Like it or not, we had to go into town to get some victuals for the coming week. Seeing as it was New Year's Eve, we made a special effort to get into town early. I couldn't begin to believe the number of folks in town or in the supermarket. There were almost none! Horsham was a Ghost Town. We wandered around the supermarket, picked up what we needed in double quick time, paid for it and still had so much time on our hands that Donna suggested a walk around the charity shops and sales to see what was available. Almost every emporium we went in to was the same - almost empty. We even had the time to chat to some of the staff that we know and they said that it had been very slow since. Our weather is very cold, soggy and grey over here in the UK but I am looking forwards to 2012 because 2011 hasn't been the kindest of years. I have plans for 2012, many of them not one hundred percent formulated but they are things that I want to do. Rather than make this a long and drawn out farewell to 2011, I am tempted to do one more video clip of someone totally awesome. On a screen test for RKO, they said of him "Can't sing. Can't act. Balding. Can dance a little." however we knew that he put this snub aside and was just an incredible dancer; Fred Astaire. Happy New Year everyone; may your dreams and wishes come true in 2012 and here's to it being a healthy, prosperous and wonderful year. Those of you who read my blog on a regular basis will know that I have been doing, and have now completed, an online photographic course. Part of the course that has provided me with the most joy has been the Facebook group page that allows students to ask for assistance or perhaps to show off a latest photograph for others to critique or make suggestions on how to improve it. Although there are over ten thousand members of this group, there are relatively few active members so you tend to see the same faces appear time after time (mine being one of them). Just like in real life, there are people on there who have absolutely no idea about what is going on and will never improve, others who are improving in leaps and bounds, yet others for who nothing ever goes right or works. There are sympathy seekers who soak up assistance and support like a sponge and then there are the busybodies and know-it-alls, Unfortunately I suppose I should classify myself in the last two categories. I'm always ready to lend a helping hand if I can or to try to put people right if they are going astray. Then there are the other folks. The ones who are downright unpleasant. I suppose it is a mirror to real society but there are some folks who just don't fit in at all and the unpleasant ones are some of those people. Over the past six months I have had a head-to-head with two of them where, for once, I have kept my cool and it has worked very well. Other people have come to my assistance and sided with me to offer support. There have been others who have been just so unpleasant that they cause friction wherever they have gone. Sometimes they get given the royal order of the boot from the group and sometimes they leave of their own accord. I think that it is such a shame that unlike Facebook, we can't rid society of the unpleasant types with little more than a click of a button but I know in reality that we have to put up with them. They are an integral part of society and we need to try and be more inclusive of them despite their unpleasant tendencies. It is only because human beings in social groups are as forgiving as they are that we can accept these others into a society and then try to change their ways from within. If we start taking drastic measures to "remove" people that don't fit the norm then we are all at risk of deviating from it at some point and run the risk of being "exterminated" so that we don't upset those that remain. For instance, if we "remove" all murderers then how long before we start doing it to petty criminals? How long before people who commit a crime of fashion come under scrutiny ("Look at that! He's wearing white sports socks with his three piece suit! Burn him!")? Or gays? Jay-walkers? The elderly? Those who have red hair and freckles? Nor can we go the other way whereby we all become inanely grinning, weird religious types who see no wrong in anyone or anything and letting people get away with murder (literally).. No. We need to be tolerant of others - we are all individuals with our own quirks after all. Whilst admonishing the errant ones for their unpleasant behaviours, we need to be helping them to correct their behaviour whether that be by means of a stick, carrot or both. In the meantime, rather than disposing of the garbage, the best we can do is to exclude them; either by withdrawing ourselves from their presence or keeping them away from us. ![]() The answer to an age-old problem. That's my bit of moralising and philosophising over and done with for today (and possibly for the rest of the year too!) Let's see what fun we can come up with for you. How about people who dress up with a horse's head mask on? Sounds weird but some folks do - check out the gallery link on this page. Cats are amazingly good at doing invisible things as you can see here. I wonder why they are so incredibly visible at doing them? Brian May, former guitarist with Queen, is a handy fellow. Here he discusses how he came by the guitar that gave him his trademark sound. MacDonalds has a reputation to uphold as one