Michelle, ma belle,

These are words that go together well. – Michelle, the Beatles  

I began to be fascinated by graffiti and word-play after I read this in the Readers Digest when I was in high school.

Q. Is there intelligent life on earth? 

A. Yes, but I’m only visiting.

And this one, only better.

To be is to do – Socrates

To do is to be – Kant

Dobedobedo – Sinatra

And what about this sign in a women’s restroom, the Zen of relationships, perhaps: “You’re too good for him.”  

Ahh, the sheer pleasure of being amused by words that go together well. When words and ideas are used inventively to create humour, as graffiti does, it’s almost always appreciated.    

On the other hand, this sign in a Japanese hotel wasn’t meant to be amusing:

To avoid robbery, certainly rock the rocker room and keep the rocker key with you all the time. Also, we will not take any responsibility for the robbery.

And this sign just before a ramp turnoff along a California highway should give any driver pause: Soft Shoulder; Blind Curves – Steep Grade; Big Trucks – GOOD LUCK!

Now here’s a classy sign at a church:  Autumn Leaves, Jesus Doesn’t.

And there’s this less classy, but no less funny, one from a different church: Staying in Bed Shouting, Oh God! Does Not Constitute Going to Church. 

And here’s some information for the thoughtful churchgoer: 

Q: How Do We Make Holy Water?

A: We Boil the Hell Out of It. 

For some clerical advice for the foolhardy driver, we have this:  Honk If You Love Jesus; Text While Driving If You Want To Meet Him. 

Here’s a sign to make burglars run, screaming into the night. WARNING – PIT BULL WITH AIDS – NO TRESPASSING.

Talk of a toilet upending the rules of poker: A Flush Always Beats a Full House! 

Here’s a sign of clear intent. “In honour of Earth Day, anyone asking for help today will be treated like dirt.”

How does a pet grooming business advertise itself? Get to the point, succinctly: Dirty Dog’s Done Dirt Cheap.  

This self-explanatory sign was on a desk in a reception area. “We Shoot Every 3^rd Salesman. The 2^nd One Just Left.”

The guy who designed this bumper sticker clearly wasn’t enthused byThe Wizard of Oz. “Auntie Em. Hate you, hate Kansas. Taking the dog. Dorothy.”

A sign for a furniture store: SOFA SO GOOD. 

One for a barber: Scissor’s Palace.

And a sign outside a cabinet maker’s truck: Counter Fitters. And, finally, this on a shoe-repair business: The Sole Provider. 

Now here’s a classy sign mocking the stereotyping of Chinese-speak in the US. This was in a Chinese-owned pet store in New York: “Buy one dog, regular price, get one flea.”

Here’s a plaintive, pro-pot protest sign: “Can’t we all just get a bong?” 

There was this sign at a Las Vegas hotel famous for organising quickie marriages: Eat, Drink and Remarry. And Steven Tyler would have loved the name of this Chinese restaurant in England: Wok This Way.

And what do you think the sign was at the shrimp place? Our fish come from the best schools. 

You could sea that coming a mile away.  

ENDS

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. –  Albert Einstein  

If you think life is inherently fair, that what goes around will, indeed, come around, than this observation by Lucy, of Peanuts’  fame, is right: 

“There must be one day above all others in each life that is the happiest.”

There’s only one problem with that and it’s obvious.

“What if you’ve already had it?”

 Alas, there’s the rub. There always is – in a world bordered by linear time. 

When I was young, time was relative – it moved excruciatingly slowly during the school hours and fairly zipped through the holidays. I was right about it too because all my classmates agreed. 

Then I hit adolescence and couldn’t wait to grow up and meet girls – somehow female classmates weren’t considered in that light.  In my case, it was pretty much a constant preoccupation during my university days: I wasn’t successful at all but that, again, is another non-story. I have even rationalised it away: glory may be fleeting but obscurity is forever. 

Ironically, I consider that time in the 70s to be among the happiest periods of my life. I’m not sure why but it may have to do with making friendships that have lasted decades, meeting the girl who became my wife, and growing up in an environment that asked nothing of you but to pass an annual examination. 

