I’ve become a vegetarian over the years.When I leave the planet I won’t to be responsible for the least number of animal deaths as possible. 
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But is it true that plants scream when they’re pulled out of the ground?
On September 7th 1920, in strictest secrecy four unidentified British bodies were exhumed from temporary battlefield cemeteries at Ypres, Arras, the Asine and the Somme.
None of the soldiers who did the digging were told why. The bodies were taken by field ambulance to GHQ at St-Pol-sur-Ternoise.
There the bodies were draped with the union flag. Sentries were posted and Brigadier-General Wyatt and a Colonel Gell selected one body at random.
A French honour guard was selected, and stood by the coffin overnight. In the morning of the 8th a specially designed coffin made of oak from the grounds of Hampton Court was brought and the unknown warrior placed inside.
On top was placed a crusaders sword and a shield on which was inscribed ‘( a British Warrior who fell in the GREAT WAR 1914-1918 for king and country’.
On The 9th of November the unknown warrior was taken by horse drawn carriage through guards of honour and the sound of tolling bells and bugle to the coast. At the quayside he was saluted by Marshal Foche and loaded onto HMS Verdun bound for Dover… the coffin stood on the deck covered in wreaths and surrounded by the French honour guard.
On arrival at Dover the the unknown warrior was greeted with a 19 gun salute, normally only reserved for field marshals. He then travelled by special train to Victoria Station London.
He stayed there overnight and on the morning of the 11th of November he was taken to Westminster Abbey where he was placed in a tomb at the west end of the nave - his grave was filled in using 100 sandbags of earth from the battlefields.
When the Duke of York (later King George VI) married Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyons (later The Queen Mother) in the Abbey in 1923, she left her wedding bouquet on the grave as a mark of respect (she had lost a brother during the war). Since then all royal brides married in the Abbey have sent back their bouquets to be laid on the grave.
The idea of the unknown soldier was thought of by a Padre called David Railton who had served at the front during the great war and it was the union flag they used as an altar cloth at the front, that had been draped over the coffin.
It is the intention that all relatives of the 517,773 combatants whose bodies had not been identified could believe that the unknown warrior could very well be their lost husband, Father, brother or son.
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Thanks for that Fruitcake, I’ve often heard of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ but never knew the story behind him…
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Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mother working as a secretary in Dallas in the 1950s when electric typewriters made her job much harder. Unlike older typewriters, mistakes on electric models couldn’t be easily erased, forcing secretaries to retype entire pages for single errors. Graham watched artists painting a bank’s holiday windows and had a brilliant idea.
In her kitchen, she mixed white tempera paint with a common solvent to create a correction fluid. She secretly used it at work for months, painting over her typing mistakes and letting them dry before typing the correction on top. When other secretaries noticed her error-free work, they begged for the formula.
Graham began mixing batches in her kitchen blender and selling bottles from her home. She called it ‘Mistake Out,’ later renamed ‘Liquid Paper.’ Despite being fired from her secretarial job for spending too much time on her side business, she persisted. By 1968, she was producing a million bottles annually from a converted garage.
In 1979, Graham sold Liquid Paper to Gillette Corporation for $47.5 million plus royalties. She used her wealth to establish foundations supporting women in business and the arts. Interestingly, her son Mike Nesmith became famous as one of The Monkees, but even he admitted his mother’s invention had more lasting impact than his music career.
Sources: ‘Liquid Paper: The Story of Women, Work, and Worth’ by Michelle Marcos, USPTO patent records, and interviews with the Bette Nesmith Graham Foundation.
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Imagine a journey to the edge of the sea, toward a small uninhabited island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. There, waves never cease their assault on the cliffs, and the wind guides us toward the mouth of a cave not built by human hands, but by ancient fire and the patience of time.
This is Fingal’s Cave, a natural cathedral on the isle of Staffa, where basalt columns rise with astonishing geometric precision. These hexagonal pillars were born millions of years ago, when molten lava cooled suddenly, cracked, and arranged itself into towering formations. From afar, it resembles the ruins of an ancient temple; up close, it becomes a living chamber of echoes, where sea and stone merge into music.
