"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

I spend too much time in  my car.

No, I'm not getting RSI due to constantly sticking various fingers up at other drivers as is fashionable in my little corner of the world.  No, play me a radio ad, any radio ad and I can recite it word for word.

Definitely not cool.  What's worse is that I get disappointed when companies change their jingles - some of them are really catchy!

Now, the new Ginsters ad is an accidental imitators dream.  About 30 seconds of non-stop one liners which I'm pretty sure they have pinched from Tommy Cooper.

Toomy Cooper of course was famous for his one liners and bad magic acts which kind of proved Abraham's Lincolns rule, but it worked for him!

Here are some of my favourite Tommy Cooper one-liners;

1. Went to the paper shop - it had blown away.
   
2. A woman told her doctor, 'I've got a bad back. 'The doctor said, 'It's old age. 'The woman said, 'I want a second opinion. 'The doctor says, 'OK. you're ugly as well. '
   
3. 'You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said 'Parking Fine. 'So that was nice.'
   
4. A man walked into the doctor's, The doctor said 'I haven't seen you in a long time' The man replied, 'I know I've been ill'
   
5. A man walked into the doctor's, he said 'I've hurt my arm in several places'  The doctor said 'well don't go there any more'
   
6. I'm on a whiskey diet. I've lost three days already.
   
7. 'So I rang up my local swimming baths. I said ' Is that the local swimming baths?' He said ' It depends where you're calling from.'
   
8. I went to the doctors the other day and I said, 'have you got anything for wind' , so he gave me a kite.
   
9. So I rang up a local building firm, I said 'I want a skip outside my house'. He said 'I'm not stopping you.'
   

10. I went into this ice cream parlour and said 'I'd like a vanilla cone'. 
    The assistant said 'Hundreds and thousands ?'. I said 'No - I'll just have
    the one'.

    He said 'knickerbocker glory?' I said 'I do get a certain amount of 
    freedom in these trousers, yes

There are more here, including some longer ones.

Incidentally, there is a bit of a debate raging within the comedy circuit as to whether or not these are really Tommy Cooper jokes or Tim Vines.

Very similar style, here is a Tim Vine video that is definitely worth checking out.

"I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions"

I'm reminded of Stephen Covey and his '7 Habits...' because of Derren Brown. I'm reminded of Derren Brown because a friend rang up this week and asked if I would like to go see him live. Which reminds me of the very first time that I saw Brown, which was this clip which blew me away. So there I was, remembering (there's a theme starting to develop here) Derren Brown, and I thought of his book, 'Tricks of the Mind' which I cannot recommend highly enough. I started reading it expecting an autobiography of sorts and finished it uplifted, mentally exhilarated and empowered with more brain improvement techniques than I did after reading '7 Habits...'!

Brown elaborate tricks are heavily reliant on memory and he discusses several techniques. The simplest is the 'Loci' method. I use this for lists such as shopping lists, it works a treat;

1) Create a mental map of your home, and move from room to room in a logical order, paying attention to things that stand out, fireplaces, sofas etc.

2) Form a visual image of the items that you need to remember in the different rooms, if you can make them larger than life and either moving or funny, so much the better.

3) Take a minute to impress the memory into your head, and then hey presto, you should remember those items for as long as you wish to by taking a 'mental stroll' through your house and asking yourself, 'what was on the sofa, or in the oven or on the creaky step' etc!

Here is a little game to reinforce the idea.

I've expanded my 'mental map' to go from the train station home, past several shops, houses and cars that stand out, right through to all the rooms in my house and various bits of the garden. I haven't counted, but I guess I could probably remember a list of 50 items if I ever had the inclination (which is highly unlikely!). There is no limit, and if you start making up locations, you will have the beginnings of a memory palace like Hannibal Lecter in the book Hannibal ( I believe that it was edited out of the film)!

They have memory championships, and those people have trained their minds to remember thousands of things.  Here is a recent champion Andi Bell demonstrating the Loci technique with a  slight twist. 

Finally, I thought I'd leave you with a couple of Derren Brown video's to amuse yourselves!

Richard and Judy

Card Trick

"Victorious warriors win first, then go to war..."

I wonder which bright spark thought to couple Major Nesbeths story with Sun Tzu's The Art of War and create the NLP phenomenon?  Sorry, I'm talking to myself again.

