Week 8 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
Harry the Cat having some tanning therapy today under my sunlamp. Yes, of course he was in the way – definition of cat that is! But at 13 and having had the medical problems he has over the last few months I reckon he’s entitled to some R&R. 🙂
Another small collection of oddities from the recent catalogue of another of our local auction houses …
A collection of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ceramic figures including the “Lenox Treasure box collection” (that has gold plated charms within), also “Brooks & Bentley” salt and pepper collection.
A full size zebra skin rug, and an antelope rug.
A continental porcelain figure of a Grecian maiden holding aloft a twin-handled urn, together with a Coalport porcelain shouldered ovoid urn and cover, the cover having a pineapple finial raised on a socle supported plinth, the cream and midnight blue ground having gilt enrichments and gilt goat head masks, the cartouche painted with a ruined castle, signed: JH Plant
[I just cannot picture what sort of mess this is]
A Chinese porcelain garden seat formed as an elephant.
A miscellaneous selection of items, to include a pair of French First World War bayonets, a pair of African antelope horns and bison horns.
A large and interesting miscellaneous collection of tribal items to include various swords, an Eskimo arrow holder, a Burmese bird cage, a North African gunpowder flask, a Russian gilded sword and many more.
Two Zulu shields, an old African tribal paddle and various spears (bearing ‘Spink & Son Ltd’ labels).
[Why would Spinks be selling spears?]
A North West Persian tribal runner with a line of medallions alternating between hooked diamond and cruciform designs and contained within three borders.
[As well as having rather ornate body art I trust the runner comes with cleft stick.]
A boxed cherub table lamp.
[You mean there is a type of cherub I never knew about – the boxed cherub?]
In amongst this collection there is though the usual selection of really nice schmutter.
Like many of you, I have a soft spot for conspiracy theories. Although I wouldn’t claim to be an out-and-out believer in such theories I’m a natural skeptic, I’ve worked in business and I’ve been around long enough to know that there is more goes on under the surface than often meets the eye – and that sometimes, just occasionally, that may amount to a conspiracy. But I also know that all organisations, managers, politicians, governments spin (to use the current euphemism for “lie”) everything to their (hoped for) advantage. Often they don’t actually realise they’re doing it – I know; I’ve done it myself. And seldom is there any attempt at conspiracy. But just sometimes there is.
It was interesting therefore to see, in the December 2010 edition of Scientific American, a short article by professional skeptic Michael Shermer under the title “The Conspiracy Theory Detector – How to tell the difference between true and false conspiracy theories”. Shermer ends the article with the following “rules”:
[W]e cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality:
- Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections – or to randomness – the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
- The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
- The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
- Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
- The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
- The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
- The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
- The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
- The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
- The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.
The fact that politicians sometimes lie or that corporations occasionally cheat does not mean that every event is the result of a tortuous conspiracy. Most of the time stuff just happens, and our brains connect the dots into meaningful patterns.
Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring.
[Brad Warner]
OK, guys & gals, here’s this week’s selection of wacky words …
Come on, Milhouse, there’s no such thing as a soul! It’s just something they made up to scare kids, like the Boogie Man or Michael Jackson.
[Bart Simpson]Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick]Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what’s right.
[Isaac Asimov]I’ve come to believe quite strongly that monogamy is not at all the natural condition of human beings, despite what we’ve been told for so many years. For some people it comes effortlessly. For others it is absolutely impossible. I think for most of us it is possible, but extremely difficult. When I hear that someone has failed at it I am never shocked or surprised.
[Brad Warner; at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/02/disrobing-genpo–brad-warner/]Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.
[Sir John Mortimer, Murderers & Other Friends]We will have to build … devices that will store and release time to where it is needed, because men cannot progress if they are carried like leaves on a stream. People need to be able to waste time, make time, lose time and buy time.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]
Just to cheer everyone up on yet another dull day, here are some more crocuses from our garden. This is a particularly nice little clump which has been there quite a few years and which I’ve photographed several times before.
