Hitchin and I have very similar senses of humour. So much so that Jen finds it a bit spooky. She first realised this when she made some comment to Hitchin, and he made exactly the same obscure yet hysterically funny joke that I had made on hearing the same comment five minutes earlier. (OK, maybe it wasn't all that hysterically funny, but Hitchin and I both thought it was.)
Anyway, while we were staying with Hitchin and Soo last weekend, Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was on the telly, and Edwina Curry was asked which is the heaviest flying bird of prey.
"The condor!" shouted Hitchin and I in unison, before the answers were even shown on the screen. We then had a discussion about whether this might be a trick question, as scavengers such as condors might not count as birds of prey, but decided that Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire? probably wouldn't be that devious (or, more likely, that it would never have occurred to them in the first place).
"I think I'd better ask the audience," said the former junior minister for health, and Prime Minister's mistress. So the audience voted. The result: 98% Condor, 2% Owl.
Now 2% Owl is exactly the sort of phrase that Hitchin and I find incredibly funny: it's such a very small proportion, and such a very ordinary-sounding bird. So, for the rest of the weekend, we tried to slip the phrase two percent owl into the conversation whenever possible. You get the idea:
- "According to the nutritional information on the side of this box, these Cheerios are two percent owl!"
- "Hey, you know that Keira Knightley? She's two percent owl! You'd never guess it to look at her!"
- "Did you know that the population of Bolivia is two percent owl?"
- …and so on.
So there's your new challenge, Gruts readers. I would like you to go out into the world and start slipping the phrase two percent owl into conversations wherever possible. But, to keep it funny, unlike me, you must never explain where the phrase came from.