Category Archives: personal

beliefs, memes, personal, photography

12 Days of Christmas Meme!


12 Days of Christmas Meme!, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr PhotoMeme

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is an English Christmas carol which enumerates a series of increasingly grandiose gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas. It has been one of the most popular and most-recorded Christmas songs in America and Europe throughout the past century. [Wikipedia]
Let’s celebrate the season with a 12 Days of Christmas Meme!

A partridge in a pear tree
Two turtle doves
Three French hens
Four calling birds
Five golden rings
Six geese a-laying
Seven swans a-swimming
Eight maids a-milking
Nine ladies dancing
Ten lords a-leaping
Eleven pipers piping
Twelve drummers drumming

1. Partridge in a pear, 2. Turtle Doves 01, 3. Three French Hens, 4. 4 calling birds, 5. Five Gold Rings, 6. 6 Geese a swimming…., 7. On the seventh day of Christmas…, 8. Eight maids a-milking, 9. Nine ladies (20), 10. Ten Lords a-Leaping, 11. 11 pipers piping, 12. Twelve Drummers Drumming

As always these are not my photos but please follow the links to enjoy the work of the photographers who did take them!

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

memes, personal

100 Things

2 Comments

Jamie over at Duward Discussion has posted this meme. It’s not unlike the 100 Things to do Before you Die on my Zen Mischief website, so I thought I’d give it a go!

To participate, just copy and paste the list into your own blog, and color all of the things YOU have done (mine are in blue, but use any colour you like). Things you haven’t done will be in black. Add some commentary if you wish. Please add a pointed back to here and/or add a comment pointing from here to your posting. And tag others if you wish.

Enjoy!

  1. Started my own blog – you’re looking at it!
  2. Slept under the stars – it’s amazing the things one did when one was young
  3. Played in a band – for the school play when I was 18
  4. Visited Hawaii
  5. Watched a meteor shower – more than once
  6. Given more than I can afford to charity
  7. Been to Disneyland/world
  8. Climbed a mountain – something else I did in my youth, in Scotland and the English Lake District
  9. Held a praying mantis
  10. Sung a solo – at the school carol service when I was 18
  11. Bungee jumped – no and I’m unlikely to!
  12. Visited Paris – several times
  13. Watched lightning at sea
  14. Taught myself an art from scratch
  15. Adopted a child
  16. Had food poisoning – who hasn’t?
  17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
  18. Grown my own vegetables
  19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France – failed this too, despite several visits to Paris
  20. Slept on an overnight train – another youthful adventure; returning from holiday in Cornwall with my then girlfriend when we were students
  21. Had a pillow fight
  22. Hitchhiked – more of the stupidities of youth!
  23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill – but don’t tell anyone; it was a long time ago
  24. Built a snow fort
  25. Held a lamb
  26. Gone skinny dipping – surprisingly for a confirmed nudist I’ve never managed this
  27. Run a Marathon
  28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
  29. Seen a total eclipse – of the moon; sadly never a total solar eclipse (but several partial ones)
  30. Watched a sunrise or sunset – both more than once
  31. Hit a home run
  32. Been on a cruise
  33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
  34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors – yep, several of my ancestors were born in and around New Romney, Kent; been there several times; next visit I must look for the graves
  35. Seen an Amish community
  36. Taught myself a new language – when I was younger I tried teaching myself Esperanto and shorthand (failed at both) and I’ve learnt several programming languages from the manuals
  37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
  38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
  39. Gone rock climbing – another idiot thing I did when young
  40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
  41. Sung karaoke
  42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
  43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
  44. Visited Africa – no and I’ll opt not to, please
  45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
  46. Been transported in an ambulance
  47. Had my portrait painted
  48. Gone deep sea fishing
  49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
  50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris – despite several visits to Paris I’ve not done this
  51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling – water and I don’t mix; it’s as much as you can do to get me in a swimming pool
  52. Kissed in the rain
  53. Played in the mud – find me a kid that hasn’t!
  54. Gone to a drive-in
  55. Been in a movie
  56. Visited the Great Wall of China
  57. Started a business
  58. Taken a martial arts class
  59. Visited Russia
  60. Served at a soup kitchen
  61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies – done lots of other things to do with scouting tho’
  62. Gone whale watching
  63. Got flowers for no reason
  64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
  65. Gone sky diving – there have to be easier ways to commit suicide
  66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
  67. Bounced a check
  68. Flown in a helicopter – I’d like to tho’
  69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
  70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
  71. Eaten Caviar – and I don’t care if I never do so again
  72. Pieced a quilt
  73. Stood in Times Square
  74. Toured the Everglades
  75. Been fired from a job – came pretty bloody close; I resigned “under duress”; another stupidity of one’s youth
  76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
  77. Broken a bone
  78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
  79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
  80. Published a book – if being joint editor of some conference proceedings counts
  81. Visited the Vatican
  82. Bought a brand new car
  83. Walked in Jerusalem
  84. Had my picture in the newspaper – in the local newspaper when young and in the scouts; I still have a copy too
  85. Read the entire Bible
  86. Visited the White House
  87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
  88. Had chickenpox
  89. Saved someone’s life
  90. Sat on a jury – it was interesting too!
  91. Met someone famous – does author Ian Rankin count?
  92. Joined a book club
  93. Lost a loved one
  94. Had a baby – I somehow think I’m the wrong gender for that as well as being a bit old now
  95. Seen the Alamo in person
  96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
  97. Been involved in a law suit
  98. Owned a cell phone – I’m on at least number 8, but then I have had a mobile for something like 15 years, and I currently have three in working order!
  99. Been stung by a bee
  100. Ridden an elephant

