I hope that you are having a good weekend. Here's a small animation about getting away from it all. It's called "Getaway".
Getaway from Team Getaway on Vimeo.
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Every year we travel the one hundred plus miles to where my parents live up in Hitchin in Hertfordshire for Easter. Because we are otherwise involved on the Easter weekend we arranged this little get together a week early for once. Everything was fine and we were good to go until the petrol delivery drivers threatened to go on strike, our brave government decided to say stupid things like "don't panic buy, just fill up" and everything almost went mammaries skywards from that point. Yesterday morning there wasn't a drop of leaded, unleaded or diesel to be found in the local area. I checked my fuel tank and found that I had enough to get to Mum and Dad's and back (possibly) or sufficient to get Donna to the station and back several times next week plus a visit to HH in Shoreham but not both. I phoned Mum and explained the situation and she understood that getting Donna to and from the station for work purposes was important but she sounded very upset about it. Later in the day, I stopped off at the Texaco garage in Mannings Heath and they had received a delivery but they were rationing everyone to fifty pounds worth and a queuing system was in place. Thankfully my little Fiat isn't a gas guzzler and I only needed about thirty pounds of fuel to fill it to the brim. I noticed that the price for unleaded petrol was £1.44 per litre, a good fourpence per litre more expensive than anywhere else I can buy it from locally but in the long run I was happy to get ripped off because it meant so much to Mum and Dad for us to be able to get there today. I called Mum up to say that we were fighting fit and going to be on our way and today Donna and I had a smashing day up there - we even got the chance to visit the local charity shops and come away with a good haul of books for good measure! Apart from a mediocre meal at a joint called "Que Pasa" everything else went swimmingly. We have just got back after an uneventful journey and now we are preparing ourselves for a light meal and to settle down for an hour sitting in the dark this evening. Yes, it is World Wildlife Fund Earth Hour day and in the UK this begins at 20:30 and ends at 21:30. So this sounds like a good excuse to turn off the lights and settle down to some music and a glass of wine or two plus a cuddle. I hope that you are having a good weekend. Here's a small animation about getting away from it all. It's called "Getaway". Getaway from Team Getaway on Vimeo.
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Shades of Kung Fu Panda there. Master Uguay said something similar to Po. In fact that is where we will start the letter 'U' with... my likes: Uguay - (also spelled Oogway) is an ancient turtle with a gentle manner in the film Kung Fu Panda. Urchins - Another name for baby hedgehogs. Upside down cake - Alas, forbidden food these days but "yum!", the memory lives on. Underwear - particularly the naughty, black, frilly, sexy ladies variety. Uffington white horse - I have always thought that it looked more like a cat. Ushers - brewers of fine ales now defunct, alas. Now for things I hate beginning with the letter 'U': Unemployment - I haven't stooped that low yet. Ugli fruit - Nothing good can come from anything crossed with a grapefruit. Umber - One of the most dreary colours / pigments in the world. U-boat - Almost responsible for the downfall of Great Britain during World War Two. Graceful but merciless. Underhandedness - A word commonly found alongside the word "politician" or "politics". And that's your lot! Come back next month for the letter "V" (why can I feel the words "Volvo drivers" topping the list of hates there? Just time for a short film about an Appalachian Hillbilly who cures smoked hams and bacon. Fascinating. Have a great weekend. CURED from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo. Even though that wretched plant is languishing in a recycling skip at the local amenity tip it is still fighting back with a vigour that I can't explain. Before I went to bed last night I was a bit scratched and uncomfortable along my arms and legs but I took the time to put some Savlon on the cuts to help soothe them overnight. This worked a treat and I had a relatively good night's sleep for once. The problem was when I woke this morning. Overnight my face had puffed up a bit, my eyes were red, my nose was running and I was a bit wheezy and needing to cough. The scratches on my arms were as red as they had been the night before so it looks as if I might have been a little bit allergic to the ivy that I had taken down. Certainly I think that the dust that had been generated was a major cause of the problem. Thus I have spent the day indoors not being that active and sleeping a lot. Thankfully things are starting to return to normal now although I do feel a little