery exists in the original sign/text. Therefore the syndrome that causes misparsings/sharkreadoes is FNAAH, which stands for Fucking Nerdy As All Hell.
All of this comes together thusly…if you happened to be on a bus going quickly down the street and out of the corner of your eye you saw this sign on a building:
And if you happened to have a critical case of ongoing FNAAH, you would misparse or sharkreado that sign as:
Which the Bing Klingon Translator (OMG an actual use for Bing!) assures me should be written as “tlhIngan DuSaQ Qob” or:
And then thereafter whenever you were on a bus passing that building (which would be pretty often if you take busses into the central bus terminal of Cambridge), you would picture a bunch of fully-armoured Klingons in there learning how to pirouette with bat’leths, which would be not only fucking nerdy as all hell but also fucking awesome as all everything.
A friend posted this link on G+ recently. It is an overlay of a map of the UK on top of a map of the US, and you can drag the UK around to compare relative sizes.
While it may be considered a joke, it’s actually important information for both sides. I’ve met some folks here who encountered problems when they assumed they could easily drive between western US cities in a short amount of time, only to find out that it takes days to cross those states. One lady in particular told me about how while vacationing in California, she and her husband looked at a map and thought they could drive up into the mountains in a short time, but as they kept cresting hill after hill – always thinking the mountains looked so close – they were actually still hours away.
And of course, Canadians (and even Alaskans) read about Texans going on about how “big” things are in Texas and they laugh, and laugh, and grab our dogsleds and laugh and weep as we prepare to traverse the vast, arctic wasteland known as “Bank Street” in Ottawa…
(Psssst, yes, it’s totally true that all Canadians live in igloos and use dogsleds for everything. You should ask us about that. We love that.)
Anyway, on the flip side, when we were coming here and I kept telling Peo we’d walk to certain places and she’d freak out, I would remind her that a) unlike in Austin, we will not be risking heat stroke for half the year, and b) the spaces in the UK are very, very much smaller than she’s used to, having been born in Nevada and grown up mostly in Texas.
In those last few weeks in Austin, whenever we’d drive somewhere I’d note the mileage and then we’d compare that between Cambridge locations to see just how relatively itty bitty this city is.
I also kept reminding her that she had to let go of her US school indoctrination about “history” and “tradition” and how the “US invented everything good in the world”, because where we were going, the university alone is older than the US as a country.
We re-emphasized that last one at a recent trip to Bletchley Park where we told Peo how the US claims to have invented the computer, when really the UK did, but in secret because they were busy winning a war with that technology.
But in the ensuing discussion from the thread where my friend mentioned the map linked above, I came to a realization based on several of these facts:
1) England is small but mighty.
2) England is really, really old.
3) England has a history of being quite adept with fancy swords.
4) England defeated Germany where your Vater is your father.
5) England has lots of green spaces all over it.
Add that all up and there’s just one obvious conclusion:
ENGLAND IS YODA.
C’mon, they even have the same shape if you squint hard enough.