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Monday 30 March 2015

Joke Pirates and Bond

Whenever a new James Bond film is announced or advertised I tend to fall back on old jokes. The jokes are often aged by me because I repeat them a lot. It's a sign of approaching old age annoyance on my behalf. I make no excuse for the deliberate piece of self-indulgence any more than David Lynch did for making "Firewalk with Me". I have some sympathy for Edmund Blackadder of "Blackadder the Third" when he outlined his desires for life:

“I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I'm deaf. ''

I know how to ruin a joke as good as anyone, but there are definite limits to my evil. I recall once being told by a member of the Millennial Generation that it was important for me to write "lol" or put in smiling or winking face formed out of punctuation marks when I make a controversial statement in case I upset the reader unless I meant to cause offense. When I looked puzzled as to why someone might get the wrong impression from a flippant, facetious or playful remark, the annoyed member of the Millenial Generation told me, as if my social education had stopped in the sand-pit, that "people cannot read sarcasm!" Maybe this is the reason why there are wars. If only our great writers, playwrights, orators and cartoonists had known to place a "lol" or a smiley at the end of one their humourous sentences we could have avoided a lot of bloodshed.