Early Risers.

[Tony_S]

4 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

His Furship was quite insistently lunging and pawing at a large fly in the window the other day. 

When Robbie was a puppy he would stalk, pounce and eat spiders. Once he was older they could walk right in front of him. We could tell he knew they were there but they came in to the can’t be bothered category. Any insect that flew into Matthew’s pet rats cage didn’t get out. 

Edited August 8 by Tony_S

[Coombe Barton]

... The weather forecast says it’s still going to be warm overnight but is better for tomorrow. Sleeping naked atop the duvet is one way of being able to get some decent sleep. Please do injure yourself laughing while considering that prospect. ...

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/08/08/postcards-from-the-periphery-2024-12/

[PhilJ W]

1 hour ago, Gwiwer said:

His Furship was quite insistently lunging and pawing at a large fly in the window the other day. 
 

After a number of attempts and much boo-wooping he licked his lips wetly as it went down. 
 

That’s a first for him that we know of. And it was neither returned nor was there any eructation. 

Many years ago we had a boxer bitch, woe betide any fly that came within three feet of her.

[Mike Bellamy]

19 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

The news has been full of stories about England burning down and piling in as it's a great story for them.

15 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I've refrained from commenting on the "news" from England. I've seen that movie before. Different groups, motives, official response and targets but the essentially similar reporting that the whole city was burning down and had descended into chaos and post-apocalyptical dystopia.

 

Back in 2001, soon after I started working with overseas partnerships at the university, I took a phone call from a member of staff at a college in Israel - she asked how we were coping - what do you mean? I asked. The smoke she replied - what do you mean smoke, thinking I had misunderstood what she said or something had been lost in translation. It turned out that all of their news broadcasts were headlined by the Foot and Mouth outbreak and films of piles of dead cattle being burned. She knew Derbyshire was a rural area and genuinely thought that what she had seen on TV was happening on every farm in the country, were we all breathing in smoke, and we would soon have no cows left. The photo in the BBC link below shows what she meant - 6 million animals were lost that year.

 

Quote

TV screens were filled with images of giant bonfires of carcasses and soldiers digging mass graves.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35581830

.

[PhilJ W]

44 minutes ago, Coombe Barton said:

... The weather forecast says it’s still going to be warm overnight but is better for tomorrow. Sleeping naked atop the duvet is one way of being able to get some decent sleep. Please do injure yourself laughing while considering that prospect. ...

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/08/08/postcards-from-the-periphery-2024-12/

I do too except that I keep my underpants on.

[Winslow Boy]

49 minutes ago, Coombe Barton said:

... The weather forecast says it’s still going to be warm overnight but is better for tomorrow. Sleeping naked atop the duvet is one way of being able to get some decent sleep. Please do injure yourself laughing while considering that prospect. ...

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/08/08/postcards-from-the-periphery-2024-12/

You do realise that that destroys the element of mystery.

[polybear]

Bear here....

 

Warehouse Day Mk. 2 - deliveries/collections a.m. and working in the sorting room (for the first time) after lunch; the donations ranged from new unused down to "you really don't want to know......"

One of the ladies opened a bag of donations this morning to find what can only be described as an "adult toy".......I'd post a piccy but I suspect I'd very quickly be on "special measures" as a result. Apparently they have a collection of those in the Warehouse - everything from fluffy handcuffs...... 

 

This evening Bear was invited to go along with many of the Warehouse Gang to din dins at a "Gastro Pub" - which was an excellent evening; Bear's choice of a veggie burger was reasonable but on seeing other options I decided that I didn't make the best choice - the Lemon Cheescake thingummy was rather good indeed, however.

 

BG

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. The heavy rain that we had this afternoon has stopped and the strong winds have dried things out so much as if it hadn't rained at all. I spotted where the spider was hiding, a tiny gap in the wainscotting. It's quite a big spider but it squeezed through quite easily.

[Tony_S]

16 minutes ago, polybear said:

to din dins at a "Gastro Pub"

I thought I had escaped ‘eating out’ for the foreseeable future. I ate well, but didn’t overeat on our recent cruise and I have already lost the weight gained! 
We are now having lunch out with some friends near Brentwood tomorrow. Aditi is having her haircut at about 11am and enquired whether a friend was about tomorrow. The friend’s husband has a medical appointment in the morning so Aditi decided we should all meet for lunch. The pub is one we have been to before but not with those friends. So I have been given the job of driving to Brentwood, finding something to do for an hour and then become designated driver for the pub. The pub does meet one of my criteria, no problem parking!

Tony

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Well I didn’t get much work done in the garden today, as Sheila fund me a couple of small tasks to do first, we also had a few intermittent showers, but I did get some done. 

 

When I went to the workshop with Charlie, I managed to finish the traverser plate, I even managed to give it a coat of paint too. 

 

I had a phone call this morning from Stepping Hill Hospital, giving me a date for my operation to fit an artificial sphincter to my euthera, date is 28th of this month! I’ll go in a dinner time on the Wednesday and get discharged the next day, the 29th.

