Toadfish Monastery

The Black Spot has posted this at TOP this morning:

QuoteBart passed away just before midnight last night. He was already frail from his condition, but went rapidly downhill after a minor operation over the weekend.

He was an amazing person and a true friend.  Here we are at my place posting at TOP:



This is the desktop cartoon he drew for my prize when Pieces and I won the pirate quiz.  It's Roy's dog Milo doing the epic Errol Flynn scene which Pieces chose for her prize.




He will be sadly missed, and to lose him and Pieces at the same time is too much to bear.

Siblings may be aware that a major campaign is under way at TOP to get our dear comrade Pieces Of Nine elected as pope.  I feel we should all support this with a campaign here.

PIECES FOR POPE!

As I post this, Opsa, you have 11,111 posts.  What a tidy number - shame it won't last.

I've been thinking for a while that I might be getting a bit deaf.  So off I went to the audiology clinic this morning and the news was medium bad.  In both ears the response drops dramatically above 4KHz, the right one is almost 30dB down between there and 8KHz. I expect all the shooting I did in my youth didn't help - we didn't use ear defenders in those days.

Anyway, the verdict is I need hearing aids in both ears.  The appointment to fit them is next Friday, 26th

Poor Wendy had to have her wedding ring sawn off this afternoon.  Her knuckles have become distorted by arthritis and there was no other way to get the thing off.  Meanwhile the whole joint had swollen quite a bit so the ring was much too tight.  She's now got a deep mark in her finger, like when a tree trunk has been constricted for several years.

That ring hasn't been off for many, many years; possibly never in the 41 years since I put it on.  We feel a bit strange about it. 

Now my head is almost back together, I'll present some observations from Rhodes.

Visitor numbers are well down, trade even more so; shopkeepers complain that people aren't spending their money like they used to.

In the last two years the number of Russians and other Eastern Europeans has escalated.  In the hotel I was more often than not unable to identify what language I was hearing, which was never so before.  Germans were very scarce this year.  Swato was right to warn me  - shopkeepers said there had been ugly incidents at the start of the season.  For the last 20 years the next language after English on all notices was German, now it's Russian everywhere on the fresh ones.



This was the only German flag I noticed - I suspect the café-owner hung it up to try and attract what Germans there were, but the place was not exactly crowded.  Most of the Greeks are firmly convinced that since the Euro, the Germans had set a trap to lure Greece into debt and take it over.  "They couldn't conquer Europe in two wars, so now they want to buy it," was a common theme.  There were a few swastika gaffiti here and there.

One morning a gigantic cruise-ship, Cunard's Queen Elizabeth, was in the harbour - I took this from far away to show how it dwarfs the whole place.



The passengers said they were due to visit Cairo, but the rioting was so violent that they came to Rhodes instead.  Scary.

I had a mild but definite feeling that all this European harmony cannot last much longer.

This morning the vacuum cleaner stopped working.  Turned out the rubber belt was worn and stretched.  So I took out a horrendous number of awkward screws, opened it up and fitted our spare belt.  Quick clean-up and reassemble.

Wendy used it for literally 20 seconds before jamming a chair drape in the roller.  There was a strong smell of burning rubber and the new belt burned through.  We have no spare now.  So I stripped the whole *-!$&%**@ thing out again and refitted the old belt.  It may last one or two sessions.

Yesterday we took Cap'n B to a sort of zoo farm, specifically because they advertised a goat race.  When we got there, the goat race was cancelled and we only saw a sheep race.



Now sheep racing is very exciting, of course, but I'm so annoyed at missing the great event.
Cap'n B didn't give a damn because he got to ride on a tractor.

How about this, Siblings?

QuoteFive minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted 'listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live', at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone's face and then said 'and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Muhammad, I will hunt you down.' He then left the room and two members of the audience applauded.

Happy Crimbo from Wendy and me to all our siblings.  And squidlings too, why not?



This is our this year's design.  It's a modern stained-glass window in Hereford Cathedral's wonderful Stanbury Chapel.  It shows the cathedral from across the river.  Stonework carved about 1480.  Photo taken specially by Wendy.

This either belongs here or in the good news channel or both.

Wendy and I were driving into Hereford this morning when we saw one of the charity's participants walking the other way.

She's got some learning difficulties but lives independently with support.  She's my age and under 5 ft tall, probably weighs about 70lb.  At the moment she's got a bit of bronchitis.  Yet she set off to walk the 12 miles to the charity's HQ in Leominster, along a dangerous main road with no footpath.  Oh, and carrying 3 heavy bags.  She said she'd missed the bus.

Of course we did a U-turn and picked her up - at this point she'd walked less than a mile.  We didn't mind popping into Leominster and I also chatted with some of the other people there, so the trip wasn't wasted.  But she was very, very lucky we saw her.

I am very fond of this lady, but how to persuade her that trying to walk that distance on the A49, with no phone, is a really bad idea?  Well, we all gave her a bit of a lecture, so we'll see.

   

The office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was firebombed last Tuesday night, after announcing that Wednesday's edition would satirise islamists and have Mohammed on the cover as 'guest editor'.

They plan to reprint the edition.



Caption: "1,000 lashes if you don't die of laughing."

So were the editors brave and noble, or damn silly?

At the recent Labour Party conference, the new leader Ed Milliband said "'I'm not Tony Blair", which drew both applause and boos from the audience.
(The media said the booers were booing Blair and the applauders approving of Milliband not being him, I but I can't see why it might not have been the other way around.)
Anyway, I've been thinking who I am most eager to state that I'm not.  It's not easy.  We have no politicians worth hating at the moment, and I'm glad I'm not any of them.  Which is no answer.
After much head-scratching I've finally settled on the Pope.

