kick the bucket

[SepticTone]

Yes, it's just a silly pun; not worth explanation.

Rich Hall was a little sharper 20 years ago. I think he's always been a better writer than performer.

Here's my favorite joke. Fewer people get it these days.

Why are some crickets louder than others?
Corduroy pants.

Most of us were a little sharper 20 years ago, taly. I'll take it as read that Rich Hall was sharper, but naturally, us Brits have preconceptions about people from the Southern States of the U.S. Informed by 'The Beverly Hillbillies", George Bush, & recent TV news featuring Florida shrimp fishermen demanding recompense from my BP pension fund for their shrimps becoming oily because of a mishap on an American-constructed & run oil platform, & blaming Britain for it. This latter does not play well over here, believe me!

Incidentally, in Britain, a 'shrimp' is a tiny tiny crustacean creature, around 1 cm/half-an-inch long, a few of which one eats 'potted' in a small tub of spiced butter when one goes to the seaside. Sometimes. They are mainly harvested with rakes from Morecambe Bay by illegal-immigrant Chinamen, boiled on the beach & are brown to start with, & not really worth eating in the first place.

Had the Floridian & other 'shrimp' fishers explained that they were actually concerned by their 'King Prawns' being affected by the oilspill, they might not have received the opprobrium they have from our popular media over here for being redneck anti-British racists worried about a few shrimps & eager to steal our money.

I don't get your joke about corduroy pants, either. Sorry.

[davec]

Crickets make music by rubbing their legs together, so rough corduroy pants...

Hillbillies/Rednecks make music by rubbing together anything they can afford, which may or may not be a device suitable for use in a real band or orchestra.

Some Americans feel justified in dunking BP for cash just because of things like Tony Hayward putting in such a bad showing for himself, acting like a clueless toff when he was sent out to talk to the common folk of the bayou. His whole demeanor reeked of 'Eeeewww, sweaty common persons. What do I say??' I don't think that justifies it.

However, having on record a 'geology expert' who had been dead for five years, now that sort of thing does lend itself to some shared culpability in the eyes of most juries. Ask around and see how that plays.

Besides, if Americans own 60% of BP, Americans are using their 60% of its profits to compensate themselves, robbing both wealthy shareholders and working people whose retirement funds are partly invested in BP. What a mess, in many ways. Wish there was a bacteria that could digest debt...

And Tony's off to Siberia!! Bet he wishes he could kick the bucket. Hope he ain't a nesh wimp. Gets right taters there.

[SepticTone]

We don't have crickets over here, dave. Imagine naming our national game after a foreign insect?

No. We don't have any insects which make a noise except bluebottles, wasps & bees. Or maybe some small moths, which sometimes make a fluttery noise. We have very few insects here at all, more's the pity.

We do, however, have corduroy. It is an extremely soft and silky material, albeit with slight ridges, but our Norman ancestors wouldn't have named it 'corde du roi ' had it not been soft & nice & fit for a king. You septics must have misread the recipe for it when trying to emulate it. It doesn't make a noise when you rub your legs: quite the opposite. That's why kings wore it, & the Upper Class still do here, when hunting sparrows or whatever they do, so as not to make a noise.

Tony Hayward is an oik, albeit a rich one with preposterous dyed hair & a face like Mick Hucknall on a bad day. His lowly provenance can be ascertained by his Estuary/Bucks accent, instantly recognisable to a Brit, & he is certainly not a toff. Here in the UK one's class & background are instantly signalled as soon as one opens one's mouth. His predecessor as Chief Executive of BP, Lord Browne of Madingley, was indeed a toff, however, but got out at the right time. Which brings this thread back on-topic.

I doubt Hayward'll be spending much actual time in Siberia doing his new job. He can direct it all from his sumptuous villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, where most of his ex-Soviet current clients/suppliers now live, so he only has to go next door to negotiate or work, doesn't need to pay any tax & doesn't have to go to the US to be grilled by a gang of gurning Jed Clampetts who assume he's a toff. Laughing all the way to the bank he is.

[taly]

Brits have preconceptions about people from the Southern States of the U.S.

So do many Americans. Don't let the accents fool you, though, they can be educated and quite sharp, if unsophisticated. Some still have no compunction about using the word nigger. I've heard that word used more times in the last seven years in the South than in the previous fifty years.

