CameronL

She should be careful saying things like that. It's the perfect opener for the husband to say something along the lines of "We'll have to build a shed / get a loft conversion / clear out the garage / move house, then". After the railway man cave is finished, Dad and sprog disappear to it frequently and she never sees them.

And if you spend your working day dressed as Mickey Mouse you're really going to want a stiff drink at the end of it.

Playing his fave hit "Sympathy for the Medieval".

She's forgotten to put the train on the tracks!

Not only that, they tell you about all the problems you didn't even know you had, and then how to solve them.

Video here. It gets scary at about 6.00 when the driver's mate is bleeding the airbrakes and just goes on getting scarier. Accounts mention one person uncoupling the cars and another one braking them, but in this video one man does everything and has to climb off and on moving rolling stock. I suppose it could be done with free-rolling stock and some method of auto-uncoupling it while moving (a DCC gizmo?) ISTR a GWR exhibition layout in Railway Modeller a long time ago which had a slip coach uncoupling from an express and coming to a halt in a station. I think that was triggered by a laser beam.

Two skeletons went into a pub and asked for two pints of lager and a mop.

I've said before that this thread needs an occasional shaggy dog story, or, in this case, a Shah Guido G story.

Did you know that, under British law, Santa could be arrested for - Driving while under the influence of alcohol Speeding Driving an unregistered vehicle No road tax No insurance Violations of military and commercial airspace Displaying a red light on the front of a vehicle Breaking and entering And probably a whole lot more. However, fortunately for Santa, it's written into British Law that these things don't apply to him. Look it up: it's called The Santa Clause.

This story was told to me a long time ago by a rather interesting character. His family was from Thailand, and his surname was Gonprapatawhanga. However, before he was born his Dad, who worked in the oil industry, moved to Iran, where he met an Italian lady. The fell in love and got married. This was in the days before the Islamic Revolution, and so impressed was the Dad with the ruler of the country that when their son was born, he named him Shah. Mum, of course, wanted to recognise his Italian heritage, and so insisted that his middle name should be Guido. It's a bit of an ask to expect anyone to go through life with the name Shah Guido Gonprapatawhanga, but Shah was fine with it, and asked to be referred to simply as Shah Guido G. Anyway, this is the story he told me… There was once a great German plastic surgeon: let’s call him Erwin. He made a very good living performing cosmetic surgery through the higher echelons of European society, but one day he found himself in trouble after performing a procedure following a night on the town. After all, if a lady goes in for a navel resection, she doesn’t expect to come out of the anaesthetic and find an ear there instead. The publicity was both his downfall and his salvation. He was struck off, but his notoriety had brought him to the attention of a long-established firm of lawyers, who for years had been searching for any heirs to an estate they had been managing since the death of the owner, a certain Victor Frankenstein. Erwin got the lot: the estate, the castle in the Odenwald, and of course the journals. Having read these he decided that he would make it his goal to continue his ancestor’s work. So, he travelled to the Odenwald to take up residence in the castle, where he was accompanied by no-one except the old family retainer: Igor, a lisping, limping, hunched wreck of a man and scion of the line of Igors who had served the Frankenstein family. Having enlisted Igor’s help in his great undertaking, the pair dug up some fresh graves in the town to secure the necessary raw materials. Victor Frankenstein had planned that his creation would be beautiful, but never managed to achieve this. However, with Erwin’s cosmetic surgery skills, looks were no problem. After the lightning had arced through the laboratory, the bandages were taken off to reveal a total Adonis. But a completely brainless one. An appropriate description of the monster’s brainpower would be “thick as a yard of lard.” Good looks, but no brains at all. (Think about the cast members of your average Australian soap opera and you won’t go far wrong). So, Erwin went back to the drawing board to see what he might do to improve the intelligence of his creations, while Igor busied himself in the laboratory where the monster was kept, locked up in a cell. He obviously couldn’t be trusted out on his own (it doesn’t do anything for local property values to have a brainless monster wandering around every night). Igor loved popular music, and the tunes from his boom box echoed through the lab all night. After some time, he noticed that the monster was trying to sing along, and shuffled his feet in time to the music. So while Erwin schemed and planned his next creation, Igor taught the monster to sing and dance – after a fashion. More creations followed: each one with godlike looks and the brains of a lightly-stunned herring. Kept in the same cell, Igor led them in their song and dance routines. Before long there were five. One night, while the quintet were running through Igor’s arrangement of “I Only Have Eyes for You”, Erwin found them in the lab. He looked totally enraged. “Thorry, Mathter,” Igor said. “They like to thing and danthe.” “Enough!” said Erwin. “This has got to thtop – I mean stop.” (Igor was wearing off on him). But it was too late. Igor had already sent a demo tape to a record company. It was only a few days later that Erwin received a letter saying that an A and R man would be at the castle in a few days to see the new boy band. On that fateful day, a huge limo pulled up outside the castle and the A and R man got out. Igor brought the monsters out of their cell and told them to begin. They sang “Bits and Pieces”, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “You Need Hands”. It must be said that, although they did their best, it wasn’t very good. They moaned, howled, and staggered about. (If you’re having trouble with this mental image, think about Ozzy Ozbourne live). The A and R man took Erwin to one side. “Let’s be honest here,” he said. “They can’t sing, or dance, or play musical instruments. They could be as big as Take That. Who cares about talent when the band look like they do? Teenage girls will scream for them.” Right there he pulled out a contract. The record company would back them totally. He even had a name for them – “The Creations.” Contract signed, he left, but disaster! Where the monsters were standing, the floor was littered with body parts: two fingers, an ear, a foot, and what looked suspiciously like a kidney, although how it had got out was a mystery. Erwin realised that his stitching just hadn’t been up to the job. He quickly made repairs, and plans. The record company basically took over: songwriters, choreographers, image consultants: all were engaged in the launch of “The Creations”. They even had names for the monsters: Barry, Marv, Ronnie, Howie and Jay. However, the choreography always caused a problem. After every session the floor would be littered with detached body parts. The stitching just wasn’t up to the job of keeping everything together through a dance routine. As Igor said: “It theems we must thource thomething thtronger to thecure the thtitcheth of the theams.” But, in thpite – I mean “spite” (see, it’s catching) – of these problems, their first single was released. “I Will Give You My Heart, As Long As It’s a Swap” went to number one in several countries, and, on the back of this success, The Creations went on tour. Now, most big pop music venues are used to getting strange riders in the artists’ contracts: a tent for meditation, bowls of M and Ms with all the brown ones removed, the construction of a pond full of Koi Carp backstage (all these are true), but “a refrigerator suitable for the storage of human body parts” was not one anybody had seen before. And the tour bus was “for the band”, but it was always followed by a refrigerated van “for the rest of the band”. The tour was a huge success, with hordes of screaming girls following the band wherever they went. Souvenir hunters would tear at their clothes (the reports that one got away with a hand might be exaggerated). However, Erwin still struggled to find a method of stitching that would keep his boys in one piece through a gig. So, if you have plans for a career in music, take a lesson from The Creations. You don’t need to sing well, or even have brains, as long as you can make the girls scream. As far as I know, Erwin and The Creations are still touring. You might think that he was a criminal for what he did, but, please bear in mind, record companies create pop groups all the time. He just took it one stage further. He still can’t find a reliable way to stitch his Creations together. So he has to work very hard to make sure that the band never splits.

