My apologies for taking so long to announce the result.
Many thanks to those who entered – and participated in trying to guess what the objects were.
Since no one even hazarded a guess at Low Wattage’s offering – I am awarding the prize of setting the next competition to him.
Please let us all know what your object is!
Cold here today, -20 C at 7am when I went to breakfast. Not often we get that kind of cold and it sounds like it might be around for a while. Creek is frozen right to the middle and the only open water is where the ice eater is working around the pilings.
Another shooting attack — a Swedish cartoonist was targeted at a speaking engagement in Copenhagen. Soon after, a synagogue in the Danish capital was also targeted. The attacker was a Muslim of Arab ethnicity born-and-raised in Denmark. Bibi has officially encouraged European Jewry to emigrate to Israel. Considering their declining security in Europe and the increase in official tolerance for anti-Semitism, he isn’t entirely incorrect in assessing that the climate in Europe is growing increasingly hostile. After all, a German magistrate ruled recently that fire-bombing a synagogue is an act of protest, not anti-Semitism and an Austrian magistrate ruled that chanting “death to Jews” is a form of legitimate protest against Israeli policies.
Recently I have thought of this frequently. In Trier there is a small alley adjacent to the main market square — “Judengasse”. All buildings are from the 17th century. Slightly seedy these days, it was once the entrance for the city’s formerly prominent Jewish Quarter. Five minutes from it is a car park where a building once stood — the processing centre for Trier’s Jews in the 1940s. Of the over 300 processed, virtually all died. Ten minutes from that is the former Trier Gestapo headquarters. Yet, the attitudes that should have been consigned to the past have been brought back — largely imported, bolstered by indigenous bigots. If this is any indication for the future, then the past half-century of peace, prosperity and relative civility will soon be but a memory.
Oranges, marmalade oranges, Seville sour oranges to be precise, no other to be borne!
You cannot buy decent marmalade in the USA unless you buy UK import stuff which is still the cheap end of the market, pretty gruesome stuff. The locals here make marmalade with any old sweet oranges, pallid tepid stuff of no use at all to put iron in the soul of your toast!
I worry that the day will come when I won’t remember anything at all. I tend to draw what remains of the tattered and frayed cloth of my memory around me against that cold dawn.
It follows that I get seriously concerned when I come across things about which I think I should have known. Take siskins, for example. I am assured by Google that they are small and active finches with narrow bills which are common in Scotland.
I see that the latest flawed data analysis that has been misleading everyone for years has just come to light. I turns out that dairy fats are not so bad for you after all. Like so many other things, poor interpretation of flawed data has lead to many people giving up on things they need not have given up on e.g. proper milk, cheese and all the other wonders of the dairy.
I wonder when the Global Warming scammers will get the same treatment (Boston Mass, has just had the worst snow on record) ? It has often been said that you can prove what you like with statistics and that the science (or should that be art) of statistics is to select the sampling method to get the result you want.
When I was young and lived in Germany my life was generally okay. I was popular and had friends. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew me, everyone who worked at school knew me. Some thought I was strange, but most liked me. My mother didn’t have much money. Despite being nominally married, my parents had had a schism several years before resulting in my mum returning to Germany. She was attending university with the aim of becoming a haematologist. My grandmamma agreed to mind me when she was away or too busy with her studies. My grandfather enjoyed slapping me around after a bad day, but that was typical of what was to come.
The recent atrocities by those Islamist homicidal nutters has left me shaking my head.
I refer of course to the awful, awful murder of the Jordanian pilot, the gay man hurled off a building and the too numerous beheadings, crucifixions etc. that I read about on an almost daily basis.
Their depravity has sunk to new levels.
A tragic true tale told in haiku form. The horrid little chap in the photograph (not one of mine) is not one of the villains of the piece, but he looks remarkably similar.
Two Jackdaws perch high
And hurl the moss with malice
From the dank roof tiles.
Continue reading “The Birds”
To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the game of Monopoly, the manufacturers are apparently putting some real euros in the cash pile in a few boxes of the game.
The question in my mind is, given the current state of the single currency, whether there will be much difference between it and the real Monopoly money.
Boadicea's Chariot 
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