Shooting Parrots

Playing Nicely

Friday, 6 April 2012

With just over a week to go before we fly off to the US, it’s time to get down to all those essential preparations. Like messing around with my blog theme. Having played with the Thesis framework for a couple of weeks, I thought it was time to a few ambitious tweaks that you can [...]

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Windsurfing Squirrel

Thursday, 5 April 2012

Ever since I was I was boy, I’ve collected ‘interesting’ bits of information. I put that in quotes because by interesting, I mean interesting to me. I can’t speak for anyone else. I collected them like a squirrel gathers nuts, tasty kernels of facts that I then bury away somewhere because I know they’ll come [...]

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L is for Ruby Loftus

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

This is my contribution to ABC Wednesday and for Round Ten I am focusing on people from the past, some famous, others less so. World War II was a time for heroes, both on the battlefield and on the home front, and one of those was machine operator, Ruby Loftus. Loftus was born in Llanhilleth [...]

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The Ill-gotten Gotten

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

There can be quite a lot of snobbery around the English language, especially when it comes to words that are considered ‘incorrect usage’. I must admit that I can be one of those snobs myself, although I tend towards the moderate end of the scale. The main culprit behind such snobbery is Henry Watson Fowler [...]

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Democratic Deficit

Monday, 2 April 2012

It’s been a long time since I failed to vote in either a national or local election, but it looks as if there will be a first time come May when we’ll be away. I thought we might be able to manage to get a postal vote, but these won’t be sent out until after [...]

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Fatima Krumkakes

Sunday, 1 April 2012

Back in the day when the internet was a lad and Facebook but a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, there was game called Google Whack. Like knurr and spell, it was an obscure and deceptively simple pastime and was practiced by a band of nerdy enthusiasts in the dark corners of the web. The object [...]

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Pointlessness

Saturday, 31 March 2012

It wasn’t until I woke up to the news yesterday that I knew anything about a by-election in Bradford. Nor that we were about to witness the ‘Bradford Spring’. A vote swing of 37%, give or take a few decimal points, is pretty impressive by any standards and George Galloway is right when he describes [...]

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Oh what a circus, oh what a show

Friday, 30 March 2012

You know that a Conservative government is either doing something right or something utterly stupid when the Daily Mail editorial is its severest critic. At the moment, it is definitely the latter. Having made a complete dog’s breakfast of the non-strike by fuel delivery drivers that has resulted in the circus at the petrol pumps, [...]

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Crises? What Crises?

Thursday, 29 March 2012

It’s a strange sort of news day when the jokey item is about VAT, but that’s what happened yesterday as the confusion and silliness about what constitutes hot food and what doesn’t rumbled on. After George Osborne was embarrassed for being unable to tell the select committee when he last bought a Greggs pasty, other [...]

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