Sujatha over at Fluff-n-Stuff has tagged me, which is only fair as I'd imposed on her good nature in an X-treme Meme of sorts a few months ago. But that's the Internet for you. "Those Who Tag Will Get Tagged Themselves and Must a Gracious Tag Recipient Be."Or, in other words-- what goes around comes around.
It's Tag Karma.
So the Tag Rules, as I understand them, are as follows:
Pick up the nearest book.
Open to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.
I will be doing all but the tagging of the five. Because:
- My network of blogging buddies is still eye-rolling over the last meme and
- There's not enough distance between it and me for a second Tag to not distinctly smell of old cheese and sweat socks
That said, on to the Tag itself!
And the book I grabbed is one I'm actually rereading-- Right Ho, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse.
On page 123, beginning with the fifth sentence, we find young British aristocrat and well-meaning pinhead, Bertie Wooster, conferring with his wise butler Jeeves over the most recent tangled mess in his friends' love lives.
Bertie has just recommended to his chum-- the portly Tuppy Glossop-- that the best way to renew the love of Angela after a tiff about Tuppy's weight (and Tuppy's open insensitivity when Angela nearly got eaten by a shark on vacation), would be for Tuppy to lay off eating.
This, Bertie proposed, would demonstrate that Tuppy is sick with a broken heart. And Angela would melt at the prospect.
But after a missed meal or two, Tuppy's willpower simply isn't up to the challenge. In the following lines, Jeeves questions Bertie about the previous evening's disastrous altercation vis-a-vis the Angela-Tuppy parties...
"Yes, sir. It seemed to me that Mr. Glossop's face was 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.'"
"Quite. He met my Cousin Angela in the larder last night, and a rather painful interview ensued."
"I am sorry, sir."
"Not half so sorry as he was. She found him closeted with a steak-and-kidney pie, and appears to have been a bit caustic about fat men who lived for food alone."
The book continues, with Tuppy unwilling to lay off the food or concede Angela's shark...
With Bertie being doggedly pursued by the soupy, saucer-eyed Madeline Bassett (a girl who believes that when a baby sneezes, a fairy is born and that the "stars are God's Daisy Chain")...
And with Bertie's awkward friend Gussie Fink-Nottle torn between his own adoration of the gooey Bassett and his love of experimenting with newts...
Well, let's just say much mayhem and merriment ensues. Wodehouse was a master of witty dialogue and bizarre convoluted plots. And I'm afraid the few spare sentences included above don't quite do it justice. If you haven't read Wodehouse before and you enjoy British humor, his work is definitely worth a read.
Oh-- but before I go today, I have a funny bit of Cabbages trivia to share with you related to Mr. Wodehouse.
When I originally was brainstorming names for this humor blog, I thought I might use some obscure phrase from Wodehouse's work. Something different-- a bit of an "in joke" that only a few readers would get.
And the phrase I had grown fond of (and which is said a number of times in Right Ho, Jeeves) was "Angela's Shark."
It seemed offbeat and easy to remember. And the fact that my name is absolutely nothing like "Angela" made it even funnier.
Well, do you know WHAT HAPPENS when you try to make that phrase into a Blogspot URL?
No?...
angelasshark.blogspot.com
Yes, that's right. Through the impossibility of an apostrophe in the URL, there was EVERY PROBABILITY that right now you would be visiting the "Angel Ass Hark" blog.
Somehow, I just didn't think it had the tone I was looking for.
Toodle-pip, chums!
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Humor-blogs also resolutely denies Angela's shark and suggests it was probably just a large, friendly herring.
10 comments:
I was all about doing the new meme until I read what I would have had to write down. My Mom is apparently already having palpitations over my blog language and this might put her over the edge. Unless I go pick out a cookbook or something.
Alice- Maybe do a test-run before you decide to blog about it or not... It's funny how disjointed it comes out if you follow the instructions, so maybe your mom wouldn't be the wiser. :)
PS- What exactly have you been reading? :)
Thank'ee kindly mum.
(Off now to get my dose of Pig-hooo...ey from the Earl of Blandings)
angelasshark would get a lot of random hits from Oogling Googlers.
Sujatha- Heh. Wow, I think you out-Wodehoused ME. :)
Joe- Yeah, fortunately I took that into consideration. This way, I'm only getting folks looking for what the "of cabbages and kings" phrase came from...
A much more practical crowd. :)
Unfortunately - I vacillate between really good smut and then I go through a factual books cycle like history-ish/scienc-y stuff. I'm in smut cycle now so I can't do the meme without my mom dying.
No one could out-Wodehouse you, Jenn! But I was definitely reminded that there is this massive Blandings Castle omnibus edition that's been sitting on my bookshelf for the last six months, waiting for its first dog ear.
Alice- Ah! Well, while sometimes the parents need a little shaking up, we don't want the woman to die by blog. :)
Sujatha- I understand. Books, though, are patient. They're there for us when we finally get around to them. :)
Jenn,
do you think many of us are into tagging and other superficial activities.....most bloggers I know dont even read others blogs...they just tag them randomly and forget it.....afterall if I am recommending something, I should believe in it?
L. Venkata Subramanian- Actually, I don't care for tags myself-- and I know very few bloggers who do. Which was why I made the comments about being tagged and trying to be gracious about it. (Also why I didn't tag any additional people and spread the pain! :)
I've only participated in a few of these and usually only when it's on a topic I feel I can do something with that's appropriate to the blog itself.
I totally agree that if you recommend something you should like the site (or product, etc.) you're recommending.
The internet of course doesn't always work that way. Though, admittedly, neither does television and often other media.
Given that this is a humor blog, however, I figured readers would appreciate the levity of a tag.
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