This month, The Spin received half a dozen fun submissions, adding to the assortment of photographs that we have been discreetly collecting.
The first one was captured while enjoying the wonderful hospitality of a hotel in Saudi Arabia. During their stay, The Spin was greeted at their room by the hotel’s housekeeping attendants, who asked whether The Spin would like any “irony”. “Would we like some what?” The Spin asked. After requesting the housekeeping staff to repeat themselves for clarity a couple of times (read: “Huh?”), The Spin’s confusion became evident to the staff. They asked whether they could “show” what they meant instead of repeating the word ‘irony’ at varying speeds. They slid open a cupboard within the hotel room and pointed to the laundry bags, which had us laughing out loud. The eco-friendly laundry bags had a call to action that read, “Let us do the dirty work, so you don’t have to,” but the line below it made all the difference, ironically.
The Spin received a photograph of a poster apparently inviting guests to a halal family movie night featuring the film Finding Nemo 2. While the initial amusement arose from the phrase below the clownfish, which clowned around with the colloquial Arabic phrase “Inshallah [God willing], they find him,” the real catch arose from the fact that the poster was a prank.The sequel to the Finding Nemo movie was never released and the halal family movie night was just meant to be a wild goose chase, which makes the phrase “Inshallah they find him” much funnier, especially for people who searched Finding Nemo 2 online to see whether it was child friendly, only to find out that they, indeed, couldn’t find him.
Speaking of chasing wild geese, The Spin received an email submission from customers of a vexed restaurant owner who believed that geese were getting into his yard because his customers failed to close the front gate. The disgruntled owner made the effort to put up a sign on the gate, expecting a closed gate to prevent geese from waddling into his private property. While customers paid heed to the sign, clearly the grammar-pedant geese didn’t, because they didn’t quite agree with the punctuation on the sign. What really ‘quacked us up’ was that a customer finally addressed the issue by leaving a comment on the sign. Wonder ‘waddle’ happen next as the owner looks to ‘quack the case’ of the ‘feathered flight risks’.
Another submission had The Spin thinking out loud, “Po-ta-toes! Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew.” When The Spin voiced this out loud, a colleague from across the newsroom retorted, “Potato-pot-ahto, tomato, tom-ahto”, responding to a Lord of the Rings reference with one from When Harry Met Sally. What prompted this exchange? A photograph of a misspelt sign at a grocery store that read “Pototo”. We guess that’s one way to distract people from the inflationary costs of a kilo of tubers.
To round up The Spin for the month, we had two other lovely submissions. One demonstrated the perfect way to prevent people from taping anything on a glass window: by having a printed sign taped to the glass.
The other one, coming in from China, offered a comical insight into why cops are willing to wait for street fights to reach their natural conclusion.
