Resilient Russian

Quite an impressive achievement from the Russian Fella.  Imagine their surprise the first couple of times he came back to life.  I suppose they must have got used to it eventually.  Either that or they hated him so much, they had a medic on standby to revive him just so they could shoot him dead again...

I'll Take A Crate!

Only £7,200 a bottle, it's a bargain!  What I don't really understand though, is a standard 75cl bottle of Cristal 2002 is £290, and six litres is equivalent to 8 bottles, so I could buy exactly the same amount of overpriced champagne for £2,320 if I went for the more convenient to refrigerate normal sized bottles.  Or to put it another way, I could buy 24 bottles of exactly the same overpriced champagne for the same money as the giant bottle.  Could it be the bottle is worth £5,000?  Because it doesn't look that great.

Every Hotel Needs...

...giant plastic snails in the lobby!  Courtesy of the Golden Tulip Noailles in Paris.  You might think it's a little weird, I certainly did, but as a marketing strategy it was spot on (for me.)  As soon as I saw the pictures on their website I knew that was where I wanted to stay.

It also helps if you have an army of plastic gummi bears watching you through the window!

Armistice Day

"Mummy, I didn't know any soldiers who died in the war.  So how am I supposed to remember them?"

The girl has a point.

Trickle Treat

"Daddy, what's Trickle Treat?"
"Trickle Treat?  No, Poppet, it's Trick, Or, Treat."
"Oh.  How do you trick or treat?"
"Well, you knock on someones door and say 'Trick or treat!' and if they don't give you a treat, you play a trick on them."
"OK.  Shall we play trick or treat now?  I'll knock on the door and you say you won't give me a treat."
"Sure."
"Knock!  Knock!"
"Hello?"
"Trick or treat!"
"Errr, trick please."
"Ask me my name."
"OK, what's your name?"
"Rubella Witchy!"
"Hello Rubella.  Rubella?  Why is your name Rubella?"
"I've tricked you, my name isn't really Rubella."

Sorry Heston

I'm a big fan of Heston Blumenthal.  I'm also a big fan of gin.  So the combination of the two should be great, right?  Errr, sadly not really.  In fact, if I'm honest, it's just horrible.  I keep thinking I must have made some kind of mistake.  Surely, Heston Blumenthal knows more about how things should taste than I ever could?  In this instance though I'm forced to admit that maybe he doesn't get everything right.  

Writing this I've just remembered that I also didn't like his Pine Fresh Toilet Cleaner flavoured mince pies.  Ahh well, never mind, I'll go and console myself with some snail porridge.

An Unlikely Princess

I took Phoebe to a kids party at the weekend.  The parents had laid on an entertainer and while she was trying to get the children involved she gathered them round her and asked them who their favourite princesses were.  Yes, they were all girls.  She got the usual answers I was expecting - Cinderella, Rapunzel until she came to the birthday girl herself.  When she was asked, she just pointed and said "Phoebe!"

I'm glad to say Princess Phoebe didn't let it go to her head.

The Dangers of Syllable Juggling

One of the long running jokes in our household is the something I have just decided to call "Syllable Juggling".  This essentially involves changing the syllables in a sentence round so they form some kind of amusing nonsense.  Unfortunately this happens in such a spontaneous and throwaway fashion that concrete examples are hard to remember, but typically something like "Let's load the dishwasher" becomes "Let's dish the loadwasher" or something similar.  Yes, the long winter nights just fly by.

However, Syllable Juggling while tired can have unintended consequences as my Darling Wife discovered when she had a go with "The Princess and the Pea" and came up with "The Peaness and the Prince*" - fortunately Phoebe is so used to this kind of thing that she didn't notice the unintended meaning, while I was able to quickly leave the room to avoid drawing attention to it by laughing.

* just say it out loud if that's not making sense.

UncleMungo - Nature Photographer IV

Finally some success or at least I got something much better than my first effort anyway.  I have to admit, this  was a massive fluke and unfortunately I missed what could have been the best shot while dragging my camera out of my bag and turning it on.  But never mind, I managed to snap this pretty cool shot of a Grass Snake apparently trying to make off with a duckling*.  For those of you with a nervous disposition, don't worry Mummy Duck was equal to the challenge of chasing the marauding snake away.  Click the picture for a better view...

* I have no idea if the snake was really after a duckling, it did seem to be chasing them though - swimming directly at the family of ducks several times before mummy finally saw it off.

