New blog

Hi folks - just a last word to say that I have a new blog here: Rattlebox

Tags: New blog

Bloody AOL

AOLUK are dumping all journals from the end of this month, bastards.

Anyone interested in continuing to read can from now onwards find Rattlebox in its new home here:  Click here: Rattlebox 

I don't know who reads this blog apart from 2 or 3 who occasionally comment - and your comments have been very much appreciated - but whether you are a commentator or lurker, you'll be welcome on my new blog so please Fave the link up and sign up for notifications.

Marooned :O)

A bloke, having split from his girlfriend, decided to take a holiday.   He booked himself on a cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank.

He found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts. After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore.        

In disbelief, he asks, 'Where did you come from? How did you get here?' She replies, 'I rowed from the other side of the island. I landed here when my cruise ship sank.'

'Amazing,' he notes. 'You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you.' 'Oh, this thing?' explains the woman. 'I made the boat out of raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm branches, and the sides and stern came
from a Eucalyptus tree.'

'But, where did you get the tools?'

'Oh, that was no problem,' replied the woman. 'On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron. I used that for tools and used the tools to make the hardware.'

The guy is stunned.

'Let's row over to my place,' she says. After a few minutes of rowing, she docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat. Before him is stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white.
While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, 'It's not much but I call it home. Sit down, please. Would you like a drink?'

'No! No thank you,' he blurts out, still dazed.  'I can't take another drop of coconut juice.' 'It's not coconut juice,' winks the woman. 'I have a still. How would you like a Pina Colada?'

Trying  to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they have exchanged their stories, the woman announces, 'I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the bathroom
cabinet.'

No longer questioning anything, the man goes into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet, a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism.       

'This woman is amazing,' he muses. 'What next?'

When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but vines, strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckons for him to sit down next to her.
'Tell me,' she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, 'We've been out here for many months. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing for?'

She stares into his eyes ..


He swallows excitedly and tears start to form in his eyes....................

 

'F*****g hell, don't tell me you've got Sky Sports?'   

Barmouth

 

What a fab day.  We went to one of our very favourite places, Barmouth on the Welsh coast, for a picnic lunch and a good long walk on the beach.  Barmouth has old fashioned charm, a treasury of everything anyone over 40 remembers of family seaside holidays.  A gorgeous stone walled harbour sits at the mouth of the beautiful estuary among narrow streets of slate roofed stone houses at the foot of steep rocky hills covered in bracken and heather.  Sand dunes, rock pools, swing boats on the beach, stalls covered in racks of buckets and spades and a very small funfair with very subdued music playing.  And it's all set in the most lovely scenery.  It's one of the best places in Britain to get some sun on your back and sand in your toes.

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A puzzle.

 

Here's a conundrum.  An older woman becomes pregnant for the 5th time just months after getting a very highly ;paid powerful job. She is an outspoken anti-abortion campaigner.  She decides to have an amniocentesis test to discover whether the foetus is 'normal'.  She discovers that it is not.  The logical inference is that she can only have had the test so that if necessary she could prepare her family for a future with a disabled child. 

But then she doesn't tell her family and when the infant is born and her elder daughter worries that the baby looks as if it possibly has Down's Syndrome she tells her that they will have to wait and see.  So the initial inference was wrong because she didn't use the time and knowledge to help her other children come to terms with having a disabled sibling, in fact she prevaricated even when the evidence was before their eyes.

 

So, why did she have the test?  Is it because she knew that two of every five amniocentesis tests lead to loss of the foetus? 

 

Welcome to the principles of America's potential Vice President.

Success?

6 years ago when we first moved to this house with its very large garden I wanted to buy a sit-on mower.  My husband was most reluctant because he is an absolute innocent about anything mechanical and he worried about not being able to fix it when little things went wrong, and also because we didn't have a vehicle we could use to transport the thing to the dealers for repairs & servicing.  As a result we've spent all these years first using a very large and heavy petrol mower which almost killed me off, and then using a Stihl petrol strimmer which we both found much more manageable, and surprisingly perhaps, even at 3 hours minimum, quicker than a mower.

It took 6 years, but today our new superduper Countax lawn tractor was delivered.  It was raining so I just took it for a short circular test drive around a tree and then into the garage. Where I crashed it into a ladder, grazed the cabinet freezer and finally crushed the cat's boxbed.  Result!

 

Isn't this a fab photo of Grace, Constance and Felix looking like chicks in a nest!

