Retro Yakking

Have you been forced to eat Credit Crunch cereal recently? That ‘global financial turbulence’ those politicians keep babbling on about is starting to take hold, isn’t it? Well worry no more, for Yak’s top tips for surviving the credit crunch are here to save you pennies!

• Save on electricity by not voting on ITV/Channel 4 call-in shows and instead throw coins at people on the street, shouting at them to “dance like John Sargeant”. This way you might actually get some entertainment, too.
• Instead of buying newspapers, create your own custom ragtop with just a pen, cereal packet and the vocabulary of an eight year old. Make up your own stories about Posh and Becks, Amy Winehouse and Steven Gerrard, and for an added bonus email them to The Mirror who will print them in their own name. Fun for all the family!
• Save having to record your/a relative’s wedding by holding the function in the high street, then sending an SAE to the council to request the CCTV tapes. Hey presto, instant cheap wedding videos on brand spanking new VHS cassette.
• Forget buying fish fingers from the shop, instead fashion your own using newspaper shreds, carpet fluff and bits swept up from the floor. With a bit of salt, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
• Instead of having a cup of tea, why not drink a cup of air? It’s far cheaper, much less fattening and the buzz of oxygen is far preferable to caffeine.

So there you have it! Please, try them out, let me know how you get on, and if you have any more top credit crunch tips please don’t hesitate to let me know about them.

A while back I mentioned that the Proximidade Award had been passed on to me by The Spinster Chronicles for some strange reason. Well, I am pleased to announce my personal selections to keep the chain going for this prestigious award. The following articles well represent the award’s terms, namely:

These blogs invest and believe in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers, who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.

And, without further ado, the list, in no particular order. Though mainly in the field of humour, there’s a few other topics squeezed in here and there.

• Forklifts Unlimited. Not updated in a while, but very funny and in places (gasp) informative.
• The Exaggerator. Charming, well written and above all freaking awesome.
• Pink Latex, a well-designed blog that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
• For the Love of G…lasgow. All about Glasgow, but has nothing to do with Glasgow at the same time. Still, it made me laugh.
• That Would be Mice. “I have five snakes, who wish they were lolcats”. Just a little bit mental, but in a quaint way.
• Sanity on Edge. Funny stuff from a passionate blogger.
• Things to be miserable about. Morbidly engaging. One for the sadists?
• The Commercials I hate. Yes. Someone after my own heart. Commercials suck!

Congratulations to the winners! The owners of the blogs listed above are permitted to select eight of their own favourite weblogs and notify each of them them. Aaaand a little link back to here wouldn’t go amiss.

Please don’t be disheartened if your blog didn’t win. There are lots and lots of others that deserve this prestigious trophy, but I wanted to restrict myself to eight otherwise I’d be dishing out over twenty awards, and I don’t think the blog police would take too kindly to that…

Cheers, and watch out for the announcement of the Lemonade Award winners coming soooooon.

The next time you are dragged to the shopping arcade by your other half, kill some time with this geekily amusing little game. Well, it’ll pass a few minutes anyway, after which you’ll have to get back to mind-numbingly boring activities such as staring at a clothes rack or counting the number of pigeons on the park bench opposite the store.

It’s called the WordArt game, and the rules are very simple. As you traverse your local high street, check shop windows to see how many WordArt posters you can spot. Basically, you are rewarded with one point for every single poster containing WordArt text you find, but there are special bonuses available if you want to play a more detailed version of the game:

• Bonus two points for every grammatical/spelling error. Ten extra if the word ’sale’ is written as ’sail’.
• Bonus five points for three individual posters containing WordArt in any one shop window, with a bonus of ten points for every five posters in one window.
• Bonus ten points for a WordArt restaurant menu, increasing to twenty if they’re plastered across the walls too. Another bonus five points if you get a WordArt-produced cheque or bill.
• Bonus twenty points for a professionally produced/printed WordArt poster! These are extremely rare and are worth an extra five points if you can stop yourself from laughing at them.
• Bonus fifty points if the poster is advertising the designer’s graphic design, hand-made sign or poster business.
• Bonus one million points for finding another person playing the WordArt game in the same high street, with an extra million available if you are the first to announce “Bumbasquat!” Ten points away for mispronouncing it “Bumblesquat”, however.

A warning: don’t announce your results publicly or you may suffer at the hands of muggers and general hard barstools that don’t appreciate anal geeks disturbing their morning theft. And no, he won’t be distracted if you give him your scoring notepad.

And those are the rules. Why not try it yourself? I’ll award a cookie to the first person to get a hundred points and a hand laminated WordArt certificate to the first player to reach a million points. Good luck!

Image courtesy of Hat-Trick/Channel 4

Warning: this post is in no way amusing. Nuh-uh. Not even the drab, wet sock of a joke about the cheese grater. Reader discretion is advised, and rest assured the vein attempts to be funny will resume sooner rather than later.

A week in blog awards

Wotcher, yak watchers. My favourite drink in the whole world is Tesco Value diet lemonade (maybe), so you can imagine my delight when I received a Lemonade Award courtesy of wizdumbckr at ne-deja-vu. To her, I extend my gratitude as it is the first recognition of my blog’s existence here on the mess of memes that is the world wide web.

The Lemonade Awards - because self-promotion is fun!

After all, isn’t that what people want - to be recognised for their efforts? Well, I know it’s hardly a Pulitzer but it’ll do for now since I can no longer afford liquid refreshment to stock my fridge. I shall announce my winners for my Lemonade Award in due course, so keep your eyes peeled and you may just win. Oh, it’s all so very exciting, isn’t it? (*Grates hand with cheese grater*)

I don’t want your awards. I want your soul.

The Proximidade Award is dished out to those who are more interested in making friends than ‘bigging themselves up’, so you can imagine my surprise when I was awarded one by The Spinster Chronicles. Nah, only joking - I’m not really here to win awards, I’m just happy to (try and) make people laugh.

To the guy(s) at TSC, a huge thanks, and as with the Lemonade Award I shall be selecting eight of my favourite blogs to have this prestigious achievement bestowed upon them. Once again, the excitement builds! (*Finishes grating one hand, moves onto next*)

So, be vigilant and not at all suck-upish and, if my hands are not completely eroded, you may win and have the chance to write a similarly ego-boosting, self-promoting topic such as this.

Was that alright? Great. I thought I came across as rather big headed? Nah.

A group of insantatics move through town.
Picture from Loren Darklyng.

Wandering hordes of people suffering from a condition known as ‘insantaty‘ have wreaked havoc upon unsuspecting residents and Boxing Day sales shoppers in incidents around the country this week.

It is thought that up to 0.3% of the population have suffered from the condition at some point in their lives. Affected individuals display signs of becoming “super-insane Santa-like dudes”, with their “stomachs swelling to gigantic proportions” and the sufferer developing the delusion they can fly or “pass through walls”.

Though largely unharmful, their state of extreme drunkenness leads to excessive clumsiness, cheeriness and jolliness. When combined with any number of mince pies, however, the sufferer becomes highly crazed, dancing in the streets and going on sprees of mass frivolity. This side of the disease can lead to looting, pillaging and throwing beer glasses at cows.

In one incident on Christmas Day, an insantatic person filled his car boot with squeaky dog toys before whipping the steering wheel, screaming “on Prancer! On doner kebab! On Splitzen!” and squirting passers by with the window washer.

Thankfully for residents (and sufferers), the condition only lasts for around three days, after which the individual reverts to their regular self in an almost werewolf-like transition. However, due to their unpredictability, drivers are advised to “run over” anyone who displays symptoms of the disease, or simply report them to:

Mr. K. Kringle,
North Pole.