Redundant objects

This post has very little to do with spam, but I couldn't possibly let this news pass without a comment.

Fans of Kaamelott (a French parodic series about the knights of the round table, which I already mentioned here) certainly remember the series of episodes named Unagi, in which Perceval and Caradoc come up with new fighting techniques. In Unagi IV, the two knights explain to King Arthur that they are perfecting a new technique that makes use of objects found in their immediate environment – which usually is the local tavern. The trick, they say, is to look for "redundant" objects (they really mean "objets contondants" in French, i.e. blunt instruments). In this hilarious episode, you can see them train with such improbable weapons as loaves of bread, a fennel bulb, dry sausage links, a recorder, a hair brush and leeks. Watch it here.

Who knew their technique would be so effective against wild animals in real life?

Mont. woman fends off bear attack with zucchini

Read this story for details of how the 200-pound black bear ran away from a 12-inch zucchini! Now, if the story proves that zucchini are "redundant", it does not reveal which end the woman was holding (does a zucchini even have a "sporadic" end??), and whether she made "perimetric" use of it, or if she actually developed her own technique...

"Sire, sire, on en a gros"

I have a .fr email address on which I receive a fair share of spam written in French. I very rarely open the messages, but my attention is sometimes caught by intriguing or outright funny subject lines.

I thought I might share the latest one I got, which somehow made it through my various spam filters. The title reads: "l'avoir gros" (literally, "to have it big"). Here you may ask: what on earth could the pronoun refer to? Something with the masculine gender and in the singular. Your nose, your butt, your stomach??? Look no further. No need to pretend you don't know what the pronoun stands for here...

If I had opened the message before tossing it with the rest, I would probably have stripped it of much of its intriguing quality. As it is, the title brings to my mind two "cultural" references.

The first one is Hamlet. Is this email by a secret admirer of Shakespeare's character. Is s/he thinking out loud and reaching out to share with me an introspective soliloquy on what it means to have it big, whatever it is. On a lighter note, the second reference, which inspired this post's title, is Kaamelott, a spoof of the tales of the knights of the round table. In one episode (season 2, episode 3), two of the dumbest knights knock on King Arthur's door in the middle of the night. They want to voice their discontent and tell the king they think they are being exploited. Their protest slogan is the following: "on en a gros !". This literally does not mean much, other than something like "we have it big" or simply "it is big", maybe. The phrase appears to be a truncated version of "on en a gros sur la patate" (literally something like "we have it big on the potato", the potato figuratively referring to the speaker's face), possibly merged with "on en a marre" (we've had enough). The video of the episode has unfortunately been taken off youtube, but you can still find it legally on wideo.fr (from France only, though, apparently) or less legally in many other places I'm sure.

Which reference is closest to the content of that message? Who knows...