I’m not going to tag anyone, join in if you like!

medical, natural history, people, personal, science, sexuality, thoughts

30 Years!

3 Comments

Last night we had a little celebration. Only a little celebration over a bottle of wine followed by an early-ish night. For why? Because Noreen had hunted back through her old diaries (who has the time and discipline for these things? I never did) and discovered that we first properly went out together on 24 November 1978. I said I thought it was earlier, like late October, but she insists on the veracity of her pretty comprehensive journal from those days. So I figured I’d say “thank you” and not argue.

There are other such mini-celebrations coming up: the first time we had sex, 15 or 16 December; engagement on 30 December (well that was when Noreen dropped the bombshell on her mother anyway); Noreen moved in with me the following May; and we married in September 1979.

If you think that’s all a bit quick, well we had known each other for at least 3 years. We both knew, but didn’t tell the other, how we felt for each other. And then we almost lost contact after a disagreement when we both thought we’d screwed up and lost the other. But somehow we managed to stay in contact; just. Then unexpectedly Noreen asked me to her birthday bash in early October 1978. The rest, as they say, is history!

But hey, I realised properly last night that it is just as good as it always was. We’ve had our ups and downs – who doesn’t?! The first 2-3 years were hard – we fought; I was depressed; we had a crummy rented flat. When we bought the house in mid-1981 mortgage rates were very high – people today think they have it hard, we started our mortgage paying 14.5% interest, and after 6 months it was up to 17.5%!! That hurt. Many couples would I’m sure have thrown in the towel. But we stuck it out; somehow. And it’s got better; we don’t fight any more; we discuss, compromise and agree a way forward. By diligence we managed to pay off the mortgage seven years early. And we still have great sex; it’s different now from the early days but it is still great.

How have we done it? We don’t really know; we ask each other this question fairly regularly. But there are a number of key factors: a shared sense of humour; shared interests but also our own separate interests; doing things together but also separately; but perhaps most importantly we talk – all the time! And like all good relationships it is multi-faceted varying between friend-friend, parent-child, adult-adult, child-child, lover-lover. Even when, say, lover-lover is missing (as it will be sometimes) many of the others are there and keep things ticking along. Where relationships hit the buffers seems to be when many of the roles are missing and they degenerate into child-child, parent-child or enemy-enemy. (I’ve written more about this on the Theory of Relationships page of my Zen Mischief website.)

If we could make another 30 years we’ll both be getting on for 90. And who’s to say we can’t? Onward and upward! Here’s to many more happy years together.

beliefs, food+drink, memes, personal, photography, thoughts

My Meme: Run up to Christmas


My Meme: Run up to Christmas, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. 1,001 sex toys from amazon, 2. Sound the Bright Flutes!, 3. In England they’re called Fairy Lights., 4. Christmas Tour of Homes, 5. Christmas Shopping, 6. Christmas Gold Organza Felt Tree 1, 7. My Lovely Bookworm, 8. IMG_8708_11242006, 9. Victorian Christmas II (Thomas Kinkade), 10. Christmas card, illustration, 11. weihnachtsmarkt2.jpg, 12. Pope Shenouda III, right, leads the Christmas liturgy held at the Coptic Cathedral of Saint Marcos late Friday, Jan. 6, 2006 in Cairo, Egypt.
As always these are not my photos but please follow the links to enjoy the work of the photographers who did take them!

