Nice one Klaus!
Confusing graffiti on Deutsche Bahn
Graffiti artists in Germany have painted part of a carriage side so that one entrance doorway looks like a wide window and the adjacent wide window looks just like a pair of plug doors! The painting is realistic enough to confuse passengers.
[Railway Magazine; February 2011]
This is the view of the solar eclipse just after sunrise yesterday (Tuesday 04/01/2011) from my study window. Like what eclipse? Typical of the UK to cock it up; can’t this country get anything right? Bah Humbug!
This is also my first photo for the “52 weeks” (ie. a photo a week) I’m doing this year. I hope I can keep up the standard of getting something off-beat each week. Watch this space.
I decided to do this survey I found to summarise my engagement (or lack of it) with 2010. If it works I may do it again in a year’s time.
1. What did you do that you’d never done before?
Retire
Be hypnotised
2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don’t make New Year resolutions (see here); but I did have some goals most of which I failed to achieve
3. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
More sex
£1M
4. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory?
Sunday 14 February
Saturday 5 June
Friday 27 August
5. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No more than normal: the usual couple of vile colds etc.
6. What was the best thing you bought?
New digital SLR camera
7. Where did most of your money go?
Fuck knows, and he ain’t telling me
8. What did you get really, really excited about?
Nothing; I waste effort on excitement or panic
9. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a. happier or sadder? Definitely happier and less depressed, at least at the moment
b. thinner or fatter? Fatter
c. richer or poorer? Poorer
10. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Photography
Cooking
Swimming
Seeing friends
11. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Eating
Wasting time
12. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Moving my mother into a good care home
Retirement
Starting hypnotherapy
13. What was your biggest failure?
Putting weight back on when I’d been slowly losing it
14. How many one-night stands?
None
15. What was your favourite TV program?
I watch so little TV I really haven’t got a clue
16. What was the best book you read?
Brad Warner; Sex, Sin and Zen
Ben Goldacre; Bad Science
17. What did you want and get?
New digital SLR camera
Amazon Kindle
18. What did you want and not get?
New bathroom
£1M
19. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
£1M – it won’t solve all the problems but it won’t half help you cope with them
20. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?
Nude when possible, clothed when necessary
21. What kept you sane?
Noreen
Hypnotherapy
22. Who did you miss?
Surprisingly some former colleagues
23. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010:
Life happens, deal with it
24. A quote or song lyric that sums up your year:
Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organised. [Terry Pratchett]
No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. [unknown]
Mr Spock … We’re trapped in an eerie, brain numbing madhouse! Any answers? [unknown]
25. Your hopes for 2011
– Successful Anthony Powell conference in September
– Catch up with the backlog of Anthony Powell Society work
– Achieve financial security for life (well I can dream!)
– More sex
– Less depression
– Lose weight
– Be a better husband
– Society normalises sex and nudity rather than being disgusted/frightened by it
A while ago I came across this article in the 7 September 2010 issue of Salon.
The smart Dutch take on teen sex
Despite parents’ allowing romantic sleepovers, the Netherlands has one of the lowest youth pregnancy rates
by Tracy Clark-Flory
I’m not going to reproduce it here as it’s available online. The article also references this study by Amy Schalet. I commend you all to go read both for yourselves. Amazingly Clark-Flory (an American) actually recognises that the Dutch have their attitudes to teen sex right and the Americans don’t. Which is what I’ve been saying for years. Society, especially politicians and the religious please note!
There don’t seem to have been many really strange sounding lots appearing at auction locally in the last few months. But I noticed yesterday that Chiswick Auctions have a sale on 11 January. Looking at the catalogue I see that the sale includes 17 lots of memorabilia which belonged to Ronnie and/or Reggie Kray including things like signed photographs and boxing gloves. So far so normal. But the pièce de résistance has to be Lot 256:
“256. Calling Damien Hirst, Ronnie Kray’s false teeth, contained in a Broadmoor brown envelope. Provenance: A close family friend.”
Maybe I should go and buy them as a birthday present to myself?!
I’ve been reading quite a bit over Christmas, so this week there’s a good selection of quotes; something for almost everyone here …
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
[Paul Harvey]
If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed.
[The Economist; unknown author and date]
You can’t prove that there isn’t a magic teapot floating around on the dark side of the moon with a dwarf inside of it that reads romance novels and shoots lightning out of its boobs but, it seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?
[Kurt Hummel]
A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is in the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements but not with as much strength, though it is deficient only in power of maintaining equilibrium.
[Leonardo da Vinci, The Flight of Birds, 1505]
Newton saw an apple fall and deduced Gravitation. You and I might have seen millions of apples fall and only deduced pig-feeding.
[Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher; Letter to the Times, 12 January 1920]
All dog-lovers must be interested in Lieutenant-Commander Elwell-Sutton’s account of his white whippet which insists on singing to the accompaniment of his (or, may I hope, his young son’s?) accordion – presumably one of those gigantic new instruments, invented, I think, in Italy, which make noises as loud as those made by cinema organs, and rather like them. This dog’s taste is low; but a musical ear is a musical ear.
[Sir John Squire; letter to the Times, 11 January 1936]
They [18th and early 19th century Quakers] became a bourgeois coterie of bankers, brewers and cocoa-grocers.
[Mr Ben Vincent, letter to the Times, 13 March 1974]
[The correct] forking technique is called the Continental method. It’s the method used in Europe as well as anywhere else that the British have killed the locals.
[Scott Adams]
Alice: Would you please tell me which way I ought to walk from here?
Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where –
Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk.
Alice: – so long as I get somewhere.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if you only walk long enough.
[Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland]