Skip to main content

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else...

Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones.
In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually existed, until he met some of them in the tea rooms at Sizergh Castle, and got beaten by one of their daughters at Top Trumps.

Early in 2012 he entered the North West Evening Mail’s slightly baffling “Big Blogger” contest, intrigued by the prospect of actually being rewarded for typing lots of silly stuff and having someone read it. Little did he know, but this was to be his downfall. After squeezing through to the main competition, he was advised that, in the interests of fairness, he was to be terminated, and replaced with his much duller, older and hairier creator, Peter Grenville.
Hamilbutton leaves behind an extensive CD collection, a niece obsessed with Doctor Who, and £3.49 in loose change.

Grenville, sometimes referred to as a “Marketing Officer” for a charity or “That bloke with the loud shirts”, expressed shock at the news that his random ranting was now actually being credited to him, and attempted to disguise his appearance by wearing two hats, a risible plan at the best of times, but made far worse by the fact that one of them was pink, and didn’t match his scarf.
As we speak, an angry mob of lycra-clad cyclists and aggrieved Range Rover and Audi owners, with their fog lights shining in his window, are nailing burning wind chimes to his front door, and would have been joined by irate Virgin Trains staff, had their train been on time.

Speaking via twitter, he is alleged to have said “LOL!” before a particularly heavy bag of recycling struck him on the forehead, rendering him slightly less annoying than before, just as some snow, forecast a fortnight ago, gently started to fall.

This blog post appeared yesterday as an entry in the North West Evening Mail's "Big Blogger" competition. Do me a favour - click on this link to view it on their website, please? Thanks to clicks, I made it through to the main contest and the final 10. One gets eliminated each week. Apparently. I'm pretty sure they make the rules up as they go along...

(What better way to celebrate my untimely demise at the hands of the press, than with a spot of ELO? Keeping me company tonight is the "Live At The BBC" double CD.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...