Yesterday was the Feast of Christ the King (the Sunday before Advent) so this week’s meme focuses on the run up to Christmas.

As usual the questions and answers
1. Place you like to buy presents Amazon.co.uk
2. Christmas music Medieval Carols, traditionally sung
3. Something you use to decorate your house Fairy Lights
4. Where (or with who) are you planning to spend Christmas? It’ll likely be just us two, at home
5. Who do you like to got Christmas shopping with? Nobody
6. Theme/colour scheme of your Christmas tree Probably red and gold, but it depends what Noreen feels like at the time
7. Someone you like to buy presents for My bookworm wife (and no, this picture isn’t my actual wife; she isn’t on Flickr, yet!)
8. What are you planning to eat for your Christmas meal? Free-Range Organic Turkey
9. Somewhere you’ll go to a party Is anyone going to invite me?
10. Something you make for Christmas Christmas Cards; for the last several years we’ve had our own cards printed from one of my photographs
11. What gets you in the Christmas spirit? Traditional Christmas Music
12. Secular or Sacred? Although the Christmas liturgy is wonderful it’ll be secular

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

beliefs, medical, memes, personal, photography, ramblings, science

4AM


4AM, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s self-portrait: 52 Weeks 39/52 (2008 week 47).

4 AM and I can’t sleep, so I figured I may as well get up for a bit and play.

And as this is week 39 of my 52 weeks “self-portrait a week” I figured I’d do a 13 things as well; so …

13 Things which bore me and which I therefore try to ignore …
1. Richard Dawkins
2. stem cells
3. IVF
4. embryo research
5. climate change
6. Africa
7. elephants
8. whales
9. Lord Winston
10. quantum computing
11. the scientific fetish that life can be only water and carbon based
12. penguins
13. Christianity and Islam

personal, photography

Colour Meme


Colour Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr Photo Meme …

1. (TB5.) Hope on the Horizon…, 2. Spring Greens 2, 3. lots of things are brown today, 4. blinkie blink blink flowwiee, 5. Okoboji – Grey Cat, 6. the emperor’s new clothes, 7. Canary Yellow ~ Lost one!, 8. Pink Pixies, 9. Clotted Cream, 10. linen grey white cotton, 11. Rosa Knicker, 12. Best tandoori chicken

Questions and Answers:
1. free square – you pick a color to start off your meme with! Old Troll Gold
2. fave colour Spring Greens, but it does depend what it’s for
3. least fave colour Shit Brown
4. colour of your eyes Blinking Blue
5. colour of your hair Steely Grey
6. colour of your car Emperor’s New Clothes; invisible as I don’t have a car!
7. colour of your fave flower Canary Yellow
8. colour you like to wear Pixie Pink
9. colour of your living room walls Clotted Cream
10. colour of your pet Russian Blue and White
11. fave 2 colour combination For flowers, Knicker Pink and White, but it really depends on the context
12. colour of your fave food Tandoori Red

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

beliefs, history, personal, ramblings, topographical

First English Lottery, 1569

1 Comment

My previous posting referred to the first English lottery being held on 11 January 1569, and Jilly asks in a comment if it was sold out, because the tickets, at 10 shillings each, were horrendously expensive.

Well I don’t know if it was sold out, a quick Google hasn’t provided an answer, but having researched a bit more I’m not sure if I would actually call this 1569 effort it a lottery at all! Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Although it is more than likely that the English first experimented with raffles and similar games of chance, the first recorded official lottery was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, in the year 1566, and was drawn in 1569. This lottery was designed to raise money for the “reparation of the havens and strength of the Realme, and towardes such other publique good workes.” Each ticket holder won a prize, and the total value of the prizes equaled the money raised. Prizes were in the form of silver plate and other valuable commodities. The lottery was promoted by scrolls posted throughout the country showing sketches of the prizes.

Thus, the lottery money received was a loan to the government during the three years that the tickets (‘without any Blankes’) were sold. In later years, the government sold the lottery ticket rights to brokers, who in turn hired agents and runners to sell them. These brokers eventually became the modern day stockbrokers for various commercial ventures.

Most people could not afford the entire cost of a lottery ticket, so the brokers would sell shares in a ticket; this resulted in tickets being issued with a notation such as “Sixteenth” or “Third Class.”

According to measuringworth.com 10 shillings in 1569 would now be worth around £105 if you pro rata using RPI or £1210 if based on average earnings.

