…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 *
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.
Referencing the previous post about weather, sharknados, and bus accidents…
This morning we checked the forecast and noted that it had actually improved since last night.
Me: So when the forecast keeps getting better as you refresh, is that predicting a minnownado? Or wet hankies? A wethankienado? And they go FTPFTUPFTPFTUP on you?
Corran: As long as it’s moving away from piranhanado. Or a Ralphnado.
Me: AUUUGGGHHHH!
But upon reflection, a Ralphnado might put seatbelts on busses and fix some of the other consumer issues we’ve been having lately. Hrm…
PS: If you need nightmare fuel, go see what I found when I googled for an image for this post.
As mentioned in my last post, driving in the UK is no fun if you’re not keen on roundabouts. So you’d think the busses and trains would be easier, right?
Um.
Okay to be fair, we all went to London for the first trip – meaning Corran was there to help with the girls – and it went fine. But the first time I took Peo and Robin to London on my own, our experience was slightly different.
Peo and I thought things were going well because we got there early and scored the rare seats with room for a stroller beside them. This is important because it means I don’t have to take Robin out and wrestle her for about an hour as she tries to wriggle towards FREEDOM and LICKING ALL THE TRAIN THINGS. So there we were, comfy in our awesome seats, when they started announcing ever-increasing electrical problems with the train. It ended up dying completely, so they transferred everyone from that train to another train that was already full. Further, the first train had no stops between Cambridge and Kings Cross, whereas the new one did.
Because there were no seats, I ended up sitting in the door area with Robin in her stroller over me. As in, my legs were under the stroller and I was effectively pinned there. The other half of the door bay was taken by a guy with a bike, so there was no room to move. Then at the stops, assholes who had been seated comfortably actually swore at me for being in the way, even as I tipped the stroller further onto myself to let them get by. Oh, and there are other doors on the car, so they could have bloody well gone down the car to the other door if it was such a big problem for them.
All of this meant we got to London an hour later than planned, which meant by the time we got to the Natural History Museum the line was up and down the block. We waited nearly half an hour to get in, and then decided not to wait in the estimated hour-plus line to see the dinosaurs. I convinced Peo to skip that line since we’d be going back when school was in (and we have been back since but the dinosaurs are “on holiday”, which is museum code for “OMFG we have to refurbish the dinosaur room after it was mangled all summer by people who lined up for over an hour and then acted like pent-up twerps once they saw the giant things that could have eaten them”).
Anyway, we did some other fun stuff at the museum and then headed home. Our train tickets are off-peak so we either have to make the 4:14 pm train back to Cambridge or wait until 7:14, so we headed back to the Tube with plenty of time to spare. However, it seems that rush hour on the Tube started in 1067 (shortly after William the Conqueror was crowned but in plenty of time to handle the rat traffic needed for the Black Death), because even at 3 pm the thing was jammed full.
Aha, but there were two seats available in those Priority Seats – you know, the ones for people like me who are dealing with a baby and have an actual disabled foot – so I sent Peo to get one and as I was about to sit in the other a woman actually jumped around me to block me and sit beside my own kid, so I had to stand with the stroller.
When an elderly lady got on a couple of stops later I had Peo get up to let her sit (again, this was the Priority Seating area) because nobody else offered a seat, including the spry young men who’d hopped off and on with ease and were joking loudly with each other further down the row. I’ve since been told this is normal in London and our continued experiences bear it out.
Then at King’s Cross we elected to not take the long Cambridge train that was boarding as we arrived, because we figured it’d be full, slow, and the 4:14 direct one would be better anyway. But the 4:14 didn’t list its platform until minutes before leaving, at which point so many people ran for it that they opened the gates and didn’t even check tickets because there was very real danger of a press.
We got a seat by the doors so I could have Robin in her stroller in the door area but still sit somewhat comfortably, so that was lucky. Luckier still was that we weren’t in the car that they mentioned on an announcement that had a “chemical spill” and “was projected to be rather uncomfortable for the duration of the journey” and they were recommending “passengers in that car find elsewhere to sit if possible and if not, we’re sorry for your impending discomfort.” O.o
Then we got on the bus back in Cambridge, and about a third of the way home some idiot pedestrian or cyclist leapt out from the sidewalk in front of the bus, so the bus had to come to a halt sudden enough that everyone on board went flying. Robin’s stroller went over sideways and crashed into the aisle, Peo landed on the floor, I crashed into the bar in front of me. My wrist swelled up and really hurt overnight but recovered by the next day, and I found random bruises on my legs later as well. Robin was fine, but Peo’s knees hurt.
Here’s a screenshot of texts to Corran to indicate what kind of day we were having at that point:
Then as we were close to home the bus stopped and some folks wanted to get on with two large strollers. I had the stroller spot, and there was a disabled old man in the other accessible spot. I stood up and said to the driver that we were getting off at the next stop anyway so I’d let those other folks have my stroller spot, and I stood in the aisle. And the buggers who got on were snippy about it and didn’t even say thanks. Nice.
Then as I whinged about all of this on G+ that evening, Robin tried to crawl into the fireplace and I complained that she didn’t even have any floo powder and thus was hardly any help at all.
Peo’s blog version of this transportation nightmare is here and contains an appropriate number of exclamation marks given her age and the issues at hand. Pre-teens use exclamation marks, adults like me just swear our fucking heads off.
Anyway, the next time we went to London everything went so much more smoothly that I kept thinking I was merely accumulating negative transportation karmic points and something terrible would happen any second, leading to this text exchange with Corran:
1) I am a professional writer and can totally spell “deinonychus” and “sharknado”. Really. Yes. 2) “Shatknado” is either really smelly or boldly goes where no Shatknado has gone before. Or both. OMG I never noticed the poop joke in Trek’s tagline until just now. I feel like I missed out on a crucial part of childhood. 3) I know it’s not just me suffering from the baby nails.
I was planning to go to London again today but slept poorly so I’ve put it off to another day. Instead, Peo and I popped out to do some errands and as we walked I updated her on the forecast. I said, “You know how last night when we looked at the weather it said 60% rain chance on Sunday when we’re in Huntingdon? Well when I looked a couple of hours later, it was only 20%, but the Friday rain had increased to 80%. And I said to Daddy that I was afraid to refresh because it was changing so fast, it might get worse.”
Peo asked, “So did you refresh?”
“Yeah, and then Daddy and I laughed because then it changed to predicting thunderstorms for Friday! We agreed we should stop or else it’d update to a SHARKNADO!”
The rare Giant Amoeba Shark descends upon London. Someone call The Doctor. Wait, no, I’m sure London has him on speed-dial.
Then Peo sighed, “I wish I really could see a sharknado.”
I said, “I’ll find the trailer for you when Robin’s napping.”
“Wait – it was a movie?!”
“Yeah, and a really bad one. It’s pretty much only famous because it was such a lame idea, that a tornado would suck up sharks and somehow they’d magically stay alive and fly around eating people.”
Contains about as much plausible science as Shark Week.
“OH MY GOD LAND SHARK!” Peo said with a laugh, mostly because we are proper nerd parents who long ago taught her about land sharks. “I thought it was just a tornado made of sharks.”
“No, it’s sharks in a tornado.”
“That’s so much worse,” Peo said. “I still wish I could see one, though.”
“No you don’t. It’d be pretty gory.”
“So we’d just stay inside?”
Yes, oh child of mine. In the event of flying land sharks randomly eating people on the streets of London, we shall stay inside. Mostly because they also probably don’t give up their seats on the Tube.
Here you go, Robin. You’re never too young to learn about the impending doom of flying sharks or British rail.