Thursday, November 5, 2009
Quick! EOTWQ!
1 You hear that John Byrne's 'Tutti Frutti' is out on DVD at last. Your response?
2 How did you find out where babies come from ? Were you surprised?
3 Any (other) long-term lies you believed in? How did you find out they weren't true?
4 What (non-musical) invention during your lifetime has changed your life the most?
5 Favourite interior decorating style? Would we be able to guess, if we visited your house?
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37 comments:
1. I didn't have a Tv in the late eighties and have lived out of the UK since '91 so this series passed me by. Interested to see what it was like, would be my answer then, I suppose.
2. I found out at age six or seven when my Mum told me I was adopted. No trauma, nothing. Just felt really cool about being a bit different.
3. "If you work weekends / a little harder / a bit more overtime, you'll get that promotion". Took me years to see through that one! Now self-employed and much happier.
4. Email - and not always for the better. especially since the advent of the Blackberry and similar.
5. My wife is a qualified interior designer, although she doesn't work in interior design. (When she qualified it was very much an all male closed shop here in Spain and the most she could aspire to was to sell furniture but never to be given the chance to actually design anything). We redecorate on a fairly regular basis. Right now bold colours and lots of contrasts with very simple furniture.
Shall I start, then?
1. My first response was to Google (new verb) John Byrne and Tutti Frutti. It rings a bell, but I don't think I actually saw it - 1987 was a fairly hedonistic time for me, I spent a lot of time not being in, either physically or mentally (or both).
2. I really discovered where babies come from when I woke up after an emergency Caesarean at the age of 43. I was very surprised, I didn't think that's where the scar would be.
3. My mum told me if I ate an apple pip, an apple tree would grow in my belly button. Being a cautious type I never tried it, so for all I know it IS true.
4. Has to be the Internet.
5. Style? Hmmm. Somthing between Charles Rennie Mackintosh and William Morris, but lighter and not too cluttered. If you visited my house you would think my favourite style was shabby B&Q with added plastic tubs full of toys and wonky shelves with dusty paper, folders and books. Sort of MFI meets Darth Vader in a dusty corner of your local reference library. With potted plants.
Oooops! Maki beat me to first place.
1. Eh?
2. I had one of those sex education books for children, there was a naked pregnant woman on the cover, and a child in her arms too.
3. My brother once told me that if you put a hologram in water, lasers would zap in all directions, possibly burning you. It was one of those you don't think about enough to realise it's obviously untrue, but yet it's still in thge back of your mind, until you're much too old.
4. It would be safe the internet changed everything, and I like the fact that I've known a world without the internet and and mobile phones, which our kids won't.
5. Art Deco or Art Nouveau. I say that but I'm not 100% sure that's true. NO way you could tell that stepping into this clutterhouse.
Bold move, TFD!!
1. Who's what is where, now?
2. I suppose from Health class. Read from a book with no dramatic expression by a gym teacher while kids giggled all around me.
3. That people on the news tell the truth. That nobody would cause the death of thousands of people for their own self-interest.
4. This fucking computer! (Sorry, computer, you know I love you.)
5. Hmmm...I don't think it has a name. Something from the 30s, I think, spare and square, but with interesting vivid though mellow colors.
No you wouldn't be able to guess. You'd think I liked to carpet the floor with legos and draw on every surface with magic markers, crayons or pencils.
Quick response, then
1. Missed it the first time although I would have liked to have seen it. I've already got too many unwatched DVD's and video's so I'm going to resist the temptation to but it.
2. Don't remember exactly. I do remember (aged about 8 years old) mentioning that Mary was 'pregnant' with Jesus and causing an awful lot of embarrassed guffaws from nearby mothers. It took me years to realise that I hadn't actually said anything wrong but that I'd said something I wasn't supposed to know about at that age.
Nowadays, tessimmel (aged 6) knows that babies come out of women's tummies although she's not too sure about how they get there in the first place except that it sort of needs a man and a woman to be either married or partnered.
I'm steeling myself for the inevitable conversation......
3. Father Christmas, ofcourse (another conversation with tessimmel I'm not looking forward to)
More seriously there was a 'Family Lie' that my Great Grandfather died in 1917 of pneumonia following his service on the western front in WWI and that his wife died soon afterwards of a broken heart leaving their daughter - my Dad's mother - as an orphan.
