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.
