Leisurely Scribbles (Part 2)

Hobbies & Pastimes Hobbies & Pastimes: Chat / Discussions
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Yes Spitty the toy situation is looking very serious this year, I can visualise a lot of parents telling their kids that Santa can’t come this year as he tested positive. :wink: :smiley:

My eldest grandson Sean sent me this photo of himself and his girlfriend taken on Monday when they both received their diplomas at Trinity College, they met at the beginning of their studies in civil engineering four years ago.

He is the first in my family to get a college education and we are all very proud of him, it’s great to see them looking so happy after all the hard work they put into their studies, I wish them well in life and hope they will be as happy together as the wife and me are.

We’ll be having a few jars with them on Friday night, there were only a small number of relatives allowed attend the ceremony on account of covid but I believe they all had a great day.

“I think sleeping was my problem in school, if school had started at 4 in the afternoon, I’d be a professor today”. I can’t remember who said that, but it reminds me of my school days. :wink:

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How’s the hadron collider firing these days Spitty, I haven’t heard tell of it for ages, are they still having a smashing time? They must have had great fun on Halloween night cracking hazel nuts in that huge machine of theirs., seems that’s about all it’s good for. :wink: :grin:

I’ve become very engrossed in the “String Theory” of how it all works, fascinating stuff, a twang here and a wobble there goes right through the entire system, it’s like plucking the strings on a gigantic musical instrument.

You have to imagine (imagination is an essential ingredient in understanding all these theories) that space is like black water, everything is actually touching everything else as just like in one big mass of water.

I reckon I’ll be dug into this theory for a very long time, but it’s worth pursuing, so I’ve joined the STD ( String Theory Disciples), a one off payment of €30 and no strings attached.

I never went along with the big bang thing, and as for Buckley’s “Bucket Theory”, you can shove that one, I can’t say that it doesn’t hold water but it pails in significance when compared to the string theory.

They sent me a free starter kit, plus a seed packet of string beans to plant next year, they don’t lack a sense of humour.

string theory

All I have to do now is figure it all out, but rest assured you’ll be the first to know as soon as I unravel the mysteries of creation via the string theory. :wink: :smiley:

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I sometimes go on another forum; it’s American, and half the posters are either conspiracy theorists, right wing nutters, or religious nutters. Anyway, I can reliably inform you that the hadron collider is a portal to Hell. Not metaphorically, but literally. I bet you didn’t know that, Jem. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Jem knows everything, well nearly, Yes that tunnel, I have tunnel vision but don’t recognize that tunnel, bang bang, you shot me down, don’t think no matter how much a scientist cranks it up, there will never be enough Tevs created for a big bang, I never created enough Tevs for one :icon_wink:

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I think I know that forum Harbal but as you know we are not allowed mention any other forum here.

There are quite a few oddballs there, nothing wrong with that, some oddballs can be very interesting even amusing, but it’s only when they try to force their theories and ideas down your neck that annoys me, I’m open to all suggestions, but that doesn’t mean I’ll adopt and abide by them. :wink:

A portal to hell, yes indeed a great description of it, very dodgy stuff going on in the Hadron collider, who knows maybe they have already discovered something huge and are not telling anyone about it, the God particle that could open up the heavens, or maybe the anti gravity system that scientists know exists but thankfully can’t find, (some say they are worm holes to the universe), imagine the destructive ideas the military could dream up with a system like that. :worried:

Then us humans would boldly go forth in all directions raising hell and havoc on the peaceful universe, stripping planets of anything useful and profitable to feed our greed.

I’ve read a few months ago that they are looking to extend the tunnel another couple of miles, not getting enough bang for their buck it would appear. :smiley:

When confronted with a different life form (as per Hollywood style) they always use the good old American army general’s strategy “Listen Men, If you don’t know what it is, blow it up first and check it out later”. :laughing:
Very heavy handed these generals yeh know, they have to keep thinking about their pensions, and it’s always only a couple of months away from their retirement, one slip and the fat pension is gone.

I’ve always believed that aliens, or the next intelligent species above us, know every move we make, they know we are spiteful, greedy, selfish, and cannot be trusted so they deliberately steer clear of us, hence you never see them, God help us all when we start to provoke them and invade their space.

Donovan gives astronauts some good advice when nature calls, this little tune always made me smile. :smiley:

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I remember Donovan being on Top of the Pops, but I don’t remember this being in the charts. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Good evening all and one. I’ve enjoyed reading back on your wisdom young Jem.

Congrats to your Grand-lad and his girlfriend. It’s nice to know that some engineers at least are being civil to each other. The Goddess only knows the engineers I worked with were quite the opposite. The whole department ran on insults and banter. If someone wasn’t being rude to you it meant they didn’t like you.