My Dad has done loads of family research and the only thing he's sure of now about this story is that this great grandfather of mine was of such a drifting, shifty nature that about the only thing he's sure of about him is that he never went anywhere near the western front and his wife probably died from the extreme poverty her husband had kept her in!
4. Computers and all their accesories (I still remember my amazement watching the first 'mouse' I ever saw) plus the mobile phone ofcourse. Never a minute's peace......
5. We're multicoloured in this house - terracotta living room, yellow/red dining room, purple bedroom and my own office is sky blue/white with burgundy skirtings. Anybody who follows my followings would be able to guess that!
1. We bought it and watched it! It was the Tutti quiffs that I saw in the much missed DsD Mk1 avatar.
2. Down on the farm ... don't remember not knowing the general principle ... but lots of happy memories of catching up on the specifics.
3. Not unlike Ali's .. that jelly cubes would set in your stomach if you ate it from the packet. Conducted a controlled experiment on my younger twin brothers and got a clip round the ear when I presented my findings ... also had flaws in my methodology exposed, "How do you know it's not still in there?".
4. 'During?' Hmmm ... another one for the Internet I suppose.
5. Little House On The Prairie ... yup, once you see the fireplaces I have a habit of building.
1. As long as I don't have to watch the "Emma" sitcom ever again.
2. As long as you put a condom over a test-tube or banana, you don't have to worry.
3. God
4. The Shoephone
5. Shoeteen #2's room is so orange, an eerie glow comes out, even with the door shut.
1. As long as I don't have to watch the "Emma" sitcom ever again.
2. As long as you put a condom over a test-tube or banana, you don't have to worry.
3. God
4. The Shoephone
5. Shoeteen #2's room is so orange, an eerie glow comes out, even with the door shut.
Ooh, Steenbeck, you've just reminded me of my own massively eye opening 'it-can't-be-true' experience..
3(again). Aged 8, I was polishing my shoes out on the back porch with a bit of old newspaper on the floor, just like my Mum insisted, so as not to dirty the floor, when a picture in the newspaper caught my eye.
It showed a group of children, evidently my age, running towards the camera all in evident distress especially the naked girl in the middle (you may be getting ahead of me here). I read the caption under the photo and it clearly stated that these children were running following a napalm attack by American aircraft on their own village.
I read it again but it still said the same thing.
Until then I'd believed what I was told that the American's were the guys in the white hats and that it was the evil communists who were the real bad guys.
I could write a whole book on the effect that my viewing of that iconic photograph had on my subsequent world view.
1) I remember enjoying Tutti Frutti but very little of what actually happens - therefore I'm quite excited without feeling like I've seen it before. Brilliant !
2) Benjamin (aged 4-and-a-half, as I've said before)has been quite sad to learn that he won't be able to have a baby when he's older, and will only be able to help a bit. He sometimes puts his favourite teddy bear up his shirt, drives himself to pretend hospital and pushes his baby out. So, Freud / Mary Shelley / Mel Brooks were right about womb envy !
3) My best friend once told me you couldn't get sick drinking Tequila. What a ridiculous assertion, as I went on to prove.
4) The insulin pen gadget for me - thinner needles than a hypodermic, so more comfortable; discreet when injecting in public places. Helps us diabetics feel almost human !
5) When the children are a bit older, my wife will explain to me what I'd like and it will all become clear. William Morris patterns are lovely but I don't know if I'd really like to live with them....
1. Huh?
2. I remember a book with the line 'when a man feels he loves his wife very much, his penis becomes hard' and something about 'releasing a shower of sperm. This feels extra good.'
We also had a lot of chickens when I was growing up, with the cockerels summarily despatched for the pot once they reached adolescence. At a young age, I had quite a complex about wanting to be 'a cockerel that lays eggs'. This doesn't seem to have affected me in later life, however.
3. I was a fairly regular church-goer until the age of about 18. No dramatic loss of faith, just a gradual realisation that I never had much of it.
4. Got to be the Wondrous World Wide Web for me too. How journalists were possibly able to function without it I'll never know.
