Red Balloons

When I was walking past the Corrie set this morning I noticed that they were blowing up bunches of red balloons. No idea what story they will be for; surely it is too early to be filming next year's valentine episode?



Anyway, the effect of the red balloons against the early morning cobbles and the misty grey sky was rather fetching.

Here's a tune about red balloons that you may remember from the olden days:



And here is a jigsaw which you might enjoy piecing together while you listen to the music.

That's enough about balloons for now, I'm off home to cook my tea.

Modern Manners

It has now become quite acceptable to separate from one's partner or sack one's employees by text message. UR sackd. This apparently is Yoof Culture, and therefore a good thing.

The Pope has been visiting Britain over the weekend, and this got the Crab wondering: does the Catholic Church excommunicate its members by text? Because if they do, the word EXCOMMUNICATED would involve quite a lot of button pushing. Even if you substituted 8, as in EXCOMMUNIC8D it would still involve a lot of clicks - and I'm guessing the Catholics have more manners than that anyway.

Does anyone know what you have to do to get excommunicated? I don't either, but here is a papal beer mat from the recent tour:



I don't know very much at all about religion, so my mind wandered on to other long words.

Here's a big one: somatoparaphrenia

I looked it up on Wikipedia (naturally) and it appears that this is a "delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one's body. As an example, a patient would believe that her or his own arm would belong to the doctor, or that another patient left it behind."

That's really rather sad isn't it? I am delighted to have a full set of limbs and fingers and toes, and I hope they are as happy to be with me as I am with them. There's something quite forlorn about trying to leave one's leg on the bus.


(These are from this blog. I've read it, and still don't know what it's about.)

Anyway, back to the Pope. He went to Scotland and he went to the South but he didn't come here, and thus I am none the wiser. Pretty well everything I know about the Catholic Church I have learned from multiple viewings of Father Ted, and what I have learned is:

As a place of employment it is shambolic, largely pointless, and layered in petty jealousy, greed, ignorance, spite and aggression, and most of the time, a bloody good laugh. So, all in all, very much like working in a Library.

Northern Lights

I have been walking again. (I'm not sure why I say "again" like that; it's not like I ever really stopped walking.) Anyway, I have now walked 1,300 miles so far this year. To be exact, 1,306.

If I was to set off in a straight line, how far would this get me?

Tromsø!



It's a long way north isn't it?

To be honest, I don't know a lot about Tromsø, so maybe I should go there. I do know they have an internationally renowned botanic garden, which I would love to see:



There's another lovely photo here.

And of course, who can forget the famous game between Tromsø and Chelsea in 1997? Oh how we laughed.



I shouldn't laugh too much, we've played in some pretty poor visibility ourselves. No, actually I should laugh, we've always won in the fog. Here we are, at home to Hednesford a couple of seasons ago:



and at Nantwich earlier this year:



(I'm in that fuzzy haze somewhere - bet you can't see me, he he.)

Many more marvellous Mick Dean photos here.

Anyway, enough football and fog for now. Back to Tromsø.

Here is the most compelling reason of all to visit that lovely northern city:



How stupidly, gobsmackingly beautiful is that!

Senseless Beauty

Isn't this lovely?



YouTube Original here,
and lots more Richard Hawley here.

Now you are all happy and relaxed - have a wonderful weekend!

Happy Birthday Sea Monkeys!

Hurrah! Today is the Sea Monkeys' first birthday!

Who can imagine it is one whole year since the first little fellas hatched out? How time flies.





To be honest, today would have been the Sea Monkeys' birthday, except they are currently all, ahhh ... let's see... how can we put this delicately?
Dormant.

Possibly Dead.

That's a shame, isn't it? We could have had such a lovely party for them, with cake and balloons and party games.

I think these Spongebob party hats would have been perfect.



Happy Birthday little guys. Please don't be too dead.

Board Rats

As I have mentioned before, but not very often because it doesn't crop up much in the natural course of events, I am a Librarian. As such, this means that from time to time I need to do some research.

Today I have been researching RATS and STRESS.



You would not believe just how stressed rats are. It would appear that pretty well everything stresses out a rat. On Scopus there are currently 75,564 articles on rats and stress.

75,564. That is a lot of stressed-out rats. They reckon that if you live in London you are never more than seven feet from a rat. Fortunately we do not live in London, but I reckon there a still a lot of rats here.

I would guess there are probably two or three rats for every person, so in this University alone there may well be 75,564 rats - living in the basements, living in the wall cavities, eating in the canteens... (There was that rather famous incident a couple of summers ago when we had a bit of an infestation in the Library, when someone left a half-eaten pizza under his desk while he was on his holidays. I won't name names, but he was of course an IT Boy.)

Anyway, it saddens me to think of all these fraught rodents living so close to my desk, so I got to wondering - is anyone doing anything about this? Do, for example, rats ever get to do anything nice, maybe have a holiday, go to the beach?

Yes they do!!!

Look at this:



Isn't that great?! You can see more pics and read all about it at Your Local Surf.

The Internet is indeed a powerful search tool; a few clicks can take you from the depths of despair to a joyous day at the beach.

I love being a Librarian.

On the move

Probably my all time favourite hobby is walking. Walk, walk, walk. I love to walk. Most days my only motivation to come to work is the nice walk home I can have at the end of it.

This year I have been keeping a tally of how far I have walked. Proper outdoor walks, mind, not just up and down the stairs at home, or around the office. By the time I get home tonight I will have walked 900 miles since the start of the year.

Another thing I really like is Googling. I've been playing with Google Maps, and they have a nice new feature which lets you measure route distances. This got me wondering: where would I have got if I had walked that 900 miles in a straight line, rather than back & forth to work, and round the Peak District on weekends?

My first couple of efforts weren't that successful - a construction site in Poland and somewhere in the Atlantic. Then I headed South East - and look where I ended up!



Faenza! It's rather lovely isn't it? (This photo has been nicked from Wikipedia - I didn't actually walk there and take it myself. Not yet.)

Obviously if I was to walk to Italy I would hit a few obstacles - the English Channel being the first. I also did a bit more research on Google and discovered I would have to climb this:



Which I must admit does look like quite good fun, although I've never tried ice-climbing and my rock-climbing days are well behind me.

I have always wanted to visit the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza so on my arrival that's what I would do. Not immediately; I reckon I'd need a shower and a nice lie-down if I'd just walked 900 miles through seas and over mountains.

They make some lovely things in Faenza.


(Jadranka Bentini)

Ahh. Isn't it nice to plan adventures? Back to work now, sigh - but soon it will be time for me to go for another walk.

Yippee!