Ringtone Songs

The problem with using a song as a ringtone is you feel very stupid when it comes up randomly during a shuffle and you try and answer it.

Boooo to Tescos

We don't normally shop at Tescos, living next door to Sainsburys is just too convenient, but once a year or so when I do I always try and pick up a bottle of the wonderful Bella Veroni Espresso Amaretto.  Lately, trying is all I can do as it appears they've stopped selling it.  Given that nobody else sells it either, it is now effectively unavailable.

Boooo.

SPAM - A Warning

Not a warning about SPAM itself.  Goodness me no.  SPAM is wonderful.  The warning is about SPAM preparation.  Don't fry it in olive oil.  It makes it go somewhat bitter and mars the usually wonderful fried SPAM experience.  SPAM is best served pan fried in its own juices.



That is all.

Duly Noted

I came across an interesting warning on a bottle of antiseptic wash:

At first I thought "Woah!  This sounds like nasty stuff!" but then I realised that "Avoid contact with brain" could apply to virtually anything.  Except maybe cerebrospinal fluid.

Language Inconsitencies

It's not that common to think about the oddities of your native language too much, idiosyncrasies and quirks are so ingrained in you that don't even notice them.  At least that is, you don't until someone who's still learning the language makes a logically correct but syntactically incorrect statement - such as yesterday when Phoebe said "Look!  That lady is cigaretting." 

Neither of us corrected her and I suspect we may adopt it as a household in joke.  But that aside, it does kind of make sense.  "The lady is smoking a cigarette" is contracted to "The lady is smoking" but of course, the lady isn't smoking (unless she's standing too close to a fire) so really perhaps you should contract it to "The lady is cigaretting" - however that just sounds wrong.  But why?

Money Well Spent

"So Phoebe, what was your favourite thing at the Zoo?"

"The bouncy castle."

German Compound Words

I've been having a friendly debate with a German speaking colleague at work about the utility of German compound words.  She thinks they're great, I think they are confusing and pointless but also strangely amusing, which is why I keep the debate going.  A case in point, I was excited to come across a new one today: Flüssigmetallblasensäulenreaktor or liquid-metal bubble column reactor from our good friends at the Karlsruher Flüssigmetalllabor (Karlsruhe Liquid-metal Laboratory) itself another cool example of the genre which amazingly manages to create a word with a triple "L", excellent Elling there from the lads at KALLA as they are confusingly known - you'd think it would be KF, wouldn't you?

Interestingly after reiterating the same old guff that she thinks they are great and doesn't have a problem working out which word is which she then misread it as Flüssigmetallblasensäurenreaktor or liquid-metal bubble acids reactor - which could be a problem if you were trying to build one.  If I had been making a point that would have proved it, whatever it was.  Fortunately I wasn't, they just make me laugh.

Anyway, I don't see how liquidmetalbubblecolumnreactor is in any way better than liquid-metal bubble column reactor - unless you are tweeting about them.

That is all.

Mrs Mungo On Streetview

This isn't exactly news, but I finally got round to grabbing some screenshots.  The good Mrs Mungo was snapped on Streetview.  Interestingly she totally failed to spot the car driving past with the giant camera on the roof!  Also note the slight failure of Google's face blurring technology in the first grab.  Google thinks her face looks like a shoulder, not quite sure what to make of that.  And why is she driving my car?  Why is she getting in without closing the passenger door?  These mysteries will never be solved.

New Moon

I had another go at photographing the moon a while back.  This time I actually thought a little about what I was doing and used filters and such like.  They definitely turned out better:

Supersized Toys

I think the manager of our local Sainsbury's has been spending too much time playing with his foam farm:

Explaining Things

P: Jesus died on a rock didn't he?
H: No poppet, Jesus died on a cross, they put his body in a tomb which had a rock in front of it.
P: What's a tomb?
H: It's a kind of cave where they put people's bodies when they die.
P: Oh.  What do they do with the heads?

Lost In a Book

I was, as usual, reading on the train to work this morning.  (This book if you're interested.) I was dragged rudely back to reality by an unpleasantly cold draft drifting across my legs.  Looking up to find out where it came from, I was surprised to discover that the train was at Waterloo and everyone else had already got off.  Good job it's winter or I might have ended up going back the way I came.

