Humour

Kris at work is kind of my sideways boss. She doesn't manage the education programmes but she does manage the Nature House and Park. Today she had been to a City workshop on using humour as a management strategy. A small detail that she said had stuck in her head on the way out had been that laughter had been shown to improve sleep patterns.

But it also reminded me of one of those irritating pieces of advice that some person who had never had to manage a classroom passed on to us, 'defuse the situation with humour'.
Clearly there are situations where this is an option, and any experienced teacher already does this, but there are situations where injecting a bit of humour would be like trying to put out a chip-pan fire with water, rather incendiary.

I like Canadian humour in general. There are some terrific home grown series that I don't think make it out of Canada.
Brits can already watch 'Trailer Park Boys' but 'Corner Gas', in my opinion one of the finest things on TV, as far as I can tell, hasn't yet made it across either the border into the States or the Atlantic. I send episodes to Austen and Sue and they wait eagerly for more. The first time I saw 'Corner Gas' was on a British Rail train on the way to Portsmouth. I had just been to collect Kevin from Heathrow and he had the laptop with him. He played an episode and I soon had the entire carriage staring at me as I was doubled up with laughter.

I have written before about 'Little Mosque on the Prairie'. I love it and Austen pointed out to me that it was mentioned in the British Press last week, since a write -up appeared in 'The Week'.
On last week's episode, Baber goes into the mosque and finds kids carving Halloween pumpkins. He goes rushing off to complain to the Imam, Amaar.
'Halloween is NOT a Muslim festival,' he said,
'You're right,' said Amaar, 'so let's make it one. Let's have 'Halaloween'.'
So in spite of sputtering from Baber, the kids carve their pumpkins and go off trick or treating.
One lady opens the front door and ignores the children who are rather boringly dressed by Baber as olives. She spies Baber in his normal clothes and exclaims,
'Oh, what a brilliant costume! You have come as the evil Taliban!' and she gives him an armful of chocolate.
Baber is made-up with this and now goes prancing about in his new role of the evil terrorist and getting plenty of sweets and candy.
It's a great show, I hope it gets exported.
And there are more.

I want to thank two of my friends, Di and Dawn.
Di responded to my post bleating about bags and how I needed a bag to fit in my bag by sending me one. Thank-you Di.
And Dawn has answered my question about whether there is caffeine in Kahlua by actually writing to the firm. This is the info she received.

Kahlua actually has very low levels of caffeine, (approximately 4.85mg in each 1.5 oz drink.)

One cup of coffee contains about 100 mg of caffeine, so if we’re looking at 100ml of Kahlua there should be about 10 mg of caffeine, (1/10/ of a cup of coffee.)

Thank-you Dawn!

And let's not forget that old,old joke, 'Laughter is the best medicine except for Diabetes and then it's insulin.' Arf arf as Basil Brush used to say.