SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[Nibblet99]

Thanks Richard, if ever I get asked about the first fully concrete house, in a pub quiz, you just scored me a point

[sv-wolf]

Stone me! Nibblers. Why didn't I think of that?

If I'd kept stum and put my energy into entering pub quizzes, I might have won enough folding money to sort out my finances by now.

Blown it, haven't I?

Trust a Midlander to come up with a scheme like that.

[blues2cruise]

SV. I think you need a good chuckle.

I think you will find this amusing. Well...I hope so anyway.


Britain is Repossessing the U.S.A.

A Message from John Cleese


To: The citizens of the United States of America:

In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President
of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the
revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties
over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which
she does not fancy).

Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a governor for
America without the need for further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded.

A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of
you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following
rules are introduced with immediate effect:

You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will
be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.


2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and
'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without
skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the
suffix -ise.

Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable
levels. (look up 'vocabulary').

3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises
such as 'like' and 'you know' is an unacceptable and inefficient form of
communication.

There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on
your behalf. The Microsoft spell- checker will be adjusted to take
account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize.

You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns,
awyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and
therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent.

Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to
sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then
you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything
more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if
you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for
your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

Holden Monaro's are also approved.

8. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables.

Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British
sense of humour.

9. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been
calling gasoline)-roughly $6/US gallon. Get used to it.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

11. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually
beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be
referred to as Lager.

South African beer is also acceptable as they are pound for pound the
greatest sporting Nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer.
They are also part of British Commonwealth - see what it did for them.

American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.


12. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters.

Watching Andie Macdowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a
cheese grater.

13. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of
proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in
time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American
football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds
or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies). Don't try
Rugby - the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

14. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to
host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played
outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a
world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn
cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the
sting out of their deliveries.

15. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.


16. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty's
Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all
monies due (backdated to 1776).

17. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups, never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in season.

God save the Queen. Only He can.

John Cleese

[Wrider]

Agreed we need to nominate a decent candidate...
But... You Brits seen the southerners lately? Might want to rethink trying to take over their land, it's amazing what a bunch of rednecks can engineer into a complex fighting mechanism!
That's a good one though! Might have to repost that on myspace.
Wrider
Oh, and no u, too many letters you use in those words!

[Patrick]

Agreed we need to nominate a decent candidate...
But... You Brits seen the southerners lately? Might want to rethink trying to take over their land, it's amazing what a bunch of rednecks can engineer into a complex fighting mechanism!
That's a good one though! Might have to repost that on myspace.
Wrider
Oh, and no u, too many letters you use in those words!

Heck down here in the south we got more guns then there are people and we all have the special hand shake. But it would be crazy for someone to attack us. A bunch of us were talking about this very topic at the fire pit the other night.

[sv-wolf]

Oh, and no u, too many letters you use in those words!

Oh, like the way you prefer a long, poncey Latinate term like 'elevator' to the elegant and economical Anglo-Saxon word, 'lift' (which originally meant 'sky' - and is so much more poetic, don't you think.)!!! Or the way you like to reintroduce the highly complicated, totally pointless subjunctive mood into everything.

The only reason Noah Webster preferred 'favor' to 'favour' was because he liked cheese and was afraid of being thought French! We, on the hand have no fear of the French as we enjoy their food but are aware that, in all other respects, that they are a decidedly inferior race. (Sorry, Pierre but you have to say it like it is.)
( )

In abjectly submitting the English language to the purile opinions of Mr Webster, you colonials have shown just how like the French you really are. What kind of people would subject something as intimate as their ('our', by the way) language to the arbitrary dictat of such a pedant. A language should be allowed to grow and develop freely. Any people genuinely imbued with a democratic spirit would understand that. One of your greatest poets, Wallace Stevens, was so beguiled by the secret Frenchiness of the American psyche that he admitted he couldn't tell the difference between the two languages.


You even allowed the fiend, Webster, to train you all to overaticulate English as though it were French. Spoken English vowels should be slurred and condensed and wherever possible replaced by a short 'u' sound (the English schwa) - like you just couldn't be bothered whether anyone understood you or not; consonants should be muttered; and the final result should have something of the consistency of a strawberry flan. It should not sound like it were being el-ec-tron-ic-al-ly re-pro-duced, which is the way you lot often speak it. (That's pronounced 'repro-dyuced', by the way, not '-doosed'. I offer very good rates if anyone over there would like to learn to speak correctly.)