tired and headache ridden. Thus, this is going to be the limit of the blog entry for today. So the only link today is a bit of fun. A treadmill fail compilation. See you all tomorrow. Today I waged a private war against one of man's most hated foes. I say man because for some reason, women don't mind this vile thing - at least until it has insinuated itself into their lives when all of a sudden they see it in all of it's horrible guise and they beg or demand that retribution is dealt out. What is this evil foe? Why does it manage to hoodwink the female of the species? Why is it such a dreadful enemy to fight? Because the only way to kill it is not to encourage it in the first place. What are we talking about here? The evil that fought a wicked battle today is a pet peeve of mine and I can sum it up in three little letters I - V - Y. Where the average male will see an empty wall or fence and know that it is good, the average female will desire some form of covering so that you don't have to see the fence's or wall's nudity and plants will be bought and nurtured. Plants that climb and attach themselves to the wall. At first it is innocent and the weedy little stems need canes and wires to support them but soon they grow unattended and can support themselves. Not so the ivy. Find any dank corner where decent climbing plants won't survive and the female of the species will plant one of these monsters. Sometimes they are suckered in by variegated foliage, sometimes it is just the teensiest weensiest of plants but before you know it, they take off and conquer the wall faster than a Sherpa can get up a Himalayan peak. Today, at OE's house, I had to fight a four hour battle with a tough and mature ivy. It had several trunks (I can't call them stems) about three inches thick and several more with marginally smaller diameters. This behemoth of an ivy had grown up straight and true out of it's dark little corner, escaping to the light where it had proliferated and started to do structural damage to her garden boundary wall. What sort of damage? Tendrils of ivy had managed to get into the mortar between the bricks and had started to pry the bricks apart. One trunk had insinuated itself into the gap between the garden retaining wall and a pillar that had been built subsequently. As I pulled the stem from its hiding place, the pillar rocked gently where the expanding trunk had forced it off the vertical and caused the mortar at the base to give way. Although the pillar is unlikely to collapse in a hurry, it will require the services of a good brickie to make it safe.This is one wall that needs to be partially rebuilt and a pillar that will need the same treatment but rather more urgently. All because someone had foolishly planted an ivy a few years back. I attacked this monster with saws, axes and levers forcing it to separate from the wall and in the end removed something in the order of eighty to a hundred pounds of ivy stems and leaves to the tip. The wretched plant attacked me using all of its available weapons; clinging on for grim death. It scratched my hands and arms and, where possible, my face. It poured clouds of dust all over me making me cough, irritating my throat and making my eyes sticky and oozing even some hours after finishing the fight with the beast. Is this the end of it? Unfortunately not. Whilst I have won this one battle, the war will continue because the roots remain and they will send up little tendrils of ivy once again and unless OE picks them off, within a couple of years it will be back to square one. This war is never ending. I've had a splendid day, thank you. Lounging around in the sun, taking photographs and answering stupid questions ("Are you taking photographs?" being one of them). I could tell a whopping fib and say that this was my back garden and that is my ancestral pile in the background but too many people know that I like to visit Nymans Gardens for that to work. Basically, today's entry is going to be just these few pics. See you tomorrow. You know me. I'm always ready to give a helping hand, even if sometimes I might sigh a little and make begrudging noises. However I need your honest opinion here. Am I a rotten, mean so-and-so? Let me set the scene. When I was doing my photographic course I would spend a lot of time on Facebook trying to help others out. Sometimes it was coaching, sometimes it was providing a morale booster, sometimes it was an electronic shoulder to cry on. One thing I found particularly irksome was when someone would post a link to a useful website which, due to the number of threads of conversations, would drop off the electronic version of the edge of the world and disappear. This usually led to impassioned pleas of "does anyone remember what the link was?". Being of feeble mind I tend not to rely on my brain cells if I can store things electronically. To this end, most web browsers allow you to save bookmarks or favourites and I was a regular saver of useful links. Thus I found