December is here and the turkeys are getting nervous. The anorexic one in the corner is laughing its miniscule head off, and the gluttons among them are wishing they’d not indulged in those food supplements quite so freely. If you accused me of fabricating those turkey thoughts, I’d plead guilty. Of course they have no concept of the meaning of… Read more »
Note: I have tried to write this in a way that won’t cause offence to most people. It does not contain any “bad” swear words until the very last line, but alludes to them several times. During my research for this article, I was shocked to discover that there is a significant and very vocal body of people whose opinion… Read more »
I was re-reading my article about the 2015 Word of the Year recently, and came to the section about Morse code. As that article states, the international prosign for a distress call is • • • – – – • • •. Without gaps between letters, this sequence of dots and dashes can mean “SOS”, “VTB”, “IJS”, “VGI” and “SMB”…. Read more »
Hands up who’s feeling there aren’t enough hours in the day. Everyone? I thought so. Okay – hands up who has more than one hobby, or whose children have more than one evening activity. Everyone? I thought so. Hands up who doesn’t want to give any of those pursuits up because they help bring balance to your life or your… Read more »
Are you one of the old school that laments the use of abbreviations and picture symbols in communications? The folk over at Oxford Dictionaries clearly aren’t. Their 2015 Word of the Year is… . Yep. That’s right. It’s an emoji, and its official name is “Face with Tears of Joy”. It was chosen, because – and I quote – “[it]… Read more »
When a person is engaged in creative writing, one of the innumerable points he has to consider is how his characters would convey their disapproval of people. Are the characters high-society types or mere mortals? Are they conservative or colloquial in their speech? Do they express their opinions carefully or forcefully? And so on. You Barsteward… My mental meanderings on… Read more »
For a long time now, I’ve wanted to analyze the degree to which my desire to be different has moulded me as a person. Stop! Before you click away to somewhere else on the interweb, please be assured that this is intended to be primarily an entertaining piece, although if you get any nuggets from it, then it will be… Read more »
This weekend marks the beginning of the Christmas Fayre/Market season in our area. Mrs. H. will be singing carols to market-goers, and one of our friends will be at two or three markets a week until the week before Christmas. “Bah, humbug” is my normal and expected comment on all this. I struggle to get into the festive spirit much… Read more »
What are your earliest musical memories? For some, it might be The Spice Girls spicing up their lives; for others, it might be Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra performing together during the Second World War. For me, it’s Perry Como singing “Catch a Falling Star” and “Magic Moments”. He released those songs in 1958, but I was only three at… Read more »
(Note: Links to videos etc. were last tested 2015-11-05) I make no secret of it. I’m a huge Monty Python fan. Ditto Blackadder. I’m not one of those fans who can recite every line of every episode or film verbatim. But I’m close. Sing me a song with off-colour lyrics, and I might respond with, “a lovely old hymn, your… Read more »