Stramala [kostas22] wrote:I at least have the consolation of winning the sig prizes. The difference is my one-liners are sometimes okay, while dinizintheoven crafts long stories that have our ribs tickled by the end. It's the duration of it that helps it hit home.
You want to know the secret? Spend your teenage years and early twenties watching Eddie Izzard's stand-up shows non-stop. He gets an idea,
one idea, and before you know it, it snowballs into a ten-minute routine that looks like a load of non-sequiturs that somehow
are sequiturs, nobody quite knows how, only the man-in-a-dress himself. Learning the clarinet, a random Australian, a Welsh Pavlov all in a house in Austria with elephants ski-jumping off the roof? Bonkers to any random person in the street, but just another ordinary day in Izzard-land.
Witness
the infamous "rant". You know how that happened? FMecha said "spend the remaining credits on speed". I thought of a very different kind of speed to what is usually associated with this forum (unless it's René Arnoux or James Hunt we're talking about). What happens to people who experiment with
that type of speed? They talk very loudly, very fast, and so... I ran with it. Each part of what would be an individual part of a sentence in the resultant wall of text contained a spark for the next bit. It's like solving one of those coded crosswords - the ones with an empty grid, and numbers coding for each letter. It starts with filling in one word, say five letters, Z-B-- hence I think it's "ZEBRA", I fill it in, now I know where all the Es, Rs and As go in there, but rather than filling it in methodically, I'll fill in a load of Es and Rs, see another word that is obvious, fill that in, fill the other letters in from that word, or at least some of them, and if it's got an S or T in there do much the better, and I haven't got to the As yet - because several things all leap out at once. The same thing happens with these posts; one fragment of a sentence leads to several more ideas, and the result of the chain reaction is what you see there. See it this way: locate the bit in the middle where Sir Bernie's spoiled daughter, Princess Darciella, falls out of a limo outside a nightclub. So I think - nightclub, bouncer, Jimmy Marku, he's got a job as a bouncer, and he came from Albania originally. Then, "Albania", I think of news reports from the Balkan wars (that Albania almost got dragged into) with old, wizened women with no teeth. Also, Top Gear's just been there, hence the reference to the Bentley Mulsanne that was an old Zastava with a Kosovo numberplate. Oh, right, communist car, that leads us to the REECCS, which I knew came from RFactor's East Cars mod, where I'd thought it odd that the Polish car was a Polski-Fiat 126p and not a Polonez, hey, look, Poland... Robert Kubica! And his dodgy arm that's been bolted back together a bit like mine. And Alessandro Nannini's, because I remember that happening at the time... and so on, and so on.
I wouldn't mind betting Jocke1 has much the same thought processes, only his are in Swedish. Now, let's see where that leads. Swedish... Sabaton! Call to arms, banners fly in the wind... a bit like all the banners at racetracks. "Don't worry MAN5ELL, Only nuts come from Brazil!" Only Brazil nuts don't come with their shells on any more because of some odd EU law that stops it, which is about as mad as that campaign to standardise the curvature of the banana. Why don't they make bananas look like Turn 8 at Istanbul Park? I always thought that corner was curved, Turkish and deadly and should have been called The Scimitar. The car about which it is compulsory to say "Princess Anne had one of those, you know." Yes, I did know, though I had no idea they were so good at carrying horses. Not as good as Tesco's, though! Anyone fancy a burger? I do, even after seeing The Burger Kitchen episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. He's not as hard as he looks, mind, he can't even eat a tiny piece of hákarl without chundering. I can, and I proved it when I went to Iceland. The country, not the supermarket, although the supermarket's frozen Chinese takeaway is really rather good considering it's from a cheap frozen food supermarket. It was how I whiled away the New Year, Iceland's Chinese takeaway and a marathon of all three extended Lord Of The Rings films back-to-back. I'll do that with The Hobbit trilogy eventually, but I'll be 36 before it's possible, which is as old as Mark Webber is now. He's come a long way since those two points in Melbourne in a Minardi, standing up on the podium with Paul Stoddart, which is the only time anyone associated with Minardi's ever been up there, unless you count Sebastian Vettel winning at Monza in 2008 in a Toro Rosso which is derived from a Minardi, had Minardi employees working on it, James Allan told us so on the day. Some people find him very irritating, but that day his enthusiasm for Perfect Seb's first win was the perfect soundtrack, and I could let him off anything. It even helped to bring back that enthusiasm for F1 that so many people had lost during the Boring Schumacher Years, especially 2004, I mean, look at all those wins... how did Jarno Trulli and Jenson Button ever get a chance to fight each other for that Monaco win? Actually, I went to Monaco in 2008 and walked round the track, doing an impression of Murray commentating on a race that was just being set up at the time, in which Jenson overtook the Trulli Train for the win, and you could say I called it, because Jenson did with a year later in that Brawn and had to run to the podium. Unlike James May, who will absolutely never run on TV unless it's absolutely necessary, and though I'll never share his taste in flowery shirts and orange shoes there's a lot about me that's very similar to him. Although I've got more hair, and I'm not in my fifties yet. When I am, some of the members of this forum might even be old enough to drink! Anyone fancy a pint? I'll have a Dragonhead Stout, from the marvellous Orkney brewery, even though I've just been to Shetland for Up Helly Aa and Orkney beers seemed to have taken over Shetland... not that I mind, because Dragonhead is so dark that light cannot pass through it and bends round it instead. I could probably have set up a few pints of Dragonhead on the pub table and seen if I could make a reconstruction of the Nürburgring to race light beams around, but I suspect I'd get thrown out of the pub, a bit like Dr. Bunhead did on Brainiac for his "Pub Science" experiments, which I've done myself - though it was a demonstration for some small schoolkids that I'd usually avoid like the plague because I'm never going to be a parent, and yes, it was in a pub, but they may have had special dispensation to do so for the day. I was handing round some of that cornflour-plus-food-colouring slime that's a non-Newtonian fluid that hardens when you hit it and pulls on your fingers... one of the kids cried when he touched it. I mean, it's not that scary, is it? Unlike Bernie Ecclestone's hair, which is... I reckon it's got a mind of its own, a bit like that episode of The Simpsons where Snake is executed and Homer has his hair transplanted onto his head... probably non-canon, it'll have been one of those Halloween episodes, although the best of those was Hex And The City which involved the Simpson family being cursed by a gypsy and Homer had to throw a leprechaun at her, who was a tiny version of a stereotypical Irish drunk who "angrily jabbered in an Irish accent" and made no sense at all, in the same way that Paul di Resta doesn't make any sense when he talks about how he'll be World Champion in three months. Well, he hasn't said that yet, but I'll bet he will. It's as if he's becoming his own personality on the F1 Slate, which I should go and check to see what fiendishly arrogant comments Michael Schumacher has come up with, or what bawdy innuendo we're going to get from Jenson Button...
I was trying to get it completely circular so we'd come back to Sweden again, but Paul di Resta stopped me in my tracks. Bah. Still, a few more mentions of jam and radiators here, an impression of Sean Connery there, and Mr Izzard, I'll have your job if you don't mind. Though without the dress and the make-up.
Because he is still looking for an F1 seat 