Mim

IS there a team jersey? Where do I need to send a stamped addressed envelope and a cheque to get one?

Sarah is a powerhouse, they created a wonderful space for often-marginalised voices here, and you should read about it.

At first I was like “oh no, we can’t laugh at a car collisio-“ and then it. it just. escalated. and escalated. and now I am wheezing 🤣

My husband has just shown me your work and I am in love. Utterly delightful.

Loving Juno Dawson’s HMRC trilogy. Anyone else a fan? They’re really fun books. Tearing through them at a rate of knots.

Going outside but shaking my head the whole time so people know I don’t agree with what’s going on

Basically I’d love to invite my friends to open mics I’m on and be able to guarantee at least to some degree that they’re not going to get dehumanised in their seats by some chucklefuck I’m sharing the bill with as a result of their wish to support me. That feels like a low bar, right? Christ.

I’m not talking here about clumsy attempts at allyship, even. Just out and out appalling transphobia. I wish more comedy nights had clear policies that said “we don’t want to put on this stuff”. (Chortle-award winning Quantum Leopard *does* have an excellent policy along those lines, for example.)

And so many blokes who, after some beer, go “I could do stand-up. I’ll do it now, in fact! Wahey!” with zero prep. May the Lord one day grant me a FLECK of your blithe confidence, whilst sparing me all of your attempts at material. 9000% aspirational drive, 0% effort. You fill me with horrified awe.

My fellow aspiring cis comics: some of you really are devoting a worrying amount of time to what you appear to think are zingy one-liners about that Supreme Court ruling. I’ve not heard a single one so far that didn’t sound like a school bully. You need to cease this. This is not our story to tell.

Here’s the ‘But’ about London open mics.

I have encountered some of the most racist, homophobic, transphobic material I’ve ever heard on the open mic circuit. All of it from people punching down from outside the house, as it were.

Stand up comedy thoughts:
- Lots of nights these days encourage people not to heckle. That’s nice! Love that.
- many people are really friendly and supportive and it’s been a delight to meet other aspiring comics.

Can you tell I’m about to go “But-“?

I’m about to go “But-“.

So I’ve started doing stand-up comedy, following a six week course at @angelcomedy.bsky.social. I have the bug real bad. It’s SO much fun. Last night was my fourth ever gig, and my best one yet, I reckon. I met Alan Francis, who was closing the show, and he said I was “really good” and made my YEAR.

In the Ewe language, an equivalent phrase to “between a rock and a hard place” is hlo madekotoku; kpakpla tse do, makplamakpla ha do. It means “you’ve got yourself a problem if you carry a porcupine in a sack or not.”

Honestly the most delightful thing I have seen all week.

A wombat undermined our house to build his burrow. Nearly $50k in foundation repairs, plus $200 in chicken wire to keep him out. Now he’s done the same thing to the shed, so $5k to build a new shed on the other side of the property. Here he is, old Fat Bastard himself.. Edit: it’s wild how many people are suggesting we “get rid” him... Apart from it being very much illegal, the idea would just never even cross my mind. It’s his home too. He’s now settled in his new burrow, and our house is wombat-proofed. The worst he does now is dig up my potatoes.

There's a thread on AskReddit asking, "People who have had to drain their life’s savings on a single event, what happened?"

99% of the answers are depressing American stories about medical bills, 1% is an Australian who found a wombat burrowing under their house.

I feel I have been "like a crocodile in a wallet factory" many times in my life.

Ooh, good suggest. Will check that out. Good name. Nice and goth.

Hmmm. What's a good way to have a newsletter that isn't Substack?

Sci-fi view of The Future: We'll all have flying cars and holidaying on Mars! Disease will be fixed with a quick blast from a Star Trek thingy!

The Actual Future:

I read this last week. It's wonderful. I'm so grateful for it. It's exactly the book I would, if I had a TARDIS, go back to 1996 and give my younger self.

Meet The Elves - Miranda! A screenshot from Patreon.

And now I’ve posted that I see the link doesn’t even have a preview on it, just a login screen. Rest assured that I was obviously really cool, or something.

Hey! I was on Meet The Elves, which is bonus Patreon content for No Such Thing As A Fish! Learn how to make any garment super unfashionable with this one neat historical trick!

www.patreon.com/checkout/nos...

BBC headline for Cornwall: Night vision camera captures beaver breaking wind

International news: everything is terrible, awful, the end times

Meanwhile in Cornwall: beaver's farted again lads

Often preceded by “absolute” or “an absolute f****ing-“.

I use “bucket”, “ladder” and “appliance” a great deal in this context.

Found out today that the word ‘rebarbative’, meaning repellant/grim etc, is from the Latin for ‘beard’, as in ‘irritating and prickly, like a beard’. OED links it to the idea of confrontationally standing ‘beard-to-beard’. Sorry, beardy friends. (I do not find you rebarbative. I married one of you.)

People have interpreted this as a call for a boycott, when I actually want a wealth tax so aggressive it'd make Lenin say, "steady on, lad" if Lenin talked like Wallace from Wallace and Gromit.

On the weekend I was on Duolingo, right, and I went to activate my righteously-earned 'you did a German lesson at an ungodly time!' XP boost, and it offered me a free trial of some weird and terrible "art" app with a pile of AI in it. I was *not* impressed.