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[BSW01]

Goodnight everyone 

[jamie92208]

1 hour ago, Mike Bellamy said:

 

Back in 2001, soon after I started working with overseas partnerships at the university, I took a phone call from a member of staff at a college in Israel - she asked how we were coping - what do you mean? I asked. The smoke she replied - what do you mean smoke, thinking I had misunderstood what she said or something had been lost in translation. It turned out that all of their news broadcasts were headlined by the Foot and Mouth outbreak and films of piles of dead cattle being burned. She knew Derbyshire was a rural area and genuinely thought that what she had seen on TV was happening on every farm in the country, were we all breathing in smoke, and we would soon have no cows left. The photo in the BBC link below shows what she meant - 6 million animals were lost that year.

 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35581830

.

I remember thst time very well.  In the middle of it we took the train to Carlisle and passed close to several such pyres and could see the smoke from many more as we went down the Eden Valley. Not a good time. 

 

Jamie

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Coombe Barton said:

... The weather forecast says it’s still going to be warm overnight but is better for tomorrow. Sleeping naked atop the duvet is one way of being able to get some decent sleep. Please do injure yourself laughing while considering that prospect. ...

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/08/08/postcards-from-the-periphery-2024-12/

 

An excellent way to get a good nights sleep when its hot and muggy, provided that you're not likely to be observed...

 

[Ozexpatriate]

2 hours ago, Mike Bellamy said:

The smoke she replied

The smoke is a problem here today. We were lucky for a while. The prevailing onshore air currents kept the wildfire smoke on the other side of the Cascade Mountains.

 

Today is the worst we've seen this season - with a blazing red sunrise. Later on it is now very hazy and hot - about 33°C at 4:30pm. It is unpleasant outside. The air quality is not dangerous - it's well into the "Moderate" category - which is not usually harmful. (Next level up is "harmful to sensitive groups".)

[pH]

18 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

The air quality is not dangerous - it's well into the "Moderate" category - which is not usually harmful. (Next level up is "harmful to sensitive groups".)

Our air quality is in the “moderate” range as well, though long distance visibility isn’t great.

[jjb1970]

5 hours ago, Mike Bellamy said:

 

Back in 2001, soon after I started working with overseas partnerships at the university, I took a phone call from a member of staff at a college in Israel - she asked how we were coping - what do you mean? I asked. The smoke she replied - what do you mean smoke, thinking I had misunderstood what she said or something had been lost in translation. It turned out that all of their news broadcasts were headlined by the Foot and Mouth outbreak and films of piles of dead cattle being burned. She knew Derbyshire was a rural area and genuinely thought that what she had seen on TV was happening on every farm in the country, were we all breathing in smoke, and we would soon have no cows left. The photo in the BBC link below shows what she meant - 6 million animals were lost that year.

 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35581830

.

 

I realised something when I was at sea, that was before the Internet was what it is now and before ships had Internet connectivity. The company would send out a telex with headline news which was literally along the lines of 'labour won the xyz by-election' and the agent would drop off a bag of news papers in port, which were often English language local papers. The effect was we missed the vast majority of news. I would go home after several months away and invariably nothing much had changed, the world was still turning, people were the same save the occasional death. Yet everyday the news would have been full of stuff, a new dire crisis of the moment etc, most of which is immediately forgotten about when attention shifts to tomorrow's crisis of the moment. I concluded that there really isn't that much genuinely important and consequential news. And that's before going into how much of the news is inflated to create headlines and the modern plague of click bait.

[Ozexpatriate]

7 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I concluded that there really isn't that much genuinely important and consequential news.

Yes and no.

 

I agreed with your post in the spirit that the 24-hour news cycle is full of hyperbole, blowing things out of proportion before quickly moving on to the next shiny new distraction to appeal to viewer/readership. The media feeding frenzy around certain issues and candidacies can also pervert the course of history in consequential ways.

 

There is a lot of truly consequential news, but it doesn't happen every day - and sometimes it is not obvious at the time - and only historians can put it in context.

 

(I hesitate to provide examples - they would be political.)

[jjb1970]

The odd thing about the news is that a lot of the important macro-level news is not really reported or is tucked away in sections of newspapers few read. This isn't just the local bias or focus on what is important to us as individuals. Adam Smith summarized the impact of news and personal experience very well with his famous comment about little fingers and China which is worth reading, many people leave out the following bit which recognizes the positive traits which motivate people:

 

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7267664-let-us-suppose-that-the-great-empire-of-china-with

 

Whole wars pass most of by as they happen far away and don't affect us, and after a while even events which receive a lot of attention fade into the background.

 

A recent example might be the Tigray war of a couple of years ago, nobody really knows how many died but I think most agree it was a big number, plus the misery and suffering of displacement, wounded, disease and the awful things which accompany war. That was reported in Britain but I suspect very few noticed or paid attention as it didn't affect us.

