Make Christmas even merrier this year with this Santa inspired DIY Christmas cracker – just in time for Christmas 2019
It was time to create another fabulous Friday Freebie
With Christmas looming, I felt inspired to create a freebie that was festive, fun and personal.
Why give a Christmas card and chocolate, when you can give the joy of a fat free paper fortune cookie with Christmas greeting and joke?
So why not give it a go? It’s easy, fun, free and most importantly personal.
If I succeeded in my discartoon,
you should have fallen asleep from boredom before you reached this sentence. But if you’re still awake, let’s discuss prefixes, shall we?
English is a funny language that is full of rules that seem to work about 80% of the time. Take prefixes for example.
A prefix as defined by the Oxford dictionary is “a letter or group of letters added to the beginning of a word to change its meaning.” So dis means not and by placing it in front of say like, changes the meaning to not like. The key thing to note here is that when you remove the dis from dislike, you end up with a recognisable word – like. But here’s the 20% catch – you can’t take this approach to all words starting with dis. Take the following:
- Discreet – What I’m about to tell you is no secret. Please be creet about this information and share with everyone you meet”
- Disrupt – The dogs stopped barking allowing me to sleep rupted all night long.
Can you think of any other prefix anomalies?
Yes, the fabulous freebie is back…
and just in time for those last minute Halloween treat creations.
Why not spruce up a Cadbury Freddo frog or Furry friend with a ghoulish witch wrapper?
This template is fun and easy. Simply print, cut, wrap around a chocolate treat and glue to secure (it has been specifically sized for Freddos and Furry friends, but depending in your chocolate, it might work on other treats as well).
What are you waiting for? Get started by clicking here.
In creating this cartoon I explored all those little things in day to day life that drive you crazy or simply make you feel that things could be better.
Obviously, my life is rather tough (not) when the first thing that comes to mind is to list decaf instant coffee as a day breaker. However, I do think that the ‘no data and no wifi’ is a breaker when I reflect on my children’s response to the internet being down.
What’s you’re breaker?
Fear not – no breaker is too small!
…especially a cartoon gif
You’re probably familiar with this proverb, but did you know its origin stems back to Benjamin Franklin?
Yes, rather surprising, as Franklin was known for his contributions to science and pot staring neither hastens nor slows the boiling process. But as you are probably aware, Franklin had many bows to his cap, including the publishing of an almanac under the pseudonym of Poor Richard. Filled with improving proverbs, below are a snippet of some sayings from the Almanacks that were published from 1732 and 1758.
- Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
- Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
- Lost Time is never found again.
- Death takes no bribes.
- Act uprightly, and despise Calumny; Dirt may stick to a Mud Wall, but not to polish’d Marble.
- Fish and Visitors stink in 3 days.
- Tis easy to see, hard to foresee.
And if you want to read more, click here to visit wiki for the full listing.
Do you have a favourite quote?
The ‘blue screen of death’…
We probably have all experienced that gut wrenching moment when the computer unexpectedly freezes right smack bang in the middle of something you really can’t afford to lose. And no matter what quirky computer freeze image the coders come up with to dull that pain – the latest Microsoft blue screen with sideway old school unhappy face emoji in font size 160 pt (no Microsoft, size of emoji does not express greater empathy for the predicament) or the Apple ‘happy’ rainbow spinning wheel (no Apple, there is no happy pot of gold at the end of this rainbow) – there are those few seconds of dread as you fully absorb the impact of the crash and no imagery will soften the blow.
So, can there ever be a funny ending to a computer crash? Well, possibly when you can see it from an even worse outcome beyond the loss of time and data.
I recall the time at work (over 15 years ago now – Eek – has it been that long?!) when I was confronted with the blue screen of death. In despair I called the IT Helpdesk, which had recently been moved to an offshore service provider who spoke english as their second language. The story went a bit like this…
- Me “Hello, I want to report a blue screen of death.”
- Voice on telephone “Um ma’am, can you please repeat?”
- Me “I wish to report a blue screen of death. It’s completely dead and nothing I have tried has fixed the situation.”
- Voice on telephone “Ma’am, this is most alarming. Who is it? Are you sure they are not breathing? I think you need to call an ambulance immediately.”
Do you have a blue screen story? Let me know.
I’m not sure if Aldi operates the same way across the globe, but here in Australia, it’s always this frantic packing process as the sales assist speedily scans items and flings them to the modestly sized ‘non-packing’ bench for you to pack on the go. I use the word ‘non-packing’ bench deliberately, as it’s not a packing bench – The Aldi preference is that you place all your groceries back into the trolley and then wheel over the ‘proper’ packing benches and take your time to properly pack. However, I can’t stand the notion of double handling; so I subject myself to this hurtling of groceries and hope for the best – sometimes you win, sometimes you lose 🙂
Tell me of your shopping experience. Is it just me?
Let’s end with a bit of mandatory and possibly useless Tetris trivia…
Did you know that:
- All Tetris pieces are polyominoes (a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge). In Tetris, they specifically are tetrominos as each shape is made from four squares
- The game was named by the Russian game designer – tetra from the Greek numerical prefix to represent the four squares and tennis, his favourite sport. He could have been super dorky and called it Tetrominis, but thankfully simplicity ruled
- All seven Teris shapes were given a name (Heck, why not? After you’ve named the game, you might as well not stop and name the pieces as well, right?). Ready for it?
- Teewee – the ‘T’ shaped piece, or the bag on green beans in the cartoon above – I guess, a bit of an obvious name to warm us up to the other names ahead.
- Smashboy – the square piece, or the bag of chips and T-paper above – OK, a kind of cool sounding name for a game.
- Hero – the long piece, or the final orange juice bottle that lost the game for us – I sort of get this name – if you manage to land it beautifully without wasting space, then you could consider yourself a bit of a hero.
- Orange Ricky – the L shaped piece, or carrots – Well, OK – the Nintendo game version is orange, but what’s with Ricky? How about Orange Lucky to highlight the ‘L’?
- Blue Ricky – this is the mirror image of Orange Ricky. It is dark blue, I guess.
- Cleveland Z – the funny Z shape, or the tri-colour pack of peppers. Nup – don’t get this one at all – Z yes, Cleveland Nup
- Rhode Island Z – Yep, another mirror image, so it looks like a S. Mmmmmmmmm??? No idea.
So did you beat me?
Chances are, if you’re male, you lost the first round as experiments have shown males have a tendency to throw a rock on the first move, hence, I played paper in round one – sneaky, huh?
Yes, I did my Google homework in constructing this gif. Searching ‘how to win at paper, scissor, rock’ lead to a bumper search result of 968,000 hits, with a plethora of strategies and tips to win. Here’s a summary of winning moves:
- If competing against a male, throw paper in round one
- Inexperienced players tend to throw paper on their first throw, so play scissor in round one
- Copy cat counter move – inexperienced players tend to throw the winning move from their last play. So, if they threw rock, their next move is more likely to be paper, so you throw scissor – Boom!
- Be unpredictable – when in doubt, throw paper as a surprise. Average stats are 35.4% rock, 35.0% scissor and 29.6% paper
- Three in a row – most people don’t want to feel predictable, so typically if they throw a rock two times in a row, their next move will either be paper or scissor. Improve your chances by throwing a rock on round three as statistically they are more likely to throw scissor.
So now you know as much as me, let me know how your next paper, scissor, rock challenge goes.
PS. I find I revisit topics every now and then, and paper, scissor, rock is one of them. Check out my last take on the game.