After a frustrating fortnight, my Lovely Cousin and I have decided we are not going to have any more children. Our kids and cars, and money management, are not a good combination.

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i’m not surprised Harbal, not a lot of people would remember that track of Donovan’s, I think it was on the “B” side on his hit “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, a favourite of my older brother who played it to death, I hated that song, that’s probably why he played it so much on his secondhand “Pick up”, a kind of old record player thing that piggy backed onto your radio speakers, it was able to play the LP’s and 45’s, just one step up from the old wind up gramophones. :smiley:

Thanks Fruity, always a pleasure to hear from you. :smiley:

About having no more kids takes me back years, it reminds me of old Finbar Walsh up the road from me, he was football crazy and they had 10 kids, all boys.
Finbar was forever telling us in the pub that he would have loved to have the full eleven as a team. He had to settle for the ten and if asked why would say, “Well the wife had enough but she was still very sad”, when asked again why that was he would smile and say “Sad because she had no inside left”
I never knew anything about football, never watched a match in me life, and it took me a while to find out that inside left was an old position in a football team. :smiley:

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And with 10 kids, it sounds like old Finbar was quite fond of playing centre forward. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ha ha, he sure was Herbal, and not only with his own wife, God rest the old villain, he was a real charmer with the old dears.
He was a docker, a “Button Man”, which meant he was more likely to get work than a casual docker, button men usually inherited their “Button” from their fathers or some other near relation, buttons were much prized on the docks and the button men got all the best work, then came the containers and that was curtains for the button men, and nearly everyone else.

Back in the 50’s and 60’s the Docks and Guinness’s brewery were just about the two best jobs in Dublin for men with no degrees, or extended education if you like, working class ordinary folks, but Guinness was by far the best with great wages and all the employee benefits including medical.

I never fully understood how the button thing worked, I used to think as a boy that a button man was an old sew and sew. :wink:

Anyway I found this two minute short video and it’s explained better by the men who actually worked on the docks.

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:smiley: :bike:

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I forgot about the buttons in Cinderella, I was going to post that oldie “Buttons and Bows”, but you’d be far to young to remember it Spitty. :wink: :smiley:

I see Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has sold another 100 seats to orbit the globe, a snip at almost half a million dollars a head. Good luck to them that can afford it, far be it for me to begrudge them.

I don’t understand all this mad rush to orbit the Earth, I remember vividly when when Yuri Gagarin did it first, it was exciting then, a very brave man and a deserving hero was Gagarin, he put his young life on the line as he went around the World in his tiny Vostok 1.

A lot of crap has orbited the world since that day back in 1961, and still does, so what’s the big deal?
Every country that has a capital city is sending up their own satellites now.

Why can’t they go the extra couple of hundred thousand miles to the Moon?
Now that would be a sight worth paying dearly for, to gaze down (or would that be up?, how do you know where’s north and south when your on the Moon?) on the big beautiful blue Earth.

50 odd years now since man set foot on the moon and nothing has happened since involving transporting humans further than orbit level, they had the technology then, does that not smell a bit fishy to you?, I mean they could do it 50 years ago but they can’t seem to do it now, very strange indeed considering they sent a “probe” craft there about 5 years ago and that had to crash land on the surface, why send a “probe” when they’ve already been there?, could it be true that no living thing gets by the Van Allen radiation belt?, methinks something stinks at NASA.

Did you know that there are diamonds galore out there in space?, meteorites can contain them, the intense pressure of travelling through space creates them I believe.

90% of industrial diamonds today are man made, used for the huge cutting saws, and the grit for discs and drills etc…

I was surprised to read this.
“Although diamonds on Earth are rare, they are very common in space. In meteorites, about three percent of the carbon is in the form of nanodiamonds, having diameters of a few nanometers. Sufficiently small diamonds can form in the cold of space because their lower surface energy makes them more stable than graphite. The isotopic signatures of some nanodiamonds indicate they were formed outside the Solar System in stars.[76]
High pressure experiments predict that large quantities of diamonds condense from methane into a “diamond rain” on the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune.[77][78][79] Some extrasolar planets may be almost entirely composed of diamond.” Wiki.

Who knows, with a bit of luck and the help of the devil, all the greedy gits of this World will bugger off to space chasing diamonds, then we can begin to sort out our own planet without hinderance.

So you can have diamonds on Uranus, or millionaire’s piles if you prefer, that’s good news for the jewellery business. :laughing:

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Remember 71 in the Flea pit. :laughing:

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I don’t know about procreating a whole football team, but there was always a kick-about in the fields or playing fields where I grew up.
When I was at grammar school I usually played left back, as in, left back in the changing room.
I did play in goal for the school team but I freely admit I wasn’t that good. Having poor eyesight and only being able to play with my glasses on didn’t help.

