#Gervais

[dozydawn]

Dolce Gervita, 1986.

Model: Nancy DeWeir.

[houserosaire]

Prompt #3: Make (free choice)

There was a light at the end of the rows. 

Silvaineaux had expected to find the stables almost entirely dark, the birds curled to sleep in their straw, the night lanterns turned low. At this nightmare filled hour of the morning the grooms would be abed, and no one save Joyeux needed to know if the Baron came to share the warbird’s straw for the remainder of the night. But when he had reached Joyeux’s stall he could see a light blazing away in one of the equipment rooms.

Blowing out his own candles and putting a finger to his lips to warn the chocobo to silence he crept toward that light. His heart was hammering again by the time he reached the doorway, but the moment he saw the source of that light the tension eased from him. Gervais sat atop a bale of straw in the equipment room, humming away to himself as he worked at something.

Silvaineaux thought he ought to say something but for a moment he was too fascinated. The groom’s rough hands moved, one over the other, turning a bundle of leather cords into a neat length of something else. It looked like a whip, Silvaineaux thought as he watched, but it had never occurred to him to consider how they were made, how that vicious length of leather with its almost serpentine texture came to be. He could not make out the trick of it no matter how he watched, the pattern of cords seemed almost random, and yet ilm by ilm gleaming leather whip unspooled from Gervais' clever hands.

Finally Silvaineaux cleared his throat, a small warning before he spoke. “Is that a whip?”

“Halone’s frosty nipples, my Lord! But I didn’t see you there.” Gervais took a deep breath and settled back onto his bale. “Begging your pardon, my Lord. Yes it’s a whip. Oh but not for our birds of course. Wouldn’t need such a thing for them.”

Silvaineaux raised his eyebrows, stepping into the room for a closer look. “What is it for then?” 

“Oh I… well… I sell them. I know a fellow works at a shop in Crozier and the owner there will buy them. No idea what people want with them after that.”

Silvaineaux might have suggested a few thoughts of his own on what people might use them for, but something else troubled him. “Do I not pay you enough?” He asked, reaching out to finger the leather thoughtfully.

Gervais looked rather abashed. “It isn’t that at all, my lord. You pay me plenty. It’s just sometimes of a long night I like to sit and keep my hands busy and it might as well be at something with a purpose. It’s fun to save up a bit extra and it gives me money to buy more of the cording.”

Silvaineaux nodded. “I think I can understand that very well.” His thumb ran over the leather again and he considered for a moment whether it was a horrible imposition to ask. “Do you suppose you could teach me?” He asked finally, watching Gervais face for any sign he should retract his request.

Gervais considered him. “I don’t know why not, my Lord, though if you want to sell them…”

Silvaineaux understood that hesitation readily enough. “I have no desire to jeopardize your arrangement with the shopkeeper nor to sell my own.” He took a deep breath considered, and then let the words fall quietly between them, the sort of confession one might only offer in the small hours of the morning. “It is only that… I do not really know how to make anything but corpses. I think I might like to.”

Gervais looked at him for a long moment, his eyes full of something that Silvaineaux did not want to look at too closely. He was not quite sure whether it was revulsion or pity and his pride rebelled at either thought. But at last the groom smiled. “I think I can understand that very well.” He said slowly.

“I will of course pay you for the cording.” Silvaineaux added.

“Fair enough, my lord.” Gervais scooted sideways on the bale. “Sit down here and I’ll show you.”

[postcard-from-the-past]

St Gervais church in Paris

French vintage postcard

[publicite-francaise]

Floréal de Gervais dessert d'antan, 1972.

[jayjuno]

Why can’t transwomen handle jokes about themselves?

Ricky Gervais is hilarious. 

Dave Chappelle is hilarious, too.

Disclaimer: I’m a transman.

Transwomen need to learn to have a sense of humor. Gay men, too. Transwomen need to learn that they can’t bully and harass comedians into being politically correct. That’s not how comedy works.

Not being able to laugh at themselves is what’s making everyone uncomfortable around transwomen. It’s NOT their fragile “gender identity” that repulses everyone- it’s their inability to laugh at themselves. It’s their inability to allow ANYONE to mock them that makes everyone uncomfortable around them.

Jewish people suffered the holocaust. Yet, Jewish comedians have joked about that. Jewish comedians make fun of themselves and their community ALL THE TIME. If a group that has suffered as much as the Jewish community has can make fun of themselves, why can’t trans women? 

I’m a transman. I never see transmen get upset about comedians making fun of them, NOT unless there’s someone from the LGBT+ community pressuring/brainwashing them into it (which would usually be a transwoman or a gay man- lesbians/transmen don’t care about this stuff).

Do you think I give a damn whether comedians make jokes at my expense? Do you think I care if they mock me for being transgender? No. 

It’s COMEDY. It’s supposed to be FUNNY. You’re not supposed to take comedy seriously, transwomen/gay men. 

Learn to laugh, transwomen/gay men. You sexist, narcissistic XY imbeciles are ruining it for everyone, especially for the XX community. 