myself in much demand as a supplier of lost and forgotten links. This became a bit of a time consuming business and detracted from me helping others out with course related questions. So I had a brilliant idea (yes - even I have sparks of originality now and then); I would create a web page with all of these useful links on (as found by myself and others) and that way all I needed to do would be quote that web page and then people could go and find what they wanted. I would ask people to bookmark the page and then promulgate the URL whenever anyone else wanted anything useful. Be that as it may, time moves on and I left Facebook. I noticed that web traffic to the page was dropping off significantly and where this page was part of my allowance from weebly.com, I decided that I would poll the users to find out whether they wanted me to keep it going or whether I could get rid of it. I set a deadline for the middle of March by when I would judge whether I should delete the page or not. Actually, there were quite a lot of pages but not all of them were visible to everyone. Anyway, out of a community of over ten thousand people, only eight people emailed me to say "please keep it going" but for such a small number, it just didn't justify the amount of effort in keeping it up to date and keeping it secure. So yesterday, I pulled the plug on the useful links webpage but I did send a copy of all the links to the eight people who took the time to email me, by way of a small "thank you" for taking the time to contact me. My problem is that I feel as mean as someone who abandons kittens in boxes by the roadside. So tell me please, should I be feeling this bad? ![]() Thought for the day. Click to enlarge. Pizza. There aren't a lot of people who say "I don't like pizza" but could you call pizza making an art form? Looking at these fellas, you might imagine that it should be an Olympic sport. Perhaps they should expand their business like these guys. Taking the "Art for Art's sake" thing one step further (from the sublime to the ridiculous?) this person has created a webpage of all of the nipples on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bookcases. If you have books, you need somewhere to put them. Here are some fabulous bookcases and storage ideas. Something, or rather someone, else that classic lines and form was Marilyn Monroe. Here are some rare and candid photographs of the lady herself. Finally a timelapse film. "Arctic Motion" Arctic Motion from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo. Today we liked: (1) The gorgeous weather. The sunshine, warmth and cooling breezes. Short sleeves were the order of the day. (2) The blue skies almost untouched by clouds; what a shame about the aircraft contrails though. I recall that period of time from two years ago when the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland grounded commercial jet flights for several days. The skies started turning into a beautiful deep blue colour with the lack of contrails crisscrossing them. (2) The woodland walk. We did four miles brisk walk around the woodlands at Nymans.. (3) Feeding the ducks. I wasn't so sure that they were going to like the remains of the onion bread that I baked on Thursday but it didn't seem to worry them in the least. We also met a huge mastiff / great dane cross bitch called Dinah who had Heterochromia. (4) Being amazed. Seeing the first bluebells of the season flowering. In late March? Almost unheard of. There were also scores of daffodils (enough to write a poem about), primroses and wood anemones in bloom. (5) Putting our Madeiran votive figure, Nossa Senhora de Fatima, back out into her shrine in the garden. Now that the incidence of hard frosts has declined, we felt that it was safe to put her back into the sunshine. Today we didn't like: (1) Losing an hour's sleep. Yes, the clocks went forward an hour overnight. It wasn't too bad this morning but tomorrow, my body is going to tell me that we are getting up at three fifteen a.m. rather than our usual four fifteen a.m. (2) Getting a phone call at eight o'clock. Yes Denis, I am aware that you can't sleep when your partner snores and you feel that you want to chat to someone but could you make sure that someone is anybody else but me please? (3) The bloody stupid, arrogant and ignorant driver of a black Volvo estate who denied me my right of way at some road works and came at me as if there was no tomorrow almost forcing me off the road. You sir, are a c@$t and deserve to have your driving licence revoked at the earliest opportunity. In future, when you have to pull out at a set of road works that protrude into your lane of traffic, make sure that there is no traffic coming the other way. I think that the worst things was that he had a wife and child in the car and he showed absolutely no remorse for his life endangering actions. Dangerous idiot. There. I think that that is all that needs to be said today. I hope that you had more likes than dislikes today as well