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On Monday I returned from three amazing days on the Isle of Wight for Bestival 2007. Highlights:

Chemical Brothers, DJ Yoda, Kate Nash and MC Beardy Man

And here is my flickr set of photo

I only just learnt that there is a word which describes the mis-hearing of a phrase, in such a way that it acquires a new meaning. The word is “mondegreen” and it is itself a mondegreen. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined it in an essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, which was published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954.

Click here for the wikipedia article.

And be sure to check out The Archive of Misheard Lyrics whose url comes directly from one of the most famous mondegreens of all time…

Recently seen on the blackboard of an olde English pub, the following riddle:

If I am holding a bee in my hand, what do I have in my eye?

Answer in the comments…

Spike Milligan’s brilliant Ning Nang Nong:

On the Ning Nang Nong Where the cows go Bong!
And the monkeys all say Boo!
There’s a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang!
And you just can’t catch ‘em when they do!
So it’s Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
Trees go Ping!
Nong Ning Nang!
The mice go Clang!
What a noisy place to belong,
Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!

Which was came top in a poll of the UK’s favourite poems according to this 1998 BBC article.

If you’re ever stuck for something to do, there’s worse things to do than attempting to escape from the Minotaur’s maze, in this neat game by Toby Nelson.

The modern day equivalent of browsing through a book of interesting facts (Guiness book of records, Schott’s miscellany etc.), is surfing sites like wikipedia for interesting articles, Flickr and Photobucket for interesting photos, and social networking sites for people you know.

I reckon we can add one more to the list - surfing through the facebook “Common Interest - Beliefs and Causes” groups (they tend to be more interesting than the other groups).

Here’s a collection of ten such groups that caught my little pigeon eye recently…

I haven’t been on youtube that much recently and didn’t know that users are able to customise their profile pages. When I discovered this I decided to check a few out. My favourite one is by a user called nusy12 who has an animated one. I’m not sure if he made it himself, but it’s very clever. You can view it here.

Here’s a screenshot of it - all the little dudes in the picture are running around and interacting with each other.