Back to Normal

Thank goodness for an efficient Telstra help desk. It took me 30 minutes to get through, but when I did they were really helpful and knowledgeable, and had my system back up in 5 minutes

The cable network had a glitch yesterday, with many subscribers being cut of from network access. I had tried to reset my modem/router while this was going on, and inadvertently deleted all of the IP and DNS settings.
Here's a helpful note to all of you out there in blogland.
Open up your network area on your computer, look at the properties of your connectors, and make a note of them on a notepad file, so you can use them to reset your modem/router if needs be.

There seems to be a proliferation of suspect identity bloggers suddenly around. I wonder if this is linked to the sudden disappearance of Tom, and the sudden disappearance and reappearance of Second?

Strange things afoot.

Hell on Earth

Keeping in the ever-popular biblical theme, I discovered I was cursed.
NO INTERNET.



From Sunday night to this morning, I was cut-off. Alone. Isolated.
No Blogs, news, email, software updates. Nothing.
It was like being transported back to the dark ages, or in New Zealand terms, back to the "Piggy" Muldoon era.

It is only through the manipulation of my miraculous computing powers, that I can get this minimal post off through the quagmire we call the Nuova Lazio network.

Hope it's back up tonight, or I'll get really upset.

Apocalypticaly upset.



End of the Universe upset.

Flatulence

Seeing how we've become a wee bit serious over the last few days, I thought I'd change to a more light-hearted (but not better smelling) area.
Like many of the population over 40, I get my blood cholesterol checked regularly. After my last checkup, my doctor put me onto a Statin type medication, designed to reduce the "bad" blood fatty acids/triglycerides.
Unfortunately, Statins can have some side effects, and the one that hit me was excessive flatulence.

Luckily I'm a bloke. Blokes like to fart. Other blokes laugh when blokes fart. It's the way we are. We also use farting to mark our territory and possessions. Married blokes often fart in bed, to give their "mark" to their nest and to their mate. The women moan, but they really know that farting in bed is a sign of love and togetherness, and they don't really mean it.

If two or more blokes are together and one of them farts, in can often trigger off a mass fart episode, where each bloke tries to outdo his mates with a bigger, better, noisier and even smellier fart than anyone else. We might moan, hold our noses and even gag, but then we laugh or giggle (It's one of the only times a guy can giggle in public with other guys)

Being a teacher can have it's own problems however. In class, farting from the kids (especially the boys) is practically de rigeur, but it is not normally a major problem form the class-control viewpoint. (Unless the fart that is released moves into the area of toxic pollution or approximates a military incapacitating agent, necessitating evacuation of the area) But a farting teacher is more problematic. Pupils "know" that teachers are only human, and that all normal bodily processes apply, but to appear superior to the little darlings, we try to project a god-like infallibility. Farting spoils this effect.
There is however an easy solution, requiring only the mastery of the silent fart, which only requires a little practice beforehand.
(Or one of these commercially produced "Fart Silencers"

When the teacher feels a fart pressure buildup that is approaching critical levels, all he has to do is begin to wander among the pupils, making comments on their work, giving feedback and feedforward. As he passes two or more boys, let the first wisps escape. This works only when you have boys in your class. Try and time it so the release happens when you're between two of the kids, so no-one is quite sure who released the miasma of corruption. As the mutters of the unclean increase, as they begin to smell the gas, quietly turn, nostrils flaring. Allow a slightly pained look to pass across your face, direct your gaze to the two boys near the centre of the gas cloud and sigh gently. A slight mutter of "Boys, boys, please." can add a subtle hint of superiority. There are no punishments awarded, slight grins can be exchanged with all males in the area, accompanied with a small shake of the head.
Hey, it's no big deal, we're all blokes together. Works.

You'll notice that there is no mention of ladies in these notes on flatulence.
Obvious.

Ladies don't fart. They project bodily perfection at all times, and such gross metabolic functions are never mentioned or alluded to.
Ladies don't fart, they just discretely exude methanoic waste products.

Hey. Maybe when just women get together they fart, belch and make fart jokes in the same way as groups of blokes do?
Maybe.
But I don't believe it.

Friday night thoughts

I've been reading many blogs tonight, not just the usual circle, but much further afield. Quite educational, so many viewpoints, many expressed clearly, but I'm a little saddened how little wit and humour is out there.
Too many people really take themselves too seriously. My minor philosophy on life is always strive to have fun, to see the funny side of any incident if possible.
Some of life's bumps and thumps are too sad to have any funny side. The death of a child for instance.

I cam across this:
"
"A Happy Atheist"

How fortunate I am to be atheist indeed,
I don't have to pray to any god with heed,
Nor do I follow a religion with irrationality,
Living secularly, I enjoy the world in true reality,
Without religion I am not morally corrupt,
My freethinking and logic do not disrupt,
My fellow infidels may agree with my psychology,
That the ultimate oppressor of freedom is theology

By Brandon Seger"


As an agnostic since I was 14 years old, I cannot take any religion too seriously. I looked at all the evidence in 1964, decided that there was really no way to decide on any faith using simple observed rationality, therefore I decided there and then to forget all about it unless someone discovered new evidence.
I am not an aggressive atheist, and I am usually harmless. Unless someone (normally a Christian fanatic)tells me I am going to burn in hell.
I usually laugh it off, but aggressive Christianity, or any other proselytising religion makes me angry and a bit sad.
How can they be so certain.
I said earlier that I am not an aggressive atheist, so if someone discovered a 5000 metre monolith on the back side of the Moon, or on Cydonia on Mars,

saying in letters 10 metres wide and 100 metres deep, incised with micron level accuracy, the words, GOD WAS HERE, then I would be relieved. Proof was present. The problem of which set of rules to then follow would become really problematic.
Maybe I could set up my own little religion, taking bits of other beliefs to fit my own preferences.(If Ron Hubbard could do it, so could I)