Step inside its seventy-meter length and twenty-two-meter height, and it feels as though you have entered a colossal organ. The waves striking its walls transform into a haunting symphony—sometimes soft as a whisper, sometimes thunderous as a cosmic choir. No wonder the Scots call it An Uamh Bhinn, “the melodious cave.”
Legend cloaks it still. The name “Fingal” comes from the Ossianic tales, sung of the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill—a figure also tied to the mythic creation of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. It is as if the two coasts were once connected by a bridge of stone and folklore.
In 1829, a young German named Felix Mendelssohn stood before its vast entrance. Spellbound by the cave’s grandeur and its natural music rising from the sea, he sketched a few bars of melody on paper. Those notes would later grow into his timeless work, the “Hebrides Overture”, music that captures the spirit of the cave: solitude, majesty, and the endless surge of the waves.
Fingal’s Cave is not merely rock and water. It is music turned to stone, myth embodied in basalt, and a gothic cathedral without an architect. A reminder that nature has its own language—sometimes spoken in columns of basalt, sometimes in symphonies of the sea, and sometimes in stories that never fade.
Hebrides Overture
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I loved watching the ‘Monkey’s’ on their Saturday night TV programme.
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The expressions First Rate, Second Rate etcetera are naval terms.
First Rate referred to sailing ships pierced nominally for 100 to 120 guns.
Second Rate referred to ships mounting nominally 90 to 98 guns.
… and so on.
During the Napoleonic wars, British crews were capable of firing a cannon every ninety seconds, whereas French and Spanish ship struggled to fire guns every two and a half minutes. Consequently, at the battle of Trafalgar, British 5th rate ships mounting 64 guns fought the 130 gun Santísima Trinidad on equal terms as overall they had a similar rate of fire.
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My Grammar School was founded in the !670s by a relative of Sir William Harvey but for some strange reason the school song and the school badge were all about Trafalgar and a ship, the Temeraire, which was captained by a descendent of William Harvey.
The Temeraire sank the French Ship Redoutable and captured the Fougueux (or the other way round).
The Temeraire name might be familiar, the ship was featured in the Turner painting, “The Last Voyage of the Fighting Temeraire”.
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Hi
The animal with the largest penis in the World is the Barnacle.
It averages 8 times it’s body length.
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Don’t tell Mrs Fox… 
I told her mine was the biggest…
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Did she keep a straight face?
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Nah. She’s got to squint to see it 
I thought I knew the name.I had a framed print of that but had to leave it behind. 
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Well actually it put her in between a rock and a hard place…
How could she argue if I was her first love?
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In 1893, when author Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, the public outcry was so immense that many called it a ‘literary crime.’
Doyle wrote “The Final Problem,” a story where Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, fall to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.
He wanted to end the series for a simple reason. He felt the detective stories were a distraction from what he saw as his more important work, historical novels.
The public did not agree. The reaction was immediate and passionate.
Readers of The Strand Magazine, where the stories were published, sent a flood of angry letters. An estimated 20,000 people cancelled their subscriptions in protest.
Legends from the time say that young men in London were so distraught they wore black mourning bands on their arms for the fictional detective. Even Doyle’s own mother apparently wrote to him, saying “You can’t. You mustn’t. You won’t.”
Under immense pressure, Doyle eventually gave in. In 1901, he published “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” a story set before Holmes’s death.
Then, in 1903, he fully revived the character in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” revealing that Holmes had faked his own death to escape his enemies.
The public’s love for the character was so strong it literally brought him back from the grave, cementing Sherlock Holmes as one of the most enduring figures in all of literature.
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Thanks Minx, I knew feelings were strong about his death, but not that strong…
It seems you can’t keep a good detective down…It’s just ‘Elementary’
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When I was at Uni, I went to see a play which was the character Dr Watson telling stories around the time of the disappearance on Holmes & Moriarty. It was one actor, with the stage set up as 221B Bakers Street. It was so good, I went to watch it a couple more times.
I know a very rude joke about the “elementary” part of that. But it’s somewhat homophobic and I don’t think the boss would really allow it. Fair enough.
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