I also have begun to distrust those who will insert "yes, sir" as often as possible into every exchange.

Informed by 'The Beverly Hillbillies", George Bush, & recent TV news featuring Florida shrimp fishermen demanding recompense from my BP pension fund for their shrimps becoming oily because of a mishap on an American-constructed & run oil platform, & blaming Britain for it. This latter does not play well over here, believe me!

Love the resource profits, whinge about the losses. Spoken with the DNA of an imperial heart. Those families in Bhopal have some nerve to complain, too.

Incidentally, in Britain, a 'shrimp' is a tiny tiny crustacean creature, around 1 cm/half-an-inch long, a few of which one eats 'potted' in a small tub of spiced butter when one goes to the seaside. Sometimes. They are mainly harvested with rakes from Morecambe Bay by illegal-immigrant Chinamen, boiled on the beach & are brown to start with, & not really worth eating in the first place.

Illegal bastards.

I spent a day/night at the southern tip of Morecambe Bay. The tides move far and fast. I recall dining on some tasty seafood and a saucy little server named Moira.

Had the Floridian & other 'shrimp' fishers explained that they were actually concerned by their 'King Prawns' being affected by the oilspill, they might not have received the opprobrium they have from our popular media over here for being redneck anti-British racists worried about a few shrimps & eager to steal our money.

I don't believe I've heard any aspersions of Brits, just the company. Your money, is it?
I've seen the oxymoronic "Jumbo Shrimp".

We don't have crickets over here. Imagine naming our national game after a foreign insect?

No beetles, then?

Cheers,

[SepticTone]

I did say that Rich Hall is pretty sharp, but on 'QI' he tends to be quite laconic, as I don't think he does 'whimsy' or 'just plain silly', like the other contestants on the show do. He's got his own series on BBC4: a series of quite long vignettes deconstructing/debunking/confirming the myths & preconceptions of the Southern States. More like a high-level travelogue seen from an insider's viewpoint. It's pretty highbrow stuff & compulsive viewing for my wife.

I was wrong about the Chinese shrimp-stealers. They go after cockles (another crustacean not worth eating, but the French & Spanish like them) in Morecambe Bay. Or did. In 2004, 23 of them were drowned in 30 minutes when caught by the ferocious tide, in the dark ( they don't have cockling licences), as it ripped in at 60mph, turning the previously solid sands there into quicksand. The rescue teams had to wait til the tide went out to recover the bodies, buried upright with only their head & shoulders above the sand, I recall. Treacherous place if you don't know it.

A day & a night is quite long enough to spend in Morecambe. I had to live there in digs as a student for 3 terms (semesters) when I was at Lancaster Uni. Scarred me for life.

I haven't seen 'Jumbo Shrimp', as that term's even oxymoronic over here, but I've seen 'Jumbo Prawns', meaning King Prawns. Strangely enough, outside the fishing community here, the plural of shrimp is shrimps; likewise prawns. I'd hate to spend a fortune on 'potted Morecambe Bay shrimp' in a Gordon Ramsay restaurant here & find it included only one.

Libya & Siberia have more oil than Mexico Bay, & they don't care if BP spills some of it, or even most of it, so I think Hayward's move can be seen as promotion, frankly.

We do have beetles, yes. But they don't rub their legs together & make a noise, otherwise we'd have killed them all centuries ago.

[PeterSF]

Random ramblings on the above, some even on topic:
ST, you're right regarding Hayward. I wasn't paying attention to his voice before, but I looked him up on YouPuke, and he does indeed not have a "toff" accent. You can tell as soon as he opens his gob.
Well, you can if you're English (or Welsh, Scottish, Irish, of course), but to most Americans he just seems like a rich arrogant, upper-class British snob, whining that he wanted his life back. Of course those dead oil workers might have an even more pressing need to have their lives back too, but it probably would have -- to work in another reference to above posts -- warmed the cockles of their hearts to see him out having fun in a yacht race a few weeks later.
By the way, I have no idea of the origin of that "cockles" phrase; it doesn't make obvious sense to me.