There’s a song sung by the Welsh.
One of the verses goes,

I’ve got a cousin Rupert,
And he plays Left Half for Newport,
They think so much about him,
That they always play without him.

Chorus
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see such a funny thing before.

Space, the final frontier! Well if we don’t sort out the only planet we have got soon, Earth will be the last frontier in my humble opinion.

I think a button man meant the person wore a button or badge indicating they had an affiliation to a certain social or political movement. A bit like being a member of a trade union or a “party member” I think.

I could of course be wrong. Most people only listen to me when I’m wrong.

Poor old Buttons. I always felt sorry for him. He was in love with Cinders but never stood a chance against the monied Prince Charlatan, I mean, Prince Charming.

I remember a mock interview between a comedian who sadly died quite young, and the assistant to a very successful magician.

The initial question asked was, "What was it that first attracted you to the millionaire magician, Paul Daniels?

There were a lot of questions asked about the Beatle’s song, Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Many people thought it was to do with drugs and an acid trip.
Apparently it was actually to do with a young child called Lucy who was a nursery school friend of John Lennon’s son, Julian.
He had drawn a picture of the little girl with stars in the background and called it, Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
Upon showing it to his dad, John Lennon decided to write a song about it.

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Great post Fruity, full of variety and info, thank you. :smiley:
Never knew that about the Lucy song, like most people I thought it about drugs too.

Talking of music.

The wife and me were watching a film on Talking Pictures last Sunday afternoon called “Mr. Hobbs takes a Vacation” (1962), there is a scene in it where that 60’s singer “Fabian” is dancing the twist with James Stewart’s daughter, he looks mortified trying to do the then popular dance. I use the word “mortified” because I have an embarrassing memory involving that word.

It brought me back to when I was a teenager, I was at a dance with my girlfriend and a few mates of hers and mine, and I asked this girl up to dance, nothing too oil paintingish, just an ordinary girl, you had to have a really hard neck to ask the very good looking ones up.

We were doing the twist and I could not get into the rhythm of the thing, she twisted this way and I twisted that way, it was all arms and arse with me and I had a dead pan face of concentration as I struggled to perfect the thing, then eventually when she twisted near me she said in embarrassment “Jaysus, yeh look bleedin mortified trying to get it right”, and she walked off the floor leaving me standing there like an eejit.

She was right, I did, because when I got back to the now wife she was doubled up laughing, when I asked her what was so funny she said the exact thing as the other girl “Jaysus Jem, yeh looked mortified trying to twist”. :laughing:
That was it for me, I never tried to twist again.
So mortified and twist are two words that don’t go together for me, mind you had it been jiving John Travolta would have been eating his heart out. :wink:

Yes, some have happy memories of doing the twist, but not me, mortification was the name of that game as far as I was concerned, the twist sure straightened me out, I learned never try a another new dance without practising it at home first.

Alas me dancing are well over now, except for the “Crawl”, I can just about manage that home when the pub closes. :wink: :smiley:

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An old Turkish goldsmith I worked with once used an expression I’d never heard before, he was telling me that when he worked in Istanbul he was caught doing a private job in the bosses time, or a “nixer” as we call that here, here’s the sentence he used:

“I thought I was squall oxed when the boss caught me red handed with the brooch in my hand”.

When I interrupted him to ask him what he meant by squall oxed, he said that in Turkey it was more or less the same thing as B*** oxed, like when you’re caught you’re caught and you can’t get out of it, and went on to add:

“In reality it’s an old Turkish practice carried out by farmers, said to prolong the life span of working Oxen, although the art itself is mostly kept secret, it’s usually passed down from father to son.
But I’ve been told that It’s almost the same principle as bricking a Camel, but using round heated stones instead of bricks, and they do squall a lot (the Oxen, not the farmers) during the procedure”. :wink: :smiley:

As Gumbud will verify, bricking Camels has been going on since man first enslaved the unfortunate animals, a talented bricker can get through a dozen Camels in a working day, no mean feat when you consider the position the bricker has to adopt under the beast in the scorching desert Sun, and that awful smell, but once safely bricked the Camel is good for another 800 miles or more before rebricking.

So there you have it, I’m glad I was able to pass on that bit of useful information to you, you never know when you’ll need it to squall ox an Ox, or brick a Camel, there’s no need to thank me by the way, you are very welcome. :wink: :smiley:

This is Kevin the Camel, the bravest Camel in Sudan, he’s showing off to his mates how tough he is, seen here in this very rare photograph courageously passing a brickery, and holding his proud head high without parting a hair, good on ya Kevin , you show ‘em. :laughing:

camel passing brick wall

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Doesn’t sound like a pleasant position to be in, but perhaps not so bad in comparison to the position the camel is in. :dromedary_camel: :grimacing:

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