5. Maximalist. Oh yes.
1. Like DP, I do remember enjoying 'Tutti Frutti' on TV but I'd fear not being impressed second time around. I suspect that I'd spend most of a re-run simply being amazed at how young all the actors are.
2. I haven't a clue when or how I learnt that. Probably from my cool friend at Primary School, also called Chris (in the fifties, no-one was allowed to talk about such things).
3. I sussed the god thing out by the age of seven. But I can't remember how old I was when digging for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, which ended in next door's garden... (I remember being wary of apple seeds and raw jelly, too.)
4. The computer is the most obvious. But I also remember stereo sound becoming available on records and also the first colour TV pictures. If computers couldn't do those two things, they wouldn't be quite as good as they are.
5. If left to my own devices, I usually go for strong colours (I hate white paintwork). You can tell which room in this house was 'designed' by me. For better or worse.
"Quiff"? Moi? It was a "bouff"[ant], I'll have you know!
Anyhoo,
1. Aw! Another fondly remembered series I'll never have the time to watch again. Every Christmas I get given DVDs, every year the discs fail to escape their cellophane wrappers.
2. Er ... dunno. I do remember feeling excrutiatingly embarrassed at how old I was when I finally discovered urine had nothing to do with it (having previously accepted as gospel some typical misinformation about the penis amongst pre-pubescent peer group).
3. (i) The impartiality of the BBC. (ii) The Falklands Conflict.
4. Airbags. I wouldn't be here otherwise. Airbags is actually a glib summation of the wider car build quality issue, but the fact remains I'd be dead without the exponential improvements in driver protection made through the 1990s. Donds for the internet though, specifically the memories of the time before mobiles & PCs.
5. We don't have style, we have kids. If you do come round to check though, don't diss it too much; it's all our own work. (I do seriously enjoy the painting & varnishing, provided I have a steady supply of coffee, a ghetto blaster, and a house devoid of daughters!)
1- no TV in the late 80's
2- I grew up on farms.. babies come from horny farm workers mixed with too much scrumpy.. and something to do with hay... (ok, not too sure still)
3- Bob Holness/ baker street/ saxaphone.. found out it was a lie when the internet was invented (thankfully he was the first ever person to portray James Bond - ((on South African radio))- that's a FACT...... (?)
4- What ever the Dutch physio used to find out my kneecaps were crumbing at twelve years old.. that changed my life a hell of a lot.
5- What is free? (or ikea cheap).. what can I make outta that.... yes you'd guess....
1 You hear that John Byrne's 'Tutti Frutti' is out on DVD at last. Your response?
Brill! I'll put it on my Christmas present list
2 How did you find out where babies come from ? Were you surprised?
My Mum told me when I was quite young. I wasn't really that surprised.
3 Any (other) long-term lies you believed in? How did you find out they weren't true?
My Dad had our dog put down when I was about 12 or 13. He told me that she was ill. It wasn't until I was 18 that my Mum told me that he had had her put down because she bit him while he was beating her for eating some meat left on the table. Bastard. I still hate him.
4 What (non-musical) invention during your lifetime has changed your life the most?
Invented in my lifetime? It has to be the Internet.
5 Favourite interior decorating style? Would we be able to guess, if we visited your house?
I love Art Deco, but you won't find it at my place. Ours is kind of boho scruffy with too many books, CDs, DVDs and guitars around. Too many clothes and shoes too.
1) Thank goodness tfd posted that on t'Spill, I'd have completely missed out otherwise!
2) I remember a pamphlet about fruit flies being left in my room - never really understood why.
3) Believed in Father Christmas waaay too long for a child of my generation.
4) The electric kettle (oops, don't know how old that is in comparicon to me)
5) I'd love EVERYTHING handmade and completely indiviual (yes, I'm sure to be in touch with Mr. Steen as soon as my number comes up). In reality it's an untidy, hideously chaotic mix of IKEA & cardboard boxes (I kid thee, sigh, not)
A list up, but don't see a new topic yet.
Gordonimmel - I don't have words to describe how powerful that story is. They don't show pictures like that any more in the news over here.
On a lighter note...
I just remembered that Isaac told me the other day that boys do special pushups on top of girls that make their penises tickle. Where did he hear that?!?!! I swear, the boy is never ever out of my sight, and very rarely out of earshot. I asked him where he learned it, and he said "at school" BUt he's never been to school!!!!