I hope these brave comedians continue to mock the transgender community. As a transman, I am sick and tired of this stupid brainwashed community full of fake smiles and phoney laughs; a community that behaves more like the church of scientology than a group full of “love”. I don’t see “love” when I look at the transgender community now- I see death threats against JK Rowling, I see Dave Chappelle being assaulted, and I see death threats against mostly people with XX chromosomes. 

When I look at the transgender community now, I mostly see misogyny.

The transgender community isn’t a community of “love”. At this point, it’s essentially a cult of mostly brainwashed people who feel the need to stalk/harass anyone they feel threatened by- just like scientologists. Instead of talking about “thetan levels” or “going clear”, the transgender cult is all about not being “cisgender”, calling out “terfs”, or “finding your authentic self”. All these stupid fake words and memorized slogans are an insult to intelligent life everywhere. I refuse to use them.

Can anyone explain to me the difference between the church of scientology and the transgender community? I don’t see much difference these days. 

Learn to laugh at yourselves, XY people... and allow others to mock you, too. 

Sincerely,

-a transman

p.s.

Ricky Gervais is right- women DO NOT have penises. Duh.

[lindaseccaspina]

Steam Men -- Paul Gervais Petawawa - Don and Jean Moore Clippings

The Ottawa Citizen Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Sun, Jun 21, 1998Page 55 Steam Engines Series– Desmond Moore Collection Ernie Giles Steam Engine Man “Where Are They Now?” Des Moore’s Steam Engine Steam Engines– Clippings About Harold Richardson Photos!! Who is With These Steam Engines? Glory Days of Carleton Place–So What Happened to the Moore Steam Engine? The Old Steam Engine Tractor on…

[m-ultraarticles]

Elon Musk gives interviewer ‘best awkward pause since Ricky Gervais in The Office’

Elon Musk gave an interviewer the “best awkward pause since Ricky Gervais in The Office” after the Twitter CEO was asked if his tweets damaged the company due to his political position, according to Sky News Australia host Paul Murray.

[smbhax]

Three versions/variants of the roguelike game Angband:

1) Angband 4.2.4.194, 2022, Windows, SDL2 front-end, Gervais tileset

2) Zangband 2.7.5.1, 2004, Cygwin

Running to my doom in the gorgeous procedural wilderness of the first Angband mega-variant. Zangband's earliest incarnation dates back to 1994, only a year after Angband was given wide release. The procedural wilderness replaced Zangband's earlier quest system and breakthrough but relatively small fixed wilderness with random towns separated by random stretches of deadly autumnal jungle. This was the final version; the promised revamped quest system never arrived, and Zangband, which had greatly expanded Angband's Tolkien-themed single town and dungeon with material from Roger Zelazny's *Chronicles of Amber*, was replaced among players by larger variants using the earlier, fixed-wilderness Zangband as their base. Zangband lead at the time was Robert Ruehlmann.

3)

Angband

3.0.6, 2005, DOS

I used the built-in color and character editors to make it monochrome and replace the ASCII mode's usual "@" player character with the Rogue DOS smiley face. ^ _^

Angband maintainer at the time was also Robert Ruehlmann; the DOS version by this time defaulted to a bitmap graphics and sound mode, created by Ruehlmann. It was his last version and the last Angband DOS release.

[room42]

James Corden apologises for lifting Ricky Gervais’ joke

James Corden apologises for lifting Ricky Gervais’ joke

James Corden has apologised to Ricky Gervais after “inadvertently” using one of the comic’s jokes practically word-for-word on his The Late Late Show. The TV host’s apology came after Gervais, 61, tweeted a clip from Corden’s show on Halloween night when he repeated a joke from his 2018 Netflix stand-up special Humanity. It was about Twitter users getting angry about a poster in a town square…

[bronva]

Woman says ‘extraordinary’ cat Ricky Gervais has saved her mum’s life

Woman says ‘extraordinary’ cat Ricky Gervais has saved her mum’s life

Ricky came into her life in 2012 (Picture: PA Real Life) A woman who has filled her home with celebrity-named cats has praised her ‘extraordinary’ pet Ricky Gervais after he repeatedly saved her mother’s life. Mary Nesbitt-Larking, 30, from Hertford, Hertfordshire, lives with her mum Carrie Nesbitt-Larking, 56, and their six cats – Ricky Gervais, 11, Nana Osaki, 10, Kristen Stewart, 10, Julia…

[dozydawn]

Dolce Gervita, 1987.

Model: Lisa Fallon.

[dogtrainingblogs]

Ricky Gervais 85 Yaşındaki Terrier'i Ötenaziden Kurtarmak İçin Savaşıyor

Ricky Gervais 85 Yaşındaki Terrier’i Ötenaziden Kurtarmak İçin Savaşıyor

85 yaşındaki Donal Rogers, çok sevdiği tüylü arkadaşını kaybetme riskiyle karşı karşıya. Kim adlı 5 yaşındaki Jack Russell Terrier, daha önce hiç saldırganlık belirtisi göstermedi, ancak yakın zamanda bir yabancıyı ısırması ile bir etkileşimi sona erdi. Bir Hata Hayatı Riske Sokar Ne yazık ki, bir köpek ısırığı, ısırık haklı veya tek seferlik bir suç olsa bile, köpek ötenazisine yol açabilir. Bu…

[weltandschaung]

Jules Gervais-Courtellemont ~ A woman poses in the traditional headdress of the Burgundians in Saone et Loire, France, in the early 1900s.

