Bad bunnies!

I was at our local fish and chip shop today getting an order in for supper to eat with Doctor Who – no we weren’t having visitors, just watching the new BBC series.

Seems like a couple of the girls who work there were having a theological quandary, and the Crow not having any better sense opened his mouth.

“So what’s Easter all about? I don’t understand it.”

“Well”, I said in my best should-have-been-a-vicar voice, “on Good Friday Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus. Then three days later they celebrate his resurrection on Easter Monday”.

“So what’s the egg all about.”

“Well the egg symbolises the stone on Jesus’ tomb which was rolled away when he came back to life. In many cultures the egg is a symbol of rebirth.”

The girl nodded her head as she took all this in, then screwed up her face and resumed her line of interrogation ... “So what’s with the Easter Bunny”.

“Ah … well, you got me”. I had to concede I was fighting a losing battle at this point.

The problem is I have issues with the Easter Bunny. As I’ve mentioned before I used to live on the Isle of Portland, where they have strange local ways – they see the bunny as a harbinger of ill omen, and the use of the “R” word as in r-a-b-b-i-t is very much frowned upon.

At first this seems all very silly, but living there a few years it slowly rubs off on you. All it takes is a couple of times of saying “rabbit” in the local pub and watching the room turn silent and dour whilst every head turn to face you accusingly. Then you realise it’s not a clever thing to do if you want to avoid your house being burned to the ground, as the locals are a bit restless over this.

With good reason it seems. The Isle of Portland’s primary business is quarrying stone – St Paul’s Cathedral is made of Portland stone. If a warren of bunnies were seen near the walls of a quarry, it often was the precursor to a disaster. The bunnies tunnels would often weakened the quarry walls, and could cause a landslide. Hence there was a unique link on Portland between bunnies and ill omen.

This meant posters of the recent Wallace and Gromit film had to be subtly changed for the island’s residents – read more here!



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Spring!

It's Good Friday! We were promised a sunny day, and so the Crow was all geared up for a day sitting out in the Sun - instead we're looking out and searching for our waterproofs!

God bless the Met Office - all those satellites and super-computers just gives them the ability to be wrong with authority!


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The H.M.S. Invincible – “The Love Boat”

The H.M.S. Invincible was one of the first ships in the Royal Navy to have women serving aboard it in modern times. Up until this point, all-male crews served aboard ship, and it was seen as bad luck to have women on board.

The Navy admiralty was up in arms over the change, as male crew got a little wild at having seeing a feminine figure onboard. There was real concern that seamen would go “girl crazy” and onboard relationships would cause the breakdown of Navy family life. In the rest of the Royal Navy fleet, the H.M.S Invincible soon developed the nickname “The Love Boat”.

“The Royal Navy has a long tradition of practising homosexuality at sea.”, complained one Admiral, “This sort of behaviour leads to ratings believing it’s alright to be straight whilst onboard, and is against the fine tradition of the Royal Navy going back before Nelson”.

The Crow believes it may have been these rumours of the H.M.S. Invincible making love and not war which caused the ship to be mothballed in 2005, read here.


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The truth about Mars ...

It's getting harder to spot the true science story from the hoax!

• Story from WhiteCrowUK about highways on Mars

• Story from BBC website about giant smiley face on Mars

Which one do you trust?


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Queen causes Camberley chaos

Today it’s been revealed that many New Labour ministers have been using/abusing the Royal Flights system as a form of RAF air taxi – including (and I’m not kidding here) environmental secretary Margaret Beckett, who regularly uses a large jet to commute to far away Derby from London, to tell her constituents how unnecessary car journeys damage our environment.

"Margaret, sit in a corner and think about what you are saying, and what you are doing ..."

Still, it was nice to see the Queen herself not falling prey to this when she attended Prince Harry’s passing out ceremony at Sandhurst, just outside Camberley. Instead, a fleet of Police motorbikes cordoned off large sections of the A30 so her Royal Majesty wouldn’t have to share the highway with dirty common traffic. One can almost imagine Prince Phillip with his usual failure to grasp such things commenting “all this talk of congestion – bah, the roads look fine to me”.

The Crow himself has only seen this kind of Police escort in practise twice before, in both instances it was to escort notorious murderers between prison and court. So perhaps the Police know something about the death of Diana we don’t …

"Hey lads - Harry's gran turned up then!"

We got stopped at a roundabout to let Her Majesty pass – a bit of a dangerous move in my opinion, as Mrs Crow has had a habit the last week of ploughing into the back of other cars at roundabouts!

"Who was that rather vulgar man in the Nissan Micra?"

The Queen may have left at 3pm (no doubt so she could get back to Buckingham Palace in time for the second showing of Neighbours), but the traffic chaos in Camberley seemed to stretch on past 6pm.

Fortunately the Crow cycles home, so just laughed and pointed at the motorists trapped in all the congestion.


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Mr Crow – this is your early morning wake-up call …

Yesterday was the lovely Mrs Crow’s birthday, and so we went out for a meal, had a good time, but felt a little the worse for it this morning.

Delightfully though, we received a wake-up call at 5:30am which went thus,

Boom, boom, acka-lacka-lacka, boom

No, this wasn’t Was Not Was’s “Walk the Dinosaur” on the clock radio – mainly because our clock radio is no more after the lovely Mrs Crow threw it at Mr Crow’s head when she was in a not-too-lovely mood.

Instead, it was our noisy neighbours, the British Army, deciding nothing says “morning has broken” better than letting loose with heavy artillery and an assortment of light machine guns. And of course, being the British Army, they've never heard of silencers for their equipment ...

We live a couple of miles from an army training range, and alas in the early hours of the morning, or late at night, the British Army love nothing better than letting off a few rounds, leaving the Crow family suffering from shellshock despite all their double glazing.

Possibly the most bizarre incident to date has been when the army used an overdose of visibility flares, causing a very bleary Crow to see lots of lights hovering in the sky, and was convinced the War of the Worlds had begun.

All this might be a cause for complaint, however it’s still a much better situation than the Crow’s previous house. Situated a mile down the road from the scenic Portland Bill lighthouse, the fog horn of which would prevent Mr and Mrs Crow from sleeping most of the night – another “feature” the estate agents forget to tell you.

The Crow is hoping to move to a quieter strip near Heathrow over the next few months …


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Crossdressing as comedy

Why does a man dressing up as a woman get used so much in comedy?

The comedy of farce often heavily uses a case of mistaken identitu, with a character pretending to be something or someone they are not.

Basically the more the difference between a characters actual identity and assumed identity, the bigger the potential for comedy. And there is nothing more extreme than a man pretending to be a woman, and discovering a world which whilst in plain sight they were originally oblivious to.

Some examples of films which have used this include …

• Charley’s Aunt
• Some Like It Hot
• Tootsie
• Nuns on the Run
• Mrs Doubtfire
• Big Momma’s House

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