December 29, 2018

Arise, Sir Michael!

I have a real soft spot for Michael Palin. I went to a Hemingway book festival event here in The Netherlands once, specifically to hear him speak. One of my fave pictures I took that evening was this one:

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And one of my treasured possessions is a book he autographed to me personally (a gift arranged for me a few years ago by Mr Esther). The man has lovely penmanship! I also have several of his travel diaries, all very much worth reading.

Last night I read that Michael Palin is named in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List! He is going to be a Sir and will be honoured for his “services to travel, culture and geography following his career as a writer and presenter of documentaries that have taken him all over the world”. I have yet to see his recent North Korea documentary, but it’s already on my to-watch list. I’m feeling very happy at this news!

Who could have predicted that a comedic knight in the 1970s with Monty Python…

would become a real knight one day! Arise, Sir Michael Palin and congratulations!

Easter Bunny

I have not had any inspiration for the latest Mach’ was Easter Bunny challenge. Easter bunnies have never really been on my radar, not even in my childhood. So, I was going to skip this challenge, but then I saw something on my Twitter timeline and although it’s not much, I figured it’s at least something!

Even before Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) became the man of Geraldine Granger’s (Dawn French) heart in The Vicar of Dibley, I used to really enjoy watching the show! And yes… I’ll just share some gifs of them here (nothing to do with Easter, just for my own viewing pleasure…)

Geraldine yells at Harry Harry Geraldine kiss Harry leans behind Geraldine Harry Geraldine hand kiss

Well, in the first season of The Vicar of Dibley, way before there was even any thought of Harry, there was an episode about Easter in which Dawn French dressed up as the Easter Bunny! She went out at night to hide Easter eggs around the village and I saw this fun little gif of that on my Twitter timeline. 🙂

Dawn French Easter Bunny.gif

So, there you have it, that’s it from me for this challenge: Dawn French as the Easter Bunny!

Geraldine Easter Bunny

Have a Happy Easter everyone!

March 19, 2017

#MerkelTrump humour

I am not going into a big political argument post here. If you read here, you may have already gathered where my political sympathies lie…

I have been following some of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Donald Trump in the US. I don’t know how the visit has exactly been received in the US, but here it seems to generally have been perceived as Trump embarrassing himself yet again. The internet has feasted on this and I just had to share! After all, the only way I can try to survive this disastrous US presidency is partake in the humour created by others and be grateful that others too keep on seeing the absolute ridiculousness (is that a word?) of this man.

As far as I could tell two events of this visit were singled out in Twitter humour. One is the handshake that didn’t happen in the Oval office. Yes, they did shake hands on other occasions during the visit but on this occasion Trump snubbed her and Merkel gave a little grimace. She does look at him like a mother looks at an over-indulged, spoilt child…

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This one below says “Did you tidy up your room? Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

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And a lewd one…

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Then there was the moment during the press conference when Merkel did a double take and looked at Trump with a WTF expression on her face…

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Yep, comments followed on Twitter…

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I so would have liked to be a fly on the wall of Merkel’s plane home to Germany and hear what she really thought of it all…

February 3, 2017

United we stand…

… divided we fall! Isn’t that how the saying goes? A new comedy collaboration movement has arisen here in Europe and I love it! To paraphrase a certain orange (our Dutch national colour by the way!) super-power leader: It will be the best comedy movement in the world! It’s true! It’s huuuge! It’s gonna be great!

Almost two weeks ago this Dutch video (‘America first, The Netherlands second’) was made in reaction to Trump becoming president of the US. It’s gone viral on YouTube…

And now reaction videos to this one are being made in other countries. Germany has made a reaction video and is rallying other European countries to join in (switch on video subtitles if you don’t understand German)…

So, now there’s also a ‘Denmark second’ video. I love how much fun they make of The Netherlands in this one. They make a great point about the name of our country, by the way:

And there’s also a ‘Switzerland second’ video…

And there are more to follow! A website has been set up to collect these videos (although it’s gone down this morning, hopefully it will come back up again soon): http://www.everysecondcounts.eu/

There’s also a Twitter account to follow: https://twitter.com/itsgreateu

Ah, they have even tweeted about the website crashing:

Media saying https://t.co/yAfFRb8Yuc constantly crashing due to heavy traffic. FAKE NEWS!!! Current moving to faster server UNRELATED!!

— itsgreat (@itsgreateu) February 3, 2017

Even the reactions to this tweet are very funny! I’ve screencapped a few…

itsgreat-react1 itsgreat-react2

United in laughter we stand!

October 7, 2016

Happy world smile day!

Apparently it’s world smile day today honouring the inventor of the smiley, Harvey Ball. Lovely idea, so I thought I’d contribute!

There are many daily situations to smile about, like when it comes to office politics…

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Or teaching the young about ‘old’ media…

There’s humour in education…

$math-sheet$

… and signs…

… and advertising, branding and displays…

(For non German readers here – “Kinder Überraschung” means “Children’s surprise” and is normally a chocolate egg with a little gift inside – for kids).

Cats are funny…

flying-cat

Election time can be funny…

hillary-selfie

Trying to ride your bike on a bike path can be funny (very relevant for someone like me living in the Netherlands, where 4 of the 5 pictures below were taken)…