I am not the Pope.

Who do you most want to say you aren't?

You have to change just one letter of a film title. For example:

The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Magnficent Semen
Apocalypse Not

Happy Chinese New Year of the Rabbit, everybody! 

BTW Mrs H and I are both pigs.

We have just said goodbye to analogue television.  It's being phased out here in favour of digital and for a couple of years we've been replacing our old CRT tellies with nice slim LCD sets with digital built in.  Happily I've got the sets for the lounge, breakfast room and kitchen from the same maker, so the decoding delay is the same on each and I can carry on piping quality sound round on the Hi-Fi without a delay of two seconds or more between the two formats.  It's more expensive to buy new tellies rather than adding digital decoder boxes which you can get for under £20, but far neater.

In our area the analogue system will finally be switched off some time in April, but we've decided to finally go over now.  It's sad.  TV began here with a BBC channel before the war.  I remember the old 405-line system, positive modulation making the picture even spottier than need be, given the 50-mile distance from the transmitter.  The BBC went out on 50 MHz, so we had H-shaped aerials 10 feet high.  Then came the ITV (independent) on 200 MHz so we had two channels, even if the rooftop did look like a modern art display.  Gradually we got more and more hours broadcast per day.  Then in the 60s we got a third channel - BBC2 - on the 4-800 Mhz band which meant three aerials on the pole.  Finally, BBC1 and ITV also went over to the new band and the massive aerials could go.  In the end we got 5 channels on that system.

This was on PAL: 625-line, negative modulation, FM sound and bags of bandwidth for Teletext signals and colour, which we got in the late 60s.  It has stayed the same system until now, and was supposed to be standardised across Europe, though in  practice it wasn't quite.  The French had to be different and came out with SECAM (Suprème Effort Contre Les Américains).  Also the Germans had a different separation between sound and vision, so with a German TV you could have one or the other but not both.

Now we get dozens of channels on the Freeview service, few of which we ever watch.  We are not interested in Freesat or the paid services, so all we end up with is the same number of TV sets as before, though prettier, and the extra channels which we'll watch once or twice a week. The government has grabbed a bit of bandwidth to sell off, and the Pacific rim countries have sold us squillions of new tellies.  I'm really sad the old familiar system has gone, but that's because I'm a grumpy old git!

Today MrsH gave me my morning smack on the head; this time with the wok, which happened to be handy.  The ringing music in my ears inspired a profound philosophical train of thought: How many of our favourite songs contain the word 'wok'?

Obviously there's the Wok and Loll variety, like Wok Alound the Crock.  But even many hymns (Wok of Ages, Creft for Me) and even soccer anthems (You'll Never Wok Arone) contain references to that crassic cooking imprement.

No doubt my highly creative and intelligent Siblings will think of a few more.

Do any Siblings have any interesting Christmas traditions in their family?  We have a few which you might find entertaining:

1) Ever since Mrs H's grandparents immigrated from Holland about 100 years ago they have always kept back at least one Christmas pudding (cooked) until the next year, and stirred it into the new pudding mix.  I can personally vouch for the line being unbroken since 1970, and the older generation were quite certain it went back to the arrival of Granny Kuipers in the UK.  Nobody has any idea whether it goes back beyond that to Holland; it might easily be very old indeed.  I can't believe nobody ever checked on that, but afaik they didn't.
At the moment the tradition is being kept up by us and also by a branch of cousins.  One year we had to give them half our pud to keep their line going and once or twice we've had to cut mouldy bits off, so not a whole pudding has always gone in.  But we claim the tradition has not been broken thereby.  Homeopathy?  Maybe.

2) For the last 15 years we've tried to get the entire family: spouses,  kids and all to come here for a weekend to make the family cakes and puds.  Mrs H also does some for friends, so we make something like 15 cakes and 15 puds.  We mix the stuff in a big plastic box and do the bulk of the hard work with a dough-hook on a mains electric drill.  The cakes are baked in our coal stove, our gas stove and often next door as well.  The boiling of the puds takes 2 or 3 days, again on 2 stoves.



3)   Before Mrs H ices the cakes, she and I sit down with a hypodermic syringe each and large tumblers of mixed rum, brandy and sherry (etc) and we inject the cakes with considerable volumes of booze.  Last night I was putting 20ml into the small cakes and 40ml into the big ones.  Believe me, you can taste it.  Considerable quantities of rum also go directly into me (drunk, not injected) which is why I'm feeling a bit rough this morning.

I shamelessly stole this picture from another site:


http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/arrrrrrrr.jpg

Perhaps Siblings might care to order one?

Rant #1:   The participants at the charity are forever breaking the tubular  chairs.  They keep handing me chairs to re-weld, and yesterday I got one that was nearly in bits and needed four separate welds.  In about 28^o of heat - you can either put on thick clothes and sweat or carry on in T-shirt and shorts and risk the spatter.  I got spattered on, in about 4 places.  Yarooogh.   AND I caught a nasty flash and I think I'm going to get a touch of arc-eye.

Rant #2:   Then as soon as I finished, the vacuum cleaner stopped sucking.  All the usual easy places weren't blocked.  It turned out to be right in the base bit at the bottom, deep inside.  13 screws and many odd-shaped bits of plastic had to come off, then by shoving from one end with a garden cane and pulling at the other with long-nosed pliers, I removed about a pint of assorted grunge.  Then I had to reassemble it.