and that your body clock adjusts to the clock change better than mine will <sigh> it was just starting to get light in the mornings too. ![]() For the Volvo driver... Nature is beautiful, eh? Well... not always. Nature can also be powerful and a right bitch. Isaac Asimov had some harsh things to say in his time. In this case, his words about the USA could also be applied to the UK. I don't understand why this website has hit the news this last week. It seems as if everyone wants to talk about it. If it was me I would have preferred a big hand. Here are some disgusting facts that you may or may not know about food. It's enough to put you off certain things for life. Here's some rare photographs of the old, famous and the dead. Finally a Japanese animation about time and life in general. "The Pendulum" A couple of weeks back I wrote an article on the heinous crime of people folding over the corner of pages in a book to mark their place. I mentioned that you could use almost anything to mark that place instead. I found a small book in a charity shop today. It is a fictional war crimes trial of Benito Mussolini and was written in 1943. What has that got to do with today's entry? Bear with me. Whilst Donna popped into Marks and Spencer for another extended bout of shopping, I did what I always do given half the chance. I tuck myself into a corner outside the shop and out of the way of the seething hordes and I take out a book that we have purchased. In fact, I try to engineer it such that M&S is the last spot on our itinerary because by then we have normally bought something to read. Anyhow, today I left Donna fighting off the Mongol hordes of Genghis Shopper, something which she seems to relish at times, and buried myself in "The Trial of Mussolini" by "Cassius". As I started to read, out slipped a small pamphlet entitled "A Mixed Marriage" by Bishop Shine printed in 1943 and priced at 1d (that's less than 1/2p to all you decimal types out there). It is an exhortation by this Roman Catholic bishop, not to indulge in mixed marriage. He isn't referring to interracial marriage or people marrying above or below their station but he is talking about Roman Catholics marrying non-Roman Catholics. It was a fascinating little diatribe with such sentences as "One false step taken impulsively has often ruined a whole life." and such like in there. Anyway, I shall keep it in the book as a book mark and in years to come when I die and the book returns to a bookseller then perhaps someone else will have a good chuckle at it too. Back to the fictional trial of Mussolini because there is still no sign of Donna appearing out of the shop. Because there aren't hordes of people fighting and screaming to get out, I deduce that she has managed to find something that she wants and is trying to get to a cash till. I read a few pages further and out of the book falls a second and very insignificant scrap of green cardboard. I picked it up and it turns out to be a 2'6 book of stamps (That's half a crown - 12 1/2p for you decimal types). Unfortunately there are no stamps left in it but it is a remarkable little piece of history. It is dated June 1944 and is stitched along the left hand edge. It has all of the postage rates for letters to the British Empire on the rear cover (2 1/2d for the first ounce and 1d for each additional ounce) . Inside there are three pages exhorting the purchaser to buy war bonds and informing them that the Telegraphic service is under great pressure so the Greeting Telegram service has been suspended. It also gives the important message "Telephone Less, Telegraph Less. Every unnecessary telephone call or telegram makes an unpatriotic call on man power". Indeed this is an insignificant little scrap of card and paper but it is a minute power pack of history dated around the time of the Normandy landings and all because someone used it to mark the pages of an obscure book. You can't do that with a folded down corner of a page can you? So go ahead and make someone's day almost seventy years from now. Leave something that you think is irrelevant pressed inside the pages of a book and think of the happy and warm glow that you might be giving someone in the future.
Have a great weekend and don't forget (UK readers only) that the clocks go forward tonight. Roll on British Summer Time! I should know better by now. I volunteered to give OE a hand sawing through some thick branches today. Having loaded the car with everything that I thought I would need (chainsaw, bow saw, secateurs, branch loppers etc), I arrived only to find that the branches in question were a couple of inches thick and belonged to a buddleia which you can just about cut through with a carving knife if you really wanted to. It wasn't even worth getting the chainsaw set up. So I set to with a vengeance and the bow saw (all without a cup of tea - that would have soaked up half an hour of valuable time) and inside five minutes, there was a neat pile of buddleia branches. However, as