of the leading junk-food retailers of our times. Heaven knows why anyone would want to imitate them but they do. Lastly a weird little animation for you. "Plato" Plato from Léonard Cohen on Vimeo. We had a nice evening with our nice-neighbours D&H (rather than the appallingly common, vulgar, disgusting, noisy, unpleasant neighbours B&D who we steer away from on all available occasions) last night There was an excellent meal (as usual) and the red wine flowed freely making for loose tongues and a return invitation for Friday when H and I are going to partake of the Bury and Rudd's number 3 gin that I got for Christmas while Donna keeps D topped up with wine. Be that as it may, we got home at a semi-reasonable hour and whilst waiting for the electric blanket to do its thing, we sat with a nice glass of ginger wine to take the chill off us. Whilst the bed was warming, I started to update my Facebook status and check any other Facebook messages and what I read made my blood boil. Facebook are going to force an application called "The Timeline" onto all users. No opting in or out of it, we are going to get it. I did a rapid search for a way around it and it appears that there will be none. I was so incensed at this lack of privacy that I was going to cancel my Facebook subscription straight away. However, being somewhat "tired and emotional", I decided to go to bed. I could always pull the plug on it in the morning. I didn't sleep at first; a combination of me fulminating at the brazen invasion of my privacy and Donna's snoring, stopping me from collapsing into the arms of Morpheus. We woke up late at nine-thirty this morning and I decided to postpone pulling the plug until after breakfast when my fat head might have subsided somewhat. Then I had an emergency job to do on the car. I had to replace the reversing light bulb on the car. Yes... I know I was meant to do it a few weeks ago but I didn't bother and I felt that I ought to. It was less awkward than it could have been but more awkward than it should have been but at the end, with little more than a few scrapes to the arms, stiff muscles and a half hour of swearing to show for it, the bulb has been replaced. Then it was time for a shower and to scrub my teeth. I decided that I needed to think about my response to the Facebook techies latest invasion of privacy crisis so Donna and I took a run down to Sheffield Park gardens to take a stroll and get some fresh air to blow away the alcohol related cobwebs from the brain. On returning from our walk, I decided the time had come to show Facebook who was who. On checking the details out though it turns out that although I will have to have this dratted Timeline thingy, there are lots of things you can do to wipe out the effects thereof and there is also a way for me to show my displeasure. So rather than cutting my nose off to spite my face, I am going to indulge in a lot of privacy changes and then display my ire in a method that they won't approve of but can't do anything to stop me short of kicking me off. Thank heavens I didn't let the alcohol get to my common sense last night! ![]() Never a truer word spoken. I didn't quite get to the stage where the booze made me lose my horizontal and vertical hold last night. Do you know why alcohol makes your head spin? Find out here. Signs. Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes not. Sometimes they make you think... "WTF?" I'm not too sure that I want to buy sweeties from this company. This chap is a bit of a poseur but he can certainly do magical illusions and in a hurry too. Here's ten illusions in five minutes. Finally a short but powerful film about an actor. "Method Actor" Method Actor from Justin Stokes on Vimeo. I noticed from one of the tech blogs that I read regularly that one of the Internet greats died a final death this year; the search engine AltaVista was finally switched off in favour of the search engine from Yahoo! returning results to a Yahoo! page. For many folks this will not come as any surprise and for even more the following words will come to mouth "What in heck's name is / was AltaVista?" In its time, it was the king of search engines but you had to work hard to get the results that you wanted; There was none of the "What do you call the red breasted bird on Christmas cards?" that you can pour into modern day search engines. True you had to work harder but that was one of the joys of searching. Sometimes the simplest of requests could return some very weird results whereas now, I am sure you will find the word "Robin" (and perhaps "Turkey") in the top results for my earlier search request. Nowadays almost anyone who is anyone (i.e. almost everyone) doesn't think of a search engine beyond Google any more. The simple and clean interface without any clutter was one of the things I found appealing about it when I first started to use it. Nowadays, the website has even been turned into a verb. How many times have you heard "I Googled for the answer."