Jokes - a dilemma

I'm not one of those PC fanatics - just a person with a conscience which annoyingly comes into play at some of the most inconvenient moments, such as when I feel like repeating a joke I've heard but then I realise that actually this joke gets a laugh at the expense of a whole load of people who have done nothing to deserve it. For instance a friend recently texted me a very funny joke about Mick and Paddy - well, it is funny, but it perpetuates the lie that Irish people are stupid, and do I really want to do that? Same goes for blondes, etc.

I found myself thinking about Jewish humour and how back home we used to tell jokes about people being stupid and of course they weren't racist, were they, we just told jokes about the people of Chelm, which was a mythical place where stupid people lived, right?

Wrong. I've just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out that Chelm was a real town in eastern Poland which in Jewish humour became the legendary capital of foolishness.

So what do we do? Can we invent a fictional place with some fictional characters so that we can tell jokes about foolishness without perpetuating stupid prejudice? Perhaps we could invent a land called Foolland, where the Foolish live?

Here's my feeble attempt at telling a joke without treading on anyone's toes. Let's see if it works.

Daft and Brush are walking home after a night out and pass the bus garage. 'Let's just steal a bus,' says Daft, not wanting to walk, and offers to keep watch. Twenty minutes later he looks in to find Brush in a flap, 'I can't find a number 7!

''You idiot,' says Daft, 'just take a number 9 and we'll walk from the roundabout.'

How could they do this to me?!

There seems to be a new trend in the world of book publishing. Am I the only one who finds it excruciatingly irritating?

You start reading a novel. You get into the plot, you feel for the characters, you really care about what's going on and how it's going to end.

Then suddenly, when you think you've still got a good twenty pages to go, without any warning whatsoever, the story ends.

Why? Because they've decided to give you a taster of the next novel in the series, so the last chunk of the book is actually not part of the novel you were reading - it's the first chapter of a different story.

I've sort of managed to get used to it with the Alexander McCall Smith books - once bitten etc. And anyway those aren't the sort of novels that get you too emotionally involved, they're more light entertainment, though very good light entertainment.

But last night I went to bed with The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks - unusual in that it is a really good love story written by a man - and I thought I knew where I was because I'd actually noticed when buying the book that there was one of these tasters at the end, and had taken the precaution of marking the page where that bit started so that I would know how long till the end. But no, they had fooled me! Because this turned out to be a special book club edition with a whole section of author's Q&A, plus suggested questions for discussion. So about forty pages out of the book are actually not part of the novel.

I was stunned when this happened. There I was, looking forward to a good chunk of reading, and suddenly - THE END! I think they should put a warning on the first page of such books: the novel part of this book ends on page 283.

I mean, it was a lovely ending, but I just wasn't emotionally ready for it.

Is it just me?

Living in England - a user manual (or: what they don't tell you at Gatwick (part 1)

I've moved this to: http://shabloolinuk.blogspot.com/ where I'll be prattling on about things to do with my life amongst the English.

All this packaging!!!

I got a package delivered this morning. I still can't believe the size of the box. 38cmx30cmx19cm - I've just measured it. It looks big enough to hold several cats, or a few dictionaries. Do you know what it was that I ordered online and received in this box today?

Go on, have a guess...

Think of something really small...

No, really really small...

No, you'll never guess. We're talking about two ink cartridges for my printer. Two ink cartridges! Delivered in a massive cardboard box, with bubble wrap inside, and a huge amount of air.

It's not that I'm a manic green fanatic, don't get me wrong, I do lots of things that would get the green police on my case if they only knew... but you'd just think that companies would have twigged by now about the question of trees being chopped down to make cardboard, and about the need for minimal packaging, and that they would make sure they have different size boxes available for the packaging of different size orders, wouldn't you?

I must say though, today's example isn't the worst I've seen. At least they didn't fill the box with unnecessary padding. I once ordered a calendar online and it arrived at the bottom of a massive box, underneath a mountain of those poly-something wormlike things... what do you call them? I'm sure you know what I mean. It's that stuff that is used for protecting delicate electrical equipment in shipping. If you know what it's called, post a comment here and enlighten me.