ever, no visit to OE is as simple as it sounds. Straight after the successful completion of the original task came the next one which was to cut back a rather large ivy which has spanned the top of the garden wall. No problems - out with the hedge cutters which I had brought with me and again, inside a few minutes, there was a large pile of ivy leaves and branches lying on the ground next to the buddleia branches. These were swiftly placed into a garden bag ready for taking to the tip. That's when the bombshell was dropped. Could I just cut back that little bush over there because it had started lifting the coping stones off the top of the wall? The little bush in question was a thumping great Stephanotis and not only had it started lifting the coping stones, in some cases, it had started to split the bricks apart. Anyway, I set to with a will and the five minute job turned into a four hour hacking, sawing and cutting job interspersed with trips to the local tip to get rid of the spoil. I still have to remove the main part of the stump which steadfastly ignored all my attempts to remove it. So I have dug around it and will fetch my felling axe to the roots next week (I didn't take that today, much as I wondered if I should). So after that final trip to the tip, I came home and showered but now I am suffering - and not in silence either. Stiff back, legs and shoulders are order of the day plus my arms look as if I have been fighting a tiger. Still, the weather was kind (up to twenty four degrees Centigrade and sunny) so it wasn't all bad. I would love to charge for my time, mileage and tools but my problem is that I am soft. OE isn't a pretty lady, nor is she shapely or helpless (much) and she hasn't offered me her body as payment in kind. She is just one of nature's really nice people and ignoring a request for assistance would be like kicking a puppy - you wouldn't want to do it. So that's been my day (apart from the housework, clothes washing and ironing). No time for a decent blog entry even. I hope you have a great weekend. Just a video today. "Fixed" a patient looks for the cure for his bad leg. "Fixed" 2010 from Jeffrey M. Thompson on Vimeo. Certainly all the companies I have worked for think that it is wrong and management consultants know that it is wrong; but me... I am not so sure. What are we talking about here? Living in the past and dwelling on past experiences. Following yesterday's blog entry, I found myself fondly recalling happy memories of my university days. Remembering the time when three of us were caught building a huge sandcastle at the end of the causeway to the college using the expensive tooth-mugs that the college had provided us with; recalling the trips out to favourite pubs when we would talk, drink, play pub games, get into deep meaningful discussions, even remembering certain work sessions in the laboratories when we all had to pull together to get the required results and celebrating or commiserating when it didn't happen. Did you notice that I used the word "experiences" back there? This is where I think that companies and management consultants have really got it wrong. None of us can be future looking all the time. We need to draw on our experience to make things work. No company can afford to lose it's experienced people and expect to provide the same level of service but they keep on doing it anyway. Take the last company I worked for; those of us with experience could (and did) tell them that what they were doing would be destructive to the customer experience (that word again) but they failed to listen. So now (according to the people who remain), life is very different, service is at an all time low but all management have done is to re-label and re-categorize the new "improved" service. What they mean is that they have lost it and are trying to put a new face on it by rebranding the piss-poor customer experience as being better than it was. It isn't. Maybe my retreat into the past is an age related thing but everything did seem a bit rosier in those heady days. Except the cars of course... they were dreadful... and the computers... they were dreadful too... and the consumer electronics... I just wonder. Do my ex university colleagues remember me as often and with the same fondness as I do of them? ![]() You'll need to click on it to read it. Talking of things past, here are twenty iconic sounds that our grandchildren won't have heard and will soon slip into oblivion. Here are another twenty things. Twenty videos of people having a very close shave with death (mostly through stupidity, ignorance or both!) These are vaguely disturbing (and I don't mean the subject matter). It's a blog dedicated to stereographic drawings. Here are some interesting taste combinations. I knew about some of them. Lastly, a video about dinosaurs. It's an autotuned set of dialogues made by "Symphony of Science". Now there is something that the future isn't better for. Autotune! Do you know what you got up to thirty