? It has become as synonymous with web searching as "Hoover" is to vacuum cleaners. However, let me ask you a question. What would you turn to if Google suddenly fell apart and was no longer available? I had a distraught phone call from my father some time back when Google had an uncustomary glitch. "Google is down," he intoned, "how am I going to search for an answer to this question?". I reminded him that there were other search engines not powered by Google but you could hear the hesitation and distrust in his voice. He had been using the big "G" for so long that he couldn't remember the name of any other search engines. So my big question for you today is "How many search engines could you put your finger on to help you out if Google wasn't working?" I can think of Bing, Yahoo! and Ask straight away but would probably scratch my head now that Cuill and AltaVista have died and if I really put my brain into overdrive, I could probably scratch up Dogpile and ScrubTheWeb from the dim and distant past There is quite a list. This one isn't quite as complete as it could be but you might want to fall back on it should the worst happen. Alternatively, you could always go to your favourite search engine and hunt out your own list. Try it, but do yourself a favour and use a different search engine from Google - just so that you know how to! I'm a bit busy to do too may links (we're off to another dinner tonight, this time with the nice neighbours) so I will leave you with this little game, bars of black and white, and this lovely video clip which shows a camel doing what camels do best - getting the hump.
Finally the mandatory video clip. This one is about a crane driver. "Man Up" The holiday season is a time for yearning, or so I find. Whilst we ply ourselves with yummy comestibles and alcohol galore, I am aware that my body is screaming out for certain things. My body yearns for simple food; vegetables come high on that list. It tells me that unless I start having lots of sprouts, cabbage and carrots and a lot less of the rich things in life, my digestion is going to be in one heck of a poor state. Likewise, my muscles tell me that I really ought to jemmy my fat behind out of a comfortable chair and go out and do some exercise; my lungs usually concur with this, telling me that a good blast of fresh air would probably spur me on to bigger and better things. To this end we decided to go out for a nice long walk yesterday, about five miles, and a similar amount of yardage today. So we opted to go out to the RSPB sanctuary at Pulborough Brooks again. Actually, it was also a good excuse to pop into one of the local supermarkets to pick up some more semi-skimmed milk. We stopped off in the Waitrose in Storrington and watched aghast as people were filling their trolleys with yet more stomach-groaning foodstuffs in preparation for the coming New Year festivities. All we had was a four pint bottle of semi-skimmed milk and a couple of extra bottles of beer for me. On to the sanctuary and we started our brisk walk. It seems that other folks were in the same mindset as us because the car parks were filling up quite rapidly. Now, it may seem strange but it is customary to bid people that you meet on your walk with some cheery greeting or other. Anything from a brisk "Good morning" to something as simple as "Hi" and it would be nice to expect something similar in return. Because everyone tends to walk around the sanctuary in the same direction, this generally means that you are only going to actually see something in the order of half a dozen groups so it's not as if you are going to spend your day in friendly greetings or acting like an inanely smiling Mormon for the entire length of your walk. This is when I begin to wonder about the people that we meet when it is always us that makes the greeting and then it is almost like having to wring any response out of people. They pretend to look away as if you have leprosy or they grit their teeth and say "gdmrnng" if anything at all. Surely not everyone that we met this morning is wetter than a Haddock's swimming costume? Not everyone can be as wet as my colleagues DM or BE surely? Come along people, it isn't going to hurt to pipe up with a cheery greeting before we do, nor to respond in a friendly fashion if greeted first. The people who do tend to answer positively or beat you to the mark are the ones who normally have something to say to you. If it hadn't been for that other nice middle aged couple who passed us a friendly greeting, we wouldn't have been aware of the murmuration of several hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand, of Lapwings in the distance, nor of the pair of Peregrine Falcons who were stooping into this mass to make a kill. If we had merely hidden our faces and made no attempt to communicate then they would not have bothered to tell us. Come on people. Let's be a little more friendly, shall we? Say "goodnight", Gracie. ![]() Good news for all of you (or should I say "all of us"?) who are scared about dentists. there is a new type of brush / drill out there that is painless. Now that should bring a smile to many people's faces. Now for some rubbish animals. How naff is that website? Not that many people are aware of it but DNS is incredibly important for how the Internet works. This short video clip will explain why and break down a few of the myths about the Internet at the same time. I have not come across these before but I would like to see one one day. Money trees. Finally a French animation set to music. Perhaps my friend HH can help me out with a translation of the final thirty seconds of froggy gobbledegook (froggydegook?) at the end of the clip. Well... did you enjoy it? Christmas that is? As you may have gathered, Christmas isn't my favourite time of year in the slightest but there is something nice about St Stephen's Day (today that