Mnemonic Fail

Like many people I sometimes forget people's names.  Particularly if they are names I've never heard before or I've never seen them written down.  There are a couple of people at my fencing club who's names I just kept forgetting, week after week.  After the third or fourth time it becomes a little embarrassing to ask them what their name is yet again.  So, I decided to use a mnemonic technique where I tried to remember their name by associating it with something unusual that was quite like the sound.  Unfortunately, there are now two people at my fencing club who I know for a fact are not called Arachnid and Camel. 

It is of course entirely possible that my lack of success with this technique was caused by me remembering it wrong.  Oh the irony.

I Am The Law

The End Of The Word Is Nigh

But interestingly only if the word is "anigh" which is so archaic as to be almost not a word anymore.  I suppose you could say the end of "nigh" is also "nigh" but that's cheating as far as I'm concerned since it's also the start and the middle and saying "The End of the Word and also the start and middle of the Word is Nigh, because the Word is in fact Nigh" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

In case you're wondering, I saw a typo on a website, it should have been World of course, but it did set me thinking - off the top of my head I couldn't think of any words ending in nigh at all.  Even a bit of light Googling only turned up one, although it is used in Lord of the Rings apparently so technically it is still in use, even if I have no recollection of it at all.

Carry on.

I'd Like My Toast...

...3 1/2 colour please.

Spotted the Station!

I've been subscribing to NASA's "Spot the Station" mailing list ever since I was gazing out of the window and thought I may well have seen it go over.  I did look it up at shortly after on the excellent ISS Tracker site and was moderately convinced it was indeed the ISS, however it travels so fast relative to the Earth that unless you know the precise time you saw it, you may as well not bother.  Even being out by as little as a few minutes can mean it was actually somewhere over Africa instead and what you saw was a plane (or some kind of UFO*.)  So I decided to take a more proactive approach and actively look for it going over.  Annoyingly though after months of getting emails from NASA telling me it would be going over at stupid o'clock in the morning or suffering the usual British astronomy curse of thick clouds when it was traversing at a more civilised hour, I still hadn't managed to catch even a glimpse of it.  Last week though everything fell into place when I got this:

SpotTheStation! Time: Thu Jan 17 7:26 AM, Visible: 3 min, Max Height: 70 degrees, Appears: W, Disappears: WNWSpotTheStation! Time: Thu Jan 17 7:26 AM, Visible: 3 min, Max Height: 70 degrees, Appears: W, Disappears: WNW

I was actually awake (because after getting up for astronomical events on spec many times and seeing a dark sky I've given up on just hoping the sky will be clear and setting an alarm) and although there was some cloud, it was patchy enough that I could see at least some of the sky some of the time.  It was quite impressive too, a bright star racing across the sky.  

I've not had an amazing success rate, but I am hoping to see it a few more times in the coming year.

* In the literal sense that it is Unidentified, not an alien space craft.

Don't Eat It!

I was helping my little girl make a snowman in the back garden, when she came running up to me very excitedly with a spade in her hand. "I've found some yellow snow for the snowman!" She exclaimed.

I carefully took the spade out of her hand and disposed of the offending material. No idea where it came from. Not sure I want to know.  

Impressive Paucity of Imagination

I recently returned from a work trip to San Diego.  As usual we were fairly busy so I didn't get much time to look around.  One thing I did notice though was how rubbish the good citizens of San Diego have been in naming their streets.  I know it's fairly common in American cities to number streets, and San Diego certainly has plenty of those, but I've never seen streets that are just single letters.

I mean, come on San Diego, you can do better than that, surely?

On The First Day Of Christmas

My true love gave to me:

A beer in a tree.

13 Years Too Late

I couldn't help noticing that riot police seem to be looking more and more like Judge Dredd, I'm surprised it's taken this long...

Drokk!

Our New Rabbit

There's something not quite right about our new rabbit, I can't quite put my finger on what it is though...

Impressive Literal Mindedness

It's easy to forget how literal small children are.  I'm hoping this will help me remember though.  Upon being asked what she got for her birthday, Phoebe replied "Some cards and presents of course!" 

Kid Jokes

Another impressive turn from nephew Tom with these two (paired) belters:

Q: What stands in the corner of the room doing nothing?
A: A Christmas Tree!

Q: What has 8 legs and stands in the corner of the room doing nothing?
A: A Christmas Octopus!

I am still laughing at that now as I type it.  Quality surreal humour from the curly haired maestro.

Not be outdone, Phoebe had a go at composing her own version of the classic "My dog has no nose..." crowd pleaser, it goes a little like this:

My pig has no mouth.
How does it eat?
Terrible!

Bless.