five years ago? Back in 1977 I was at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Eliot College reading biochemistry. I thought I would let you know this irrelevant piece of information because guess what I found today? Yes! I kept a diary for a couple of years - possibly the forerunner of this blog - and it turned up! So what mundane things was I getting up to thirty five years back. I quote verbatim... "Got up at 7.30. Ooh what a lie! I got up at 8.00 and went to breakfast. Started the day off right. I spilt a whole cup of Eliot coffee all over the table - and me, So I've been smelling of coffee all day. Went to first lecture. Skived off Thermodynamics to do dome work for Doc Bridges supervision on rates of reactions. As it was he didn't ask any questions so we were OK. Didn't have lunch but did a bit of work for Biochem supervision with Chris Knowles. Took Ian down to the station to get his trunk sorted out. Went back to Dot's room and had a cup of tea and had a heated argument about evolution, religion and my thoughts on creation and the possibility (?) of the Great Flood "being caused by a large meteor with a low albedo that could affect the climate so that it couldn't be seen by the human eyes, that passed right close to the earth." (What a load of balls!) Went to Eliot for supper. Sat around in my room until Pat and Dot came around. Spent 1/2 an hour chatting to Pat and Brum and then spent a couple of hours working at my Biology Practical. Then I went and listened to some of Brum's records. We all decided to round the day off nicely with our usual cup of hot chocolate. Ian Walsh shifted his trunk today - with a bit of help from Brum and Dave - and Carlos! Dot fell asleep on my bed again. I don't really mind because she looks rather beautiful when she's sleeping. Pat also looks beautiful - most of the time." Rivetting stuff? I think not. You see... not all students are rabid political animals. The group of people that I knew and loved and in one case am still in touch with were great, slightly weird people. As you can see I had the hots for Dot (unreturned I might add) and not quite as much of the hots for Pat as I should have done (she thought the world of me apparently - I was just too dumb to see it!). Just looking back at this one day has brought all sorts of pleasant memories flooding back. I must read some more of my doings just to see what else I got up to. Ah... happy days! Just time for three video clips. The first is of man powered flight - a successful take off and landing using flapping wings! The other two are of other attempts. I suppose that management consultants would say that I am eating my elephant one bite at a time but I just love days like today. Days when I feel that I have enough energy to do things, but more importantly, the will to do those things. I seem to have started the day well and it has just gone from strength to strength. Let's have a look at what I have done, shall we? Apart from getting out of bed (and that is a major chore sometimes) and taking Donna to the station, I have: 1. Done the ironing. 2. Baked a loaf of bread. 3. Cooked dinner for tonight. 4. Dealt with some god-awful pensions paperwork. 5. Cut the grass. 6. Done some minor gardening. 7. Checked up on Ruth and Ben to make sure that their engineer turned up and fixed their phone. 8. Added another thirty books to my book database. 9. Caught up on some technical reading. 10. Written to my Aunty Margaret (who is in a retirement home). That isn't too bad at all for a day's work and each little task done has been a tick in a mental box, each small win building up into a big victory for the day overall. Thankfully I haven't suffered any small (or large) defeats because they tend to set me back and not do as well as I could do. So let's hear it for those small wins, shall we? Hip, hip Hooray! Let's hope I can continue in the same positive vein tomorrow. ![]() I'll be back! Click for a larger version I just love those laser eyes! If you have a modern browser (Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 11 or whatever) then you can do something similar. Just go to this website here and drag your picture over the square provided and then sit back and watch the fun! Hats in art. This website might take a little time to load because of the size of the .GIF it is downloading but it is worth the wait. I suggest that if you are about to eat a meal, are eating one or have just eaten one then you might want to not go to this next link. Particularly if you are going to have, are having or have just had a nice juicy steak. If you want to see the sheer immensity of human folly then this link to what man did to the North American buffalo fits the bill. Finally every musical genre of every decade combined into one shared phrase. Day off? In a pigs ear! Donna was, as you might have known from last week's blog entries, working very long hours and because the Government won't pay overtime she has been accumulating extra hours which she