Beat the Tuesday Blues with my Tuesday Doodle.

Here’s an interesting little known fact ; More people visit Las Vegas in a year than visit the UK!!

Four years to go before the next Winter Olympics in PyeongChang – Sochi from the opening ceremony until the closing ‘do’ was great and Team GB did so well with 4 medals! Because one of them was gold that makes us higher up the overall medal table than for example Italy!!

It was Emile Zola that said, “In my view, you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.” It could have been me, I guess!!

A wink apparently goes direct to the heart! I can’t argue that. After all I’m not that good a winker anymore!

So I attended my first public transport meeting for a few years during the week. Yes it was a bit of a ‘moan fest’, they always are! Funny thing though, the meeting started late because there were no parking spaces available because it was market day. Hang on it was a public transport meeting! Surely it would have been better to have been late starting because of late trains or buses. I did quite enjoy the meeting though, maybe it was because I was one of only four people out of about fifty that still has to pay to use public transport!!

I overheard this during the week and I do kind of understand. “I used to be quite religious until the pope was German.”

<<CLICK HERE>> for yesterday's post, the Terence Davies film, 'Of time and the City' about his native city of Liverpool. It's brilliant but maybe not for everyone!! Local (to me) history geeks will love it! This was originally shown on BBC2 on Sunday and is also available on BBCi player.

Of Time and the City....

Terence Davies (1945- ), filmmaker and writer, takes us, sometimes obliquely, to his childhood and youth in Liverpool. He's born Catholic and poor; later he rejects religion. He discovers homo-eroticism, and it's tinged with Catholic guilt. Enjoying pop music gives way to a teenage love of Mahler and Wagner. Using archival footage, we take a ferry to a day on the beach. Postwar prosperity brings some positive change, but its concrete architecture is dispiriting. Contemporary colors and sights of children playing may balance out the presence of unemployment and persistent poverty. Davies' narration is a mix of his own reflections and the poems and prose of others.



THIS IS FOR ALL MY LOCAL HISTORY FRIENDS...... LOCALLY AND HISTORICALLY SPEAKING!!

How cool is this..........?

RADIO CAROLINE BACK FOR 28 DAYS!

This is 'the most amazing' cover version ........ EVER!!

With thanks to a Chicago, Wilko News reporter via the Book of Face!

Tuesday Doodle.

So, are you just loving the Winter Olympics? Now we’ve got ourselves over the controversy of holding them in that nasty Russia. Thing is you always enjoy them better the better you do – you as a nation – so now it’s just like our summer Olympics – our as a nation – we are on the medal table and in Winter terms we are doing so well, the Olympic spirit has continued to flow since 2012. Long may it continue I say! While the Olympics are on I always wish there was more of each of the individual sports shown so we didn’t have to play catch up every four years but 48 hours after it’s all over and the Olympic flame starts its way to Rio it won’t be an issue. It will be forgotten for another four years!

Billy Collins, it’s ok if you’ve never heard of him! He was American poet Laureate 2001 – 2003, I’ve just discovered this poem of his called Consolation.

Consolation

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna. 

That, of course could almost be written by any traveler whose plans are cancelled. I personally wouldn’t be at all surprised if those of you who know me could see me writing something like that, if it happened to me!!

Meanwhile I’ve had a busy week – moving one of the Wilko crew from one house to another, a task that over the years, to be fair we have had quite a bit of experience at, one way or another. However this was possibly the most difficult…. Ever.For no particular reason, I have to say, you can perm any combination from the following list : Four children between ages of 2 and 9, decorating as much of the new house before the move and stripping walls of ancient wallpaper in some cases twice. A family funeral right in the middle, half term kids holidays, prominent crew member only able to get one 12 hour shift off, an oversized sofa that nearly got chain sawed to get in the new house, constant cold, rainy, wintry weather and that is just the start!! However most of it is done and the lord above only knows how we all made it. Yes it is very much an ongoing project but great efforts all round…. So far1 (Sofa?!!) Well done Wilko/Corbett crew!!  

By the way have you seen the Lego Movieyet?

Have you seen the Lego movie yet?

So the movie's out and yes I am so going to see it!! 

In the meantime though..... People with so much time to spare have been filling the internet with this type of 'selfie' Lego movie for years!! This, AC/DC 'Hells Bells' is one of the better ones.

Tuesday doodle time.....