is... Boxing Day is what most people call it). It's the day when Donna and I open most of our presents. So we were sat there this morning from about nine thirty until almost eleven thirty, clad only in our dressing gowns opening presents. Which brings me to my first real question of the day. Out of all the Christmas presents which one rates as your favourite one? In my case it would be the battery powered socks that one of the cats bought me. These marvellous bits of hosiery take an R20 battery each and this warms the toes up to a lovely temperature. Obviously Santa head my whines and winges about having cold toes and did something about it. Second on my list is in fact a joint second. First of these was the bottle of Talisker whisky that HH bought me - a welcome present and one that I tackled last night. Just a small bracer but "Ooooooooooooh" it was lovely! The second of these was the bottle of Bury Bros. Number 3 London Dry Gin that Donna bought me. I haven't had any of thatyet but I will put it to good use tonight. Neither of these bottles of spirits are to be wasted by just glugging them back or offering them as drinks to the neighbours. They are for contemplative sipping and sheer enjoyment. Third favourite present? I don't think that I can pick a third favourite out of all the others that I got although some of the books should be interesting. Which brings me to my next question. It's a bit trivial but it's a bit of fun. If you could be any animal, what would it be and why? I suppose that with all of the chilly weather about I could say that I want to be "a little Otter" but that would be too obvious and one of the worst puns ever. No; I think that if I had to be another animal, I would want to be a pampered house cat because they get cosseted and overfed and spoiled and stroked and... whatever! Granted I would have to be microchipped and neutered (or spayed depending on what sex I came back as) but I think that I could put up with that. I did think about being a zebra, all that lovely hot weather and safety in numbers but I thought that the diet of veldt grass might be a bit monotonous plus the prospect of being caught and nibbled by any number of a different variety of predators (e.g. lions, leopards, hyaena, wild dogs for starters) put me off a bit. It was a close thing though because I thought that the stripy costume was neat. I did think about being a lion or a leopard but I don't think I would like to have to risk a hefty kick from my prey whenever I fancied a bit of zebra for lunch! So there you go... let me know which animal you would like to be if you had the chance and why. ![]() It's almost that time of year again! "It's very nice dear. Just what I wanted. Thank you soooo much." was what you said but as soon as Aunty Mabel goes you can't wait to take it back to the shop for a refund because you don't like it. The BBC news has some helpful hints on returning those unwanted gifts. Candy canes. How do they make them? You can find out here. I can feel my blood sugars soaring just thinking about them. Here's a great guy to talk to about paper art, folding and cutting. Think of a leaning tower and almost instantly Pisa will spring to mind. Here are ten other towers that lean as well. Finally, the usual animation bit. "Share the Joy" Humbug! Humbug! Humbug! I still don't like Christmas but today wasn't too bad in the end. We were lucky that our friend HH came to visit and stay for lunch. Sitting around a log fire and having a chinwag was the best thing that could happen as far as I am concerned. We swapped presents and had a lovely meal prepared by Donna. Not the usual roast turkey and trimmings but cheese and mushroom soufflé, chicken stuffed with blue Wensleydale and plum served in a white wine sauce with asparagus and french beans and chilli and lime rice all followed by a steamed mincemeat pudding with custard. All of this was served with a bottle of Medoc and even though it wasn't the usual huge roast that leaves people groaning as they overeat, it was an elegant sufficiency. Certainly I don't think that I will be partaking of any further food today. In fact, I don't think that we are going to open the rest of our Christmas presents today either. I am just contemplating cracking open the bottle of Talisker that HH gave me for Christmas and have myself a bracer. I hope that you had a really special day and that you don't suffer because of it. Just one link today. A Christmas story of friendship.
Has anyone else noticed it? That it doesn't feel Christmassy yet? Maybe it's just me. We have spent the day with Donna's folks down near Gosport and have swapped presents and a lot of chat but nowhere on the way there seems to have the feel of Christmas. I was expecting the local towns to be chocker and the roads surrounding them full of frenzied drivers but that wasn't the case either. We had one of the best trips from door to door in both directions today all bar the rather nasty accident that blocked the road just outside of Amberley. Thankfully there were enough other people on the scene doing their thing that we just turned around and came home a different way. Not the nicest way to start your Christmas hols.
