Distaff.
1. A cleft staff about 3 feet long, on which, in the ancient mode of spinning, wool or flax was wound.
2.The staff or ‘rock’ of a hand spinning-wheel, upon which the flax to be spun is placed.
3. As the type of women’s work or occupation. Hence, symbolically, for the female sex, female authority or dominion; also, the female branch of a family; a female heir.
Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), Girl with spindle and distaff. (Spindle on left, distaff on right.)
![[42/52] Green Woodpecker](https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6234/6254149303_0432490798.jpg)
Week 42 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
Green Woodpecker (probably male) this morning on our next door neighbour’s lawn. This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen him visiting in the last 2-3 weeks. He spends a lot of time (I watched him for 45 minutes one day) covering the same area, so it must be very rich in ants.
Taken at a range of 20-25 yards from our study window with my biggest lens and still this is a small crop from the middle of a frame.
As regular readers will know I don’t always do Kate’s weekly Listography — sometimes because I just don’t get time and sometimes because the subject doesn’t fire me with enthusiasm. But this week Kate is asking us something simple: list the top five keyword searches on your weblog (excepting the name of the weblog and keywords like “blogger”). So I can hardly refuse, especially as whenever I see anyone listing the searches used to find their weblogs they’re usually either a scream or completely unbelievable!
Will mine be any different? In a word, No …
At #1 we have pheasant. Yep really. Four times the number of hits of its nearest competitor! Everyone seems to have liked my December 2009 recipe for Pheasant Casserole.
#2 is the quite shocking pussy porn. I guess, guys, you were sadly disappointed to find this, this or this.
#3 is perhaps the equally worrying, and equally disappointing, dumb blonde.
At #4 we have another search for pornography: osho on porn. But this time it is a serious article.
Finally at #5 we go from the sublime(?) to the ridiculous with the search woodpecker feet. Well, yes, I really did write a post about woodpecker feet!
In the words of JBS Haldane:
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Week 41 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
Girls from the next door ladies hairdressers having a break outside the barber’s shop at Rayners Lane, Harrow. They’re there, drinking coffee and smoking, every time I go past; they never seem to do any work. How do they make a living?
Purlicue.
1. Space between extended forefinger and thumb.
2. Flourish at end of a handwritten word.
3. A discourse, especially its summary.
Number 10 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.
Something I Like: Tea![[40/52] Recycled Cat](https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6098/6217493638_0245a65a59.jpg)
Week 40 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
It seems that, at least as for as Harry the Cat is concerned, the place to sleep at the moment is in the paper recycling box in the study. It’s nice and dark and quiet and secluded. Even better, it’s a box. And we all know how cats are irresistibly attracted to boxes.
He was so sound asleep, that he didn’t move a whisker when I took this! In fact he’s still sound asleep some 20 minutes later.
To quote Garfield: “Eat and sleep. Eat and sleep. There must be more to life, but I do hope not”.
Well let’s start this week’s selection where we left off last week, with something from John Aubrey …
Even the cats were different, and Aubrey could recall when ‘the common English Catt was white with some blewish piednesse sc gallipot-blew, the race or breed of them are now almost lost’ … Aubrey says that Archbishop Laud had been ‘a great lover of Catts. He was presented with some Cypruss-catts, our Tabby-catts, which were sold at first for 5li a piece. This was about 1637 or 1638’. Tabbies are still called ‘cyprus cats’ in Norfolk.
[Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends]
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
[Isaac Asimov in Newsweek, 21 January 1980]
I discovered books and music while everyone else got into drugs. Books and music were my drugs. What I read and listened to then shaped and changed my life forever.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]
I find being middle aged rather liberating. I wear what I like. I eat what I like. I listen to and watch what I like. I do not feel ashamed of anything that makes me happy and makes my life feel richer, better and more joyous.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]
Katy, dearest, how many more times do I have to tell you that you aren’t middle aged? You can’t be middle aged — you’re younger than I am! Anyway I’m not having it, if only because if you’re middle aged then I’m senile and I ain’t ready for that yet.
To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as an easy way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
[John Perry, University of Stanford, Winner of the 2011 Ig Nobel for Literature]
And finally, confirmation from an unknown source of what we all suspected …
Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.
Quite some while back, and I can’t now find who’s weblog it was on, someone asked about the five songs/albums which would provide the soundtrack to your life. Not necessarily songs associated with particular events or people (although that turns out to be almost inevitable) or even ones you would want to take to a desert island, but which provide the right overall background music.
Having put the idea away for another day, I find that day has come and I want to write about it. So here we are; five songs/albums which are my background soundtrack, in no particular order:
1. The Beatles, Abbey Road
It’s that zebra crossing! No, it’s The Beatles!
[youtube
Well you could make that almost any late Beatles (ie. Sgt Pepper’s, Abbey Road, Let It Be) but Abbey Road is the favourite as for me it best encapsulates days as a student.
2. Gregorian Chant
Almost any well done Gregorian chant (male voices, monastic acoustics) will do but for me one of the most ethereal is the Pange Lingua of Good Friday.
[youtube
And yes, that’s despite my not being religious — Roman Latin liturgy has always done it for me. It is after all a form of magic: what is the priest doing walking round the alter with a thurible if it isn’t casting a circle?
3. Cliff Richard, Summer Holiday
I seem to feel I need to put something in here to evoke childhood and what better than Summer Holiday. Those hot lazy days with no school!
[youtube
Not only was Summer Holiday the first film I was allowed to go and see on my own, but Cliff comes from my home town and The Shadows used to practice in the boys club at the back of my primary school playing field. Heady days!
Well back from the ridiculous to the sublime …
4. Monteverdi, 1610 Vespers
The height of Renaissance music, this was one of the early shares which Noreen and I had all those years ago and long before we even thought about going out together.
[youtube
And the 35+ year old John Eliot Gardiner recording is still the best available.
5. Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly
The story of my life: learning to fly (and failing mostly!)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX5R00ndzQo&w=420&h=315]
I don’t know what it is this track does to me, or why. But it does. And that makes it for me one of the great rock tracks of all time. And Floyd are out and away the best rock group ever, for me.
Numpty.
1. A stupid person; an idiot.
2. A bumbling fool or one who is intellectually challenged.
3. Someone who (sometimes unwittingly) demonstrates a lack of knowledge or misconception of a subject or situation to the amusement of others.
4. A reckless, absent minded or unwise person.
5. A good humoured admonition, a term of endearment.
Originally Scots dialect.
In 2007 numpty was voted Scotland’s favourite word.