Here’s my usual round-up of things which have amused me during the year. Yet again, this has not been a vintage year. So here are the pick of this year’s sparse fruit.

Product of the Year
This is one of the few categories which has done well this year, with quite a few contenders. It has been almost impossible to separate the top five:

ToppCock Silver Hygiene for Man Parts with Odor Neutralizer
Yes, lads, a deodorant for your dangly bits. Buy it on Amazon.

Frisky Light Up Fidget Spinner Anal Plug
It’s what it says on the tin. Again, buy it on Amazon.

 

Unicum Zwack
Yes, I’m afraid we’re still being disreputable, except that this one is a Hungarian liqueur which can be obtained from The Drink Shop.

Cowshed Cow Pat Moisturising Hand Cream
This one’s specially for the girls. Again it may be procured from Amazon.

Walkers Crisps: Brussels Sprout Flavour
As if Brussels Sprouts weren’t bad enough with turkey, Walkers now make special Sprout flavoured crisps. I can hardly wait!

 

Headline
Well, of course, we had to exclude every thing to do with Brexit and the nonsense of the General Election. And that left us with these two winners:

Halal holiday bookings soar as Muslims opt for the Med
From the Guardian, 10 March 2019.

Five hundred goats save the Ronald Reagan library from wildfires
Again from the Guardian, this time on 31 October 2019.

Plonker of the Year
Leaving aside Boris Johnson, there was only ever going to be one winner here:

Jacob Rees-Mogg for this comment on Twitter: The vassal state must not be replaced by penal servitude.

Magazine / Newspaper Title
This year’s award for the best magazine or newspaper title has to go to the Olive Oil Times. Next year the Popeye Times perhaps?

Auction Item
As regular readers will know, we love the strange things which people sell at auctions. This year’s superlative has to be from our local auction house in July:
A pair of designer novelty Christmas trees made from scouring pads on silver plated bases

Personal Name
The winners here are a pair of twin girls born in early December to Peter Florence and his partner: Lark Win Florence and Winter Glad Florence.

Organisation Name
Our winner here is the fucking wonderful Whitstable Profanity Embroidery Group.

Place Name
And, yes, we’re keeping the vein of profanity for this year’s place name winner:
Katies Crotch Road in Maine.

Oxymoron
The accolade for this year’s best oxymoron goes to … Hot Coolant which I spotted as a label by a filler cap on a Chiltern Rail train.

Animal
So now to our animal of the year, where we have two winners but for different reasons.

First place goes to Wisdom the Laysan Albatross who is the world’s oldest known wild bird at 68 years old, and who has produced 30 chicks.

And then there’s the wonderfully named Alston’s singing mouse, Scotinomys teguina

Sport
Having said this isn’t a vintage year, I again find myself having to declare a group with two winners. So this years joint winners of sport of the year are: Unicycle Hockey (basically Ice Hockey on unicycles) and Mule Dressage. In both cases one is left asking “Why?”.

Do what?
There are five winners in this year’s competition to make one say “WTF?”.

I would favor to call together among anyone sympathetic to pursuing higher tangled community subjects as regards our line of work, associate me through my web page conceding that you think the same.
[Hat-tip: Chris Comley on Facebook, 21 January 2019]

… light is known to be fuzzy at the quantum level. With the help of a team in Australia, researchers are sharpening the light by squeezing the fuzziness.
[From BBC News]

This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.
[The blurb for Nicholas Birns, The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space]

We introduced a control groups for this treatment group as one each for the three treatment groups too.
[Hat-tip: Steve Olle]

Y’all need to remember that heteronormative whiteness is the discursive cultural mechanism by which an oppressive hegemonic discourse of phallogocentrism serves to delegitimise a black/homoexclusive modality and reinscribes a proxi-fascist rearticulation of power structures.
[Titania McGrath on Twitter]

OK, so that’s all for this 2019 edition. We’ll be looking out for brilliance again next year; contributions are always welcome. Let’s see if we can make it a vintage year!