The only two things that made me feel happier today were that I managed to fill the car with Esso petrol at 127.9 per litre (that's about 8p or 9p cheaper per litre than around here) and I fell in love with a beautiful little kitten called Lucy when we stopped off to deliver our Christmas present of cat food at the Gosport branch of Cats Protection. If anyone wants a beautiful, playful little minx of a tortoiseshell kitten (about twelve weeks old and soooo cute) she is up for adoption and if you are interested then send me a comment and I will pass on your details to Debbie who is currently looking after her. If only we didn't have a full complement of very jealous kitties then I would take her myself. Which reminds me, in case you haven't see one of the latest Simon's Cat animations "Double Trouble" where a new kitten is introduced then you must see it - click here. For all cat owners who have tried to introduce a new kitten into an existing cat household, it is hilarious and you will recognise many of the signs. Apart from that, Donna is making a good recovery from her cold, my sniffle is drying up and we are looking forward to having HH over to lunch tomorrow. I hope that you have the Christmas that you were expecting. I don't know if I will be blogging or not tomorrow. It depends on how paralytic I get! You'll just have to come back and see. Talking of getting drunk, I can see that it is beer o'clock already. See you! I am reasonably well known for having a bit of a rant over things that annoy me. If you look back over the past couple of years you will see that I have had a dig at quite a few different groups of people but I thought that I would reserve my ire for these two types until now. Who are they? The "overly generous" and the "clear definers". Let's start with the overly generous shall we? This year there is one particularly over generous gentleman who has ensured that our Christmas is going to be a bit of a subdued affair. I don't know the gentleman's name at all but I would like to thank him for sneezing copiously over Donna at the start of this week. No attempt to find a handkerchief or to catch his infectious droplets in his hand, he just let go with a nose full of cold-laden droplets. So Donna has started coming down with a cold which is guaranteed to help the Christmas spirit flow whilst the infectious gentleman will probably be over the worst of his cold before the big day. Worst still, Donna might have imparted this git's cold to me so that is going to be tow of us feeling run down and like death warmed up. Thank you Mr. "I don't give a toss how many other people catch my cold" Overly Generous Person. Let's hope that someone buys you some hankies as one of your presents and someone else (your Mummy perhaps?) teaches you how and when to use them. Let's move onto the clear definers now. Over the years I have come across many books where people have found ingenious methods of marking the page where they last were. I have seen a variety of bookmarks from five pound notes to pieces of toilet paper pinned between book pages. I have even seen an unused tea bag (one with a string and a tag) used to define the last spot where a reader has been. The one set of people I have no tolerance for is the army of page corner folders. Why? Why do you insist on doing it? It is the start of a degradation process that ends in the book losing one or more corners of pages. Worse still are the people who fold over almost the top half of a page. It is sinful enough that a good book should lose the corner of a page but when it is almost half a page of text that disappears because you have folded it, that then renders the book useless. Worse still are the offenders who do it to books that they have been lent or to library books. Would they do it to a priceless volume of the Book of Kells? Very probably. So to Mr Overly Generous and Mr (or Mrs, I can't tell) Clear Definer, I have reserved somewhere special for you. A special section of hell that you deserve to go for eternity. No links today as I have a special photography shoot to do. I'll tell you more tomorrow.
Addendum... Photo shoot over. Happy Christmas from "The Boys" in their new Christmas costumes. The weather was lovely today. So much so that Donna and I decided to take a walk. Off we drove to Nymans, on went the walking boots and off we went around the gardens and down into the woods. As is usual during one of these walks we fell to talking. Today we spoke of many things, of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- of cabbages--and kings. Sorry, I waxed a bit more lyrical there than I meant to and broke into "the Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll. Where was I? Oh yes, speaking of many things... As is normal during these walks and talks I am doing my best to listen to Donna whilst my mind wanders. This is usually the time when she sneaks a bombshell under my radar (e.g. "I said it was OK for xyz to stay with us for a few days in January") but I have become used to these sort of sneak attacks under the pretence of me not listening but today my lack of attention wasn't hit by such an attack as this. I was wondering what I could write about for today's blog entry. I could mention that it is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and also tell you that this is normally the twenty first of December but that this year it falls on the twenty second but decided not to... except that I just did. Then it dawned on me. Today is my second anniversary. Today it has been two years since I was thrown onto the manpower scrapheap by IBM - Thanks IBM, it was really nice of you to make me redundant (by the way, I didn't take the extra £1000 "shut-up" money offering from you so I can say this without fear of prosecution - you cheapskate bastards). Two whole years since I started writing my blog. (that was in the bad old days when I was creating a web page for each day rather than using the blogging facility). I hadn't meant to keep it going this long but it just seems to have happened. That reminds me... I better renew my subscription to Weebly's "Pro" service because that is just about due now too. It has been a hectic two years and a lot has happened but there wouldn't be any point in me telling you any of this when you can read it all for yourself on this blog. As this year slips by into oblivion, I wonder what the new year will hold? I have rather got used to not being part of the rat race, my health has improved dramatically (rather, my health conditions haven't worsened at the rate they were doing). No - I would like a little job and a bit of extra cash in my pocket but I can't see me ever sitting at a desk in a stressful situation in the manner that I used to. I would like to say "Thank you" to all the people who have taken the time to read my daily ravings and hope that you all have a great Christmas, wherever you are. Do you ever wonder if Santa has his problems? Apparently he does. Santa is an engaging personality, even if he is a fake dreamed up by the Coca Cola company advertising boys in the early years of the last century. I trust that everyone has been watching the latest David Attenborough wildlife spectacular "The Frozen Planet" recently? Here is a film clip that he didn't manage to get. If you are thinking of buying me a Christmas present (sorry to leave it so late this year) then I think that I would like this sweatshirt please. Thanks Finally, a little bit of Bach for you. Today is the first day of the holiday break for Donna and I. We made the most of it by having a three hour lie in! This means that we got up at seven thirty this morning. Believe you me, when you get up at four fifteen normally, you feel like half the day has wasted if you sleep in until seven thirty. First day of the break doesn't mean that we have been slouching around. No sirree, it sure don't! (I'm not sure if I should add "y'all" to that statement or not...). Whilst Donna finished off something vaguely work oriented, I put my elbows into a mountain of ironing. To help me along, I was listening to a CD of sixties and seventies hits under the title of "Vintage Cheese!" and it was rather frightening to find that I knew a lot of the lyrics and tunes still because they were the music of my very young youth. Some of the tunes, I can remember listening to on my transistor radio. Those were the days when "trannies" meant small components that allowed miniaturisation of electrical devices, such as radios, to the size of a small brick rather than gentlemen who wear ladies clothes or gentlemen who have had the operation to make them ladies. Those were the days when tuning dials on radios had Radio Caroline on them (before it became a pirate radio station based on the ship the Mi Amigo). Some of the tunes stem back to my early youth and others to my teenage years. Some of them brought memories flooding back. Of long car trips to see Grandma Everest. Others reminded me of happy years spent roaming the forests in Germany, yet others of sunny days at my last school and my first visit to a discotheque. I thought back to absent friends. I wonder where David Palmer is these days? Michael Julien? Sally Jefferies? Timothy Duckworth? Susan Wagstaff? They are of my age group and I am sure that they all have had run of the mill lives and jobs, families and their share of heartaches and happiness. I wonder if these same tunes that I have been listening to evoke similar memories for them? Perhaps one of these folks has listened to these tunes and has even thought about me. It's a nice thought and one that I will cling to over Christmas. ![]() Must have run out of batteries! We all hear of third world countries and the problems that they have. Here are some typical first world problems. Some people are never grateful! Kim Jong-il has hardly been dead a couple of days and the Internet is poking fun at him (quite right too! Why should he escape world wide ridicule?) Here he is with a selection of sunglasses. Did you enjoy the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films? Do you want to see a trailer for the forthcoming film "The Hobbit"? OK. Here you go. Heroic dogs. Here's five of them! Now for a peculiar animation. An egg and an apple build competing transmitting towers to attract a transistor radio. I told you that it was peculiar! SEED from Seed Movie on Vimeo. Last night, Donna put marzipan and icing on the three Christmas cakes that she bakes every year for the monks in the local Charterhouse. This morning I had the pleasure of delivering those cakes. These three very large, "substantial" cakes (i.e. mostly fruit and alcohol held together with very little in the way of flour and eggs) are one of the small things that we do to help the monks in return for all they do for the village. We know that their diet is austere and vegetarian but we also know that they do enjoy small luxuries. Then again, there isn't a spare ounce of fat on any of these men so I don't think that we are doing them any harm by giving them an occasional treat. After the delivery, I popped up to Horsham to see a friend. She was glad to see me and topped