Leavings

I live lost in solitude,
Kindred spirits my only connection
To reality.
Here in a warm womb of melancholic nirvana,
There is a soft sadness born of sweet joy
That my heart is held safe by distant hands.
And I will hold their hearts forever
For within the purity of their wisdom
Lies no wish for greater love.
And I could not ask my Mother, The Earth
For greater trust.

It's Quiz Time.

Not to be outdone by a certain American gentleman, (you know who you are) I have decide to throw my ring into a hat and write a quiz.

I don't know why, just wasting some of the time I could be using to plan the single handed ascent of Everest I had pencilled in for next wednesday after work.

Still, I expect it would've rained anyhow.

I must point out the 'Rules' before you all go straight to wikipedia.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE, UGLY THREAT PLEASE DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA OR ANY BOOKS OR OTHER REFERENCE STUFF.

It's not much fun just looking things up. That's just like doing your homework. This is supposed to be a pub quiz type quiz. So I would suggest you get yourself a nice glass of beer, or perhaps meths in some cases, and pretend you're in a boozer. No books to look at, and on this occasion, you are Billy/Betty Nomates. You're on your own, you poor old saddo. Nobody is near enough for you to peep over their shoulder or read their lips as they blurt out the answers to their team-mates.

Besides, there really isn't any point in cheating cos there's only an imaginary prize. However, the greater your imagination, the more you stand to win. But just imagine if you will, how bad you'll feel when all your winnings have been gained not only by imagination, but also by cribbing. You'll only be fooling yourselves. And of course, a certain Mr. Clause will find out and then a certain stocking will be several pounds lighter in a few weeks. There are some dudes over whose eyes there is no wool to be found, and upon whom, there are no flies.


So, I have enabled the comment moderation again for the duration of this post only cos I don't want an email address on the blog for obvious reasons. This means that should anybody actually take part in the quiz of the day, (queeez de jour) they won't spoil it for everybody else unless I'm stupid enough to post their comment. However, if anybody posts a set of answers which are entirely incorrect, I'll post that comment and shame them forever.


Extra points may be awarded to crawlers who tell me I'm just super and all that, but points may be deducted for uber-creepyness.


Hey, I make up 'The Rules', O.K.


I will of course, endeavour to be fair and honest in the marking. Forgive me if any of the answers I give, should we all get that far, are actually incorrect. After all, I'm not the reincarnation of Magnus Sodding Magnusson, (correct)?

Disputes will be settled by a calm rewriting of 'The Rules' and history as we have previously known it.


And so, having made myself utterly clear to all and sundry,

"Let The Games begin!"

A; My dog's got no nose, how does he smell?

B; £ is to 5 as & is to ...what?

C; For what is Valentina Tereshkova most famously known?

D; What year was the R.M.S. Lusitania built and in which year did it sink?

E; Which British 'pop star' bought John Lennon's piano upon which Lennon wrote the song 'Imagine'

F; Which Major League baseball (rounders) star holds the world record for the most home runs ever?

G; On which Beatles album is the song 'Your mother should know'?

H; Who directed the following cult or blockbusting movies.
i) The King of Comedy
ii) 2001 A space Odyssy
iii) Jaws
iv) The 39 steps
v) The Doors
vi)Withnail and I
vii) Alien
viii) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
ix)Love Story
x)Being John Malcovich

I; Name the five usual passengers of 'The Mystery Machine'

J; Which U.S. state is known as 'The Green Mountain State'

K; Which English county is known as 'The Garden of England'

L1; Who won the F.A. cup in 1936? (cough)

L2; 'If 6 was 9' , who was the drummer?

L.S.D; If it takes three men thirteen days per month to walk a fortnight, how many apples in a barrel of grapes?

M; Please put these capital cities in order determined by their distance from the equator, closest first.
London, Rekyavik, Kathmandu, Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Prague, Brasilia, Paris, WashingtonD.C. Beijing. Bonus points for saying which is furthest from the North Pole.

N; Who wrote the 1995 novel, 'The Northern Lights'

O; What was The Rolling Stones first U.K. no 1 hit single? What was their first U.S.no 1 single?

P; Who were the four U.K. prime ministers in office during W.W.1. and W.W.2?

Q; Which 'Knight of the Realm' was the controller of B.B.C. 2 from 1965 - 1968?

R; Famous actor and all round attractive hunk George Clooney tried out for which U.S. baseball team? Played which character in 'South Park'? Was born on what date? And has what middle name, if any????

S; The following names are the forenames of four famous, or famous(ish) people all nicknamed 'Spike'.
Shelton Jackson; Lindley Armstrong; Terence Alan Patrick Sean; Henry Bertold.
What are their surnames?

