The Frumplingtons

You’ve heard of slide guitar: now here’s slice guitar. It’s like normal guitar music (plucking, strumming and posing) but played on an egg slicer instead of a Stratocaster.

Egg slicer guitar sounds best if, as illustrated below, you use an authentic eggshell plectrum.

If enough of us got together with homemade instruments, we could probably revive skiffle. By the way, I also play ‘kitchen percussion’ (i.e., improvised kit of lo-fat spread tubs, butter knife, saucepan lids etc), so in a way I’m a bit like the Phil Collins of neo-skiffle: sometimes up front, sometimes at the back.

I’ve even started writing songs for the egg slicer, starting with a new version of an old Beatles classic:

Eggshell ma belle
These are words that go together well,
My eggshell

What I’m wondering, though, is whether to bother with all the acoustic stuff. Why not go electric right from the start? Now, all I have to do is hotwire the slicer into our hi-fi speakers, attach a wah-wah pedal and…

BOOM!!!!

(Oops. If anyone asks, you haven’t seen me round here, ok?)

I have always enjoyed the Isley Brothers song, Summer Breeze. Shana likes it too. Or at least she did until yesterday evening. She will never be able to hear it again, though, without hearing my vegetarian rewrite, which starts thus:

Calabrese,
Makes me feel fine

Sheer laziness (and a tendency to be a tad pernickety about things like rhyme and meter) means I have progressed no further with my veggielyrical ambitions. You, however, may feel free to expand on the promising beginnings above. Consider it one of those Internet memes if you like. Or an exercise in creative writing. Or — failing all else — a reminder to keep up with your five-a-day nutrition programme. Share your efforts via our comments, if it makes you feel better.

Note to scholars: our grub-eared and doggy (no, hang on…ah, whatever!) copy of Chambers dictionary seems to think ‘calabrese’ is pronounced like some sort of Italian delicacy. We, however, have always heard it pronounced to rhyme with ‘breeze’. Maybe we hang out with the wrong kind of people.

Poor Shana. She’s traumatised. Wanna know why? Well, two days ago she found out…

(I can hardly bring myself to type this.)

…she found out that she shares a birthday with…

[Takes deep breath before resuming post. P’raps it’s better just to type it real fast and have done with it. Right, here goes.]

…with…

[Gulp!]

…with…

…Amy Winehouse!

Phew! That’s better. I feel fine now.

(Shana doesn’t, though.)

Inside my head lives the advertising agency from hell. The campaigns these guys invent are, as a rule, about ten times as corny as a plate full of corn on the cob. And there ain’t no off switch!

Thank goodness, then, that I can offload their nonsensical ravings onto you.

At the moment, the little guys upstairs are working on a series of ads for one of those air freshener companies; Gladewick or Airsick, or whatever they’re called. You know who I mean.

The ads are all about a new range of potpourri. (That’s POE-pourri, not POT-pourri, just so as we’re clear about that.)

The latest ad is set to music. The tune is ‘Denis’ by Blondie, but the words have all been changed. The advert now goes something like this:

Establishing shots. Middle class ma and pa, cheeky brat of a kid, family dog etc. all enter bathroom and exit pronto holding noses and with expressions of disgust. (Usual ad cliches.) Song plays in background:

Denis Denis, you’ve got a smelly loo,
Denis Denis, oh what will you do,
Denis Denis, you’ve got a stinky loo-ooh-ooh

Next shots show the new product solving the problem. Smiles all round. Group hug. Closing chorus:

Pot pourri, ooh-be-do,
No more smell of poo
Pot pourri, ooh-be-do,
No more smell of poo!

Give it a little while and this ad could become a reality. With advertising, nothing surprises me any more.

For firm proof that some people just don’t get all that rap and hippity-hop music, here’s what Shana recently asked me:

“What, exactly, is a ‘Gangsta’s Pair o’ Dice’?”

Aw shucks! I’ve no idea. Sorry.

The Eurovision Song Contest final is being held next Saturday. We can hardly wait. We’re already prepared for the big night:

• We’ve got home-made scoresheets and little stubby pencils from the local bookies so we can play along at home and give all those tinpot nations like France and Germany ‘nul points‘.
• We’ve got beer**. And, most important of all,
• We’ve got earplugs!

We’ll be cheering for Dustin the Turkey next weekend. Which turkey will you be voting for?

** Did I say ‘beer’? I meant ‘cake’. Sorry.

Update:

Dustin the Turkey fails to get through the semi-finals

Last week we bought a xylophone. Nothing too elaborate: just fifteen wooden bars and a couple of dinky round-headed mallets.

Tonight, however, we found that the humble xylophone can be the ideal instrument for nervous headbangers; people like me, who like to play along to their favourite heavy metal choons, but who don’t want to bug the neighbours too much. READ MORE >>

The second in what may well be an interminably long series of ‘Record reviews my Mum might have written‘. If you like this and you haven’t seen Mother’s rock reviews, Part 1, go take a look.

But first,

God Save The Queen, by The Sex Pistols

Well…erm…it’s got a good beat, hasn’t it?.

Beeeeeeep!, went the microwave oven.

Shana yawned. “Oh no, not beep again. How boring. It’d make mealtimes much more interesting if someone invented ringtones specifically for microwaves,” she said. “But what tunes would we choose?”

“I know,” I said, knowingly. “That one by those Fast Food Rockers that goes something like: ‘McChicken, McChicken/Fenkucky Tried Donalds and a Hizza Put‘.” [Note: no-one will ever know how much effort I went to, to avoid giving any fast food chains a free mention in this post. I just couldn’t face having to invoice them all for ‘advertising services rendered’.]

So anyway, what microwave ringtones would we choose if they were available?

Well, we could, I suppose, go for a touch of irony, and send up the whole ringtones phenomenon by opting for our microwave to play that old cellphone classic, Grand Valse to let us know when our meat pies are done to a turn.

Other people could choose microwave oven ringtones that are appropriate to their own lifestyles, musical tastes, or cooking abilities:

An incompetent cook might, for example, probably be best advised to choose the Smiths’ Panic or The Bee Gees’ Tragedy.

And up until recently, I myself could have chosen Toast, that all-time favourite by Paul Young’s former group, Streetband. It is, after all, the only meal in which I am confident that I excel.

And besides, I don’t think there’s a song called ‘Blackened Pasty‘ yet, is there?

This is Cawley the crow. He’s one of those Ty beanies. Sweet, isn’t he? Notice how Mint Sauce, under the pretext of introducing Cawley to you, is trying to muscle in and hog the limelight. What a prima donna!

Cawley came to us in late June, all the way from Sheffield at around the time the city was flooded in this year’s incessant summer rains.

See those denims? He’s a bit of a rocker, our Cawley. Favourite band: Status Crow. Yeah, I know, it’s corny, isn’t it? And besides, they’re not even proper denims: they’re dungarees.

Ah, whatever…

Cawley doesn’t care for boy bands: he prefers bird bands and singers. Here’s a few examples:

• Mott the Hoopoe.
• Kaiser Choughs.
• Sophie Ellis Beakstor.
• Sly and the Family Stonechat.
• And legendary blues guitarist, Gary Moorhen.

And he’s also a big fan of that old Number 1 single by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey. You know the one. It goes: “She’s an easy plover….”

Any more ornithologically inspired suggestions for music Cawley might like? Leave ‘em in the comments section.