Things to brighten up a Monday morning.

To be honest, this first one made me laugh out loud and I had to tell my colleagues.

It’s from South Korea and is the story of how a woman had a “fight” with her robotic vacuum cleaner in that, she set it going and then decided she wanted a nap so lay down on the floor. The vacuum cleaner thought her hair was dirt and started vacuuming it up. She called the fire brigade to get her free.

The second one is dear to my heart. If you’re a regular reader you’ll know about my “wine diet”. Now this isn’t any old wine. No, it’s any old RED wine. Now, the DailyHateMail regularly has articles telling you how red wine is good for you/bad for you (in fact, it regularly has articles on virtually everything, one time extolling the virtues of whatever it is and the next telling you how it will kill you) and, obviously, one should take no notice. However, recently, a number of friends have been asking if I’ve lost weight (which I haven’t, unfortunately – although I don’t weigh myself, I can tell by whether my jeans and shirts fit) and I wondered if it was because, apparently, red wine helps to keep you slim!

And, I guess, with my intake, I really should have lost weight! LOL

Marrone, maroon, catsagna and Chesternut 5

This, being Autumn, in Italy, is the time for chestnuts. I actually quite like chestnuts although F can’t stand them. Ah well.

However, if you buy the candied version, they are called marron glacé – the French name.

So, this morning I’m chatting with my colleague over coffee (you know, the one who has “blonde moments”) and, as she often does, she will be talking about something and then say to me,

“theword, you know what is?”

In this case, the word was castagna. Now, I do know what this means but sometimes I just reply “no”, as I did this morning.

She said, “oh, you know, marron?” This made me laugh. I explained that this was a French word, not English.

She seemed surprised by this. “But, Marron 5?”

This made me laugh more. What she meant was Maroon 5, the group. I had to explain that maroon is not the same as marron. But what really made me laugh is that all this time she has been thinking of Maroon 5 as Chestnut 5!

I said that the word was a colour – a sort of dark red (I always thought a kind of purplish-red although when I looked it up it’s supposed to be a brownish-red, the name having come from the French word for chestnut).

So, all these things turn a kind of full circle – castagna (It) = marrone (It) [both a type of chestnut and a colour] = marron (Fr) [as in marron glacé] = chestnut (Eng) which could = a darker version of maroon (Eng) [colour] = the first part of the name of a group, Maroon 5!

Of course, there is also a friend of F’s who regularly calls castagna “chesternuts” which always makes me smile.

I further explained to my colleague that Maroon 5 was a group name and said that, for example, a famous (in Italy) group from the 70s or 80s was Pooh – which, of course, could be translated as cacca as pooh is an alternative spelling of poo. Of course there is also Winnie-the-Pooh – but I always thought that name had something to do with Christopher Robin’s idea of fun, since children always think bodily functions are funny.

Anyway, while we’re here, let’s have a bit of Maroon 5:

and a little bit of I Pooh [The Shit, if you like] (who, if you’re not Italian, I’ll bet you’ve never heard of!):

A Makem and a Geordie go for a job

Had to give you this joke:

A makem (man from Sunderland) applied for a job at a factory in his home town. A geordie (man from Newcastle) applied for the same job and since both applicants had similar qualifications, the manager asked them to take a test. When the results were in, both men had scored 19 out of 20.

The manager went to the makem and said, “Thank you for coming to the interview, but we’ve decided to give the geordie the job.”

The Makem said, “Why? We both got 19 questions correct. This being Sunderland and me being from Sunderland surely I should get the job.”

The manager replied, “We have made our decision not on the correct answers, but on the question you got wrong.”

The makem said, “And just how would one incorrect answer be better than another?”

The manager said, “Simple. On question number 7 the geordie wrote down, ‘I don’t know.’

“You put down, ‘Neither do I ‘”

Lifted from Of course, I could be wrong…..