I was looking at your photo’s Sweetie, a grand selection to be sure.
If you spot Charlie Chan in Chinatown tell him I didn’t do it.
Enjoy the rest of your stay.
Pug must be on the road again, a hard working fella fair play to him.
I came across this picture of a guitar shaped Island and I immediately thought of him.
Funny how pictures of places and faces trigger off other places and faces.
I have always wondered how men shaved in ancient times, no hard metals were available to them and some early cave drawings depict clean shaven men.
Come all ye hairy faces who dwell on our Isle
Sit down till I tell ya, it’ll just take a while
Mr. Gillette has come to your Town
And there won’t be a stray hair to be found.
A Short History of Shaving.
“For thousands of years man has been fighting a battle with his facial hair - over 25,000 hairs as hard as copper wire of the same thickness.
The hairs grow between 125mm and 150mm per year and man will spend an average of more than 3,000 hours of his life shaving them.
Egyptians shaved their beards and heads which was a custom adopted by the Greeks and Romans about 330BC during the reign of Alexander the Great.
This was encouraged for soldiers as a defensive measure to stop enemies from grabbing their hair in hand-to-hand combat.
As shaving spread through the world, men of unshaven societies became known as “barbarians” meaning the “unbarbered”. The practice of women shaving legs and underarms developed much later.
Men scraped their hair away in early times man with crude items such as stone, flint, clam shells and other sharpened materials. He later experimented with bronze, copper and iron razors.
In more recent centuries he used the steel straight razor (aptly called the “cut-throat” for obvious reasons).
For hundreds of years razors maintained a knife-like design and needed to be sharpened by the owner or a barber with the aid of a honing stone or leather strop”
These “weapons” required considerable skill by the user to avoid cutting himself badly"
It must have been torture to have to shave every few days back then. I remember my grandfather using his cutthroat back in the 1950’s, I’d be watching him carefully and wondering why the skin wasn’t coming off his face with each stroke of the razor. No matter how careful he was he always ended up with one or two bits of newspaper stuck to his face to stop cuts bleeding.
There you are now Alexander the Great and his army were sissies pulling the other fellas hair to win battles.
Ceramics seem to hold a good edge, I bought the wife a set of six ceramic knives and she thinks they are fantastic, there are ceramic blades in my hair trimmer too and they are still sharp after constance use over five years. I believe they are bringing out a ceramic razor for shaving, if it’s not already out there.
I’ll stick with beards meself?
A lightbulb moment
There comes a moment in our lives
There comes a moment in our lives
When our all in all appears
Suddenly comes this big surprise
For now eclipsing fears
The world is seen , truly making sense
seize this precious moment
Banished are the untruth and lies
Bask in the glorious present
For soon this revelation fades
It’s too much to take in
For our lonely solitary lives
Let the rest of life begin RJ ©
[FONT=“Franklin Gothic Medium”]
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity when, for a few brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh, it’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
Christopher Isherwood.[/FONT]
Hello Possums.
I have been to 34th Street, no miracle for me!
I went to 59th street, but I didn’t feel groovy.
No ladies of the night on 42nd street.
“No ladies of the night on 42nd street”
Reminds me of when the ladies of the night went on strike here back in the 70’s, a certain group used to hang about the Royal Canal end of Croke Park, and all the lads were singing “Empty saddles by the old Canal”
Why are all the streets in New York called numbers? is there a No.1 street? They have plenty of famous characters to name them after, what better way to honour them by?
On second thoughts maybe it’s just as well as it is, it’s a very cosmopolitan city and someone is bound to be offended or felt left out, so why rock the boat.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have ones birthday on a street of your age, say you were 50 and you booked a candlelit dinner on 50th street. If I was a native New Yorker I’d have had a drink on every street up to 72th street just for the fun of it.
Did you catch 22 street yet Sweetie?;-)
As children the brother and me spent most of our time with our grandmother, her two adult unmarried sons, and her daughter, also single and all in the same small house.
My Aunt worked in a sweet factory and you’d think that her two young nephews would be in heaven with that arrangement, but although she could purchase jars of sweets at a fraction of the retail cost she only took home Bulls Eyes and Lemon Drops, she loved the Bulls Eyes and the granny loved the lemon Drops.
There was an endless supply of those great big square glass jars that retailers used to proudly display to tempt the kids and pester their mothers to buy them what they fancied.
Auntie’s jars were housed in the outside ‘Cooler’, a big wooden box on stilts not unlike a pigeon loft out in the back yard with a metal grill on the hinged door, it contained butter, milk, cheese and of course the jars of Bulls Eyes and Lemon Drops, and one could easily tire of endless Bulls Eyes and Lemon Drops. The brother and me did make gentle hints several times to try to persuade her to try Bon Bons for instance, the little caramel balls coated with caster sugar, or even Licorice All Sorts, but the hints fell on deaf ears, it was a case of Bulls Eyes and Lemon Drops till they came out your ears or no sweets at all.
