964 Little Rays Of Sunshine

Holy, crap! I just added them up and found that this is my nine-hundred and sixty-fourth post! Another few weeks and it'll be my thousandth.

That is quite staggeringly scary … nine-hundred and sixty-four pages of complete and utter toss; a veritable fœtid pismire of unconscionable wank.

Will I let the side down by writing anything worth reading today?
Will I fuck …
Let's talk drivel.

Camp drivel, to be precise.
Both Katie and Lucio have recently held forth on the subject of camp, with lucidity and insight.
Never one to be blessed with either of those things, I - on the other hand - shall reminisce about that most disgusting and unpalatable of childhood privations: Camp "coffee".

Let me take you by the hand and lead you back in time to Austerity Britain shortly after the end of post-war rationing.
Exhausted by war and crippled by debt, we survived on such things as powdered egg, Spam™ and Camp coffee.
Those were the days when the only fruit we saw was an orange in our Christmas sock.
We didn't get to taste actual coffee until the 1970s, when mum and dad bought a new-fangled "percolator", which may go some way to explaining my overcompensatory caffeine addiction in adult life.

What we had was this wretched stuff:

Made by the Scots - probably in revenge for Culloden, and originally envisioned as a quick way of brewing something awful for military purposes - this ghastly concoction consisted (and still consists if you have the stomach for it) mostly of water and sugar, together with 26% chicory essence and 4 (yes, four)% coffee essence.
It is a thick, syrupy glop that is truly nasty, even when massively diluted in hot water and leavened with yet more sugar.
Totally unpalatable.
Utterly disgusting.
Ick.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it produces a cup of brown liquid that is almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee.
I still shudder at the memories …

In an amusing twist, a couple of years back, the company changed the label (much to the fusty spuffling fury of racist old tories and Daily Mail readers … "This is political correctness gone MAD!") to finally allow the Sikh manservant to sit down and share a mug of this revolting liquid with his Scottish superior, having been standing there with his tray since 1876, when the stuff was first unleashed upon us.

Anyhoo … enough camp nostalgia; let's get nostagic about condoms instead.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase was inspired by the title of the accompanying song: "Weekend".
The phrase was:

何かには週末

"Nani ka ni wa shuumatsu".

This probably makes no sense whatsoever in Japanese, as it is an English idiomatic phrase.
Another classic would be "A piece of cake" for something that we find easy, yet translated into French and rendered as "Un morceau de gâteau" it becomes gibberish.

As with 何かには週末, which - as any fule kno - means "Something for the weekend."

Apparently - having discussed this with a Colonial - the phrase is meaningless even to our cousins across the pond, so please allow me to elucidate.

Let us step back again for a moment into Austerity Britain.
Due to a mixture of prudish and cowardly government and nutjob religious pressure, condoms are not actually available anywhere in the country …

… except …

… for some unfathomable reason in … er … barbers' shops.
Accompanying dad to such establishments for a short back and sides in my youth I became familiar with the phrase.
Condoms were deemed too shocking to display, even in such a male-dominated environment as the back room of a barbershop and so - once a gentleman had been shorn - the barber would ask his customary question:
"Something for the weekend, sir?"
Monies would change hands and said gentleman would walk nonchalantly away, wearing an embarrassed smirk, his jacket pocket bulging with stinky rubber.

So …
Now we've got that out of the way, let's dance.
Or "踊りませんか", as you should have learned by now.

Today's phrase for you to learn is a handy one at a dance:
"酔っぱらっただけならまでしも、彼はとんでもないばかをやらかしたんだ。"

As it is Pizzicato Five Week here on the Planet, we'll get jiggy to another of Nomiya Maki's incomparably stylish homages: Baby Portable Rock.

Love that dress!