You can have an awful amount of fun in between. There was but one rule: don’t put off till tomorrow what can be enjoyed today. 

OK, it sounds like “the good, old days” syndrome and there are those who would say that the main reason for that tosh is a “bad memory.” But that’s the beauty of nostalgia: it softens the hard edges, the grimmer aspects of those days so no one’s the wiser.   

Things keep moving though. Suddenly, you’re in your thirties and before you can yell Mahathir Mohamad, the years begin flashing past. 

They should have warned us, all those years ago. That sometime in our 30s, the Great Programmer would quietly press fast forward on the cassette deck of the rest of our lives and we’d spend most of that time playing catch up. 

And maybe we are playing catch-up if anyone remembers a 1960s cartoon series called The Jetsons.

It was about George Jetson and his family who lived in a future where space colonisation was a given: where capitalism and competition thrived in a future where man lived in aerial colonies.

Except for its flying cars, everything else on that 60-years-ago-show has come to pass: robot servants, talking video screens, mobile phones.  

Surely flying cars and talking dogs can’t be far behind? 

Nothing should surprise us where time is concerned. “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” 

The statement was uttered by Harry Fosdick, an English clergyman ahead of his time.  He predicted it in the 1930s. 

Where we’re concerned, we might as well take a leaf out of English comedian Benny Hill’s book: “Live each day as if it were your last…because one day, you’ll be right.” 

ENDS

I have a friend who generally reacts to a joke he’d heard before by way of a quip. “Same dog, different lamp-post,” he’d say.

No one likes a critic. Indeed, writers generally regard critics with the same enthusiasm lamp-posts  reserve for dogs. It explains Mark Twain’s burst of spite after his newspaper columns were panned: “No one’s ever put up a statue to a critic.”

Twain may have had the last laugh: there are multiple statues of him in the US but none to a critic.

Even so, Western education highly prizes critical thinking. One of the key books for General Paper in our Form 6 examination was John Doraisamy’s Understand and Criticise. It signaled the shift away from rote-learning to a more evaluatory approach to education.   

In any case, criticism’s good for the soul. “I like criticism,” said basketball great Lebron James. “It makes me strong.”

Occasionally, however, book, film or theater reviews can be vastly entertaining. “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly,” said poet Dorothy Parker in a review of a book sent to her for that purpose. “It should be thrown with great force.”

Or take this laconic review of the film Ben-Hur. “Loved Ben, hated Hur. (The name of the unfortunate actress who played the female lead in the movie escapes me).

The Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini was said to be temperamental. Once, after a recital, he turned on his hapless orchestra: “Assassins!”

Comedienne Joan Rivers can be acerbic but this put-down of actress Katie Holmes borders on the cruel. Holmes played the wife of John F Kennedy in a role that Rivers described as “so bad that he shot himself in the film.”

The music critic Bennet Cerf gave a thumbs-down to a performance he attended. “The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night….Brahms lost.”

Listen to Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle’s defense of Donald Trump. “Trump’s nothing like Hitler…there’s no way he can write a book.”

Could there be anything more scathing than Roger Eben’s review of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles: “I’ve seen audits that were more thrilling.”

When pressed for advice, actress Tallulah Bankhead had this to say to a young actress; “If you really want to help the American theatre darling, be an audience.” 

When you live in glass houses…. This is what critic Alexander Woollcott said about Bankhead’s performance as Cleopatra on Broadway: “Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night….and sank.” 

Only Mark Twain would be egocentric enough to put Henry James down: “Once you’ve put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”

This is guaranteed to lightly turn the minds of a young writer to thoughts of suicide. “He is a writer for the ages…..for the ages of four to eight,” grumbled Dorothy Parker, that eternal malcontent.

But one doubts if Jeffery Archer would be fazed by this comment: he used to be a politician anyway.

“The last time I was in Spain, I got through six Jeffrey Archer novels: I must remember to take enough toilet paper next time,” groused English entertainer Bob Monkhouse.

We’ll leave the final word to the incomparable Groucho Marx: “From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter: someday I intend reading it.” 

ENDS