Category Archives: amusements

amusements, current affairs

Green Custard **

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Some of the week’s odder headlines (with commentary) …

Khat spread
as opposed to anchovy spread, one assumes!?

Sweaty armpits
this week’s new expletive

Barclays in Treasury debt talks
good that someone’s paying off our national debt

Pope rejects African condom use
you’d have a problem fitting one on the Horn of Africa anyway

Can eating Chinese staples ward off breast cancer
what’s wrong with the staples from my desk draw?

Construction faces migrant curbs
dangerous these migrating curb stones

France chastises Pope on condoms
new SM fetish – being whipped while lying on a pile of condoms?

Pink elephant is caught on camera
mustn’t be racist and have nothing but white elephants

Papal embrace
well that’s a new name for it!

NZ plane birth charges
but do planes reproduce sexually or asexually?

** These posts are named in honour of His Imperial Sliminess Peter, Lord Mandelson as originally blogged here.

amusements, current affairs, memes, personal, photography, pleasures

Getting to Know All about You Meme


Getting to Know All about You Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr meme is about getting to know you.

These photos are not mine . . . please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

As usual here are the questions and my answers:

1. Who would you most like to meet? Dalai Lama
2. Who would you most like to have dinner with? Dinner is such a restrictive idea, but I would like to meet the Genie who dispenses health wealth and happiness
3. Who would you refuse to meet? The pure evil known as Robert Mugabe
4. What are you best at? Organisation, administration and procrastination
5. What are you worst at? Anything that requires fewer than 20 left thumbs; I’m hopeless at anything practical — after 3 years of woodwork at school I still can’t saw a piece of wood straight
6. What is your favourite poem? “Macavity: The Mystery Cat”; TS Eliot
7. What was the first record you bought for yourself? “Albatross”; Fleetwood Mac
8. What is your motto? Zen Mischief
9. What’s the biggest/best compliment you’ve ever been paid? What’s a compliment? I don’t think I get them. I just do the job right the first time.
10. Who did you hit? Me? No-one. I have an alibi.
11. What is your worst phobia? Not having money
12. What insect do you dislike most? Maggots

1. Dalai Lama_Geelong_6_ 10.jpg, 2. Genie In A Bottle, 3. Mugabe, 4. Overcoming Procrastination Motivational Mind Map Poster, 5. the freak of the rubber duck world, 6. Macavity the Proud, 7. Royal Albatross, Southern Ocean, 8. Zen Kitty, 9. The Original Version., 10. Who Me, I am Innocant, 11. Old diesel train, 12. Maggot Art

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

amusements, current affairs

This Week's Oddities …

Some of the odder headlines I’ve seen this week (mostly perpetrated by the BBC) …

Green custard thrown at Mandelson
the mind boggles
Arrest in Mandelson custard probe
and the mind boggles even more
TV magician Ali Bongo dies
nah, you’re ‘avin a giraffe!
Modular Windows plan welcomed
yeah, it’s called double-glazing these days
Swiss blackmail gigolo jailed
but why would the Swiss be blackmailing a gigolo to start with?
Moyes unhappy with Wembley semi
well they’re good enough for the rest of us …
Twitter made me lunch
well at least it’s good for something!
Sea rise to exceed projections
we have a logic problem!?
Indian police enrol rat recruits to fight mice army
sounds more Irish than Indian to me
Deep water fish decline concerns
so deep water fish are fed up with the nanny state too!
Conference on Vikings at Cambridge University
I didn’t know CU was that old
amusements, science, sexuality, thoughts

Zen Mischievous Moments #150

I offer you two snippets from the ‘Feedback’ column in this week’s New Scientist:

The entirely flat cotton bed sheet that [Reader A] bought from the department store House of Fraser came with a label telling him to wash it inside out.

[Reader B] from Edinburgh in the UK reports on a pack of condoms bought at the supermarket Sainsbury’s which had a security label stating: “Please remove prior to putting in the microwave.” [Reader B] is worried that he might have dozed off and missed a crucial part of his sex education classes at school.

amusements, history, memes, photography

Photography Meme


Photography Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr Photo Meme is to about, well, Photography!

So here, as usual, are the questions and my answers:

1. What camera do you use the most? Olympus E500 dSLR
2. What is your favourite lens? My Spectacles; I’m as blind as most of a bat without them.
3. Who is your favourite photographer on Flickr? Tina Manthorpe, although that is a really hard choice
4. Who is your favourite photographer of all time? Leonardo da Vinci. What? You mean all those things aren’t photographs? Oh come, on … he invented everything else so he surely had a camera! (In fact David Hockney has the theory that even as early as Leonardo artists were using camera obscura
5. Who introduced your to photography (mom, dad, friend, sibling, etc)? My father; I started by using his Box Brownie
6. What is your favourite thing to shoot? Arrows. In the air!
7. What is the one most important tool? Excluding your camera! Err, my eyes!?
8. What inspires your photography? Almost anything, but probably mostly colour & pattern, and the humorous
9. If you could shoot one event in history what would it be? This isn’t something I’ve ever really thought about, so I’ll go for: Great Fire of London, 1666.
10. Where would you be published if you could choose? Anywhere they’ll have me; I’m not proud
11. Choose anywhere in the world that you would love to photograph Shinto Temples of Japan
12. What was the subject of your favourite photograph? Pretty Girls

As always these are not my photos (except #5) so please follow the links to enjoy the work of the photographers who did take them!

1. Enjoy summer (and beer), 2. Funny Glasses in Rome, 3. Swaledale, 4. Leonardo da Vinci Annunciation, 5. kcm76 and Parents, 1984, 6. I shot an arrow into the air, …., 7. Black Line Eyes, 8. Shaping Light, 9. London’s Burning005, 10. Fish., 11. Giant Wooden Phallus, 12. While waiting for you…

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

amusements, arts, current affairs, personal, thoughts

A Modern Day Maudie?

On Wednesday this week there was this wonderful picture (below right) of the delightful “not quite Essex girl”* Mrs Beckham in The Times (just see the close-up of those feet!) .

One was struck by the uncanny resemblance to Osbert Lancaster’s rather more upper class heroine, Maudie Littlehampton, seen (above left) in a characteristic 1966 pose.

** Mrs David Beckham, née Victoria Adams (aka Posh Spice) is described in Wikipedia as “an English singer, dancer, fashion designer, author, businesswoman, actress and model” – whoever wrote that surely had their tongue firmly in their cheek, didn’t they?! She actually comes from Goff’s Oak, a area of my home town, and just a couple or three miles on the Hertfordshire side of the Herts-Essex border.

Hat-tip: Noreen of Norn’s Notebook

amusements, arts, personal, photography

Rusty, the Danish Bacon Hound


Rusty, the Danish Bacon Hound, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Let me present, at no expense to this august establishment, Rusty, the Danish Bacon Hound.
We must apologise for the state of his coat, he’s in need of a good hose down as he’s clearly been grubbing around the pig pens.
(Made from thin white card after a design by David C Mills.)

[Later] Noreen thinks he should be called Streaky rather than Rusty, this also being a characteristic of the coats of Danish Bacon Hounds.

amusements, quotes

Zen Mischievous Moments #149

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Another from New Scientist dated 07/02/2009 …

How not to right click

THE mother of a friend of Dave Higginbottom was trying to get the hang of her daughter’s computer. After a while, she shouted to her daughter: “What do you do when a squiggly red line appears under a word?”

“Just right-click,” replied her daughter from the next room.

A moment later the mother replied: “I’ve written ‘click’ but it makes no difference. I just get the word ‘click’ after the word with the squiggly line.”