Patria o muerte!
There's a new restaurant opened up near me, advertising "The Genuine Cuban Experience". And it's true; the staff all seem to have a slightly haunted look and there is a big and slightly sinister-looking bloke walking round checking up on them all the time. Every time I go there I feel like I ought to bring a copy of "The Constitution of Liberty" and offer to carry messages to the outside world. And oddly enough, when I go back, the person who served me the last time seems to have disappeared and all of the other waiters claim not to know who I'm talking about.
Apparenty they have excellent healthcare though.
This is only *almost* as bad as your Mr. Mankiw joke. You're improving.
ReplyDeletewow, a long term reader, thanks! It is, on the other hand, substantially better than the one about the Royal family "blackening Princess Diana's name" by calling her DeeAhnia though so the short term trend is up too.
ReplyDelete¡Patria o muerte!", surely?
ReplyDeletehow do you do that?
ReplyDeleteWhat, how do I manage to get the punctuation wrong in a posting correcting somebody else's punctuation? It's called "posting before having had one's opening coffee of the day" and it is something one should never do.
ReplyDeleteIf however you mean "how do you do the inverted exclamation mark?" then there are a variety of ways - certain combinations of keys that produce different symbols, or even cutting-and-pasting from the internet. In my case however I am posting from Spain and am using a Spanish keyboard, which makes it easier. (A bit harder, though, when I want to do a pound sign.)
Oh I see, it's a specific character. That actually makes a lot more sense than what I thought, which was that there was a way of just making arbitrary characters appear upside down.
ReplyDeleteI have a vague memory that I first found out that Spanish uses inverted exclamation and question marks when reading Asterix in Spain as a child. I think that the Spaniards in the book spoke in speech bubbles using Spanish punctuation.
ReplyDeleteSeated as I am in a children's bookshop, I'd normally expect to be able to check this - except of course that the copy I have here is in Spanish (Astérix en Hispania) and all the punctuation is Spanish.
¡ʎsɐǝ sı ɓuıʇıɹʍ uʍop ǝpısdn
ReplyDeleteYou're definitely correct on the ¡Asterix in Spain! front; I remember being confused by it as a child.
ReplyDeleteSpecial bonus Asterix fact: the books were translated into English by Oliver Kamm's mum.
John B
No.
ReplyDeleteThat's a fantastic one if true, right up there with the great Tippex fact.
It's a distinguished family. Anthea Bell's brother (thus Oliver Kamm's uncle) is the former MP Martin Bell.
ReplyDeleteThe boy must have been such a disappointment to them.
ReplyDeleteWell, we're most of us a disappointment to our parents (and my parents are a disappointment to me).
ReplyDeleteI'm just playing with upside down words you can make out of normal characters
ReplyDeletepunosun
is my best so far
¡ʎsɐǝ sı ɓuıʇıɹʍ uʍop ǝpısdn
ReplyDeleteI did that gag here.