The Fall and Rise of Stray Thoughts

1. Am I the only one who thinks that there’s a joke to be made about the fact that George Bush Senior had a Vice President called Quayle, and the current V-P shooting someone whilst out on a Quail hunt? I haven’t seen anyone else comment on it, so feel free to work up the exact details of the joke yourself and drop it into conversation. No need to credit me.
2. There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the ‘death of the sitcom’, probably part-fuelled by the fact that the US Networks are having a hard time finding something which proves to have the broad appeal of Friends or Seinfeld. But it’s discussed a lot in the UK too, and there are constant references to the fact that in the 1970s, sitcoms would get huge ratings, the like of which could barely be dreamed of now. Um, everyone’s remembering that there were only three TV channels in those days, right? The maths is fairly simple, even if you only apply it to terrestrial channels: 30m ÷ 5 = 6m (if you’re lucky), and so on…
3. One of the greatest nonsenses and least impressive comebacks of all time has to be ‘Takes one to know one’. It’s so weak as to be meaningless to my mind, and effectively says ‘I have no reply to that, have a cliché’, in which case silence would surely be the better option?
4. Twice that I know of, people have noted down the title of the book I’ve been reading on the tube, presumably to see about buying a copy later if it proves their sort of thing. The first time it happened was a year or two ago, when I was reading a book about the life of Aleister Crowley. The second time was this morning, reading a quite insane travel-type book (I’ll review it here soon, as there’s a startling amount I have to say about it), when I became aware that the man next to me was scribbling the name of the book on a piece of card he’d retrieved from his pocket. I looked back to the book, where, a line or three later, the author started to recount a meeting he claimed he’d had with … Aleister Crowley. Hmm.