decided to use up as time off in lieu. So today dawned bright and clear (and cold! We even had a frost in Cowfold) and we were supposed to be going down to Brighton to take the air on the seafront and for me to take some photographs. Unfortunately, Donna's parents have been having problems with their telephone line and with the company that services them and to top it off, they have a well meaning but ham fisted friend who managed to nobble their mobile phone for them. So we drove down to see them. I tested the phones and then phoned the errant telephone company and before you could say "Jack Robinson" backwards, an appointment for an engineer to come and test the line was arranged for tomorrow. Fifteen minutes after that, I had undone the mischief with the mobile phone. Once that was all sorted, it was time to cut the grass for them as it was getting a bit long. Then I suggested that I pop down every ten days or so and did it again. It's a bit of a haul but it means that I can do some odd jobs and keep things under control in the house and garden. Given the way things are going, I would do this for Donna's peace of mind, let alone Ruth and Ben's. We took our leave around midday and took a long brisk walk along the seashore before moving on to Chichester for a picnic lunch in the Bishops Gardens and getting a very passable collection of books from the charity shops. A quick return home and the world seems to be peaceful. Last night? The film? You want a brief synopsis? John Carter is a good, no nonsense, action packed film. The storyline is a bit tenuous but it is loosely based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs story. It had a scantily clad buxom wench or two in it so I found it quite satisfying. The surprising thing was that it was in 3D. Neither Donna nor I had realised this and it was our first experience of a 3D film in a cinema. At first I found some of the motion effects a bit nauseating but soon adjusted to it. Overall, I reckon the film could have been shorter by twenty minutes and not lost anything but it was great fun and when it comes out on DVD I shall purchase it. What's that? How did the roast meal come out? The oven timer kicked in at the correct time and we arrived home with half an hour to spare to get the veggies cooked and there was a gorgeous scent of roasting chicken and oak smoked garlic in the air as we walked into the kitchen. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable evening. I hope that you all enjoyed your Sunday night and Monday as much as we did. Seeing as we went to see a Disney film about Mars last night, here's a Disney cartoon about space and Mars that was made back in 1957 (a good year - that was when I was born!). It also mentions Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's just under an hour long so settle yourself down with a cup of cocoa and watch to your hearts content. Not that Donna is a mother but the cats send her a card and get her a little something every year (actually, this year they didn't get her a present but that will be remedied in due course). So what have we been up to? Well, first off, a big thanks to HH for a scrumptious and hearty meal last night. Sorry to be a party pooper and leave so soon but poor Donna was absolutely whacked after her long week and I could see the tell tale signs of fatigue in her eyes. After a refreshing sleep, we were up bright and early to get away before today's annual Sunbeam Pioneer Run which comes through the village and snarls up the traffic for a few hours. I would have liked to have got some photographs but there are some unsavoury, unwashed characters in the village who only dare show their faces when there are lots of people around (I wouldn't put it past some of the scruffy tinkers to be pickpocketing if they saw the chance) and I have no desire to brush up against them - you never know what I might catch. So it was off to RSPB Pulborough Brooks to watch the birds and to see nature perking up after yesterday's rain. We had lovely blue skies and fluffy white clouds plus plenty of sunshine to make up for the battleship grey skies of yesterday. We also managed to glimpse our black adder once again but she was very cagey about human beings so she was off into the undergrowth like a shot at the sound of voices. Following our walk, we stopped for a smidgeon of shopping in Storrington - we don't seem to be able to buy any fresh orange juice in the Horsham branch of Waitrose at the moment. We returned home to the tail end of the vintage motorcycles tootling and puttering down the road and prepared dinner for this evening. Why so early? Because we are off to the cinema in Horsham to see John Carter tonight. Based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs story it looks action packed and great fun. I'll let you know how we get on tomorrow (perhaps). It does mean that I have had to get the instruction book for the oven out to learn how to put it onto timer so that dinner will be perfectly cooked by the