 

My other news is that a mere 8 months after making my New Year resolution to go scuba diving I've actually booked it.  One week cruising the Jordanian Red Sea to Aquaba and a tootle by Moses' burning bush and striking water from rocks country followed by a week scuba diving at the beginning of February next year.This will be not only a first scuba holiday but also a first for actually keeping a NY resolution.  Then again, scuba holidays are more likely to be kept than my usual weight-loss/more tolerant of dimwits doomed hopes. There's my top tip for successful NY resolutions - make them a treat rather than a threat  :O)

 

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Is teenage pregnancy as sad a misfortune as we think?

 

Young women across the whole of the less economically developed world have children at very young ages as happened in the west before industrialisation (and equal opportunities) came into play.  We don't condemn rural peasant cultures where marriage and motherhood commence shortly after puberty, and even if we wish it were not so, then generally we appreciate the reasons for it - shorter life expectancy, lack of state social welfare provision, lack of health care, lack of education, lack of alternative lifestyle choices etc.

Here in the west tho single teenage motherhood is viewed by those not involved as a bad thing even when there are no economic costs to society - generally because of the notion that very young mums are damaging their own potential life chances and consequently those of their infants.

 

But as we all know, over the past couple of decades it has become harder not easier for people to climb out of the socio-economic position they have been born into.  A young girl born poor has little chance of becoming not-poor whether she becomes a teenage mum or not.  In fact, research has found that poor teenage mums have very similar earnings trajectories to similarly poor young women who wait until their mid or late 20s to begin a family.  These days having a baby at 14/15/16/17/18 does not economically disadvantage either the mother or the child in comparison to older poor mums.

 

Given the increasing likelihood in western societies that a woman will at least partially raise her children alone isn't it economically sensible for a poor young girl to choose to have her children while she still has the financial and practical support of her family rather than wait until she has no choice than to go it entirely alone?

Hey hey good lookin............

We women are beseiged from a very young age by media exhortations to improve our appearance to fit the cultural norm in the beauty stakes, but how important in terms of actual measureable life opportunities is the possession of good looks? 

 

A Queensland Mayor recently caused a stir by suggesting that as there are 5 men to every woman in his city, women who are 'beauty-disadvantaged' should consider moving to live in his town where their chances of getting a male partner would be improved. 

There's some sense in this suggestion in economic terms in that scarcity value can often overcome prejudice - if you dearly want a beer and all that is on offer is what my husband calls rat pee, then by and by as your thirst increases you will be glad to get rat pee and may well pay over the market rate for it too.  So if women believe that their lack of physical attractiveness is a significant factor in being unable to find a dearly desired life partner then it makes sense for them to up their chances by going where they have scarcity value. 

On the other hand, 'beauty-disadvantaged' women may not be desperate enough to replace Roger the Rabbit with some man who clearly has had very limited experience of how to relate to women as people rather than as sexual outlets if the man voted in as Mayor is an example of the local type. 

 

There is also the consideration that, as mining is the main form of employment in this particular town, any women moving there would in effect be narrowing their income opportunities to the sole expediency of wedlock and would in all likelyhood reduce the city's per capita income and increase its welfare benefit bill. 

The Mayor's suggestion therefore seems based not on the best interests of his city residents but on the chauvinist notion that every man deserves  and/or needs sole access to a woman.  In terms of moral  and practical economic principle any women who take up his suggestion would be exchanging their sexual availability for a life of economic dependancy.  There's a name for that.

Female residents of this city are incandescent that their Mayor has turned women into no more than sexual objects and have responded by declaring  that while in their town the odds are good the goods are decidedly odd.

 

A different take* on the advantage of good looks compared to the disadvantage of less conventionally good looks draws the interesting conclusion that where all other factors are taken into account - age, education, length of employment, qualifications, number of hours worked, parental education and expectations, height and weight - people of both genders who are generally rated as good looking or beautiful earn more than those rated as average, and that those rated as average earn more than those considered 'homely'.  They conclude that this disparity in earnings, given that all other things are equal, is the result of 'pure prejudice' on the part of employers.

 

Now anti-discrimination legislation has been ennacted in several states in the USA to prevent denying employment on the basis of 'height, weight and personal appearance' and proposed elsewhere on the basis of 'facial features, build and height' (Philippines).  A Vermont Supreme Court in 1992 ruled that a chambermaid's lack of upper teeth qualified as a handicap protected under Vermont's Fair Employment Protection Act and the movement to include suboptimal physical appearance as a legally protected handicap is growing apace.

