Pens. ink and getting out for an hour.

23 February

And so another week begins; another week the Queen will get share of without even thinking of it! As for me, I shall plod on as usual.

Yesterday I did manage to get into town for a few hours. I went down with a set purpose in that I wanted to get a few items of shopping that I couldn't get from Asda. Here's the story ...

As we were sorting out all the stuff that Dave left when he snuffed it, we came across a Shafer pen set containing fountain pen, ballpoint pen and a propelling pencil. Jan decide that she would like to have it so it became hers. Later however she realised that she would never use it so put it into our store of hundreds of pens, pencils and so on that we had also found. I came across the fountain pen again earlier last week. So two of the items I wanted was a bottle of ink and some blotting paper. How long has been since you last heard those terms I wonder. Smudges supplied the ink but the blotting paper came for Rymans.

Later I called in to a market stall and bought three new paperbacks and a photo-mag, none of which I needed but one of the books was Stephen King's Cujo that I had wanted to read for some time. The other item I wanted was morning coffee biscuits which I really do like. Trying to get them in the major store is getting a lot harder and when you do they very expensive. Heron Foods in the Abbeygate shopping sells them in large packets and for just 50p per pack. So now I have enough to last me for a good few weeks.

Stephen King ... sometime ago I was on about my reading speed. Well, something Dave left was a number of stop watches. They too have turned up again just lately so using one of those I decided to time myself as I read The Green Mile. I finished it last night; 430 pages in just over 23 hours. The copy I have is the standard size paperback (form the same stall as I got Cujo from actually). As you can see, that shows a very slow reading speed. Part of the problems is that I can't skim-read, I need to read every words to absorb the story.

Speed reading is OK for business use I suppose. But is it? I wonder how many cock ups have happened because someone has speed read something only to find later that there is a clause or item in there they really should have taken note of. How much has that cost over the years?

I also got a few new photos yesterday too, here's one of them ... 

Part of a flower bed in Dorktown Market Place.

And we have the Sage to thank for today's funny ...

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour
COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk
FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk
NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you
BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then
throws the milk away
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy
grows.
You sell them and retire on the income
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by
your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption
for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.
SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to
produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why
the cow has dropped dead.
A GREEK CORPORATION
You have two cows. You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds,
dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds.
You still only have two cows.
A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.
A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.
AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.
A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.
A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity. You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.
AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You worship them.
A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows. Both are mad.
AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows. You tell them that you have none. No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country. You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.
AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.
A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows. The one on the left looks very attractive...

Bird club, photograpghy and polution

21 February

I was due out to Bird Club last but come 4 o'clock I didn't feel like going at all so I mentioned it to Jan. Her comment was right - as usual. 'You might as well go cos you'll wish you had gone if you don't.' Well, I did go and sat through a slide show about birds of Iberia given by the club President. And it was great! Not only that I won the first prize in the raffle. Jan opened it when I got home to find a set of set VHS videos on British birds. Ah well, not sure what to do with them seeing as we've had DVDs for years now - lust like everyone else and their uncle!  A good night though, topped off with a pint of Wobbler in the Anker on way home.

Damage to the environment has cropped up in Amateur Photographer this week again. The reason for it this time is that after years of decline there is a growing number of snappers moving away from digital and going back to film with Japan leading the way it seems. Environmental damage comes into it right from the start with producing the acetate base of films and then on to the light sensitive chemicals that are then added to the base. The same then happens with printing papers. But what the writer of the letter on this subject missed by claiming that digital is far less damaging to the environment, is that from the  very start of manufacturer energy is used, and a lot of it over the whole build process. He also forgets that there are PCBs with in today's cameras, and they have plastics in them. Solder is used, as is copper and then more plastics on the coatings of cameras, memory cards, battery cases. After that comes printing of images and energy to charge batteries, run computers and printers ... ... ... But as the editor replies, film photography will now only be a niche activity now and the environmental impact will be small compared to digital.

At one time I used to do both digital and film photography and I found the film method a lot more satisfying. However, I was also studying with Open University at the time , and here's where I was forced into a choice. I had an assignment due but my printer inks needed replacing. On top of that I was running out of film and chemicals and we couldn't afford to buy it all. So what was to go? The printer inks won and we bit the bullet, sold all the film kit we had and concentrated on digital. Now I will never go back to film simply because of cost.

Today's photo then is of a flower... 

