Quite a good set this Five Question Friday….

What is the funniest thing you saw on Facebook/twitter this week?

I’ve been working offline quite a bit this week so haven’t been scouring the net for unnecessary hours as is my wont normally…I haven’t really come across anything THAT funny this week, certainly not as funny as “I’d rather shit in my hands and clap!!!“

I had seen this before and remember when the incident first occurred (yes, this is a true story!) – it may be more scary than funny when you consider that there really are people that dumb out there, alive well and walking around….

What is your favorite Olympic event?

Don’t care…maybe the one where it all ends and the world goes back to normal – except maybe the hosting nation that hasn’t bothered to learn from any of its predecessors and now founds itself broker than Greece….

I think that the Olympics have become just yet another commercial event with a vague tenuous sporting connection and any interest I might have had, vanished when synchronised swimming was recognised as a ‘sport’…

Do your kids do chores around the house? If so, what are they and how old are the children? Do they get paid for them?

They did and they liked it…actually we only cared about the first bit…you live in the house, you do some work around the house, end of…Pay? No, not really, but then they never really wanted for much either…

If you get bad service/food do you complain or keep quiet?

If I’m unhappy with food, I may send it back…unlike Mama M, I’m not too worried about the dreaded ‘loogie’ or ‘ throat slime’ in my replacement meal: I figure that the standard of many service staff now is so bad you run that risk anyway – if you don’t like it then I guess you just committed yourself to a life of cooking your own food…

America has this great way of dealing with poor service…it’s called tipping…no service, no tip…for all the whining about it here, I think the introduction of tipping would lead to a massive increase in service standards in New Zealand…the first time I went to the US, I did a one day bus tour around Oahu. At the lunch stop, everyone just mixed and matched to fill up the tables and I ended up sitting with three generations of women from a single family(apparently all the menfolk had gone off to slaughter defenceless animals or such so the girls were giving themselves a holiday in the sun). Anyway, our waiter was pretty bad (but thought he was personally pretty good); when he brought our bill, he reminded them ” Now don’t forget the tip, ladies...” Famous last words. The Mum turned to him and hollered “Tip?! Tip/ I wouldn’t tip you if you were the last waiter on earth; you were so bad you should be tipping us…!!!!” Lil ol’ me was a little taken aback at the depth of her feeling and the loudness of her voice. She explained “Here, sweetie, we tip for good service…lousy service, no tip; ask for a tip, no tip – it’s etiquette. And you see how packed this place is today and the size of the queue outside? That boy just got a $100 lesson in etiquette!”

If you could pick ONE frivolous item for your home, what would it be? (massive room sized closet? swimming pool? greenhouse? etc…)

A green house would be too practical here to be ever be considered frivolous and we inherited a semi-room sized closet (two of them) with the house (I think maybe there were bedrooms for kinda short people – certainly there was a bed in one of them) but, yes, a decent swimming pool up here on the side of the Mountain could definitely be considered frivolous and yes, we would so much want to have one…covered, of course, with a powerful heating unit attached….