T; Please put these U.S. presidents into chronological order.
George H.W. Bush; Grover Cleveland; Abe Lincoln; Andrew Jackson; Theo Roosevelt; Calvin Coolidge; Bill (cigar-box) Clinton; Franklin D.R. Roosevelt; James Monroe; Ulysses S. Grant.
For a bonus five points, which one had the most vice presidents serve under them.

U; What colour shirt am I currently wearing?

V; If you were to multiply together the number of legs which the following real creatures would usually have :- spider, aye-aye, human, scorpion, llama; and then divide it by the total number of heads from these mythical creatures :- cerberus, minataur, hippocamp, gorgon, sphinx, centaur; what number do you arrive at?

W; What time is it?

X; Who played King Arthur in the epic film, 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'?

Y; The following are latin names for animals. What are their common or English names?
i) ursus americanus
ii) ornithorynchus anatinus
iii) sarcophillus harrisii
iv) ursus arctos
v) phodopus cambelli
vi) cavie porcellus
vii) lemur catta
viii) procyon lotor
ix) spirogale gracilis amphiala
x) meles meles

Z; You are on a large flat surface, like an airfield. (disused). You walk 10 metres to the south, then 10 metres to the east, then 10 metres to the north, then 9 metres to the east, 10 metres to the south west, 15 metres to the north, and finally 10.6 metres to the south west to the nearest metre, how many metres are you from where you started.

Good luck everybody, you're gonna need it. Remember NOT TO CHEAT cos it took me BLOODY AGES to write this all out and then type it and do the research(?) in the first place and it'll spoil EVERYBODY'S FUN if you do. The closing date is open, probably about a week or when I'm bored or can't mark any more.....cos I'm bored or it's all too much and threatening to ruin my kids x(christ)mas. Oh and one more thing. One of the above questions is for tie break purposes only. You don't know which one it is, but I do. So you'd better try to answer them all well, cos you may end up in a dead heat with somebody and then all your imaginary prizes will vanish in a puff of apathy.

Fungus

I'm sitting in a living room. I'm waiting for a close friend to come home from work. I'm a tiny bit bored even thought there are plenty of entertaining things to do. I just popped out to look at the foul weather and decided I couldn't stand venturing out in such inclement of atmospheric conditions. I found this unusual fungus growing under one of the trees in the garden. Can any amateur mycologists, or any laypersons indeed, tell me what it is? I'm afraid it's not a very good photo as it was quite tricky to get a hold of on my own. See what you think and let me know.

The Folding Stuff

Today was a day off work. And what better way to spend it than in the company of the F.G. down at the nearest main shopping street to my comfy little abode.

She suffers so in the dimming of winter, (she is effectively solar powered) and so we gathered what light this drear November day could offer, and strolled abroad, about the merry folk as they yabbered in West country accents, weaving their tales of joy with old fashioned working class bonhomie to all and sundry.

I've become partially obsessed with the task of finding a cheap egg-poacher of late, and this visit to a pound shop paradise turned out to be precisely how to do it. A fiver, what a bargain! Now all my eggs will be perfect, though it has been pointed out that my cholesterol level may bump up a bit as a result. I remarked lately that I refused to go for one at a tenner, but a bluey would be the fair exchange that proves no robbery. And so, I felt duty bound to hand over the aforementioned Princely sum and scuttle off with the goods.

A mere minute or so later, barely time to explain how ecstatic I was to F.G., I found myself glancing downwards at the pavement as I walked. Hush my cotton socks and go to the foot of my stairs, if there wasn't a tenner on the deck. I stuck my foot on it, in that cool way that finding cash brings out in a miserly old scrote like myself, and swept it into my pocket. This is, after all, the payback for being so short.
Now scarcely able to put my elation into words, but able nonetheless, I strolled on hand in hand with my girl, who was expressing her wonder about how it was I always found money in the street.

Then the first pangs of guilt began. What if somebody really needed that cash? It was found with a receipt from the greatest retail outlet of them all, (Not Harrods you fools, Wilkinsons) Perhaps I should find out whose cash it was as the purchase was only a few minutes previous. I was talked out of it by the kind of common sense as used by girlfriends who are being driven mad by verbose sidekicks apparently pushed to the edge of apoplectic hysteria by a gross profit of £5 and the prospect of neater breakfasts.

I like walking about with this woman. She brings the paradox of calm insanity to my day. I feel though that we should always walk in step with each other, opposite feet treading at the same time ie. not like marching soldiers. Normally, I have to adjust my gait in order to achieve this by doing a sort of one pace skip. With this in mind on the way home, walking up the 99 steps to where my house sits atop an urban hill, amid the other jostling architecture, I contemplated all my good fortune of the afternoon so far, and could ask myself only this question.
Why is it that some people fold their arms right over left, and others left over right? Can any of you out there help in my quest for the answer to this query as there is no logic behind the answer, I fear, and it's beginning to fry my grey matter?

