John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

The five-day weather forecast: More fun coming!

The weather this month has been dreadful, but I've had fun at work popularizing descriptions of how bad the weather has been. My favourite has been Fogust, which Tom Dunne coined as a hashtag on Twitter with this very tweet. (It's also been used to describe the weather in Tofino, B.C., by the way.) My colleague Jane Adey came up with Augember, another colleague Maggie Gillis gave us Soggust today on the Morning Show, and there's also the very clever Augtober, which I first saw via the Hava Java Twitter feed.

While it's always nice to chuckle, it's not so nice to see a forcecast like this, which has rain or at least some precipitation in all but one of the days ahead.

Sigh.

The "more fun coming" in the headline to this post, by the way, comes from a bit of black-comedy shorthand that Martha and I have had since it aired in a Codco sketch 20 years ago or so. It stems from one of the "wake of the week" sketches featuring Mary Walsh and Cathy Jones, in which (unable to mourn anyone who has actually died) they head to the hospitals. They looked at the chart of Ricardo Huerta (one of Andy Jones's characters), and ruefully say, "MFC - measure for coffin." When he asks them to repeat that, they glue on smiles and say, too happily, "More fun coming!"

Thus, when Martha or I have been having one of those days, we only have to say MFC. The other knows that this would be a great time to suggest, say, going out for dinner.

Ship Inn Man

Ship Inn Man was a song (and a filmeo, as they were called during that Eighties heyday of Wedding In Texas, etc.) composed for the Codco series on TV. Definitely a moment in time. The Ship still exists, albeit as the Ship Pub, and the arts community still hangs out there en masse, but the song Cathy Jones sings is about another era. The filmeo features many of the regulars, some unfortunately no longer with us and able to enjoy a nostalgic smile.