Halo Stickman

Bloody hell, I’m knackered just watching that! Brilliant effort by the team – showed bags of character and fight for the cause. Delighted we got something for all our hard work!

Very professional performance, Toby excellent as usual, pleased for Mané.

I am extremely proud to see that someone has nominated me alongside Bletch in the Muppet category. It is a particularly poignant moment because this year is the centenary celebration of mine and Bletch’s first meeting. As a founder member of the Gosport Chattering Classes, Bletch had brow-beaten the military top-brass into issuing him with a batman – as far as I’m aware, he was the only serving private in the history of warfare ever to have had one – and that poor batman fellow was me. Off we went to fight the good fight, but by 1917 Bletch had worn himself out tussling with the truculent Turks, and I was exhausted from lugging around Bletch’s enormous crate of dictionaries, thesauruses, anagrams, word-clouds, word-bubbles, word-puzzles and other word-associated paraphernalia. The authorities decided that both of us were in dire need of rest and recuperation, so registered us with an early forerunner of TMS, namely, the Netley Hospital Asylum. They quickly diagnosed both of us as ‘stump orators’. Bletch was never happier than when beseeching, besmirching, beguiling, bewitching or bewildering us with his large lexicon. I was far more taciturn by nature, but, after spending tediously long years in Bletch’s company, I’d developed the unfortunate habit of pale imitation. How matron laughed at our antics! She said we were hysterical. The rest of the medical staff was less impressed; in fact, they thought we were a couple of bores and employed a variety of methods to ‘suggest’ we change our silly ways. I hastily adopted their ‘suggestion’ and within a couple of months had dropped Bletch in favour of more interesting company. Sadly, the medics were less successful with Bletch. Every method of ‘suggestion’ was employed – blindfolds, gimp-masks, chains, whips, surgical probes, bicycle pumps, wigs, Downton Abbey repeats, labradors, llamas – all to no avail: Bletch lapped it all up and remained resolutely verbose, but, otherwise, hopelessly incompetent. It was a long, long while before they found the poor fellow gainful employment, and it is with some sadness that I note he has remained in that same employment ever since. For anyone who might be interested, a film of Bletch and me at Netley Hospital Asylum can be seen below. Viewers will be glad to learn that it is a silent movie. Please also be advised that Bletch and me are denoted by our military service names: Private King (Bletch) and Private Sandall (me). [video=youtube;7mrM--tXIeE] With acknowledgement and eternal appreciation to the real Privates King and Sandall, and millions like them, who sacrificed their health and lives for muppets like us.

Well, Bletch, as it’s Christmas Eve and I’ve had a few beers, I’ll let you into a secret – you’ll always get my vote because I love all that word stuff you do. Damn, now I’m gonna wake up on Christmas Day feeling cheap and dirty and full of regrets, again.

The GSOH in the personal ads column of the COXFORD CLASSIFIEDS swung it for me, Lou.

Yep Bletch, I feel like a member of your family - those two rabbits you gave me have done what rabbits do best; I’m now infested with a plague of punning bunnies setting anagrams and word puzzles and correcting me grammar and punctuation, ffs. You're not alone, Lou! Bletch's anagrams are slow burners at the best of times.

Merry Christmas Muppets! God Bless Us One And All (except for MLG, obviously) This one had better be a bloody labrador!

I thought that the new formation worked well – can see it being adopted for more matches this season. Impressive debut by Reed; great performances all round; delighted to see Long and Yoshida play so well

That’s an interesting idea, but I suspect that the 1914 Christmas truce was too short-lived and the top-brass too quick to stamp out the fraternisation for any kind of social media coverage to have had much of an effect. Imo, what is more pertinent with regard to possible social media coverage is something that is claimed to have happened in the book Trench Warfare 1914–1918. The Live and Let Live System by Tony Ashworth referenced on the Wikipedia Christmas truce page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if social media coverage had been available at that time to help encourage a more widespread and entrenched (no pun intended) adoption of this ‘live and let live system’ – arguably, the more widespread and entrenched this practice became amongst serving soldiers on both sides of the conflict, the more difficult it would have been for the top-brass to reinsert the ‘kill and be killed system’.

Hypo, if you do decide to go down the ceilidh route then make sure you source a band with someone who is good at getting people up onto the dance floor. The main reason why it worked so well at the wedding I attended was because a lot of the dance reels are designed in such a way that you are continuously swapping partners, so it’s a great way to get to know complete strangers. The fact that most of us didn’t have a clue as to what we were doing just added to the general hilarity – and I say all this as someone who normally doesn’t go near a dance floor until such time as I’m too pissed to stand let alone dance! The wedding I went to happened up North, so it’s no good me recommending that band. Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide to do.

