Nature scene

“I wish I had the balls to do that, I thought, as I enviously watched the juggler.” [Brett Andy]

SAYINGS

My favourite saying guy in the world is a guy called Jack Handey… if you don’t know who he is, then you probably have not hung out with me long enough.

Classics such as:

I guess of all my uncles, I liked Uncle Cave Man the best. We called him Uncle Cave Man because he lived in a cave and because sometimes he’d eat one of us. Later on we found out he was a bear.

Why do the caterpillar and the ant have to be enemies? One eats leaves, and the other eats caterpillars. Oh, I see now.

I remember how, in college, I got that part-time job as a circus clown, and how the children would laugh and laugh at me. I vowed, then and there, that I would get revenge.

And probably a life time favourite: “Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you’ll be a while away and have his shoes.”

That inspired me a couple of years ago when i was in Americaland to try and come up with my own Jack Handey styled comments and while the majority of them were not nearly as good as the majority of Jack’s, i did have a lot of fun and a number of them came pretty close. Thus Brett Andy’s were born:

‘Do you think if minutes were edible, they’d taste good enough that we’d want to go back for seconds?’
[Brett Andy]

‘I would imagine a horse drawn carriage would be a really ugly thing. For starters, it must be almost impossible to grip a pencil with hooves. Plus there is all that fine detail around the edges to consider.’ [Brett Andy]

‘People who live in glass houses, shouldn’t.’ [Brett Andy]

‘I heard “Thyme heals all wounds” but when I rubbed some of it into my cut last night it just left me with this nasty rash.’ [Brett Andy]

‘I started a business designing and manufacturing shoes for circus clowns using the lead from discarded pencils. But I had to stop once I was made aware of the huge carbon footprint I was creating.’ [Brett Andy]

i have not come up with any new Brett Andy’s for a long time and perhaps i should because it was fun to play around with words and in particular puns and misdirection. i do have a Brett Andy site where they all live and started improving it by adding random nature pics alongside the thoughts, but it still has a long way to go.

AVOIDING THE LIE

i also enjoy coming up with my own sayings and back when i was a youth leader at Claremont Baptist there were a couple of guys called Taylor [Julian and Stephen] and also a Fritz and Mark Baker and some others who we used to come up with these with. One of my favourite and most successful at the time was, ‘Hey mann’.

i know a lot of people. i used to write for a very popular Christian magazine in South Africa called ‘Truth’, at one time i was a DJ called The Penitent Guppy [i know!] on a Christian radio station called CCFM and i used to do a lot of youth, school and church speaks… but i didn’t always know their names. This has always been one of the toughest lines of maintaining integrity for me [which i often get badly wrong] as Honesty is one of my biggest values, but when someone comes up and so obviously remembers you and greets you with a huge, “Hey, Brett Fish!” and you respond with, “i’m sorry i don’t remember you” that can be tough, and people get disappointed to.

So the more generic ‘Hey mann’ which incidentally worked for women two as double-M man was the gender-neutral ‘guys’ type word. And any time someone walked up to us we would be like ‘Hey mann’ and it became a warm and you’re-part-of-the-group inclusive greeting. And saved me a lot of lying. Because once you’ve been ‘Hey mann’d you feel like you are known.

OTHER CLASSIC MISDIRECTIONALS

We actually came up with a whole bunch of other fun sayings as well. One of my favourites was to randomly point wildly behind someone and as they turned to look, shout, “LOOK, A DISTRACTION!”

Another one we used to do when we’d be in a restaurant with a bunch of mates and a really obviously particular band song would start playing, say Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and one of us would loudly exclaim, “Aw man, I LOVE The Pet Shop Boys” or some band clearly far removed from the actual one. Private little joke for us but often people will explain and point it out which makes the joke funnier as you sincerely, “Oh? Wow. Flip. Cool” their ‘knowledge’.

The third one that comes to mind that we had a number of variations of, was to look at someone and say, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but…’ and then follow it up with a compliment that was virtually impossible to take the wrong way:

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but i really like your shoes.

And it was so great cos people didn’t know what to do with it. You brace yourself for the insult that is obviously coming and then you hear a compliment and then you get confused and typically peoples’ response would be, “How could i take that the wrong way?” by which time the laugh was already there. These always worked much better if a Julian or a Stephen or Fritz was nearby to enjoy it with you, but sometimes it was worth whipping it out on other occasions.

GENERAL BRETTFISHERISMS

i love making sayings up. If i was completely honest i guess i would love for there to be people all over the country or world quoting me like Jack Handey, which may have happened if Brett Andy had taken off a little more.

One of my more random sayings i came up with years ago, which is completely ridiculous, but which i love and made into a Brett Andy by association, is this one:

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it throw stones in glass houses.

i’m not sure why but i just dig it.

i would love to say stuff more deeply that lines from my talks would become sayings in cards and on bumper stickers as well, but i’m not sure that’s going to happen either. If you’re saying stuff for the purpose of people repeating it, then you’re probably quite misdirected anyways, so probably not a good one to aim at. And totally a feel-good pride thing of ‘hey that person said my thing’ so completely unnecessary.

i did ALMOST get a Hip Hop Dance video made of the one saying i often start camps with though:

God, you’re bigger than my box

You’re bigger than my theology

You’re bigger than my understanding

You’re bigger than me

We got the demonstration [Houseboat Camp 2014 on Lake Shasta] but never quite got the video, which is probably for the better cos it was one of the most bizarre things that has ever happened to me. But it was also completely GREAT so i’ll file that in the memory box.

i just suddenly thought about movie quotes and in particular, Monty Python, but i think that will have to be saved for a different Highlight Post cos that will be a long one by itself.

No, it won’t.

Yes it will.

I’ll come in again…

Jack Handey quote

[For semi-naked mountain walks and police calls in the middle of the night, click here]

[For others of the 100 Highlight Moments of My Life, click here]