time we return home. Yeah! Right! The instructions have been translated from Japanese into English and the whole thing was created by techno-geeks in the first place. There is no such thing as "set the time you want the oven to come on and then set how long you want it to cook for." That would be too easy, wouldn't it? You have to tell it when to stop and how long you want it to cook for and then it calculates the start time for you - if you are lucky. This little sequence of events took a bit of fiddling around to determine because of the "clarity" of the instructions. Again, I will report on how raw the roast chicken was tomorrow - if I haven't got a rampant stomach bug that is! Apart from that we haven't done much with the day. Actually, I lie! We found a brass gewgaw in one of the charity shops yesterday and Donna cleaned it up. It has Turkish writing and symbols on it and a perfunctory search on the Internet shows it to be some form of milling machine (salt / pepper / spice / coffee / hashish). Although they are still made, this one is rather old. Old enough for someone cleaning the brass to have rubbed away much of the inscription - this isn't something one would manage to do in a short time. We paid the grand sum of £2.50 for it and you can see something just like it here. A good buy, no matter how you look at it. Well that's it for today and this week. I will leave you with a futuristic, post apocalyptic animation. "Ruin" (there is a lot of Terminator 2 style action in this but it has been very nicely done all the same) RUIN from OddBall Animation on Vimeo. I was reading a variety of blogs the other day and came across one that caught my eye. It suggested that one's parents taste in music affects what type of music you like. I wondered if this was true so I thought back to my childhood days to the music of my youth (as played by my parents) and to see whether it was true. So I can remember my parents listening to vinyl LPs of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Hmmm. Yes. I quite like jazz and I do like both Ella and Louis singly and together. Let's see what else... Herb Alpert and his Tijuana brass... well, not quite so much but still listenable to. James Last and his orchestra. That's a definite "No!" from me on that one. Actually, if I am quite honest, Mum and Dad didn't listen to a lot of their own music. I can't say that ours was a quiet household as a child but I can't remember my parents playing a lot of music for pleasure. The radio, when it was used, was tuned to the BBC light program (what is now called Radio 2) but that was mostly for broadcasts of Mrs Dale's Diary (we weren't followers of The Archers) and for listening to the Goon Show. My father loathed and detested The Clitheroe Kid and that hatred has come down to me. It now extends to The Krankies which to all intents and purposes followed the same pattern as Jimmy Clitheroe as far as embarrassment goes. Once my sister and I had been bought transistor radios we were invariably tuned to one of the pirate radio stations. My first transistor radio had Radio Caroline marked on the dial (by the manufacturer, not me!). When Radio 1 was launched in 1967, I was an avid listener (I always did like The Move) but I soon became disillusioned and switched back to the pirates for my listening pleasure. It gave me the chance to get to know the sort of music that Radio 1 didn't play much of because nice people didn't want that! Then there was a hiatus in my listening because my father was stationed out in Germany with the RAF and like it or not, there wasn't a lot of choice on the radio; The British Forces Broadcasting Service or local German radio. There was only radio (definitely no television like there is these days) on the BFBS with endless repeats of The Goon show, Back in England and with puberty springing up on me, I started listening to more eclectic stuff. Whilst I loved the 1970s for it's music, it was still a bit too mainstream. I started developing more obscure tastes, sometimes helped along by friends (CC gave me my love of the original Genesis and Uriah Heep) and sometimes just by sheer chance (I found out about the joys of Tangerine Dream and Roy Harper). That has been the start of my listening habits. I still find new bands and music to listen to but very much as the Disco craze stifled music back in the late seventies, rap music and it's derivatives are slaughtering any real innovation today but just once in a while something worthwhile listening to comes along. Then there are the old timers... the Pink Floyds, Roling Stones and David Bowies of the world. Sigh! Music just ain't what it used to be and I am sure that my parents will agree! Because Donna and I are out to dinner this evening with HH, there is just time for one video and if this doesn't freak you out then nothing will. Happy St Patrick's Day! |
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May 2015
AuthorPaul Everest - Shining wit (at least that is what I think they said) |