When the brother and me went to the pictures on Saturday afternoon we were each given a homemade paper cone of 6 Bulls Eyes and 6 Lemon Drops to take with us along with the 4 pence admission. As I preferred the Lemon Drops I always ate the Bulls Eyes first and kept the Lemon Drops for the big picture, the brother was the reverse in his choice.
I still like the odd sweet, but I have never had a Bulls Eye nor a Lemon Drop since I was 14 years old when I began to work and could buy any kind of sweets I fancied.
One would imagine that I would have life long nightmares about Bulls Eyes, but fortunately I never even had one, although of the wife’s Bulls Looks I have had many.
I have gone round in circles Jem.
I took this pic for Scribbles.
You can all sing Goodbye…
That works only for East to West ‘cross streets’ Jem.
The North to South are Avenues,which are all named, not numbered.
The practice was actually nicked from Philadelphia in 1793.
Philly used a system in which each street’s number ascended according to how far from the central Avenue it was. The ascendance operated as ‘5th St West’,or ‘5th St East’,etc.
But constant building, removing old buildings, restructuring,blah,blah, put the practice into confusion, so in 1861,NY adopted another Philadelphia system, which was to ‘decimalise’ the cross-street system. [I shall now stfu-sorry]
I go round in circles here Pugsy.
Minus 8!!! Tomorrow!!!
WIMP! Minus 8 is standard ‘November breeze’ temperature.
That’s tee-shirt under your unbuttoned shirt ‘sleeves rolled-up’ weather, in Shetland!
[Although to be fair,it’s rare we roll’em down,tbh].
Oiy I have my Teeshirt.
So,lemme get this straight…minus 8c,ice all over the ‘sidewalk’-and you’re wearing stiletto heels?
Oh-and JUST a low-cut tee shirt?
Hmm…and YOU wonder why you’re seeing so many crashes…
Thanks for the info Pug, much obliged to you.:-)
Pity it’s so cold in New York Sweetie, well it is Winter, but I hope it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment of the City. If it’s any consolation to you it’s bitter cold here in Dublin too, so we can all freeze together and sneeze together.
I think the only good thing about Winter is the fact that one can always look forward to Spring, that helps us all get through it, who was it said that Winter was the season of hope, fair play to him/her.
I’ll be meeting up later for a pre Christmas drink with an old workmate and his lovely wife, he’s a Greek diamond setter who came here to work as a young man in the 60’s, he met his wife here who is also from Greece and they married in 1970, both are retired now and live in a thatched cottage by the sea in Galway. Phyllis and herself always got on very well and we’re both looking forward to seeing them.
His party piece is doing a commentary by Peter O’ Sullivan on the Grand National race, you would swear it was O’Sullivan himself, very talented he is with voices, his Prince Charles is priceless, I hope I can persuade him to imitate a few people when we meet up in my local this evening, he was always a bit shy, but there’s nothing like a few jars for banishing the shyness and loosening the tongue.
Hello Possums.
I met some lovely people from Dublin yesterday.
What,BOTH of them,Sweets?
Oh well-that’s Dublin’s ‘lovely people’ quota down by 50% for the duration…
[don’t tell Jem I said that,I’ll deny all knowledge]
Pugsy Bear I meet them wherever I go.
There is an Irish bar that I will partake a drink in tonight, they come from Dublin.
Later. X
Sorry Pugsy Bear and Gummy Bear, I have met some lovely NYC Bears.
Nice looking white bears Sweetie, well stuffed, do they sing?;-)
In the beginning why didn’t God didn’t create two men, or to be fair, two women, I mean there was no need for offspring in the garden of Eden where one never ages or dies, what was the point of having two sexes then, they were bound to clash and it was a recipe for disaster.
There is a very old North African tribe I read about, can’t remember the name of it, but the passed down tales of creation are very similar to the bibles version.
One big difference however is that in the beginning God created two men and placed them in a paradise Valley, the serpent temps one man to eat an apple from a forbidden tree and when he eats it his penis falls off and he becomes a woman! Shock! Gasp! Horror!, Well that’s what I read and they believe, no mention of spare ribs at all.
All tribes and races have there own versions of creation, interesting reading about them.
When God made Adam a long time ago
He thought he’d have no regrets
He left him alone to come and go
With no troubles and no frets.
But Adam became sad from being alone
And God feared depression was coming
From Adam’s chest he took a rib bone
Then God created Woman.
Paradise lost, and the rest is history.;-)
