"Hipster" is really a state of mind

-          Rob, what does HIPSTER mean?

-          In which context? – this always is his first question. I think he just needs time to drift away from Arrhenius plots and readjust his mind...

-          SLURP ME WITH YOUR HIPSTER STRAW.

I wish I could describe the look on his face...

„My name is Graham the Smoothie! Please drink my goofy fruitiness in as maverick a manner as possible! Slurp me with your hipster straw.“

I love things which do not make sense!

Like Caitlin Moran. She is nonsense. Nonsense the way I like it.

She just points out random things without any hesitation and makes you believe, it is absolutely fine to write just for the sake of writing, and to fall in love with words which no one ever uses anymore but you are too desperate to admit it and to make matters worse even try to say something legendary with the word ‚bilious‘. Ouch!

Call me culturally ignorant with my „thrift store words“ and passion of pointing out, but you have to admit it is effortlessly cool being pointedly silly about serious things... this must be hipster, right?

The sentence of the day:

SLURP ME WITH YOUR HIPSTER STRAW.

Cristmas turkey gorging on harmless birds

Gorge on – „Protected sea lions gorge on threatened salmon!” Hm, one of the very first hit google provides on ’gorge on’. Overcoming my prior panic attack I really did give a thought to this. What do you do when a charismatic marine mammal is wreaking havoc by gorging on a threatened species that humans also find delicious? What we always do: kill them all. Well, we are notoriously picky eaters, but a salmon stuffed sea lion sounds as delicious as a Christmas turkey stuffed with 12 birds. All you need is an extremely agresive and hungry turkey or a proper fatass dead turkey and a sick carnivorous mind.

I actually spent hours figuring out the birdy puzzle, judging sizes, looking up not existing species even. And for you all starving for knowledge… tamtaratamtamtamtaaaa (?)

1.      quail

2.      partridge

3.      pigeon squat

4.      poussin

5.      pheasant

6.      mallard

7.      guinea fowl

8.      chicken

9.      aylesbury duck

10.  barbary duck

11.  goose

12.  turkey

All in one, this easy to make recipe (stuff the smaller bird into the bigger one) provides me enough unknown words to make up my delay for my 5-a-day!

None can say I am not treating this matter with the gravity it deserves!

5-A-DAY

No, I am not listing nutritions here. I do count calories though. What I am trying to do is to overcome my sloth-like laziness and learn 5 new English words every single day (more or less) to improve my provincial rhetorical and literal skills. Therefore I am writing blog entries. Not interesting ones. More geek-chic ones. Let’s get started. God, I am hungry!

1.      Humbug – gibberish. God bless you Ebenezer Scrooge, one word less remains for Harry’s new English dictionary. We got enough hanky-panky in the last decade. Bah!

2.      Hoax – like a false report... vendre un canard à moitié – to half sell a duck. Exactly! Like a canard. „What a gem of a word, with an enigmatic and darkly suggestive history behind it.” (at least Ph.D. Octopus thinks so)

3.      Deceive – I don’t know enough verbs. I don’t like them. Way too powerful for my taste.  They often deceive me. I would say things like: Let’s crumble on the bed (yeees, cuddle). Verbs are old impostors!

4.      Diligent – that would be me.

5.      Sassy – that would be Nigella. Oh, no! She is more the goddess of all things dirty and fabulous in food terms. Sassy is a truly gay word (no offence) with the sizzling double ’ss’ on top of your tongue.

You might say now: what a juice? But hey, sooner or later I will finish off the entire English vocabulary and I could have started with words like ’neurotransmitters or essential amino acids’. You just have to suck it up!

The sentence of the day:

You just have to suck it up!

‘Lets begin at the beginning, we’re lovers and we’re losers’ Frank Turner

So we figured almost four months after setting up this blog we should actually make the effort, well I should make at least write something. As this is the first entry it would seem to make sense that I start at the beginning with an introduction as to how this Englishman found himself dancing with a Hungarian girl at 1am on a Sunday morning in a small town in Wiltshire and how that one action lead on where we are today. It was one of those Saturday’s, a late call from a friend to head to the pub and watch the football, it was Wales vs. England and a solemn agreement was made ‘lets just go out for a couple and leave it at that’. This as always proved to be famous last word as after the game we headed off with another friend to have some food in town and a couple more beers, England had won and we were feeling good, so good we end up going to what can only be loosely described as a night club - the inevitable end to an afternoon that start with such good intentions.  I am stood talking when all of a sudden a girl literally falls into my life, the details there after are somewhat sketchy (I have drunk a lot of rum and G has been on the cocktails) I know we danced because I had to make myself – I HATE dancing at the best of times but I just had to give it a go. It gets worse, I am assured we danced to the Macarena, no amount of rum can excuse me from this, but if you can’t remember it does it really count?

 

It turns out G is just in the country for 3 days 1 had already past and she flies home on the Monday, it makes no real sense but we agree to meet on the Sunday for a coffee, you can never have too many friends but I know I want more. I walk her home, we kiss again and say goodbye. 

 

The next day comes and I feel awful! Hung over just does not cover the way I feel but I am up and manage to arrange a time and place to meet. We have a couple of coffees and have a walk along the river, for March it is a beautiful day the conversation is easy and the laughs keep coming but we totally miss read each other. No kiss, just a goodbye hug, she is late for her first English Sunday roast. She flies home the next day. I certainly know how to pick them…

Ladies and gentlemen...

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Mary Schmich