Happiness is escaping the enemies of the homestead

The nightly wolf is baneful to the fold,

Storms to the wheat, to buds the bitter cold.

-- John Dryden

Happiness is contentment

'Tis better to be lowly born,

And range with humble livers in content,

Than to be perk'd up in a glist'ring grief,

And wear a golden sorrow.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Happiness is watching Gordon Ramsay make mayo in less than two minutes

 

The secret is 100ml of neutral oil per egg yolk, added ever so slowly at the start. A three egg yolk recipe seems about right for a standard food processor as in the video. I got away with just two. For small batches of mayo, a smaller food processor is ideal.

The beauty of the Cuisinart that I own is that it comes with a lid with an oil reservoir on top which dispenses the oil through a pinhole at the ideal rate.

I add capers at the end for the Tuesday night beer-battered cod fry tartar sauce. In the absence of the juice of a lemon, substitute white vinegar.

Happiness is a Deltec home, designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Designed for disaster: These homes can withstand a Category 5 hurricane

'Matt Oblinsky, Deltec’s director of engineering, spearheads an effort to constantly find better building materials to further strengthen its designs.

'“After each and every hurricane … we reach out to each and every homeowner in the path of a storm to ask how they are,” Linton said. “99.9 percent of the time we’re seeing ‘we lost a couple shingles’ or ‘we lost a piece of trim, but our neighbor’s home was demolished.’ Our homes have been field-tested for a number of years.”'

Happiness is the nonsense verse chant Flea Fly Flow from Boy Scout camp in the 1960s

The chant is a "repeat after me" or "echo" song. The leader at the campfire chants a line, the boys gathered round are to echo it exactly in reply.

There are many, many versions.

The idea was to make the nonsense lines a little longer each time and to vary the elements in order to make them more tricky to remember, which is great fun but is probably why no one can remember the thing exactly the same way now. 

In this case, the nonsense probably goes all the way back at least to Shakespeare's King Lear of 1605 ("Child Roland to the dark tower came, His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man") and was immortalized in the English fable Jack the Giant Killer of 1711 ("Fee-fi-fo-fum").

"Fie!" is an old word which you use when you smell something really bad, i.e. a stench, a subject of some fascination for young boys.

By beginning with an allusion to the form of these then well known lines, the expectation was set for something familiar to come, but is immediately turned into a tongue twister to set the audience of young boys off their balance and arrest their attention and engage them. It needs to be remembered that boys were then relatively better educated than they are these days, and that it was fun to play loose as it were with the otherwise more or less serious subjects of their school days.

Add some strategically placed stick-banging and tub-thumping and it gets to be quite the scene around the bonfire!

The form is a playground for improv, but most if not all of the versions people now remember have regularized the opening tongue twister by incorporating an "L" in each line and element, as in Flea! Flea fly! Flea fly flow! 

This is how I remember it:

Fie!

Fie fly!

Fie fly foh!

Kooma-lotta kooma-lotta kooma-lotta Feast Day!

Oh, no, no, no not the Veesday!

Eeny meany deci-meany Ooo walla walla meeny, Eeny meany, hexa-meany, Ooo walla walla!

Beat belly oaten boaten Bobo benoten botten, Bobo benoten botten, Bobo benoten botten, shhhhh!

Happiness is the fabulous Linda Ronstadt with her 1975 cover of When Will I Be Loved

 

Happiness is Ed Norton from The Honeymooners

 

"Did somebody say I'm trending on Twitter? Well I'm HERE for it!"

Happiness is Do You Know What I Mean? Lee Michaels 1971

She's a dandy, yes indeed, but now she's free.

This is the Rock 'n' Roll you first heard fifty years ago and suddenly you wake up one morning with it playing on continuous loop in your head for some reason.

Happiness is sort-of-Italian opera

 

Happiness is the patriotism of our Irish

 

Happiness is being content with one's share in the blessings common to all

 

Every creature has a share in the common blessings of providence; And every creature should rest well satisfied with its proportion in them.

-- Roger L'Estrange