Happy 10^th Birthday Facebook. The one and only, single, solitary mention – sorted. Though having said that some of the nearly 2 Billion 62 second videos are really quite good, only some though!

Meanwhile in the real(ish) world….. I love the Winter Olympics, yes I know it’s a shame that some of the controversial aspects of Putin’s Russian politics get in the way of the spectacular sporting events but in my book that doesn’t mean that we should not watch it. It’s not the athletes fault is it? Years and years of training to reach the standard of being an Olympian and competing for your country is an incredible achievement and deserves to be seen by as many people as is humanly possible. These, the twenty second Winter Olympics are shaping up to be a fantastic spectacle of sport, don’t miss it because of the petty bureaucracy that has crept in to Russian politics since capitalism’s ugly head reared in the place of Communism’s equally ugly face.

Mayday (button!)….. Am I the only person in love with Amy Amazon? All I need is a Kindle Fire! Just as I post this I discover there are 2 Amys!! Amy Mayday UK, who is Irish and Amy Mayday US who is from St. Louis, and now I don't know which Amy I love most!!

Talking of love – St Hallmark’s later this week masquerading as a Saint that people are hard pushed to find any real evidence of but know that there was a massacre on his day in Chicago in 1929! Don’t forget folks to tell the person you love that you do love them in the 24 hours of February 14^th, even if you never do again throughout the year. Otherwise it could end in a forced martyrdom or even a massacre!

Happy 10th - I think!!

Click below for my very own personal 62 seconds of my life according to Facebook!

Ok well I had big doubts about nearly 1.2 Billion 62 second videos to celebrate Facebook's 10th birthday but looked at mine and it's not that horrible! Notice though they didn't put my picture up of how much I dislike their policy over copywrite!  

Tuesday doodle day!

So Goodbye Year of the Snake and welcome Year of the Horse. In Chinese astrological terms that is! One of my readers celebrated the outgoing year by finding a snake in the bathroom!! I’m not making light of it, I’m sure it was a highly traumatizing episode but I personally would be conscious of not going around to the house any time around February 19^th next year. Well because unexpectedly finding a horse in your house at all would be bad enough but in your bathroom?

I can hear you all saying – Wow isn’t the Chinese New Year late next year? Yes it is and would you like to know why? It’s because we have already been too greedy this year as far as lunar cycles are concerned! Only the 4^th of February and already had two new moons!! So of course we have to pay it back next year!

Apologies in advance to my American readership for using, in the next bit. a couple of words that you are not that familiar with!!  However with that apology you can be safe in knowing that you are in the vast majority – maybe 99% of Americans that have never ever done this!! Let alone understand it!! This is how the story goes!

I was on a bus the other day that went the whole way round a roundabout twice!! That’s actually the whole story!! Maybe I should add, at once and the same time? Maybe not? For those familiar with buses and only one bus stop serving both directions on roundabouts then this is although a little extreme very easy to get your head round. To those more local that know Clatterbridge hospital roundabout and the 487 towards Neston and passengers thinking it goes in to the hospital when it is three quarters of the way round the afore mentioned roundabout then this is so understandable you could probably go on to the next bit already!!

I had thought of over complicating that story with the fact that there is a petrol station in the centre of this roundabout too but thought for the sake of the red squiggly lines from spell checker (US) under all the words, I wouldn’t!

I love learning things and if I learn something every day – no matter what it is then that’s me one happy bunny!!

My learning experience yesterday is still rattling round in my mind! Thank you to a couple of readers and Tesco for this gem. At a self service check out at the above mentioned grocer there were two products being purchased. A clipper lighter, with a handle that you would use maybe for lighting a cooker or a boiler and a pack of 4 forks, just ordinary forks, without their knife partners. Forgetting that when purchasing lighters, alcohol, some meds and adhesives you have to have your age verified before you can continue, the assistant had to come to the check out and log in. “Sorry mate I forgot I was buying a lighter!” Can you imagine the shock when on the screen it said, AGE VERIFIED for product PACK OF FORKS!!

So cutting to the chase what I learned from this story was that you have to be 25 before you can stab someone or yourself to death with what are in effect very blunt forks but you are perfectly free to burn your house or their shop to the ground at whatever age you happen to be. So please mind yourself while you are eating and take extra care while you are washing up your cutlery!! As an aside to that story the verdict on the forks was that really they found it difficult tearing the flesh of a sausage let alone 'stabbing' human flesh!!  

Know your Chinese zodiac animal?

Choose your travel destination.