me up with tea whilst I helped out with one or two little tasks around the house. She was bemoaning the fact that she was going to have to go on the post Christmas diet, before Christmas. I must admit that she was looking very plump and comely but I would have thought that starting a post Christmas diet before Christmas was a silly thing to do. It turns out that she is going on a cruise in February next year and she needs to be able to fit into her cocktail dresses by then. Being the rude and vulgar person that I am, I did offer her lots of rampant, rumpy-pumpy to wear off the puppy fat but she knows me for the perv that I am so she just giggled and said "no thanks!" (actually, it would have been scarier if she had said "yes please!" because I would be hoist by my own petard!). As I know too well, Christmas is a heck of a time to be contemplating a diet given the huge amount of calories that people in the Western world push down their throats. The best thing to do would be not to overindulge beforehand and certainly be a little more sparing with the calories over the holiday period. Certainly, Donna and I are not going to be eating or drinking a great deal more than usual and we tend to go off for long walks over the two or so weeks that we have at home. This usually means that we end up in the new year weighing less than we did in the middle of December. No, we are not perfect; this last couple of weeks have been dotted with small deviations from the normal low fat, low salt, low alcohol, low everything diet. However, we do try our best to stick to the straight and narrow. Come the new year, I am going to make an effort to lose my middle aged spare tyre with increased exercise as well as diet (lots more nooky? Probably a lot more miles on the exercise bike if I am honest). The best way to do this is for me not to get too used to the calories beforehand. So it looks as if the pre-Christmas, post Christmas diet is on my horizon too. To be successful I have two choices as far as I can see. The first is to join the local Charterhouse and live like a hermit and the second is to set myself a target like being able to get into my friend's cocktail dresses. Now there's an interesting concept! ![]() Having a whale of a time at Christmas. A lot of folks get bored over the Christmas period. If you are one of them, then check out this list of four hundred and seventy four different things to do. Trained dogs. Trained to do what? Well, watch the video clip and find out! Here's a present for all the ladies who complain that men don't lift the toilet seat. It's a no lift seat. Now for an uplifting story of survival. The story of the faceless kitten. I will warn you that some of the photography is very graphic but the end result is a very heartwarming story. Finally, an animation about two artists who fail to see the bigger picture. "The Artists" The Artists from Giant Creative on Vimeo. 2011 has been a very good year for getting rid of things. Dictators, for instance. Granted, the dictators probably haven't been too happy about the situation and some of them are fighting hard, and bloodily, to maintain their particular unpleasant regime (Yoohoo, Mr Baššār al-ʾAsad, I'm talking about you here). Some of the dictators have left of their own accord as soon as they have been granted freedom from prosecution, others have been ousted militarily, yet others have been killed and today we learned of Kim Jong-il of North Korea shuffling off this mortal coil to his heaven or hell. From the sounds of things he was in fact Kim Jong-very-ill and had been for a long time but I am glad to see that in the end he did something worthwhile with his life for his country - he died. Whether these evil people have gone to their respective heaven or hell will never be known but they certainly helped a lot of innocent people from their own countries to their respective afterlives. Now that we have removed some of these evil people from their countries and made the world a "happier" place to live in, isn't it about time that we got rid of some of the evil people in our midst? I'm talking about a group of people so evil that they have made life absolute misery for the common, working man. Yes. I am speaking of banks and corporations. You don't need a lunatic like Gaddafi at the top, making life a misery and coining it in when there are thousands of boardrooms across the country where these bankers and corporation leaders are voting themselves huge personal salaries and making life a misery for almost everyone. Their companies and banks persistently break the law and consistently get away with it, whilst voting themselves even larger inflation busting salaries and bonuses. Inflation busting? Far from it. It's people like that who make inflation the problem that it really is today. I'm not advocating bloody rebellion to remove these monsters from our midst but I am saying that ordinary shareholders should strangle the funds that these corporations and banks are granting their leaders. Excuses such as "we need to pay these huge sums of money to recruit and keep the right calibre of people." just don't wash any more, if they ever did in the first place. If these people were of the right calibre then why are countries all over the world in such a mess? Greed and mismanagement perhaps? That doesn't sound like the action of highly qualified professional people to me. That smacks of personal gain. So let's have a