Week 7 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
Our lawn and fruit border are full of crocuses, mostly in shades of purple. I know we’ve planted some, but they must be spreading as I’m sure (like these in the fruit border) they’re in places we wouldn’t have planted them. And they seem to be doing well despite the waterlogged clay soil of the lawn.
There’s a Grey Squirrel sitting almost in the top of our Silver Birch tree. It has been there since about 1015 this morning. It is now 1545-ish and beginning to get dark. Apart from turning round two or three times it has been stock still, as if asleep. I find it hard to believe that a healthy squirrel would choose to sleep for this long in broad daylight, in the open, in the rain and in the top of a bare tree being blown hither and yon by a freezing wind. Maybe it is ill and dying. If so it can’t be long before either it falls out of the tree or the carcass is taken away by the crows. This is (a crap photo of) the fellow at about 1030, soon after I first spotted him …
… and he’s still there!
Interesting times we live in. We’ll have lions whelping in the streets next!
Another in our occasional series highlighting the oddities which turn up at our local auction house. In reading this remember we are talking suburban London, not seaside.
A square of South African grass weaving in yellow, brown, black and orange, size 25″x25″ approximately.
A canteen of plated cutlery for not quite six.
A stuffed gull in a glass case.
A mixed lot including Wallace & Gromit teapot, a pair of large oriental vases, bejewelled scent bottles, wind-up tin-plate Mickey Mouse, a pair of china horses, mottled glass basket, figurine in Highland dress, etc.
A Black Forest gateau carved cuckoo clock, embellished with stag head, hare, game bird.
A fishing creel with leather straps and handle.
A vintage ear trumpet, with telescopic stem, of tortoiseshell appearance.
A vintage model of a goat, in goat fur and simulated horns.
An old wooden box containing old packaging, Fairy toilet soap, old matches, old tins, and a box of old bulbs and Aladdin 2″ wicks, Delsey toilet tissue, soap, etc.
A pair of moulded concrete garden flower pots and a pottery elephant stand.
A baby bath full of old saws, secateurs and similar, an old Ransomes hand push lawn mower and four boxes of old tools, mainly chisels, hammers and spanners.
I’ll just leave your minds to boggle quietly. Although having said that they are also selling a lot of rather nice sounding 18th & 19th century silver and a few valuable Chinese vases. I guess that’s the joy of a “provincial” auction house.
As readers will know I rarely comment on politics and international affairs, but I have to be honest and say that the situation in Egypt (and indeed in Tunisia) is worrying.
The Egyptian people (the demonstrators anyway) seem to think that having got rid of Hosni Mubarak it’s all downhill.
Well maybe not. As I read it, all they have done is manage to force Mubarak into an orchestrated military coup. Mubarak bought himself enough time to get his money to a safe haven and is now in the process of following it having handed power to the military. Let’s not forget that the military senior officers are almost certainly all Mubarak’s men; as such they have little interest in change even if their junior officers and men don’t share their views.
What would you read into these headlines from BBC News today?
Egypt army tries to clear square. There is a stand-off in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as protesters who have camped there for 20 days thwart army efforts to clear the area.
Egypt’s army dissolves parliament. Egypt’s military authorities say they are dissolving the country’s parliament and suspending the constitution, two days after taking power.
Superficially this looks to me like the actions of the average military dictatorship:
We do not want any protesters to sit in the square.
Hundreds of policeman – who had become hugely unpopular for their violent attempts to suppress the uprising – had entered the square.
Military statement said the current government and regional governors would “act as caretakers”.
The higher military council said it would stay in power six months, or until elections … saying it would suspend the constitution and set up a committee to draft a new one.
Main priority was to restore the country’s security … if instability continued there could be “obstacles”.
It is all the right noises, but they are the noises all newly installed military rulers make: “We’ll stay in power until we can arrange elections”. And so often those elections never come.
It all sounds to me like the beginning of a repressive military dictatorship. For everyone’s sake I just desperately hope I’m wrong, and that this …
… doesn’t turn into this …