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Paul Gervais (French, 1859-1944) The madness of Titania, 1897 Musèu dels Agustins

[thewtcho]

Ricky Gervais won't tell fans of The Office if Tim and Dawn are still together

Ricky Gervais won’t tell fans of The Office if Tim and Dawn are still together

FANS of The Office will never find out if Tim and Dawn are still together, writer Ricky Gervais says. He said people often tweet him asking if the romance endured.Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis) finally got together in the mockumentary’s 2003 Christmas special. 1 Ricky Gervais says fans of The Office will never find out if Tim and Dawn are still togetherCredit: AFP Comic Gervais, 61,…

[terastalungrad]

Sometimes, you’re a comedian with a touring show to promote, so you do an interview with a regional newspaper.

I think that’d be the funniest possible time to reveal a big scoop, wouldn’t it?

Stewart Lee is currently touring, and to promote his Yeovil performance, gave an interview to Blackmore Vale Magazine.  According to Wikipedia, the Blackmore Vale is an area of north Dorset, south Somerset and southwest Wiltshire.  According to the comedian Jake Baker, the magazine would cover his school sports day as he grew up in Dorset.  That’s the level of news you’d expect.

The questions are friendly and easy, from a journalist clearly familiar with Lee’s work and history.

The first question is about the show’s angle.  Lee describes the nature of the show, and here’s an excerpt:

So it looks like stand-up, and sounds like stand-up, but it’s actually a kind of character piece about a desperate person who’s frightened and trying to organise the world in a way that puts them in control. And I guess you could argue that’s what a lot of stand-ups are doing anyway. Ricky Gervais to me looks like a very frightened man. He’s frightened of transgender people coming after him, the act is a defensive wall.

Fun!  This is a Ricky Gervais hate blog, so it’s nice to see a sudden, unexpected attack in an unrelated promotional interview.

Lee mentions Gervais again in response to question four.

Sometimes I become bitter and think ‘I get all this good press, why can’t I get 10 million quid for a TV special like Ricky Gervais?’ But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want that audience, it wouldn’t allow me to be better.

And then again to question eight, where Lee explains why he spends six months running new shows in the relatively small Leicester Square Theatre (as opposed to arena comics who might do 10 warmup shows followed by 60 tour dates).

You can still run it like a club gig, you can interact with people in real time. Also, you wouldn’t get better at the show because you wouldn’t have done it as many times. You can see this with an act like Gervais. Those shows have not been run in, they’re not fluid, they’re a succession of inflexible statements that would snap like twigs if the pressure of an unforeseen event was applied to them.

The journalist finally addresses this head on.  It really is worth reading the entire article - there’s a lot more than I’m quoting, including an interesting story about Sean Lock:

But here are my favourite bits:

[Gervais] still kind of copies me though, which is the weird thing. There’s still a lot of cadences of what I do but they’re used in the service of evil. In Star Wars, he’s Darth Vader and he’s taken the force, which is me, and used it for evil purposes. He was a fanboy, he was actually the booker at University of London and used to book me and Sean Lock all the time. And when he became famous for the Office, he wrote an hour-long act that was so indebted to us it was awkward. [...] If he’d come up through the circuit that would have been rubbed off him because you find your own voice doing club gigs. It took me two years of gigging five nights a week to come through the mesh of things I liked. But he didn’t have that experience in the same way. [...] Funnily enough, in his first show there were bits I’d never recorded that he’d do almost verbatim. He’d clearly remembered them. I went to see him at the Bloomsbury – on his invitation actually – with my then girlfriend and she was very concerned for me. I’d given up at that point due to lack of interest, and she was concerned for what it felt like to see my act being done to hundreds of people, it was quite weird. On the other hand, that sort of did make me think I don’t want it to be consumed into someone else’s vocabulary. And also, I think because he had a residual sense of guilt, he would always credit me in interviews as being an influence – that helped me in 2004 to get the audience back.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time Lee’s ever claimed that Gervais stole his material.  He’s certainly talked about Gervais clearly taking influence from him (though in the past, he downplayed this compared to the account given in this interview).

It’s a pretty big thing to accuse a comic of stealing material.  That’s a big taboo.  I reckon this is partly because Lee wants to discourage fans of Gervais from coming to the show.

Anyway, let’s finish by quoting the end of the interview:

It must be strange to have that level of financial remuneration and those audience figures but not really a single good review. And I expect what that does for you is create a cognitive dissonance where you have to manufacture a worldview by which the whole world is wrong and you’re right. Which can’t necessarily be very good for your mental health, although I expect the money’s nice.