1] My answers might be a tribute band of answers very similar to others already given and, regards Tutti Frutti, I'm in AliMunday's camp of '87 not being a staying in and watching TV sort of time, so I missed a significant chunk of the series. I can see why it was loved so much but it's like my immediate thought when I found out Guy Butters played about 35 times for Spurs in the '89/90 season - how stoned must I have been to miss that?
2] Sex education reached me, like desirable consumer goods getting across to East Berlin, over the course of the 80s. Some of it via biology lessons, some via the media, and some because, at my Catholic school, we needed to know about embryos if we were going to picket abortion clinics.
3] Yep, God. I realised at 18/19, living away from home, that I never actually had a religious belief, just a mum.
4] Another vote for the internet.
5] Probably ArtDeco but kids and finances never made that a remote possibility. If you visited my house, you'd wonder when it was that IKEA began furnishing the Maze prison.
1. So what?
2. Somewhere in primary school, didn't make much of an impression then, that changed radically when "practice lessons" started a couple of years later ;-)
3. Kept on believing that Santa Claus existed for quite a long time for practical reasons: the presents kept coming....
4. a. Colour TV
b. Computers
c. The internet
d. the iPhone
5. Bauhaus/De Stijl. Yes.
1) Didnt watch it first time around. But this news makes me wonder if I should catch up.
2) I was in a posh private school from four to eight years old, and around the age of seven, we were all taken into a special class (all the boys and girls together) and our teacher (Mrs Cooper, with a tight little hairbun balanced on her head and a bright Scottish accent) explained to us what we would eventually do with our 'wee lettle wellee' one day. We left the room satisfied that we understood and that was that. Nae bother.
3) Recently read about the Law of Attraction and realised so many myths in my life. Couldnt be gladder if I tried.
4) Internet. Period.
5) Art Deco. Love it. No clues from my house, since I dont own one.
1. David Byrne. Check. Gabriel Byrne. Check. John Byrne. Eh?
2. Probably from some precocious little minx from school and the facts were probably very sketchy. Don't remember how I reacted.
3. Father Christmas of course. I badgered my parents in the name of boosting my street cred at school. They cracked under pressure and my career as a criminal interrogator was born.
4. T'Internet. I believe one may talk of a revolution here.
5. Art nouveau and art deco although looking around you would not guess as I have just little bits and pieces and some of it pastiche. There's a tiffany glass lampshade and an art nouveau vase. Haven't been on Ebay recently and the furniture costs a bomb. If I had the spondoolix the entire flat would be deco. There's some great shops in Baden Baden specialising in deco and I sometimes press my hot and sweaty little forehead against the window. Way out of most people's budget unfortunately. But beautiful.
---
Cool questions TFD!
FP
Love Ejay's brother's hologram stoy - I take it he's turned into a successful sci fi author? And TonNL I Love Bauhaus too. Pete Murphy WAS clever with the Black and Decker. Who'd a guessed it?
1) the what now ? Assuming I knew what it was I would add it to the long list of other DVDs I'm not going to be buying any time soon. Going through a non-TV phase at the moment, even though I'm just after getting all the sat cables and dishes sorted out. I don't think about the delivery mechanism - DVD, TV, sat, woteva - I'm not watching much at the mo.
2) babies came from my ma, that's all I knew. More recently they have come from Mrs Zag. I've worked out how this happens and am taking steps to control supply.
3) "we neeeeed you to work this weekend because that's the only time the systems aren't in production" I wised up after a while when I realised that if the people using the systems in production really needed them fixed they would make a weekday slot available and not be so lazy and tell the IT guys they could only be worked on over the weekend.
3.a) TV news channels actually don't carry news. After coverage of some event or other when there was the same image over and over and over and over and some journo talking to some punter about stuff that wasn't actually news but was tangenitally (sp ?) linked to the event at hand.
