moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2019-10-17 08:22 am
moon_custafer) wrote2019-10-17 08:22 am
Morning Commute Thought
Is “stealing a traffic cone and taking it home” the direct replacement for “putting a lampshade on your head” as the trope for indicating that a Very Good Time was/is being had? They both have that feeling of performative drunken zaniness. OTOH, I think of the traffic cone as more of a UK and the lampshade as a North American thing; also the milieu is house-party vs. evening out bar-hopping with your mates— but that may simply reflect a shift in how and where social drinking happens.
I haven’t seen the lampshade thing referenced in at least twenty years, except in the deliberately retro work of Shaggy or Ape Man or whatever he’s calling himself these days, but (thinks) it’s a present-tense way of indicating you’re tipsy, isn't it? You're doing it to amuse/annoy your fellow guests, and you leave the lampshade at your host’s house at the end of the evening. By contrast, traffic-cone stealing is more like bringing home <i>proof</i> of your evening out, even/especially if the only audience is your hungover self the next morning.
I might have my Hallowe'en costume sorted.
I haven’t seen the lampshade thing referenced in at least twenty years, except in the deliberately retro work of Shaggy or Ape Man or whatever he’s calling himself these days, but (thinks) it’s a present-tense way of indicating you’re tipsy, isn't it? You're doing it to amuse/annoy your fellow guests, and you leave the lampshade at your host’s house at the end of the evening. By contrast, traffic-cone stealing is more like bringing home <i>proof</i> of your evening out, even/especially if the only audience is your hungover self the next morning.
I might have my Hallowe'en costume sorted.
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Me neither. Alack?
I think my mother said something once about her relatives putting lampshades on their heads at parties when she was young, and her feeling terribly embarrassed by it; but then her side of the family were/are a clan of frustrated vaudevillians.
Some neighbours borrowed a couple of our lampshades for Hallowe’en costumes, but they actually dressed up as lamps—had cardboard or heavy paper rolled around themselves to represent the bases—so it wasn’t quite the same thing.
I tried putting a lampshade on my own head this morning before work. I can’t tell how it looked, because I couldn’t see through it.
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Take a selfie with it on?