The Great Names of America No. 1.

RANDY

Certain words have different meanings here and in the States. Common examples would include Pavement, Fanny Pack and Freedom (Ooh, hark at me with the cutting political comedy). Amongst scholars of the name, none is more interesting, nor amusing, than Randy. “Hi,” an American may say on entering a British 1970’s sitcom, “I’m Randy.”. Cue much mirth and farcical hi-jinx.

The origins of the name Randy are much disputed. Mr Colin Gem, author of the Pocket Baby Name Book, contests that the name is the shortened version of Randolph, or maybe Randall. However Harry C. Pigmere, author of “Randy: Name of the Gods” and presenter of the PBS series of the same name, strongly refutes this:

“There can be little doubt that the name Randy is derived from the Nordic name Wrandii. Wrandii was the least known of the Skyn family of Scandinavian gods worshipped briefly by the Vikings during the invasion of Eastern Britain and Ireland. Following the invasion many of the Norse gods were cutback to make a more streamlined set, of whom Wrandii Skyn’s brother Thor was obviously the most famous.”

It is likely that the Viking’s penchant for pillaging and debauchery, spurred on by the great horn-bearing god Wrandii resulted in the name not finding much popularity amongst the indigenous population. However the American, who hadn’t been invented yet, was impervious to the connotations that the name carried. Thus Randy has become one of the Great American Names.

Randy: A True American



This is the great Randy Sugarman, a true American Randy. Randy runs his own business and once employed a good friend who was lucky enough to meet him. Sadly Randy chose not to work in the confectionary business, but rather chose the exciting world of Accountancy and Litigation. He may or may not be available for after dinner talks.





Randy: An American Parsons



This is Randy Parsons, General Manager of the radio station JoyFM. Some things you may not know about Randy include:

• His most favouritist book of the Bible is Hebrews. (A bit of a no brainer really)


• He once had a job collecting bills in the ER at a hospital. (Someone may have once said to him, “This is costing me an arm and a leg”, but Randy wasn’t available to confirm this.)


• He enjoys shooting God’s creatures with his rifle.


• He owns two moustaches, one of which he wears only on Sundays and for photo opportunities.

Lookalike

Sir,

SYi2 Blog

Private Eye Letter

I note a distinct similarity between a Private Eye letter and my blog posting of two weeks previous. Are they perhaps related? I think we should be told.

ElYokel,
SYi2.

The Great Names of America

A trip home over the weekend provoked me into acting upon a new blog series that I have been considering for a while. But before that can I just get something off my chest.

My name is Gary and I watched Eurovision.

Furthermore, I enjoyed it. Any competition that produces the lyrical gems “the arockalypse”, “bring thyn rock and roll” and “when the rockening comes” is a fine competition indeed. And let’s face it, they’re the best lyrics produced by a metal group for at least 10, if not 20, eternities. Supplemented with a crazy dancing guy who looked like one of Mrs P’s uncles, some German C&W plus a not insignificant amount of Belgian beer, ‘twas a fine evening, and no doubt I’ll do it all again next year.

Anyway, The Great Names of America was inspired by the childhood memory of a girl in the village named Charlotte Ring. Her father was Roger. This is still my favourite name combo ever, but not what I’ll be focussing on in The Great Names of America. This will be a celebration of the true classic names of the good ol’ USA that are most probably not used by anyone there anymore, but which will give me an excuse to post pictures of men with big moustaches.

At Least They Were From A Northern Culture

Many thanks to Catherine for giving the heads-up on this letter. Ew. I’ll never use “heads-up” again. I blame the two days of management speak that I’ve sat through as part of my induction to my new job.

(An Aside. Most David Brent like quote: From the HR manager – “If you speak to engineers, many of them will say how much they love their pumps or equipment and how they want to see them perform perfectly. Well that is how I feel about you guys. I love our company’s best resource – our employees – and I see it as my job to make sure that you work like well tended machinery.”)

Tonight’s letter somehow slipped under my radar. It’s most probably because it focuses on the Princesshay development. In the early days I liked this topic (I even wrote a couple of times myself) because it involved the total destruction of a really ugly bit of town. It was great reading as people tried to attack the knocking down of a big lump of concrete, which at its very best looked like a level off of Tony Hawk’s Skatin’ kidz game.

However, the issue started to bore me and now I rarely make it past the title. Which is a shame, because this bad boy is a beauty, linking wonderfully to one of my favourite early blogs. (Is it not the done thing bigging up you own blogs? Well it’s all relative anyway.)

COUNCIL HAS RUINED CATHEDRAL GREEN

Exeter City Council has ruined Cathedral Green. Stand in the southern corner, by South Street, and you will see one of the most famous views in England desecrated by the new Princesshay development.

Princesshay now hovers over the ancient Cathedral Close - the most ancient section in the northern corner - like a hawk hovering over a bowling green.

Our heritage has been destroyed.

Francis Huddy

Exeter


Now I was all ready to ridicule the letter and point out that I had trouble picking out Exeter Cathedral from a cathedral round on University Challenge once and I’ve been visiting the city for over 20 years, thus how could it possibly be one of the most famous sights in the whole of Freaking England. However, first I went down to South St. and had a look at the cathedral and was horrified. Look at what they’ve done – Oh! think of the heritage.



"Wait a minute", you might be thinking, "That reminds me of something. God dammit, what is it?".

The rarely-seen Giant Redtailed Hawk visiting a recreational sports area frequented by older people, perchance?



I thought so.

At Least They Were From A Northern Culture

I thought I'd run a bath for Mrs P before I sat down to write this post (I'm nice like that) but I find that my hands are stinking of her bubble bath, some of which has found its way into my mouth. Pah. Pah.