4) Google maps and equivalents - 5 years ago when you were researching a house or a hotel or anything (anywhere) on the surface of the earth you might be able to dig up a bit here or there, but now you can zoom in and see what colour undies are hanging on the washing line. I'm not sure this really ranks as changing my life the most, but it does rank as being a pretty awesome achievement by the boffins in HQ. In general though, d'internet would have contributed a lot to changing my life but like others I'm glad I grew up in a time without the internet. I overheard some student teachers on the train the other day discussing their assignments and it went along the lines of "Yah, I totally cut and pasted the sample lesson plan from some place in the States. It's really easy". And these are the teachers of the future . . .
5) Whatever Mrs Zag is into. As long as the room is dry, has a seat or two and doesn't have bits of food strewn across the floor I'm not unduly fussy.
3b) Moonlighting (the TV series) was actually awful. I held on to the view for a long time that it was a brilliant series, but recently after getting the box set out of the library and watching the first episode and 3 or 4 minutes of the next I gave up and sent them back. Excruciating - what was I thinking all those years ago ?
1.Remembering hearing about it at the time (possibly discussed in the late lamented The Listener, which I loved even though I was scarcely listening or watching anything due to being too busy with student life) but never saw it. Not terribly bothered, I'm afraid.
2. Can't remember this either; probably as a result of precocious, well-beyond-actual-age exploration of parents' bookshelves. Can't have made that much of an impression.
3. Saw through the lies of capitalist ideology (including Father Christmas) and religious dogma at an early age, probably again due to excessive reading of books that were a bit too old for me.
4. Another one for the Internet, for better and worse.
5. Bauhaus. No, you wouldn't know, because Mrs Abahachi likes lots of warm wood and chintzy fabrics. We can at least agree on plain white walls.
1. I think I have vague recollections of this and I think it was kinda cool...
2. I really really can't remember...
3. I think i've mentioned it before, but finding out that "Wee" Jimmy Krankie was NOT a 12 year-old schoolboy but was in fact a 45 year-old woman, really knocked me for six! My childhood officially ended on that day.
4. I'm constantly in awe of even the most rudimentary advances in technology; squeezable Branston Pickle, they part that makes it easier to take cellophane wrapping off....oh and I suppose that internet business was a bit clever....
5. Seeing as we run our own vintage ('50s, '60s and '70s) Scandinavian interior shop (no furniture, just crockery and knick knacks) it's all vintage Scandinavian in our place. It's immediately evident as it's all co-ordinated and the simple retro-modernism of the Scandinavian design fits in nicely with the paper-walled simplicity of the Japanese flat. Well, that's Mrs J says anyway!
1. Is that an ice-cream flava?
2. Tesco?
3. Smoking makes you look cool and sexy (doesn't it??!?!)
4. Xbox
5. MFI
@tonNL - are your door handles gropious?
Not much here that I can deal with except computers and 'interior decorating'.
We don't call it interior decorating, we call it painting. Were you to visit you'd see a very rare example of an obscure rarely seen style, we call it 'MyDIY'. With the exception of the settee, dining table & chairs, and two comfy recliners, everything else was made by me, I'd even go so far as to say designed but my designing is confined to envelope backs, most things are made up as I go along. I have a small fairly well equipped wood-shop and for a short period I even taught that subject and I find it far more satisfying to make something rather than to buy it ready made out of particle board.
The music room has three of my tables, 2 oak, 1 Brazilian Rosewood, plus a CD cabinet for about 800 and the albums are in a 4 high cabinet that will hold just about 5000. [Do you have any idea what 5000 LP's weigh?]
We installed new windows last year so I made oak window frames with 6" by 8ft shelves for the cat to observe the world. There's bookshelves and cabinets in every room plus one detail I'm most proud of, there was an enclosed space below the hall staircase, I opened it up and created a lovely pantry with tons of shelves and storage, I created a door from the kitchen. Because the ceiling was at 45 degrees I removed the existing floor and made 2 steps down to the concrete slab and tiled it, now it has all the headroom you'd ever need.
We also have a Barcelona chair in the conservatory, the cat's the only one who'll use it, he sleeps on it.
@Captain Raveman:
While married to Gus she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus dies and her teardrops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar.
But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only came home now and then
She said "Vot am I running - a chowhouse?
It's time to change partners again!"
Alma, by Tom Lehrer
Bit late coming to this:
1. I loved Tutti Frutti at the time but it's one of those things I'm not really desperate to see it again. I would probably watch it if someone put a copy of the DVD in my hand but I'm not intending to pop down to HMV to part with £20 or so.