Interestingly lottery-results-info.com claims that the first ever lottery with prize money was held in Florence, Italy, in 1530. But as there are (apparently) references to lottery-type activity in The Bible, we’ll probably never know.

But don’t things like this make history fun! Much better than all those Corn Laws, Poor Laws, treasons and bloody battles that were inflicted on us at school!

books, medical, memes, people, personal, science, topographical

My Birth Meme

2 Comments

Jamie over at Duward Discussion has laid down a new meme, so I just have to give it a go!

This is what you do:
Go to The Birthday Calculator, This Day in History and/or Google and enter your date of birth to find all sorts of interesting things about what was happening when you were born.
Now tell us about some of these interesting things.
Then, if you wish, tag a few of your friends to do the same.
And post a comment to this post so we know who’s followed the meme.

OK so here goes for me!

Birthday: Thursday 11 January 1951, 1250 PM GMT in University College Hospital, London. My mother has told me that I was 2 weeks early. This means I was conceived in the early days of May 1950.

Astrological Sign: Capricorn

Birthstone: Garnet; said to be a power stone
Alternative Birthstones: Emerald, Rose Quartz.
(Interestingly I’m not so keen on Emeralds, but I love Rose Quartz)

Fortune Cookie: There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its trust, its hope, its power to endure.

Chinese Year: Tiger

Native American Zodiac Sign: Goose
Plant: Bramble

I share my birthday with: Golfer Ben Crenshaw (b. 1952) and Anthony Powell’s younger son John (b. 1946)

Lucky Day: Saturday
Lucky Number: 8
Ruling Planets: Saturn & Uranus

Birth Tree: Fir Tree, the Mysterious. Extraordinary taste, dignity, cultivated airs, loves anything beautiful, moody, stubborn, tends to egoism but cares for those close to it, rather modest, very ambitious, talented, industrious uncontent lover, many friends, many foes, very reliable.

Lunar Phase: waxing crescent

The day I was born:
There appear to have been no major world events, births or deaths.
Arsenal beat Carlisle United 4-1 away in an FA Cup replay.
London Algebra Colloquium met to discuss “Non-Archimedian Normed Spaces”

On this day in other years:
1973. Britain’s Open University awards its first degrees
1946. Enver Hoxha proclaims the People’s Republic of Albania
1922. First use of insulin to treat diabetes in a human patient
1864. London’s Charing Cross station opened
1787. William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus
1569. The first national lottery is held in England; 40,000 lots, at 10 shillings each, go on sale at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London

Top Song of 1951: Mockin’ Bird Hill by Les Paul & Mary Ford

All in all it seems to have been a fairy dull day, so I guess I fit in well.

books, memes, personal, photography, pleasures, topographical

Twice the Meme!


Twice the Meme!, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. Cat Help Needed! Ajuda Felina Urgente!, 2. New Banksy Rat Mural in New York, 3. Bat, 4. Air raid Beano, 5. December 1931 Country Life Magazine Christmas edition, 6. Punch 1957, 7. Icy Waterfall in the Harz Mountains – Germany, 8. Dartmouth Christmas, 9. Calm water at Buttermere, 10. Adnams “The Bitter” (Cask), 11. beaujolais nouveau, 12. All true tea lovers like their tea strong……, 13. Gandalf the Grey, 14. “The Satanic Verses”, 15. Evelyn Vaugh, “Decline and Fall”, 16. We ♥ Norway, 17. Not of this Earth – The Bubbling Sulfur Pools of Iceland, 18. japan, 19. 69/365- Words are worthless when you’re laying in my bed, 20. 49 pigeonholes, 21. day 76: pebble-dashed sky, 22. Holy Water at St. John the Russian’s Church, 23. James Turrell, 24. Jabez Rounds House

Questions and Answers, with something about why I chose each sequence:

This week we’re going to do 8 rows of 3!

1. Three animals
Cat, Rat, Bat; because they rhyme

2. Three magazines
Beano, Country Life, Punch; I remember them all from my childhood

3. Three holiday destinations
Harz Mountains, Dartmouth, Buttermere; I’ve been to all three and would like to go there again

4. Three drinks
Adnams beer, Beaujolais Nouveau, Tea; three of my favourites

5, Three novels
Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkein), Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie), Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh); three of many that I can’t read

6. Three countries
Norway, Iceland, Japan; I’d love to visit them all but I won’t because I object to their stance on whaling

7. Three numbers
69, 49, 76; number of houses I’ve lived in

8. Three names
John, James, Jabez; three of my great-grandfathers
[Later] Actually four of my great-grandfathers; two were called James!

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.