 

I think we are living through a historic inflexion point in global affairs and future historians will look back at it as a period worthy of serious study but I'm not sure I'd get that impression from the most of the news.

[Ozexpatriate]

On 07/08/2024 at 02:33, The White Rabbit said:

What niche - i.e. totally crackers - sport would you like to see added to the Olympics? 

Less facetiously than cheese rolling - though the UK missed an opportunity in 2012, the host nation has the option to include a 'new' Olympic sport.

 

LA is hosting the next games. There are people seriously suggesting pickleball as a an Olympic sport. (They may or may not work for a cable sports network that broadcasts pickleball.)

 

It is a 'real' sport with rules and actual scoring. No subjective judging of aesthetics. There are professional leagues. It is popular with amateurs and curling is a winter Olympic sport.

 

Unless you want to see baseball/softball reappear?

 

Just saying.

[Ozexpatriate]

12 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

A recent example might be the Tigray war of a couple of years ago

Yes. terrible.

Quote

Total deaths:

80,000–100,000+ (per Ethiopian officials)

162,000–600,000 civilians (per Ghent University)

 

Another is the Yemini 'civil' war. The world press was all over it a couple of years ago. Dire stories of famine and non-existent medical care.

Quote

According to the UN, over 150,000 people have been killed in Yemen, as well as estimates of more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war

 

Now crickets - except for Houthi missiles and how they impact western commerce. It's not like the civil war is over. There are other distractions these days.

 

[jjb1970]

Yes, I thought about using Yemen as an example. A few months ago I wondered what plan B would be if US, UK and allied air strikes failed to stop attacks on shipping given that a force which had been heavily bombed for the best part of a decade to little effect on their willingness to fight (albeit at dreadful human cost) was unlikely to be intimidated by anyone. Container lines are using the cape route to avoid Suez and the Red Sea with no end in sight. 

[TheQ]

In 2001 I came back from Saudi, no burning piles here in Norfolk that I could see, but then we are mostly plant based farming. It wasn't till about 5 years ago that we got an increase in sheep and cattle farming in the area.

The current farmer of the land around us appears to be much more traditional in having a mixed farm, and using O Der de cowshed on the fields. There was a big pong around here yesterday, hopefully the promised rain will wash that in before the ploughing commences.

 

Saudi TV news other than being anti Israel, was mostly showing how wonderful the king (and the rest of the house of Saud) was, and how bad Iran and the rest of the world was.

 

Just what is the American obsession with "pickles"? there are often sailing events mentioned on American forums which reference " pickle bowls".

 

Mooring Awl,

3 hours sleep, medium awake , 3.5 hours sleep, plus some unspecified dozing.

As for what I wear on the bed rather than in it, it depends on how hot it is, it looks like Monday will be not a lot..

 

Just been and taken the trial pill, from the kitchen window it appears to be very windy outside with a hint of drizzle, very overcast.

 

Our various Collies over the years generally ignored flys until they got annoying, then you'd hear a snap of their jaws, sometimes the buzzing would stop, but not often, they weren't that good at catching them.

 

Time to get up properly, get breaky then suited and booted for the radar museum.

 

 

 

[polybear]

Bear here....

 

Today's good news is Bear has just received an email from Mickey's Insurers to confirm they have received the costs for the recent H&R from scrote's insurers - meaning the claim is now closed.  That's a Definite Tick - his insurance is now screwed for the next X Years.  However, I've yet to receive "The Biggie" - namely confirmation from The Plod that he's also been nicked for "Failing to Stop" and received oodles of Points (and hopefully a fine) on his licence.  I live in hope.....

The email does also include a carefully worded paragraph to the effect that my renewal cost "might" possibly go up as a result though, even though my NCB remains intact and they got all their costs (and I suspect "a bit more" on top) back.  T0ssers.

 

Today's fun includes a druggie run to collect a new batch of sweeties from my friendly local dealer;  other than that I suspect today can best be described as "playing".  A Tick has been reserved.

 

Harry the Honda still remains unsold; one Guy that was previously interested (though a little under the asking price - but would now be acceptable) who was stood down in favour of the guy who has subsequently p1ssed me about has confirmed that he's since bought another bike instead.  Turdycurses.

I do have a Dealer who wants it - but as you can imagine his offer (whilst being 00's rather than 000's under what Harry's worth) is somewhat under the asking price; at least he's left the offer "on the table" as a fall-back should I decide to accept.  We'll see - I had another enquiry yesterday; as to whether or not anything will come of it remains to be seen though.

 

Time to wriggle......

 

Bear Gone.

[Hroth]

2 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

Yes, I thought about using Yemen as an example. A few months ago I wondered what plan B would be if US, UK and allied air strikes failed to stop attacks on shipping given that a force which had been heavily bombed for the best part of a decade to little effect on their willingness to fight (albeit at dreadful human cost) was unlikely to be intimidated by anyone. Container lines are using the cape route to avoid Suez and the Red Sea with no end in sight. 

 

Thats going to hit Egypt in the pocket, losing the Suez transit fees.