Gurning!

In the early 90s, when I was a kid, manufacturers of arcade games were under pressure from parents' groups about the negative influence their games were supposedly having on children. After all, on any random afternoon you'd find a bunch of teenagers wagging school to hang around at the video arcade. In response, manufacturers started including earnest (and completely random) messages in their video games, exhorting players and bystanders to "Say No To Drugs" and "Stay In School".


Mortal Kombat also got caught up in this, but instead of the unrelated and earnest approach they simply had the machine, when in attract mode, every so often just bring up a screen which said:

What an improvement! Instead of giving the kiddies an out-of-context lecture about staying in school, simply hotwire their need for education directly into their will-to-power, until they realise that that the acquisition of knowledge is just as powerful as the ability to rip a man's heart out of his chest. Or something.

Anyway, this could almost be an unofficial motto of this blog, because you just never know when a given piece of knowledge is going to come in handy. Knowledge pays compound interest, because the more you understand about the world the better equipped you are to understand the next piece of knowledge that comes in. And this brings me to today's article, on the subject of gurning. 

A gurn is a distorted facial expression, a typical example of which (apparently) involves projecting the lower jaw forward as far as possible and covering the upper lip with the lower lip, though apparently any distorted expression counts, as a picture in the article helpfully illustrates:

The article goes on to assure us that gurning competitions are a rural English tradition, and that the one at the Egremont Crab Fair dates back to 1267. This sounds just like the kind of made-up shit that you might expect to find on a page which has presumably been edited by the crazy-looking idiot pictured above, but I did a bit of external research and apparently it's true, or at least the organizers of the Egremont Crab Fair assure us that it is.

Last year's winners, apparently. Honestly, you'd think that after 830 odd years you'd have run out of new ways to gurn.And y'know what? I think they have.

What else is there to be said about gurning? Very little, which is why one must wonder whether in fact this is the kind of knowledge that is not, in fact, power. Gurning is merely the act of pulling a silly face (though apparently restricted to silly faces which can be pulled without the aid of the hands), and "gurn" merely a local term for it from North-West England. I remain confident, however, that this knowledge, like all knowledge must inevitably improve our lives. 

If it doesn't, then I've got problems.