So, here's a little ethical dilemma to make the day more interesting: is it better to shop online, thus saving on car use (not to mention the attractive low prices); or to go to the shop, not forgetting to take your reusable bags, thus avoiding excess packaging and also supporting the real (as opposed to virtual) shops, which if we all shop online are going to gradually go out of business?

British Summer Time

I always smile when I hear the term "British Summer Time" (in case you don't know, this is when they move the clocks forward by an hour - what the Americans call Daylight Saving Time, I believe).

I smile because to an Israeli this season in this country doesn't seem to resemble summer at all. Where I come from, we get boiled from May to September, during which time umbrellas are left to gather dust. And here we are in England today, with our new patio furniture wet from the rain... for which I'm very grateful, not just because of the simple equation of no rain=no food and certainly no flowers, but because I hadn't got round to washing my car for a long time and today's rain washed some of the bird droppings off it.

Sorry, what was that? Oh, hmmm... did I have something meaningful to say? Well.... er... no, not really. You don't have to write meaningful stuff in a blog, do you?

How did this happen again?

This keeps happening.

I get to the point where it's just impossible to find anything, not to mention making room for a cup of coffee on my desk. I have a major tidy-up. I survey my nice tidy desk with a huge sense of satisfaction.

And how long does it take till I'm back where I started? This time we're talking five weeks! I know because it was when I got the new laptop, and felt it deserved a clean desk to sit on. Plus I needed space for all those instruction leaflets. Which are... there somewhere I'm sure... I can see something that says "Packard Bell" on it peeping from under some papers. And somewhere underneath I can see a corner of the page representing my email address list, which I was really going to put onto my new computer.

So what happened this time? It might have something to do with the fact that I've started blogging.

You wouldn't believe the things that people would go and do

I was going to write something and head it "et tu, BT?" following my attempt a few days ago to get British Telecom to divulge to me how much they charge for a call to an 0870 number - obviously highly classified information, which you can only receive after giving them your phone number, your name, your postcode, and possibly some other stuff I've forgotten. You may think I'm blowing it out of proportion, but, you know, things do get out of proportion when you've been waiting 15 minutes to talk to someone whilst being constantly told by a recorded message that they are very busy at the moment, which I translate as: we can't be bothered to hire enough staff to answer your calls more quickly. And that 15-minute wait comes, naturally, after the usual ritual of having to press 1 if you're an Aries and 5 if you prefer your pizza with olives.

Tsk. Everyone gets annoyed by these things, right?

And what about those people who dawdle on the road, doing 40mph when the speed limit is 60? Isn't that just infuriating?

And those cyclists who cycle on pavements?

Oh, hang on a minute, what did you say? You do that yourself? Oh, sorry, hmmm, well, now that you mention it, it's not really such an awful thing to do, now, is it... Hmmm... No, you're right, it's not anywhere near as bad as murder... And, yes, you're right, I probably do some things that annoy other people. Actually, I expect there's someone somewhere at this very moment having a moan about people who write blogs in which they moan about all their pet peeves.

The thing is, first of all, to get things into proportion. My pet peeves are only my pet peeves, nothing more. Doing things that annoy me is not, in itself, wrong. (That's because I am not the centre of the universe.)

And when you discover who the person is that was doing whatever it was that was annoying you, and if turns out that that person is someone you actually like, that kind of takes the sting out of the whole thing, doesn't it? I remember a particularly stressful day at work when I got very worked up because when I went to the photocopier and put a page in and pressed the button, what came out was a pink photocopy. Because somebody had used pink paper and forgotten to remove it. I came back to my desk muttering darkly, 'You wouldn't believe the things that some people would go and do!' until my best friend at work apologetically confessed, 'It was me.' That's when I burst out laughing.

And ever since then, when I find myself getting worked up about annoying things that people do, all I have to do is say to myself, 'You wouldn't believe the things that some people would go and do,' and the bubble bursts and I find myself laughing.

So, if you see someone sitting in a car, stuck in a traffic jam, laughing her head off, it may be me...