Some business expert wrote quite convincingly about why BP left that buffoon in charge for so long. He deduced that they wanted to wait till the worst of the crisis was over, then they could wheel in a new and more media-savvy (and American) CEO who would be associated with the turnaround and not the unbelievable cock-ups and PR gaffes of the former boss. The resulting contrast in leadership would help BP's image after the initial cleanup and ending of the leak.

From what I have experienced, or at least on the radio stations I listen to, people here blame BP management for the whole fiasco, which included brushing aside engineers' concerns about inadequate safety margins, as mentioned elsewhere on this forum. It appears that British people have the opposite impression though (i.e. that there's a lot of anti-British sentiment)

Entomology and etymology (on-topic again, mostly)
Re the entomology stuff, there are grasshoppers in England, and I suppose they are a cousin of the cricket family, but like our shrimp they are much smaller than the American variety and I don't think they make as much noise (no, I won't go there...).
I can't comment on how the taste compares though. I have no desire to be a victim, I mean contestant, on some "Survivor"-style unreality show.

I think ST is feigning willful ignorance on some aspects of Americana, but stereotypes can be funny -- sometimes even to those stereotyped.

Rich Hall was mostly known a while ago for his pretty good Reagan impressions (ok, not such a hard feat) and now seems to have been sent out to pasture, as we rarely see him here except at some safe-for-old-people-and-political-occasions appearances. I suppose Mike Yarwood is the same if he's still alive, and still performing. He did do a good Harold Wilson. I still remember, "The pound in your pocket will not be devalued" as spoken by both, with that back of the throat vocal sound.
On the other hand, his Edward Heath annoyed me.
Come to think of it, so did Edward Heath's Edward Heath.

Nice explanation of the etymology of corduroy. I was not aware of its noble origins but it's pretty much the same as the original French. Obvious in hindsight, like so many things.
Corduroy pants -- ahem -- I mean trousers (or kecks to some northerners), do tend to be coarser here and make a noise if your thighs rub when you walk. They are therefore not too popular with some of the more "amply endowed" citizens. To quote Tom Baker in Little Britain, preceding a Marjorie Dawes sketch, "In America, there are more fat people than people."

Another titbit of info (oh and in America "tit" is a naughty word, for some unaccountable reason, so I think that's why they use "tidbit" instead). There's maybe another "nugget" for the Septics Companion site?

To get to the point of the aforementioned titbit, the car that is known as the Volkswagen Beetle in England, i.e. the "people's car" designed by the wonderful Mr Hilter [SIC], is called the Volkswagen Bug over here. I thought they had beetles here, no? I suppose it's because all insects are "bugs" to Septics, hence the unfortunate renaming of ladybirds as "ladybugs".
That is, unless you were the first lady under Johnson. Which she probably was less frequently than other ladies, judging by his reputation for womanising and prowess with his, er, johnson.
Well, like the old Led Zep ditty, I've rambled on enough for today.
It's five o'clock and I'm late for my tiffin.

[davec]

My, a five-course buffet. My post will be a mere tiffin (light lunch--Chris-new entry?) in comparison.

Heyward may not have the accent, but he certainly puts on a good toff act.

Most Americans don't have much anti-British sentiment, but then many don't actually know enough about Britain to have any real contemporarily relevant sentiments at all, and the occasional bit of anti-Brit sentiment you do encounter is often obviously based in very outdated views. I don't know which Brits should find more offensive, dislike based on mangled knowledge or dislike based on pure parochial ignorance, as if a major world power nation were, say, Senegal. Good job public television these days has news programs like France 24, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera, the latter best world news available here. We bombed an Al Jazeera station in the mideast during the early days of the Iraq war for 'leaking' what the Bush administration felt was sensitive 'news'.

Everything makes more noise in America. That's why Southerners are always checking your reception--'Come on back soon now, y'hear?'

Love that American neo-Calvinism that colors our language. Tit=breast=mildly offensive word, depending on where it's used. Just like 'cock', as I mentioned in the thread The Word Cockerel.

We nicknamed the Beetle the Bug long ago. Anglo Saxon is a very low-syllable-count language, but Americans like to push it yet further. What can I say? Mmmmphhh... I once owned a VW Carman Ghia, which is the Beetle chassis with a slightly sportier body. I guess Mr. Hit--I mean Mr. Hilter--HILTER--just missed his calling, that's all.