I'd buy all of them, put them on one exhibition layout, and see how many cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion occur within The Elucidated Brethren of the Counted Rivet.

The problems there are that the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction stops working when you put the brakes on. And it only has an significant effect when the object in motion is travelling close to the speed of light. So, it's only observable by constant-acceleration interstellar starships. And BMWs in 30 mph zones.

Anything is fightin' talk North of the Border.... Especially if it's said in an English accent.

How do you improve the sound of a set of bagpipes? With a Stanley knife.

I'm sorry, but you're questioning the presence or absence of a footboard on a Southwold Raliway van on a model of the Southwold Railway, and you're running an SR van behind an Austrian engine? I think this is a case of Matthew7, verses 3 to 5.

Do Yew think jokes like that are oakay?

But not totally enamoured by the autocorrect blooper.

This is our previous and much-beloved dog, Mac, with the (great deal younger) children, on the local pooh-sticks bridge. We always said that he'd be thinking: "Waste of a good stick."

Freddie Mercury did not have a good time on Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?...

An old one, but I couldn't find it on here... Two good ol’ boys were walking through the woods when they saw a bear (or ‘bar’, as they were known in those parts). Billy Joe said “Jim Bob, thar’s a bar! What’r we gonna do? Should we climb a tree?” “Don’t you be no fool! You cain’t climb no tree with no bar.” Jim Bob replied. “If’n yuh climb a tree, that bar’s gonna do one of two things. If’n it’s a black bar it’ll climb the tree aft’r yuh. If’n that bar’s a grizzly bar it’ll push the tree down. You cain’t climb no tree with no bar.” “So, what we gonna do?” Billy Joe asked. “I don’t knows about you,” Jim Bob replied. “But I’m gonna run.” “Don’t you be no fool!” Billy Joe said. “You cain’t run faster ‘n no bar.” “I knows I cain’t run faster ‘n no bar,” Jim Bob replied. “But I can run faster ‘n you.”

Not to mention "Millenium Prayer". How many people have those two songs caused "profound and lasting damage" to? He blames the BBC for covering the raid. That's like blaming radio stations for airing the songs.