I went to an Irish mate’s wedding a few months ago that had a ceilidh band performing at the early-evening part of the reception. I thought it was going to be shit, but the woman who played the lead-fiddle got everyone on the dance floor, demonstrated some basic ‘dance steps’ and away we went. It was a bit like country-dancing at school, but, with a few drinks on board, it turned out to be a real hoot, a great ice-breaker and a perfect segue into the late-evening disco.

At risk of this thread trailing off into a re-enactment of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch … Prior to central heating I remember spending most of the winter sat on the living-room rug in front of the coal-fire – it was the only remotely warm place in the entire bloody house!

That’s right; UK populations of some bird species, especially smaller birds such as wrens – at greater risk of losing their body heat – were reduced by more than 80 percent during that winter.

You may well be right about that, trousers: let’s face it, anyone who’s watched the news this week will have witnessed what a fucked up world we live in. Nevertheless, we only need to rewind the clock-of-time back a few centuries or so to find people being broken on the wheel, hung drawn and quartered, burnt at the stake, transported to Australia (ffs!) for the most ridiculous of ‘misdemeanours’. Generally speaking, these things no longer happen; therefore, perhaps there is hope that humanity is moving forward and will one day get its act together – with or without Brand’s help.

Did you mean flue? PS I've never listened to that show, is it any good?

Being very young at the time, I only have vague memories of that winter; however, I clearly recall walking up my Isle of Wight lane with the snow up to hedge level and seeing a hole in the snow where someone had dug down to reveal the roof of a car. My mum says that the heavy snow started, as you say, on Boxing Day and that there wasn’t really that much fresh snowfall in subsequent weeks; however, a severe frozen period set in for the next couple of months, which prevented the snow from melting. According to Since Records Began, The Highs and Lows of Britain’s Weather by Paul Simons (I always hoped this little book would come in handy one day!) the ice reached 2.5 miles out to sea at Herne Bay in Kent and there were reports of drifting pack ice in the Mersey, Humber and Solent. One of the interesting legacies of the 62-63 winter was that the electrical supply industry (which had been caught hopelessly under-prepared) made a huge financial investment in extra capacity, which, 22 years later, played a role in defeating the miners’ strike. With regard to White Christmases (again referencing the above book), statistically speaking, many parts of Britain are more likely to see a White Easter; in the last century, snow has fallen in London on Christmas Day on only 11 occasions. Apparently, the idea of White Christmases (over the last 170 years or so) can be largely attributed to Charles Dickens. He was born in 1812, which happened to fall in the coldest decade since the 1690s; he would have seen snow fall on Christmas Day on 6 out of his first 9 years. Later, he referenced these White Christmases in his books – most notably, of course, in A Christmas Carol, written in 1843. The first Christmas cards also appeared in the 1840s; the Victorians, being keen on nostalgia, harked back to the same White Christmases of Dickens’s childhood for the images on these cards, even though, by then, Christmases were more commonly like the ones we usually experience nowadays, i.e. grey and damp. So, the moral of all this: anyone thinking of putting money on a White Christmas might be better advised to put it on Saints beating Everton on Saturday. Or, perhaps not?

Portsea Lil wrote me a note saying she had made her fanny look nice and Christmassy Turned out she meant nanny

Lols, see what you did there, Bear - you meant toke

Verbal, you obviously have a lot of first-hand knowledge on these issues, and I, for one, would like to thank-you for taking the time to share it with this forum – very interesting stuff.

+1.

I’m still struggling to get over that entire series of Dallas that turned out to be nothing more than Pam Ewing’s dream

Didn’t watch it myself – I missed out by the seems of it – but that is exactly how Mrs Stickman interpreted it.

True story. A female acquaintance of mine – a highly-strung woman at the best of times – became particularly fraught during her pregnancy and convinced herself that somehow her baby would get mixed up with someone else’s at the hospital. The morning after the long night of the birth she woke up to find her baby lying in a cot by the side of her bed. Someone had attached a label to the cot that read “Normal Vertex”, which I understand means ‘normal delivery’ as opposed to ‘caesarean section’. Imagine the meltdown when said acquaintance misread the ‘l’ for a ‘n’ and thought someone had given her Mr and Mrs Vertex’s boy Norman.

Well then, you're certainly being true to your word. Trouble is, I'm still feeling the pain of tonight's defeat, so have you got any more Vietnam jokes, or saucy wordplay with interchanging letters?

Are you sure this is better than the post match thread?