Finally, I'm afraid to tell you that blues's post, while it accurately delineates some of your failings, is a set up. If John Cleese had actually written this he would have known that:

There is no such thing as 'catsup', this is a crude pidgin English for ketchup. But I can understand your fear of using this word correctly as it is of Chinese origin.


Words ending in '-ize' do not belong exclusively to the American dictionary (if there really is such a thing!). Please do not try to colonise our language. (Typical bloody yanks!!!) '-ize' words are perfectly good English English. Unlike the US, England is not a Websterian police state. It allows people to spell -ize words that have come into the language from Greek via Latin with either a 'z' or an 's' according to taste. ('Z' is the Greek, 's' is the Latin form. We don't discriminate. We'll steal anyone's culture, given half a chance.) Our language has allowed these freedoms since at least the thirteenth century. Remember, during the thirteenth century you were still part of us and had not yet developed your insecure American persona - so you ought to know better.

The only exception to this rule is the word 'capsize' which must be spelled with a Greek 'z' in honour of what happened to the British navy. (The Romans beat the "poo poo" out the Greeks - god! do I have to spell it out!)


'Aluminum' is a very bad example for an Englishman to use (another reason for thinking the educated Cleese did not write this) because this is one of those rare occasions where you West-Ponders are technically correct. 'Aluminum' is the original, etymologically correct spelling and pronounciation. It's just that it sounds so poncey without the extra 'i' (as though you had a lisp, or something) that it was completely necessary to stick one in.

British beer is a distant memory, having been supplanted by nasty continental stuff called lager many years ago. Proper beer (beer that does not need to be chilled to disguise how disgusting it actually tastes) is now only available over the counters of 'proper' traditional pubs attached to local breweries.

If, by chance, Mr Cleese did have a hand in writing this, he was merely pandering to your prejudices, a habit that is to be deplored.

Write out two-hundred times. "I must not throw tea into Boston Harbour, I must not throw tea..."

(By the way, what the hell is a 'Holden Monaro'!)

Cheers guys

[Wrider]

WhoaWhoaWhoa... You see, that would have been funny and all, but you compared us to the frogs! Now that's just a blow below the belt!!!

Besides, a "lift" is what we work with cars and bikes on, not what takes us to different floors! (Designed in America btw) And besides, with how many "u"s we eliminated it more than makes up for it!

As for the Boston Tea Party, the harbor (notice the spelling) needed a good few hundred boxes of tea into it. Nothing like caffeinated fish running on your line to get your heart pumping! Besides, where were the British guards, did they turn frog and let the "inferior" colonials on?

Lol I like this conversation, shows all of us how many differences and yet how many similarities we all have!

Oh, and good thing we don't have any French on the board, I'd have to sincerely apologize, although I do to the Quebecois, I feel bad for their roots! Just kidding guys!
Wrider

[sv-wolf]

SV. I think you need a good chuckle.

I think you will find this amusing. Well...I hope so anyway.

Great blues, LOL. At last! Someone is telling the truth!

I got a bit blue myself, yesterday (St Valentine's Day) for obvious reasons.

HOWEVER... I did get a Valentine's card.

Yep, that's right. I have an admirer.

Unfortunately, the admirer is 'Peter Pan'.



I cannot tell you how icky this valentines card is. The evelope came with a message written all over it: "hugs and licks on Valentine's day"! God knows what the postman made of it.

Let me explain. Being a true English stereotype I give a portion of my monthly income to 'The Dog's Trust,' a charity which looks after abandoned and abused dogs. 'Peter Pan' is the name of the Jack Russell my money goes to sponsor. He's one of the dogs that, for various reasons (usually because they are too traumatised) cannot be placed with a family, so the charity gives them a home for life and looks after them at one of their centres.

Now that's all very worthy and I'm very happy to give them my money - but every 14th of February I get a Valentine's card from the little mutt. No truly. Please don't throw up. This is for real. Peter Pan sends me a Valentines card telling me that he loves me, and writes all his news in it.

Now, I'm sure 'The Dog's Trust' (formerly known militantly as 'The Canine Defence League') is very professional: it has done its research and knows its market. And this, it has concluded, is the best way to get the money rolling in.

So if you want to understand a little more about the sloppy side of the British public, get a load of this.

[blues2cruise]

Oh. good grief. A Valentine from a shelter dog.....

I think the letter to the Americans should have also included that from one in, they will resume calling the letter Z as Zed.....not Zee...

You response was almost as funny as the letter.

[sv-wolf]

Well, maybe the differences are a good thing. All these strange colonial quirks allow us to spot Americans in advance so we can patronise them appropriately.