2. I'm still not entirely sure ... it all seems so unlikely ...
3. My parents always used to give me and my brothers an extra birthday card from the cat - paw mark and all. I'll never forget telling my younger brother that Cocoa didn't really sign the card himself (he was old enough to know - and I don't think he really believed it any more) but his response was pure comedy genius:
'First Father Christmas, then God, now this ...'
I still believe that Everton will one day win the Premier League ...
4. Definitely the World Wide Web.
5. Sorry - I don't often hear 'style' and me mentioned in the same sentence. Plain and simple, please. Don't think it's got a name ...
1 John Byrne's 'Tutti Frutti'
wot dat?
2 How did you find out where babies come from ? Were you surprised?
I grew up on a farm, so it wasn't hard to figure out. (The only thing was our cows were artifically inseminated, so I had a funny idea about my mum)
3 long-term lies
What like about getting songs on the A list?
4 (non-musical) invention
internet. I don't have to be the only whatever I am in the village anymore.
5 decorating style
You'd know I have young kids and puppies, lets put it that way.
Now to read your better answers
@ steen
''the boy is very rarely out of earshot''
er, not to put you off or anything, but that could be your answer
@ zag
A roommate at the time swore by Moonlighting. We had to put it on every week. I read in the corner.
Thanks for all the interesting replies - I'll do comments later, but here are my answers:
1 Shall I buy it straight away or maybe wait in case someone gives me it for Christmas?
2 I really can't remember. I do remember my mother telling me about homosexuality (but then, I had asked her). In school science, it was all about rabbits, which wasn't helpful at all, but there was a book called He And She that circulated among my friends when we were about 13. Yes, I was very surprised.
3 My husband told me he was half Jewish - on his father's side, so not 'officially' Jewish. He said our name was really Rosenkrantz or Rosenblum or suchlike. I can remember Naomi being really annoyed that she didn't know what her real name was. Then when I started doing his family history, I found that the Roses went way way back on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, working as market gardeners and wheelwrights. Didn't sound very Jewish to me.
John's dead now so I can't ask him: what the heck?
4 As a child I always wanted to find out stuff; but then you had to use books which sometimes were hard to find. Now it's all easy. Yes, me too, the internet.
5 Everybody laughs when I say this, but I love the really minimalist style: it's hard to imagine myself living this way though because of all the stuff I have - my own, plus all my parents'. At the moment I'm working slowly through a big clearout, so it won't be so hard when I move to a smaller house - but I'll still end up surrounded by books, pictures and plants with no recognisable style at all.
What a splendid set of responses...
1 A clear divide here between people of the wrong era/in the wrong country and us Tutti Frutti fans. (OK, and a few who weren't bothered anyway.)
2 Interesting that several of us grew up on farms and so were perfectly cool with the whole thing. Ali, I loved your being 'surprised by the scar'; barbryn, I was pleased to hear about things 'feeling extra good' since such a lot of sex education seems to be on a 'don't do this or you'll be sorry' kind of kick. Zag's 'steps to contain' produced images of...oh well, never mind what; and there seems to be a bit of a sub-theme about boys wanting to get in on the whole giving-birth scene. Thanks, DaddyPig, for Benjamin's teddy-up-the-jumper story.
3 We got a whole range here, from the bad effects of apple pips and raw jelly to gordonimmel's tale of seeing the photo of the napalmed Vietnamese girl...did you know she now lives in Canada and works to support children affected by war? Carole's story was appallingly sad; fp's research launched her career as a criminal interrogator (that's odd, fp - I thought you were in the movies); and Japanther's life was deeply affected by finding wee Jimmy Krankie was not what he seemed...
4 Well now. I was thinking this was a daft question since everyone would say 'the internet'...then I read about the insulin pen, the air bag and the Dutch physio magic. Thanks, chaps.
5 Clutter seems to be the enemy in many households; kudos to those who go their own way, those who get it one piece at a time, and to TonNL for living the Bauhaus/de Stijl dream. I'm intrigued by TatankaYotanka's fireplaces - could we have a photo or two, TY? - and liked barbryn's 'maximalist' label. OH yes.
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