Craig Sawyers

Have a totally spiffing tall day, old bean.

In her day she was an incredible ratter. We had a rats nest under the shed. They set up home because our neighbour had an aviary, and the rats were after the roosting birds. I bought a rat trap - a huge back breaking sort. Baited it with chocolate and waited. Next morning, trap tripped, chocolate gone, no rat. I eventually bent the mechanism to operate on a hair trigger, if you sneezed it would trip. Next morning bait gone, trap tripped, no rat. Those buggers are clever - they must have used a stick to trip the trap. I had no idea that rats were tool users. The guy next door tried a humane trap; all he caught was a hedgehog. Then Cleo got on the case. Worked her way through the lot of them. Of course they fight back, so she'd come in really proud with tail high looking a bit battered, and outside a half eaten rat. She got all five of them. She was a quite small cat, but a scourge of rats! And voles, and mice, and birds etc etc. Many brought back alive as a trophy to try to teach the higher primate chimp owner how to kill a small animal.

Ah - gotcha. Sorry I knee jerked - I'm just kind of raw at the moment. Can't sleep tonight very well - it is 2am in the UK

Sorry - why was that a funny post, TMoney? I can assure it it was not fucking funny having a cat I've know since she was 1 year old euthanized. Not even remotely a ha ha moment.

We had to say goodbye to our old girl - 18 1/2. Until yesterday she was great, eating like a horse. And two days ago I took her to have her nails clipped. But in the last day she went downhill real quick. In the end she could hardly stand, and had even lost the will to get out of the litter tray. At the vets there was no option, and we had to make that difficult kind choice. Carole came along for moral support, because we reckoned that the end was not far off in any case. We're having her cremated, and we'll bury the ashes in the garden RIP Cleo, you were a splendid cat.

My accent has got a lot softer after several decades away from the North East. Geordie actually has a lot of words and phrases from the dark ages invaders from Denmark, Sweden and Norway (5% of my DNA is Norwegian). I'm gannin hyem for going home is exactly the same phonetically in Danish, as is bairn for child. Fell for hill or mountain is from the Norwegian fjell, and a splinter of wood in your finger in Geordie is a spelk, from Swedish spel to chop wood. It even lives on in science as the word spallation, in which a proton beam is smashed into a tunsten target to produce a neutron beam - the proton chops the neutron out.

Happy birthday!

Newcastle - that is where I'm from. How did you get on with understanding the Geordie dialect?

Ah - the Lake District. Perfect and Idyllic area. I've been up about 80 of the fells there (there are over 200 of them all told), and pre-covid we'd holiday there twice a year, and hire a cottage as a walking base. It is about 5-6 hours drive from where we are. If you plan to do some walking there, be careful. I'm a trained walk leader, and even I can get caught out!

While we're on the subject of chocolate, that is a native word in the Mexican Indian native language of Nahuatl. As is avocado and tomato. 🍅

Forgot to say - keep the chocolate McVities in the fridge. Double delicious.

I can mainline a whole packet of those bad boys.

Digestive biscuit And then you can get ones coated in chocolate. Yum yum.

That was the European Union, not just the UK. Which makes most of the measures no less daft. It is a lot of years back they were a whole lot dafter. They tried to standardize the loaf. And in the UK we have a biscuit called the Digestive. It is a particular biscuit that is dunked in a cup of tea. The EU tried to change the name, because in their view the name Digestive implied it was auto-digesting. They succeeded in neither of these idiocies.

Well, I passed the aneurysm screening. It is just a one-off; allegedly if you don't have one at 65 the chances are slim that it will be a problem later. My grandmother died from one - but she was nearly 90. Way back in 1986. The other thing I've been getting hot under the collar about is the UK ban on halogen lamps. Our entire house is now LED, other than in my workshop where all four lamps I installed are halogen. Now only one has failed so far. But halogens are ~UKP1 and the LED version is UKP5. So I've just stocked up with halogens before they become illegal. The thing that riles me though is the UK government is selling this on the green agenda, saying it will save 1.26 million tons of greenhouse gases. Per capita that is 0.018 tons of CO2 per person per year. Put that against the 6.8 tons per capita in the UK, and the halogen ban will reduce our carbon footprint by a mere 0.26%. But it misses the point that halogen lamps are a mature technology, and can be made for very low cost. LED lamps need a semiconductor fab to make the LEDs, and use noxious gases like arsine and phosphine, and are inherently higher cost.

I just don't know whether to use a smiley or a sad face emoticon! Me - off to aortic aneurysm screening this morning. Once you march through your 60's they start taking an interest in your body. Every two years you get a bowel cancer screening kit (poop in a box, then smear it on a sensitized stick and send it off) and now ultrasound screening for aneurysms too.

You should have received one along the lines of lurk and understand head-case before posting, and don't mistake others familiarity with each other as inviting you to join in. This is NOT a conventional forum by any stretch of the imagination, and piling in with idiot messages is a sure fire way of you getting kicked out on your ass. If you want somewhere to just post rubbish, join head-fi https://www.head-fi.org/ . I suggest you pipe the fuck down, lurk for some weeks and get a feel for the place. If indeed this is the place for you - which I strongly feel it isn't.

So you joined an hour ago, and you're two pushy mails in. Did you not read and understand the welcome message?

And wearing a mask, of course! Pre-pandemic if you went into a store wearing a mask the swat team would be called

You are one seriously lucky guy. Cowboy Junkies would be right there on my list of must sees when and if they ever make it back across the pond. But like you, my main experience is with Trinity Sessions. In their current tour they are seemingly doing USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia (whole chunks of which are in hard lockdown at present). But not Europe.

It's years since I thought of eating Spam (stands for SPiced hAM). But we used to fry the stuff. Wikipedia is your friend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(food) . I had no idea it originated in Minnesota. Because it is such a worldwide thing, I'd cheerfully believed it originated in the UK (wrong). And frying it is definitely a thing - Spam fritters. It could be eaten with the Scottish delicacy of deep fried Mars bar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_Mars_bar now this is a truly horrible thought.

No as bad as a Maromoset on a crumpet

Churchill's parrot was a macaw, not an African Grey (or a Norwegian Blue). Here's an article about the bird, who was 114 years old a few years ago https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/local-news/having-chat-churchills-parrot-114-13642592

My Aunt Molly and her husband Ken owned an African Grey parrot. It used to speak in Ken's voice - so when Ken died, it was kind of freaky to hear this bird speaking in dead Ken's voice. It is apparently a real problem; often a bereaved person cannot cope with a bird talking in their dead partner's voice and have to sell the bird. An African Grey can live up to 80 years. About 10 years ago a reporter for our current affairs radio channel (Radio 4) tracked down Churchill's ancient African Grey, which had ended up owned by a garden center. It must have been a slow news day: "Does it speak in Churchill's voice?","Well, not really. It's very old and doesn't say much at all", "OK - but Churchill was famous for swearing - does the parrot swear?", "Never head it swear". Basically summarizing the story - Churchill's parrot fails to talk.