 

As the evidence grows of the impact of physical appearance on life opportunities we may find ourselves approaching an era when being less physically attractive than the ideal type is a legally accepted handicap and covered by equal opportunities legislation across much of the world. 

 

Given that physical appearance is primarily a matter of genetic inheritance - but that it can be 'improved' by medical procedures - how soon shall we see someone suing their parents for neglecting the proven best interests of any potential child when choosing their sexual partner or, in the UK, suing the NHS for failing to ameliorate their 'handicap'?

 

 

* http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Hamermesh/BeautyAER94.pdf

My outdoor lav - enjoy! :O)

I had a cortisone jab in my left shoulder this morning.  I could have typed reams - would my now duff left arm allow - describing in horrid detail the absolutely dire pain which both caused me to have this jab and resulted from submitting to it.  I further embarrassed myself by silently sliding off my chair onto the floor in a dead faint, my GP following my downward trend to finish the job as I lay prostrate and semi-conscious in a crumpled heap. 

Instead I thought I'd just post a pic of my outdoor lav as a piece of expressive art denoting my feelings of lost dignity.  If my shoulder doesn't improve following this torment I may post a pic of the lavatory pan.  Fingers crossed that isn't necessary.

Good Lord!

August 8, 2008, 12:48 PM EDT

Members of the East Central Narcotics Task Force arrested a West Hartford man was arrested after a short chase in South Windsor Thursday evening.

According to police, Almighty Supremebeing Allah, 35, of 119 Elmhurst St. West Hartford refused to stop for a marked cruiser and was detained about a mile down the road after the initial stop.

He was charged with Reckless Driving, Disobeying an Officers Signal, Interfering with an Officer, Criminal Attempt/Sale of Cocaine Criminal Attempt/Possession of Cocaine.

Imo his parents should be arrested too.

I wonder how often he's heard 'Oh My God' screamed into his pillowed ear <g>

Georgia on my mind

 

Georgia -what's it all about really?

 

I don't know.

 

I read a lot of reports so that I could attempt some level of informed opinion.

 

I read that the 2 secessionist regions are areas of land which have been Georgian since Georgia began.  That the population there are mainly Russian passport holders who don't want to abide by Georgian democracy.  That these people are Muslim. 

It made me think of the possible future English scenario, once we have been firmly put into our separate EU Regions for, say, Lancashire and Yorkshire to want to secede from England and set up their own mini-states.  The similarities to the Georgian issue would be very close - those counties are English since England began, and, if it ever came to pass, it would be because of Muslim Pakistani passport holders demanding secession.  If the Pakistani government or even the EU sent in tanks to help the secessionists then I suspect there would be an armed struggle.

 

I thought, right on Georgians, don't let them get away with it.  If these Russians don't like being governed by Georgians whilst living in Georgia then they can simply walk across the border to Russia. Let them go, or let them abide by the democratic decision making process.  Staying in Georgia and then trying to take Georgian land from the Georgian people isn't on.

 

Okay, Go Georgians!

 

Then I read more. 

 

I read about the USA wanting to put nuclear weapons and Early Warning systems in their bases in the Ukraine until Russia said that such an action would be taken as a declaration of war.  Then I read about Georgia knocking at NATOs door for admittance and thought about how then Georgia's armed forces, bases, airfields etc would also be Nato bases, airfields and armed forces. 

I imagined how we Brits would feel if Russia, China, or anyone else were to take over Eire's military installations and put troops, tanks and nuclear facilities so close to the British mainland.  How would we feel if some ancient enemy tried to surround us with military forces?  We wouldn't be happy bunnies.  We might send troops right on back into the Republic in an attempt to take the whole of Ireland into British control again. 

Unless of course all this was being done by the French in which case I'd get my little dog to yap at them and send them scurrying back to France.

 

Hmmm, so now I don't quite blame the Russians either.

 

Then I thought about the sheer aggression of the Russian attacks on Georgia and remembered that when the same thing happened in the Kosovo region of Serbia with (Albanian) Muslims wanting secession the Russians supported the Serbs.  So, the Russian military action isn't one of principle.

 

Putin is an old Cold War warrior with old Cold War ways of thinking.

Bush is in the thrall of US armaments manufacturers and fancies himself as an armchair warlord.

An oil pipeline goes through Georgia.  Hmmm.

 

I have ended up little wiser after spending quite some time reading and thinking about all this. 

