Karlology Blog Weeks 8-10
The final week of Karl's blog wraps things up with some pictures of Karl with hair and the duvet studio for the upcoming audiobooks.
October 30th, 2008
Thought
Every time I turn the TV these days I see someone trying to win a job. Last night on telly it was some people winning a job at running a restaurant (The Restaurant) Other jobs that have been on offer is office work (The Apprentice) air hostess (Celeb Air) Hairdressing (The Salon). Television has turned into a job centre.
I think we’ve got too many singers in the world now due to Pop Idol and the X Factor so TV should get people interested in other lines of work. We’re short on doctors and nurses so why don’t they do a Doctor Factor. There’s loads of people on waiting lists for surgery so it’ll be good for them as they’ll be seen to sooner, and viewers will love it as it will be full of sob stories (being told over Fix You by Coldplay).
I bet there’s loads of young people out there who could be good surgeons. The news says that all young kids are now carrying knives so they may as well be given something good to do with them.
November 3rd, 2008
I DREAM THEREFORE I AM.
Cheers to Steve for sending this fact in:
What I have learnt by Steve Lynn
Armadillos, possums and sloths spend up to 80 percent of their lives sleeping. I once said “If you haven’t got eyes, you shouldn’t have wings”, when talking about moths. After learning the above fact, I don’t think Armadillos, possums and sloths should have eyes. It seems a waste when they are only being used 20% of the time. I wouldn’t mind, but sloths don’t seem to do that much when they are awake anyway. They use the 20% that they are awake to plan where they are going to sleep. It’s like their dreams are more real life than their real life. They may aswell be in a coma.
In my book Karlology I wrote a chapter about the day I had a day at London Zoo where I learnt that sloths are half deaf, only defecate once a week and sleep for 15 to 18 hours a day.
I’m starting to wonder if my aunty Nora is a sloth. She has all those symptoms.
November 5th, 2008
BACK FROM THE DEAD
Heard about some scientists in Japan that have managed to make some mice clones from mice that were frozen at minus 20C 16 years ago. After thawing out the dead mice, the researchers collected nuclei from cells in their brain tissue and then injected them into empty eggs whose own DNA had been removed, to generate cloned embryos.
It’s all very clever but it’s a lot of messing about when you think you can buy a new fresh mouse for about £2. It’s the same reason I’d never make my own bread. Too much hassle for such a small saving. It would be worth doing it with guinea pigs cos they’re quite expensive, but then they’ll take up more room in your freezer.
I’d never be able to do any of this cloning as I haven’t got a freezer to store dead mice, only a fridge.
Here’s a chat we had about cloning on one of our audiobooks (available at iTunes)
November 7th, 2008
EXTREME SCRABBLE
I like a game of Scrabble. We call it Squabble in our house cos when we play it me Mam and Dad end up having an argument over a word. Me Mam gets fed up cos she thinks the game goes on for too long. She says that’s why they call them ‘bored’ games. I think I’m pretty good at Scrabble. My brain seems to know quite a lot of words that my mouth never thinks of saying when I speak.
To celebrate 60 years of Scrabble, people are playing it in extreme situations. Scuba divers are playing it with sharks around them, sky divers are playing in mid air, and a couple of fellas played it with a few crocodiles watching. Maybe there were more than two players when the game started.
See what word you can make out of these letters. Kola Glory
November 10th, 2008
Cold Head
I went bald about ten years ago. I put it down to one of three things:
1) Mistaking my mams hair dye for shampoo when I was younger.
2) Working a 24 hour shift making Roy Chubby Brown tapes (read about that in this book)
3) Catching something from the scruffy barbers I used to go to. He used to wash my hair in a sink that was full of used cups. It was a hut that was next to a train station that started off as a place you could buy flowers, but that closed after bad business and it reopened as a barbers. I think the same fella who cut flowers thought he could cut hair. It’s just a shame he didn’t use any Miracle Grow on me head.
It’s at this cold time of year that I think how nice it would be to have hair again.
This is a wig that a mate bought for me. I think if you’re gonna lie about having hair you may as well have a lot of it.
Seeing as we’re talking about the head, Ricky describes it to people around the world by saying “Karl Pilkington’s got a head like a f***ing orange” so I thought this was a good time to show you this:
It’s the skin from an orange I had earlier. When I peeled it the skin came off in one piece.
“I’ve got an orange that looks like a f***ing elephant”
By the way, I’ve done a christmas card to help raise money for ‘Children in Need’. You can buy one here.
For ‘Karl in Need’ buy here.
November 13th, 2008
Monkey news
What I have learnt by Grant Bradford
Some organizations such as Helping Hands have been training capuchin monkeys as helpers to assist quadriplegics and other people with severe spinal cord injuries or mobility impairments. After being socialized in a human home as infants, the monkeys undergo extensive training before being placed with a quadriplegic. Around the house, the monkeys help out by doing tasks including microwaving food, washing the quadriplegic’s face, and opening drink bottles.
Cheers Grant for sending that fact in to the ‘Learn Me Something’ part of the blog. It just goes to show that everything is still evolving. Some things quicker than others. Chimps were being used to sell tea bags in the 1980’s, yet look at them now, they’ve got jobs being home help.
Jellyfish don’t seem to have moved on at all. They reckon they might have first appeared 650 million years ago and they ain’t even set yet.
There’s a Charles Darwin exhibition on at the moment in London. He’s the one who annoyed a lot of people back in 1859 cos he said that us humans have come from monkeys. Imagine how it would have gone down if he had told everyone that they’d also be nicking our jobs.
It’s getting worse as well, they are taking our jobs and WE are doing theirs.
November 19th, 2008
JUST BUILD
‘I was Head of Production at XFM radio three years ago’ is what I thought to myself while sat on the floor in Ricky’s new office, cross legged, piercing holes into the top of duvets. I was making a makeshift studio so we can record some new audiobooks in there.
More of a Togcast than a Podcast (duvet related joke that)
It was like something off the TV programme Scrapheap challenge. The mission being to make a sound proof area on the cheap that can be easily taken down, while at the same time not making too many holes in the wall or ceiling. Ricky was worried so much about having holes put in his walls that his idea for sound proofing was for each of us (me, him and steve) to sit with a duvet over each of our heads. I said this isn’t a good idea as there is an office that over looks his office and it would look like the Ku Klux Klan had moved in, so he agreed to letting me use a few hooks.
Ricky’s last office wasn’t perfect to record the audiobooks in either. Before each recording I had to go and tell the fella who worked upstairs to stop typing, as he hit the letters on his keyboard so hard that the sound could be heard on the recording. He was no Anne Frank
This is a picture of duvet 1 of 6.
It’s odd to think the Egyptians built pyramids over 1000 years ago.
It still needs to be tested, but if it works, a new audiobook should be released on iTunes in the next few months or so. We want to come up with something new to chat about so we can put all talk of insects and monkey’s to bed. Which with all these duvets about, should be pretty easy.
In the meantime, why not read a book instead.