Lucky Me.

I'm going to bed to read my book because I can't talk much about the predictable nature of the England football team's demise this evening. I wrote a post about the domestic violence which may take place around the country as a result of this defeat. I deleted it because though it was heartfelt enough, I don't really know what I'm talking about and perhaps that subject is so very close to so many peoples' lives I should at least do some reading or talking about it first. Suffice to say, ya basta.
I've driven myself around in circles now and but cannot just delete and run away, so I'm just filling another piece of cyber space with more conjoined phrases and thoughts. No jokes, no funny asides. I'll just keep myself to myself.
And later, when the coffee wears off and the fatigue of another day finally strokes my eyelids toward each other, I can sleep safe and sound in my womb of dreams and Western World comfort.
Lucky me.

Embarrassing A Dead Tree.

I've written about trees and the tiny people who live and scurry about them recently.

I have an ongoing project which may end up as a blog or as a series of photos to be exhibited, assuming I could find a mug to exhibit them.

I'm gonna witter on about one tree though, because recently this tree has suffered perhaps the greatest of all indignities, and has been cut down. I am probably the last person in the world to have taken a photograph of this tree. This tree has been on television, at least once, in an adaptation of Terry Pratchet's 'Johnny and the Bomb'. I thought it looked quite healthy, though my friend who is a tree surgeon may have been able to inform me otherwise had he ever seen it in all it's arboreal splendour.

However, the shot I took of this tree was not of it's regal limbs extending into a Wintry sky, or of it's Autumnal leaves cast confetti like into a whistling wind, to sail unto some hitherto unknown destiny, perhaps to become a coracle for some pond skimming faerie folk.

No, I took a picture of it's arse, because that's the kind of guy I am.

Now, I know what some of you may be thinking. Trees, to the best of your knowledge don't have arses. Well no, in the traditional sense of the word, they do not. But neither do many things which people describe perfectly understandably as having an arse end.

And so, as if to cause this formerly grand, now reduced to council park mulch, tree embarrassment beyond it's temporal existence, here is it's bumhole.

It All Comes Flooding Back

After a day at work and an evening spent doing a little washing and defragging the ailing and geriatric computer, I spent half an hour on the phone to my long distance lover, partner and all round top woman. I was expecting my 16 year old daughter to come back home any minute. She's been up the road gabbling with her goopy mates all evening. I thought maybe I could escape to my room as soon as she did, having said hello and goodnight. There's nothing quite like a relaxing read in the comfort of ones own bed. Or maybe I could listen to one of my bird call cds and pretend I'm on a farm in late spring surrounded by wildlife abounding.

As it is, these options were not to be open to me this evening.

My daughter is not a delicate girlie girl. She's a good kid, but can be a tad brusque and bullish at times.

She had asked if a mate could stay over tonight as well. Considering I was supposed to be having a quiet night in totally alone, this was not first choice but hey, what can you do?

So, just as I'm finishing the aforementioned phone call, in crash Daughter and Friend, another 16 year old, who I've met before.

Only this time she's rather drunk. Actually, she's totally pissed, but being a polite girl, waves absentmindedly from the sofa when I say hi.

I prepare for my retreat to the inner sanctum upstairs, but just as I'm issuing instructions for the teens part in the peaceful remainder of the evening, Friend, who has gone awfully quiet, lurches forward. And with a mighty heave, regurgitates a pot noodle and half a pint of snakebite onto my living room carpet, her lap, and the corner of the sofa.

Oh what joy!!!

A vomiting teenager. To cut a not very long story short enough to allow me some sleep tonight, I and Daughter, who is not drunk at all, spent the next hour holding this poor girl's head over a bucket whilst she did that heartrending uuuuerchhhhaaah! noise over and over again.

We've all been there, (well, most of us anyway) I suppose. I have a history which involves doses of alcohol as an emetic. At her age, I was a past master at the old Technicolour Yawn, and I wasn't always in control enough to be too fussy about where it landed. Let's face it, discretion is not top priority when you've got to call God on the Great Porcelain Phone and you just don't have the strength or coordination to get to it.

Her mum came to pick her up. It took a while to get her moving but I'm confident that she'll be ok.

And so I'm winding down in front of the revved up P.C.

Soon I'm off to bed. Far too soon after that I'm up and off to work. Soon after that, Daughter will continue the sterling efforts we have both made to render the living room odour free. Of course, that wont be possible but we have to try at least.

Goodnight everybody, and please comment with your best/worst teenage overdrinking til vomit stories.