peaceful revolution that makes the boardrooms of the world quake in their boots and become accountable to the people for their actions. Oh... politicians will be next on the list... ![]() World peas. Click for a larger picture. What sort of noises do rhinoceros make? You would imagine a sort of grunting, not these whale sounds. How about this for an absolutely pointless website? Make your own cereal box! Yeah, right. I think I'll call mine "Numpties!" Now this is just plain frightening. I know a lot of people who can't park a car or know how to use their mobile phone. Can you imagine them trying to do both at the same time? I think I'll catch a bus or walk if this becomes a reality. This one is quite old but it makes me chuckle whenever I see it. Guidelines for pregnant parents. Lastly for today, a short video about orphaned monkeys. _"Home, home again. I like to be here when I can. When I come home cold and tired. It's good to warm my bones beside the fire." Thus warbled those minstrels, Pink Floyd, on one of their tracks on the "Dark Side of the Moon" album (off you go - go and Google it and see if you can find the track because the title is on the tip of your tongue. I'm not going to help you...) We have had a fairly uneventful trip up to see my parents apart from the driving snow for the last twenty miles getting there and the slushy sleet for the last twenty miles coming home. We have done our usual present delivering, had a good chinwag, fixed and cleaned up my Dad's PC, had lunch and another chinwag. Now... I am totally knackered and I am just waiting for beer o'clock so that I can go down to the fridge and get myself a coldy. No more for today, just one of my favourite Christmas videos of all time. "White Trash Christmas". See you all tomorrow. Guess what time just rolled around? BEER O'CLOCK! YEAH! If you are then I have two words for you. "STOP IT!". We had our first flurry of snow yesterday, big, sticky wet flakes which decided not to settle on account of it being far too warm and far too wet. I was quite thankful in a way because tomorrow we are travelling about a hundred and twenty miles up country to see my parents and I hate doing it in inclement weather. These days you can even add rain into that list but driving that distance (short though it is) in snow would be absolutely dreadful. Worse still will be the return journey which will be in the dark. I don't have a real problem with driving in snow but it seems that other people do. In fact some folks seem to have a problem driving in anything but good conditions as far as I can see. Take last night for instance. I was on my way to pick up Donna when the chap about five cars in front of me hit and killed a deer that shot out in front of him. The deer just about totalled his car even though we were doing about forty m.p.h. at the time. From that point on traffic movement was like cold treacle being poured off a spoon. The chap who had the accident did the right thing and pulled his car off the road as far as possible and with the aid of another driver, moved the poor deceased animal off the road. Between them they picked up the bits of broken plastic and glass, made phone calls to the police, break down services, home etc. Now this is the strange part. Even with the chap pulled mostly off the road, people were reluctant to go past; in either direction. Eventually, some brave soul inched past from the other way (and I do mean inched) when you could happily have got a couple of lorries or buses going in either direction without any trouble. It would appear that a lot of people just aren't aware of the size of their cars, either length or in this case width. Of course once the flow got going one way, it took a while before anyone going in our direction would even chance it despite the fact that there was almost no constriction in the road. Unfortunately there were a large number of rubber neckers too who took their eyes off the road and disengaged their minds from the task of driving thus almost causing several additional accidents due to their mawkish curiosity. Needless to say, it was dark as well which didn't aid matters one jot. I have this strange feeling that there are a lot of people out there who would benefit from additional driving lessons and basic familiarisation with their own vehicles. Driving should be what it was intended to be, a skill; not some sort of inalienable human right to allow the gormless to get around. Right - that's my little rant over with for the day. I may not be able to do a blog entry tomorrow. It will all depend on the vagaries of the driving public and what time we get home from my parents. Electric toasters. So important that they even have a webpage of their very own and you can even buy a calendar of them (it doesn't help that it's the 2011 calendar though!) Now for a festive greeting from Cyriak (the man who gave you disturbing video clips about sheep, cows, kitties and teddies) One of my cousins donated all his Christmas card money this year to the RSPCA on behalf of rabbits. I thought that rabbits were just nose twitching, lettuce eating, poop machines but it turns out that they need toys too! How about a visit into the microworld? Fantastic photography! Finally, another of those movie mashups. This time it's "Sit down and shut up!" |
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May 2015
AuthorPaul Everest - Shining wit (at least that is what I think they said) |