Hot and bothered

ROCK stars are known for their eccentric relationship with inanimate objects. They crash cars into swimming pools. (Keith Moon.) They toss TV sets out windows. (Nearly all of them.)

There’s always a danger such antics will become cliched and commonplace. Which is why it’s essential to constantly add to the repertoire.

For example, Travis frontman Fran Healy has been tampering with a freezer whose door refused to shut because its innards were jampacked with ice. Fran grabbed a nearby hairdryer (rock icons are vain chaps who always have a hairdryer handy) and blasted the freezer with hot air for two hours solid, thus vanquishing the ice.

Which does seem a tad excessive. Surely it would have been easier (and more satisfying) to toss the freezer out the window, to join the many TV sets rusting down below.

Doggone it

FORMER Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale is still getting to grips with modern technology. During an online Zoom meeting she was forced to apologise because her dog was snoring loudly behind her.

Useful advice for Kezia: Lock the dog out the room before your meeting begins. Or better yet, have more entertaining meetings. Then the pooch won’t fall asleep in the first place.

Lap dog

AND while we’re on the subject of man’s best friend… Reader Grant Keane wonders what excuse lazy school children use nowadays when they forget to complete assignments. He imagines it must be passe to mutter: “The dog ate my homework.”

Instead, all the cool kids probably say: “The dog used his paw to hit delete on my laptop.”

Marcel Marceau massacred

A CRUEL joke about a mime that we recently published has outraged reader Hugh Peebles to such a great extent that he has provided us with another.

“How do you shoot a mime?” he asks.

“With a silencer.”

Theatrical hit

WITH the doors of theatres shut at present, Stephen O’Neill has been thinking about A.E. Pickard, who ran the Britannia Panopticon, starting in the early years of the last century.

Our reader recalls that the roguish impresario encouraged his boisterous Glasgow audiences to throw shipyard rivets, nails and rancid turnips at substandard performers.

As Pickard often pointed out: “There was no turn unstoned.”

Face facts

WE are currently collecting words for what we are calling our Super-Strange Dictionary for Super-Strange Times. Our latest contributor is David Donaldson, who suggests:

Maskerade, n. Demonstration organised by anti-maskers.

Classic behaviour

SOPHISTICATED reader Tom Platt wants to buy old copies of Classical Music Magazine. “I’m looking for Bach issues,” he explains.