I got this one at Brandon Marsh sometime ago. It was taken with a Nikon Coolpix P4500, that was the one that could be swivelled 900. Not a bad camera, in fact very good but not very reliable. Mine kept on breaking down.

Funny time ...

I took my wife fishing to teach her a valuable lesson. I soon caught a fish, l laid it on the ground and smashed it over the head, killing it. She screamed "What kind of lesson does that teach me?" I replied "it would still be alive if it had kept its bloody mouth shut!"         

Council contracters, watsed dosh and my bloomin Kildle thingy ... ... ...

20 February

You may remember that last year we had a new bathroom fitted by a council sub-contractor. Well, our toilet has been leaking for a couple of months now and after a number of visits to get it fixed it's still not done. Last Thursday we were told that the pan itself hadn't been fitted properly and needed to be taken out and re-installed, two men were required and they would be here the following day to do it. On Tuesday Jan phoned the council again over it and a plumber arrived this morning. That man is not a happy man at all. He claimed that ours is the third job this week he has been to where the contractors had done a bad job that needed correcting. He didn't tell us that, we heard it when he was on the phone to his office. They are not happy at all. All we want is a toilet that doesn't leak!

Sadly though this is not an isolated incident. Before we moved back here to Dorktown we had been council tenants for over 30 years. During all that time we have watched the council spending money, no, wasting money doing patch up work instead of doing the job properly in the first place. How much money have they wasted working like that I don't know. It seems that Dorktown is not the only place where this happens though, it goes on all over the country. Of course, they are not spending their own money are they, so it seems it doesn't matter so much. What surprises me more though is that the accountants haven't picked up on it yet. It might be interesting to find out just how much wasted money there is in working like that. But in a company which is dependent on profits, they wouldn't get away with it!

We had another telly-less evening yesterday and we finally went through to bed around 10.20. Well ... I've nearly finished War of the Worlds and I hoped to get it finished last night, so I took my tablet through with me (that's where I have a Kindle app see). As soon as lay down though I managed to touch something that reduced the back light of the screen - but only on the Kindle App. We just couldn't get it working properly again so I gave up with it and continued reading The Green Mile instead. Jan tried to sort the tab out this morning and it took her about 10 minutes to do. It seems that I touched one something on the screen and that is what caused the problem. Ah well ... it works now.

And so for a photo ... 

A nice red sports car.

And today's funny is ...

Little Sally came home from school with a smile on her face and told her mother, "Frankie Brown showed me his willy today in the playground!"
Before her mother could raise a concern, Sally said, "It reminded me of a peanut."
Relaxing with a hidden smile, Sally's Mum asked, "Really small, was it?"
Sally replied, "No... Salty."       

No telly, Councilors and Councils

19 February

Last night we turned the telly off. Yes, I know, incredible eh ... doing so allowed me to get some proofing on Shipshape and I got to around half way with it. Jan spent her time her lappy. Turning off the telly isn't really all that rare for us. There's many time we feel like having a quiet evening reading or doing something else that needs catching up on. Thing is though, we like telly and we do record quite a few programmes we like, especially when the schedules clash.

One of our local councillors is in bover yet again. He's the Green Party man and its seems that he caused a row last year while the snow was lying here in Dorktown. Apparently the councillor used his facebook account to insult a council officer over the failure to remove snow from the town centre knowing full well that it is a county council task not a borough council task. The councillor has been ordered to apologise to the officer and to undergo extra training over the issue. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I didn't know that councillors actually had any training, let alone extra training. But more to the point, if the man making the comments was ready to say sorry, surely he would have done it by now. The idea of being ordered to apologise doesn't really cut it in my mind. How meaningful would the apology be when given under duress? Not much I would have thought.

Warwickshire County Council is Tory lead; Dorktown council is Labour lead. The leader of the county council has declared that they have to find savings of £92 million and that has suggested that one of meeting the figure is for all the town and district councils being scrapped and the county council is made into a unitary council taking charge of everything within Warwickshire. Oh dear readers, you should hear the squeals of protest from the north of the county. And I can understand why. The south of the county is very green and rural while the north is more urban and industrial. The big fear is the a Tory lead unitary council would favour the southern part of the county over the northern part. We will all sit and wait to see how things work out.

And now I we go find a photo for today ... 

 

Coombe Abbey, more or less in central Warwickshire but run by Coventry Council.

And funny time ... and it's a graphic ...