 

My sole secure conclusion is that I think the Gordian Knot is mispelled.

Stung by tears and by my local council

Wasn't the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony simply superlative?  How can London ever hope to match it?  I expect to be mortally embarrassed in 2012.  I also expect Seb Coe to explain the national humiliation by whining about having a virus as he did without fail every time he lost a race.

But I must be getting awfully emotionally shallow.  I watched the opening ceremony from start to finish and, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, several times found myself getting teary - even the firework 'feet' got me surreptitiously reaching for a tissue.  I know that much of the symbolism was hypocritical in light of the realité; the representation of the Chinese ethnic minorities for example, and the mass participation dove of peace thing to say nothing about the 'green' theme thing but it seems to me that the Olymics is all about ideals and so actualité is somewhat beside that idealistic point.  I sat there like a completely wet ninny watching the little lad who supposedly sang to keep up the morale of his classmates who were buried alongside him by the Szechuan earthquake and even tho I thought the story was probably nothing but Chinese national morale raising propaganda I still came over all sentimental.  Sentimental and a bit Jewish momma - I kept thinking 'his/her mother must be so proud!'

I must be sickening for something.

Something else sickening was the council man who came out yesterday to sort out the wasps nest in my lawn. Parked, walked across the grass, stuck his spray nozzle down it, one squeeze, done.  £34 for less than 3 minutes thank you.  He spent more time telling me that his son who lives 10 minutes away would have done it for half the price.

Tags: Olympics, wasps

Not NICE at all

A body of whom I've written a piece before: NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) - now there's a misnomer if ever I heard one - today ruled that kidney cancer patients may not have drugs to prolong their lives because at £30K pa it costs too much. Never mind the millions spent to prolong the lives of infants born with no kidneys, no bowels or no stomachs, or the millions frittered on removing tattoos or pinning 8 year old ears back. Today someone whom I regard as a genuine stoic and hero made a post on her blog.  Please read it and email your local MP urgently.

Shocked and disgusted......

 

Asses, Arses, and the Law.

 

Yesterday a couple of blokes were standing on an open air train platform and having a cigarette while they quietly waited for their train.  A woman, who had apparently done the same thing earlier in the week, decided to harangue them and told them to put their cigarettes out.  It ended with one of them pushing her away and she fell off the platform and broke her wrist.

Well, that's not a very nice thing to happen to her and it's regrettable that she had a fall.  On the other hand being loudly and aggressively harangued by some nosy intrusive busybody when you are doing no harm to anyone, and then having them do it to you again the next time they see you also isn't very nice.  I'm not at all glad that she got hurt but you know what?  I'm glad that for once one of these self-righteous anti-smoking fascists found that while she may have been within in her legal rights to hassle these men, on this occasion it wasn't entirely without cost.

 

The Times Online says:

The men made obscene gestures as she walked past them shortly after 7am, a police source told The Times. “She turned round and told them to grow up, and they pushed her. She stumbled backwards and fell on to the track. We don’t think they meant to push her on there. They were as surprised as she was.”

 

Another bit of news was about a Scotsman who, when his elderly wife who looked after him wouldn't hand over cash for him to go boozing, strangled her until she was dead.  The Judge said that prison wasn't the right place for him.  Presumably the Judge thinks that relatives, neighbours, or the female care assistants and frail inmates of residential homes for the elderly would be much better able to physically handle a murderously violent elderly alcoholic better than could burly prison guards and tough convicts.  This murderer was 'punished' by being told not to go to the pub for 12 months.  That's it, that's his only punishment.  Meanwhile his poor wife lies cold in the ground and he's ticking off the days whenhe can go to the pub instead of sending next door's nipper to the Off Licence.

 

So, based on the above, what punishment will the blokes who pushed the woman get do you think?

Lazy days of summer.

I've had a busy day today, mostly owing to crops ripening.  I've made and frozen 2 ice cream containers of rattatouille made from all organic home grown red onions, garlic, tomatoes, yellow and green courgettes, orange peppers and purple aubergines.  Then I picked a backbreaking 10lbs of blackcurrants and made a litre of blackcurrant cordial and 4 pints of sorbet.  My kitchen tops got so splattered with concentrated blackcurrant juice that they look like they have some dread disease and I doubt they will ever recover.

In the garden Gyp discovered the most gross humungous caterpillar, exactly the length of my index finger and at least as fat.  It was an unbelievably fast mover but I managed to get it onto my husbands cap brim long enough to take a pic.  It's the caterpillar of that equally horrifying moth I found in the kitchen sink a month or so ago.  Crap pic but I think it still conveys the horror.

