What made you smile today?

Goodness me, ehBeth! I can understand her loving you (well, who doesn't? ) but to be so forthright, so lacking in subtlety!

Anyway, glad this made you smile! Made me smile, too!

With the "i" element. For example, here is how you type the word "italic" in this sentence in italic:


Does that help?

You have heard of Hampton Court I presume? That's where codpieces first came into fashion.

How did we get off onto codpieces?

Better men than us have tried to understand the convoluted peregrinations of Spendy's fanciful flights.

Without success.

It was easy Mac.

rjb had written "WARNING TO "THE HAMPTON'S": WHITE TRASH ALERT!

It made me smile because of the English usage of the word "hampton". I imagined it as a notice on the wall in a VD clinic.

As this thread is about things which make us smile, although I must admit that some of the contributions leave me po-faced, I thought it served the thread's interest, if a thread be allowed to have such a thing as an interest, to share it with the company of those lost souls who are desperate enough to inhabit it.

rjb, being an American of the standard type, questioned this usage so I quoted a wikipedia slang thread for him. Which made me smile as well.

Pursuing the search for a smile Hampton Court entered my waking consciousness and it was intended as an anti-aristocracy joke which I readily admit is not as subtle as some jokes in the oevre: such as Royal Ascot. (Ascot Water Heater Water-Slip Transfer--geddit?)

It seemed a short step to codpieces which are known to make everybody smile. It's a shaggy willy story really. Nothing to it except an attempt to conjure a smile. Bang on topic.

Are you a numpty or just acting it out?

I have a theory that smiles, and indeed laughter, are produced by a connection being made between two brain elements which had previously been unconnected. A reflex, entirely physiological and thus involuntary. Connectons between the romantic and the prosaic being best for stimulating the reflex.

Not many people, for example, would connect Ms Harriet Harman, speaking on the subject of the honesty of most of our MPs, to her knickers, to which she is indisputably connected. When the connection is made, having been prompted, it makes most normal people smile and not a few of them to wonder what the hell women are doing in our highest counsels.



Genuine smiles I mean. Not those condescending ones which verge on sneering at someone's discomfiture or those self flattering ones with which people sometimes pat themselves on the back with to reassure themselves that they are such wonderfully humourous persons. Those are fake smiles.

Novelty is the key. Like the connection between an airliner passing overhead and the three hundred or so anuses arranged in two phalanxes of equal size and pointing in one's direction. If the flight is inward bound it can be thought of as containing a smattering with ring sting.

Well Jack, my old buddy came in today when I was talking to Mrs. Hicks who is the loveliest little ninety year old woman who walks miles and miles every day and I had just taken her picture with my camera and he asked me to see it - as he'd never seen a digital camera before up close.
So I showed it to him and he said, 'She's beautiful - she could be on the cover of a magazine' and smiling at her said, 'You're my number one heart throb - you know that don't you?'
She's pretty deaf I don't think she even heard what he said but she goes, 'Yes, yes...' and walks out the door.
At which point Jack turns to me and says, 'Who was that - I've never seen that person before in my life....'
So I told him who she was and he says, 'Speaking of not recognizing people - I hardly recognize you with those glasses on.'
I said, 'Jack - I've been wearing these glasses every day for three months now.'
And he asks 'Why?'
And I said, 'My eyes are changing and I can no longer read with my contacts in - I have to get a new prescription.'
And then he says, 'I wish you would do that and the sooner the better.'
And then I ask him, 'Why- what difference does it make to you if I wear glasses or contacts?.'
And he says, 'You look like a diplomat in those glasses and I don't trust diplomats.'
To which I respond, 'Yeah - so says Mr. Diplomacy who's walking around telling women he's never seen before they're his number one heartthrob.'

It makes me smile to think of continuing to wear these glasses just because I know it bugs him.

You make him sound like an ingratiating greaseball of the lowest type. He's trying to get you to make the first move. Begging on your knees possibly and mewling like a hungry cat.

Spendius - he is 87 YEARS OLD!

I love this guy - he's not a greaseball at all - he's the most erudite, intelligent, yet purely elementally honest person in the world. He really, really does not like my glasses and he doesn't hesitate to tell me that.
I don't really like them either. But what're you gonna do?
He also goes to church everyday and says a prayer for me. That makes me smile - he walks through the door and says, 'I said one for you...'

He was REALLY, REALLY handsome as a young man though - he brought me a picture of himself when he was traveling the world with the royal navy during and after world war II. Looks like a rugby player doesn't he? He was, apparently. (We're working on his life story - he dictates and I type - because he doesn't know how).
If I'd been born forty years earlier and in England - I might have gotten down on my knees and mewled to him.

It's better this way though - we can just be friends who rag on each other.

This is Jack - then and now:


How can you not smile at that face?

I dunno but it isn't difficult.

Just to close out the NY Hamptons and the UK hamptons story. Andy came back to work today. He said they had a fun time but the place was every bit as he imagined it would be; full of snobby, pretentious people living in a a fairy tale world of very conspicuous consumption.
Yes, people did stare at him. He couldn't tell if they were looking at him with his unusual appearance disdainfully or out of curiosity that he might be some kind of celebrity.
There are no fast food outlets in the Hamptons so, while walking around, Andy and Katie would go to a fancier place for lunch then they are accustomed to. He got the impression, when they were leaving, that the waiter was counting the cutlery.
The owner of the house stopped by Sunday evening, perhaps for the same reason, and managed to drop into the conversation that the house cost $22M, the Mohair carpet in the study cost $7K and the value of one of the paintings easily exceeds the cost of Andy and Katie's house.
I agree, Spendius, that this a quirky thread designed to post things that may or may not make people smile. Sometimes the stories work; sometimes not.

rjb, totally rad chic, maybe some black panthers could have showed.

You would expect a place where the Big Dicks hang out to be called The Hamptons.

And conspicuous consumption is really only a socially acceptable method of flashing in a Darwinian sense.

I am done with my weekend in the Hamptons story. Let's move on.

Since when are you in charge of this thread? You move on. Don't tell us what to do. I'm not your ******* dog.

Duly noted. I meant to say "let me move on." Carry on with the hamptons as long as it amuses you. I don't mind; don't mind at all.
But if others here would like to move on...do you have a problem with that?

The Hamptons are on Long Island.

I have no problem with anything on A2K.

Mysteryman's photos of the woman he loves, his grandkids, and the dog. Very smile-inducing.

Where was that?