I am competitive.  Tonight I was due to play at TopGolf (a golf driving range with bowling type scoring) with a friend.  I always win, which is how I like it.  Trouble is, since we last went, he's bought his own set of fancy clubs and has been several times, and has started edging closer and closer to my highest ever score.

Starting to feel slightly anxious at the prospect of not winning, I remembered the story of Major James Nesbeth of the US Army who, probably unwittingly, utilised visualisation techniques.

He was a POW during the Vietnam war, and spent four years of his life in a cell about five foot square, routinely tortured by his captors.  To preserve his sanity, every single day, he would visualise his local golf course.   The sights, the sounds, the smells and he would spend about four hours a day, working his way around the eighteen holes, all in his head, in as much detail as possible.

Eventually he was freed, ended up back home and on his favourite golf course.  The story varies at this point, but what is generally agreed, is that he achieved an almost identical score to his best ever, thanks to the mental pictures that he had been creating during his captivity.  

So, I knew what I had to do, trouble is, I didn't have four years (or even hours) to do it!

That's when my trusty friend, the internet sailed to the rescue on the information super-highway!

In just ten minutes whilst having lunch, I perfected my swing thanks to videojug and how to hold the damn club correctly in the first place thanks to 5min.  

I haven't had enough time to go through videojug and 5min properly, but they seem fantastic concepts... short little instructional videos on how to do anything from juggling through to finding your seven chi spots... now that video I'm looking forward to!

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"

Darwin would be proud of me.  My life (and my family's) is about to be turned upside down with the missus about to start work and me becoming a house husband!

The main fear that I have is to do with cooking.  Don't get me wrong, not only can I cook, I am brilliant too - as long as I'm cooking mac cheese or penne arrabiata!

Trouble is, that's where my creativity ends.  Fear not about the health and diet of my kids!  Thanks to the web that is world wide, I have found a perfect site!

http://www.studentrecipes.com/

Not only are the recipes for students so therefore easy, on the home page, you can put in the ingredients that you have got at home and it will suggest recipes for you - perfect for little ole disorganised me who won't remember to go shopping!

And before anyone thinks I'm going to have it easy with this house husband lark, I'd just like to point out that I still have my own business to run inbetween!

As a treat for all the hard work I'm putting in?  I think I'll have to wander over to anniebakes site dedicated to chocolate recipes and drool, mmm!

"If I Have Been Able To See Further, It Was Because I Stood On The Shoulders Of Giants"

Who would have thought that bestiality could lead to so much fun.  Wait, hold your horses (not like that!) Let me explain.

The story starts in the mists of times with those Ancient Greeks.  King Minos annoyed Poseidon, and vengeful git that Poseidon was, he arranged for Queen Parsiphae and a bull to have 'relations'.  Infamously, the resulting child was know as 'The Minotaur'.  King Minos did what any good husband would do - he ordered a clever chap called Daedalus to build a Labyrinth that was near enough impossible to escape from as a home for The Minotaur.   

As an aside, King Minos then locked up Daedalus and his son so nobody could ever discover the secrets of the Labyrinth.  Of course, Daedalus being rather clever, he fashioned some wings and escaped, but his dimwit son was Icarus who flew too close to the sun, lost all his feathers and subsequently drowned!

Anyway, we went to the world famous Hampton Court Palace Maze last week.  What a disappointment that place is!  Even my 2 year old managed to find his way in and out, without needing to stand on my shoulders, unlike Sir Isaac Newton (unless he was talking physics, and not mazes?)

So, I had a look on the net, hoping to find some 3D mazes that would be better.

Instead, I found this brilliant game called Theseus and the Minotaur.  So far, I've got stuck on level 4 which is dead annoying!  Did I mention that it was Theseus that finally killed The Minotaur?

There was also this site by Robert Abbott who's apparently a bit of an expert on mazes.  His games are also different, but challenging in a cerebral sense, give them a go.

"Real Stupidity Beats Artificial Intelligence Every Time"

... So said Terry Pratchett.  

And that witty quote in the picture has been paraphrased from Einstein, which sounds like another sensible thing that he's said (creationists care to disagree?).

Woody Allen said "The brain is only my second favourite organ".  So that's your two favourite things that can't be enlarged then!

Wrong, help is at hand!  We'll stick to the second organ, for the time being.  Here is some Brain Training to get that thing working.  Sign up's straightforward and so far I haven't been inundated with any junk emails.

Maybe in a few weeks you can become clever too, and the you can spout quotes such as;

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." 

That was Oscar Wilde who also said "Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit".

Oh well, you can't have it all.