Ahem, now where was I. That's right, a letter from the E&E. Now what I like about the E&E letters page is the 4 or 5 right wing resident loons who take the typical bug bears of the little Englander and add their own twisted logic that forces you to consider the sanity of their author. Take this entry from Tony Parsons (no relation):

WHAT IS THE POINT OF SPEED CAMERAS?

12:00 - 12 May 2006

We are now heavily taxed in all ways yet the Government is continually saying we have insufficient funds to improve the NHS, pay medical staff and invest in transport. So it invests in speed cameras and makes a few million pounds. There is no doubt in my mind that speed cameras are installed to make money.

Thus the letter starts off as a standard attack on speed cameras. Boring. But this is Tony Parsons (no relation) and he's going to delve deeper into the subject in the only way that a E&E letter writer can.

We are a country of people who fear death. The police say they are saving lives by installing speed cameras and this makes most people happy.

But why do the police want to save lives when the Government is no longer able to pay our pensions?

Tony Parsons (no relation)

Haymans Close, Cullompton

Let's have a bit of analysis here: Tony Parsons (no relation)appears to have identified an anomaly that he feels supports his assertion that cameras are only around to make money.

People don't like dying. The police recognise this and say "We are installing cameras to save lives." But this doesn't add up, not for Tony Parsons (no relation) anyway. That's because in his world the police, puppets of the government, have no interest in saving lives. If truth be told, they would be a lot happier if more of us would die, thus solving one of their governmental master's big problems: pensions. Maybe they'd even get a bit more money themselves to spend on a new siren sound - how about the theme from the A-Team done by Crazy Frog. How cool would that be, they're thinking. Therefore the police don't want to save lives, not really. They're only saying it as a front for the real reason: to make money.

Q.E.D.

Doe, a deer. A female deer.

Right, Hi. Slightly drunk, which apparently isn’t a good time to blog, but here goes.

…. Sorry, I was stuck in the tractor beam draw that is quiz television.

Right, watch Newsnight Review. Concentrate. Blog.

So tonight I was watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which is a fine film. As opposed to the second film of my Oscar 5-ology of best film nominations, Brokeback Mountain, which was astonishingly average. Heath Il-ledger-ble, as I will forever call call him, and thus copyright, resulted in Helen and I rewatching the final scene of the film 6 times to try and work out what he says at the end. If you know, please tell me, because the closest I got to a translation was “Ah, Mo Mo. A Rebel”. Which didn’t make sense.

Um, other things that happened to me this week was another interaction with one of my neighbours. Last week it was the one who does surprise nude modelling. This week was the guy who stores dead animals under our house.

Not to bore you with the details, Helen and I ended up in a dark passageway, wearing our dressing gowns, with the inhabitant of Flat 2. It was 11:15 PM. After discussing some pressing issues, our neighbour said “Do you want a rabbit?”

“No thanks”, I replied.

“Veggies, are you?”

“Um, no.”

“I’ll skin it for you.”

“Um. No thanks – I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

It was slightly surreal. Later in the same conversation he added, “I’m surprised I didn’t disturb you earlier because I had to drag a roe deer up through the passageway.”

He may not of disturbed us earlier, but we are sufficiently disturbed now.

Drawing the Nude

Mrs P. has always been a bit of an artist and recently she signed up with Sandford Catherine (as opposed to Cambridge Catherine or London Katherine) on a life-drawing course. Unfortunately for Catherine she was unable to make this week’s class. Luckily for me this meant that I could have a go at the old drawing.

You may or may not know that, when I get chance, I like to do a bit of drawing (I did pottery as a GCSE. Hey, stop laughing.). I’m not great at it, but it is something that I get quite a bit of pleasure from. Thus the opportunity to partake in some proper art-like stuff was one that I was happy to take.

Now life-drawing involves the drawing of the nude. Hmm. Week one of the class featured a 60 year old man. So for my week you might expect a change – a young lady, perchance? Yep. But as an artist, or at least someone who steps in at the last minute when a friend can’t make it, I wasn’t at all bothered by this.

What did slightly bother me, and I guess is a slight risk you run when you draw nudes in a smallish community, is that I actually knew the young lady in question.

And not just know of her.

The nude model was my neighbour. My neighbour of 18-months who I have seen often, yet spoken to about five times. Including nodded hellos. So not even knowing her name until 2 minutes previously, I was drawing my female neighbour 100% naked.

But far from being uncomfortable, it meant that Helen and I got to chat to her in the breaks, (whilst she was wearing a gown and socks). She was really nice and interesting, and the only thing that we felt embarrassed about was that we hadn’t spoken in the one and a half years previous.

Gary's World. Of. Football.

You ain't going to believe this, but it's true.

Saturday afternoon I was in London and, more precisely, Earl's Court. Looking at the bits and pieces of dead people in the Bodies exhibition. I'm not going to review it or anything (didn't like it), but one bit involved the foot.

Labelled was the metatarsal. I began to think about old Dave and his breaking of the aforementioned bone. Then I began to consider how unfortunate it would be if the boy Rooney was to break his. Honest.

Now I'm a sciencey kind of guy and it seems obvious to me that this strong thought made the relatively short trip to Stamford Bridge and thus rendered a key part of the right punter of Mr Wayne fractured. What can I say, I apologise to the nation. Next time I'll nip such thoughts in the bud. Or perhaps start wearing a hat. At least he'll have some time to get writing Volume 1 of his memoirs.

And while I'm thinking about the bodies exhibition, I think I'll relay one of the comments that someone had wrote in the guest book type thing at the end:

"This was real GANGSTER. Now I no how babies are made lol."