We also have a very busy underground nest of digger wasps.  The local authority pest control man is coming out tomorrow to get rid of them as we have Grace and her little friend here from Sunday and the last thing I need is two tots with fat stung legs.  £34.50 it's going to cost, isn't that disgraceful?

We are inundated with teensy little frogs, some of them a hundred yards from their pond and one poor little thing we found drowned in the pets' courtyard water bowl.

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More summer visitors

As soon as Constance and her friend Esme had been collected

by Felix and his Mum

our youngest granddaughter Imogen

 

and her parents came for a long weekend and on Saturday we went to the Oswestry Show. 

 

Just after I took this photograph the cow blew a massive snort at Immy and she fell over backwards in shock.  I almost fell over in shock myself.

Now we have a few days clear and then Grace and her friend Eleanor will be with us for a week.  I'm definitely moving to the wrong side of the tracks in Nuneaton before next summer  :O)

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Connie

I've had Constance and her little friend staying for the week:

They came with us to get our dog and cat boostered up and asked why they had to have a jab when they weren't poorly.  To stop them catching anything says I, forgetting how literal 6 year olds can be.

Later, back at home Connie told me the jab hadn't worked on the dog, because 'she can still catch sticks Granny'.

 

Later today Imogen comes for a long weekend and next Sunday Grace and her friend for a week.  Sometimes I think I need a much smaller house.  And coloured bedlinen.

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Detouring

 

We went out to lunch in Bishop's Castle today and took a detour onto some high heathland behind White Grit where we parked up and took an uphill walk on a rough and stony path through bracken to the high tops.  There on sheep cropped grass which was spangled with harebells and tormentil we came across a 3000 year old Bronze Age stone circle on a hilltop.  Leaning against those warm lichen encrusted stones I wished, as so often I do at these times, that I could be transported back to see what they had represented to their builders and what ceremonials they been used for and by whom. 

A few yards outside the circle was the site of a recent large fire which we supposed may have been lit during the Summer Solstice, Bishop's Castle being something of a bohemian habitation - Druidical bookshops, whole earthers, crystal healers, that sort of thing being more common there than Mace Grocers.

 

From the stone circle we were able to see across to another height where there was an equally ancient barrow and we climbed again to walk around it.  Then, making our way down by a different route, we came across a scruffy old van, side door wide open, sound system fairly ramped and a certain herbal fragrance in the air. 

In a high and wild place such as that, on a hot summers morning, well, I dragged my husband off the look at a nice big camper van en route home after lunch.  Mind, at £40K+ onroad costs I think if I take to the travelling life it will have to be in a bender.

Sex Bomb!

 

What a dreadful shock for the poor wife of Max Mosley to see in that scurrilous rag The News Of The World that he'd been paying good money to have himself smacked on the bottom and shouted at by no less than five prostitutes at once.  All those times when what she most wanted was to give him a damn good slap and telling off and now she discovers that not only would he have liked her more for doing it, but he'd have shelled out big bucks too. 

But my heart goes out even more to any Mosley children.  Reading this stuff about your dad is weird enough even if your dad doesn't have a spooky embarrassing father of his own to live down as Mosley does.  At least I suppose the Judge has said that there's no actual evidence that Max was acting out his dad's dream of being smacked by blonde female members of the Gestapo so there is, I suppose, a little comfort there BUT think on.....

the absolutely worst, most humiliating revelation of all, and one which will smash his children's (and grandchildren's) street cred down into oblivion's depths is that, after his caning, after the cries of 'Who's been a very naughty boy then?' had died down, Max and the five blonde dominatrix all sat down and had a nice cup of tea. 

 

How English, how laughably unsexy, how obvious that the public-school educated Judge would find in Mosley's favour.  Brothers in arms - I should say so!

 

OI, where are MY royalties??

A few entries ago I mooted the potential of high decibel James Blunt as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (Click here: Ban this ban that, what's the world coming to????).  It would appear that the CIA really do spy on blogs because they have stolen my idea, tweaked it a bit to avoid my tort for theft of intellectual property rights, and put it into practice.  Prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are being bombarded non-stop with David Gray's 'Babylon' at top volume. 

I have just two observations on this 1) if the poor beggars are still holding out after this cruel torment then they must be innocent and 2) I appear to have missed my natural calling.  Tho some of my kids wouldn't agree there.