Could I suggest another small competition to find an appropriate name for use along with Bruce and Sheila to designate Australia’s “third sex”?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-02/high-court-recognises-gender-neutral/5361362
I suppose we could use Norrie, but I think of that as a surname.
Where are you, OZ? Your country needs you.
As pointed out before, these creatures breed like rabbits and become pests.
Having spent quite some time complaining about Alex Salmond’s disenfranchisement of expatriate Scots – me, Sir Sean and Sir Alec among many, many others – I was delighted to see this article in today’s Sunday Times.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/scotland/article1385137.ece
I don’t know how the Chariot’s resident jurist, JM, would rate the chances of success, but any pushing and shoving that might be required south of the border I shall happily assist.
When I was young, it was always said that proficiency at snooker was the sign of a misspent youth. Snooker halls were considered the depth of depravity. A friend and I were the first two females in the snooker room in our university union when the ban was lifted and since then I have been interested in it.
Yesterday I watched the first two matches in this year’s Masters Championship from Ally Pally and it struck me once again what a pleasant, courteous atmosphere prevailed. A cue can be used for making a shot or tapping the table to signify praise for an opponent’s shot. No sledging, (do female cricket players like those who beat Australia in Perth do that?) no abuse of racket, no shouting at the referee, no physical assaults on opponents, no diving. Nothing at all unpleasant. There are accusations of players having thrown matches, but that is true in all sports.
By the way, I am not at all proficient at snooker.
Shortly before Christmas there was an article in a local paper about the church clock and bells in a nearby village. A decision had been taken to stop the church clock striking every quarter during the night. I must say this seems reasonable to me. I’m sure there is no long-standing tradition of bell-ringers ringing during the night, before the advent of clockwork mechanisms. I looked up this church on Wiki to learn a bit about the bells, a peal of six, each with its own history. This reminded me of the Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel “The Nine Tailors”, which I then started to read again. Not very cheery reading at Christmas, perhaps, but the narrative starts just before the New Year.
The story is set in the Fens where there are some outstandingly beautiful churches, and the hero, Lord Peter Wimsey of course, ends up stranded in a small village after a car accident. The village bell-ringers are intending to ring in the New Year with a record-breaking peal of Kent Treble Bob Majors, but an epidemic of influenza has reduced the number of change-ringers and Wimsey is pressed into service, having admitted some previous experience. The whole book is centred on the fictitious village, Fenchurch St Paul, its church and its bells.
What is still relevant is part of the foreword:
“From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. … England , alone in the world, has perfected the art of change-ringing and the true ringing of bells by rope and wheel, and will not lightly surrender her unique heritage.”
It always annoys me when people who have bought a place in the country as a weekend retreat then complain about the church bells ringing on a Sunday morning, as they have probably done for centuries.
For anyone who is interested in change-ringing, I can recommend this book.
Arriving in France the day after the Front National candidate won the local council election at Brignoles in the Var – the departement next to us – I was prepared for the usual hand-wringing and “how could they do this” wailing. Instead all was calm in the press, perhaps helped by the arrest of three suspected jihadis in the same neck of the woods that day. The French are fed up with Hollande and fed up with the number of Roma in the country, setting up squalid , illegal camps and living off crime. The FN expresses these concerns and is anti-EU, which the French believe is the reason all these illegals are infesting the place. So the FN is gathering more support.
This week’s cause celebre is Leonardo, a fifteen year old Roma girl of uncertain origin who was scooped off a school bus and deported back to Kosovo with parents and five siblings. Pupils at some schools have been protesting vigorously about this, and Hollande in his usual pathetic effort to please everyone has said that the girl can return but without her family. Leonardo has said that she cannot leave her family, but by all accounts she had to say that or else her father would have beaten her again. Father has been lying in his teeth for some years now. He and mother, who may or may not be Italian, are not married; there are no papers such as birth certificates or passports available and father’s story is unravelling by the minute. The local police in France are glad to see the back of a petty criminal; mother never learned any French or attempted to integrate; the family is now settled in a flat in Mitrovica, but two- thirds of French people asked do not want the girl back in France. Seems a pity, since without her family she might have a chance of a decent life.
I was amazed to read in the Huffington Post that the Occupy Wall Street movement has plans to introduce a credit card.
This seems, as many have pointed out, alien to the movement’s original philosophy. The scheme is to collect 900,000 dollars and to issue prepaid debit cards to those who would not normally qualify for credit. Of course if people can amass say $50 to put on their debit card , then they might as well just pay cash for their purchases, one would think. Charges on the proposed new card would be lower than on standard credit cards, but I still can’t see the point of the system.
Another site gives more details
http://www.cutimes.com/2013/07/26/occupy-wall-street-intends-to-step-out-with-visa
The fee suggested is 99 cents per month. So you put your $100 or whatever on your card and then pay another dollar a month for the privilege. Might as well stick to the sock under the mattress – it’s free.
Last week we spent a few days visiting Shetland, sharing an early flight from Aberdeen with the daily papers being delivered to the islands. Contrary to most peoples’ expectations, we had mild, sunny weather, albeit with a few showers.
This is the sort of weather most people expect of Shetland
Following on from the Chariot’s own stand-ups, here are some jokes I enjoyed.
There have recently been quite a few films and documentaries on the work of Bomber Command during WW2 which I have watched with interest. So when granddaughter, aged three and a half, said that she wanted to see aeroplanes, I was pleased when a family outing to Duxford was organised. Granddaughter has visited the RAF Museum at Hendon a few times, but at Duxford some of the planes actually fly.
Boadicea's Chariot 
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