My new church site

Perhaps sacramental wine from the Catholics (The Wine Guy could advise on vintages), but not the little dinky glasses in use at present. I would propose a bottle each, with half bottles of Malt(Laphroig)


on Holy Days (every other Friday).
Add in 3 wives per man as per Islam and/or The Church of the Latter Day Saints.
The penultimate section of the service would be a nice thank you to the now-proven God for Sunsets, flowers, little girls singing and dancing on a late summer meadow, yeast,self-repair mechanisms in DNA replication, and then as a finale, a thoughtful request that a little intervention in wars, disease, floods and storms, cancer and ageing would be nice, if that was OK.

Wouldn't it be nice to know.

Friday Quickie

PRAISE TO THE GREAT RON

Off to Nuova Lazio High in 10 minutes. I'm understudying our departing UnterFuhrer so I can be ready in 2 weeks to take over the onerous duties of relief setting.

To the non-teachers out there, one of the peculiarities of the teaching profession is this business needing to have a trained or semi-trained (or sometimes a warm body)person to take over the running of a class, and to be responsible for that class's learning and teaching if the normal teacher is off sick or on a course.

A great fear in a school is having a class sitting in a room without a teacher, or even worse, having a horde of unsupervised kids running around the corridors.

What most people and parents don't realise that many of these relief teachers are completely unqualified, and simply employed by the school to "baby-sit" the class.

Anyway must be off.

Have a nice day.

Dog Food

Richard (of RBB) has been telling us all about his new friend and companion, Fluffy (of RBB), and I was thinking about pets when I arrived home last night.
I noticed that my beloved had left 5 bags of shopping at the bottom of the stairs, and it now became my job to carry them up and load the groceries and stuff into the appropriate cupboards and shelves. I don't mind at all doing this chore, as my beloved has 3 prolapsed disks (caused by years of lifting patients when she was a nurse)and carrying weights, especially upstairs is very painful for her.

As I was putting away the dog biscuits and doggie dental chews, I noticed the blurb on the front of the packet.

"Lamb and Mint flavoured for maximum enjoyment."

Who's enjoyment?

We spend millions making dog and cat foods, some of the ingredients could easily be used in human foods (like the soya meal in the biscuits), and the morality of feeding pets before starving children introduces uncomfortable questions of morality.
Yes our pets are affectionate (we think).
Has a cat ever said "I love you mista?", or dog volunteers to go out on a walk alone in the pouring rain?

As humans we tend to anthropomorphise observed animal behaviours and superimpose human emotions onto the animal.
We don't know, but probably assume that all of the pets we keep (probable exceptions of fish, spiders and snakes)have emotions identical to ours.

Anyway this business of pet food flavours. Lamb and mint is a human favourite, so is "Chicken in a thick and tasty savoury gravy" or "Delicious salmon with traces of Dill".


I have observed my little dog, when out on a walk, sniffing and trying to eat;
dead bird
cat poo
decomposing roadkill rat/possum (it was very flat)
apple core

Dog's do not seem to be very discriminating when it comes to food. They seem to have one rule. If it's edible, scarf it down as fast as possible.

So I think that the pet food manufactures put the nice flavours on the packets to entice the humans who actually buy the stuff.

And how do we know the flavours are accurate. Do you try the Lamb and mint flavoured biscuit, or the salmon and dill? As far as we know it could really be "cat poo and fish guts" flavour, or even "unidentifiable material found in the bottom of a skip" flavour.

Sometimes people are weird.

I can speak with some experience on this as I work with


Richard (of RBB)
The Basket Guy
The Computer Guy
Kiwidoug
Man of Errors

and until recently

Fflur
Nicola (of Nicola's Travel Bag )

So I can really recognise weirdness when I see it.

Relief

I'm very relieved that Richard (of RBB) is feeling OK after his confrontation with a blackbird.
I'm also relieved that the water is back on chez TwistedScottishBastard. So nice to have a really long hot shower. It's strange how expectations differ. When I was a boy in Scotland, a weekly bath was quite the norm. My family prided itself on our cleanliness. We had two baths a week, and changed our underwear every other day.
Looking back now, I wasn't aware of any especially bad smell, but I think that we must have all smelled.
The reasons for what we would now see as unhygienic conditions were based on economics and technology.



Most homes then did not have washing machines, families used communal wash houses. Water needed to be heated by fires. Either a wetback boiler in our household coal fuelled fires, or copper boilers fuelled by wood or coal for the communal wash house. It took time, effort and money to heat and wash, and all three were in short supply in the UK in the early 50s, still recovering after the war.
I can still remember the excitement when my Dad had our first electric immersion heater fitted.
Showers were virtually unknown, it was a bath. Either plumbed in in a bathroom, or a tin bath dragged into the kitchen, and filled from the kettle which was always kept simmering above the coal-fired kitchen range.

I now feel uncomfortable, to the extent that my skin feels like it's crawling, if I don't have at least one shower a day, and I really need one before going to bed, or I just feel unclean.

So nice to have instant, almost unlimited hot water.
So nice to be able to wear clean clothes every day.
It's easy to forget what it used to be like, and what it must be like for a very large proportion of the human race.

Waterless in Silverstream

Got home, knackered as usual, looking forward to a cozy meal with my beloved.
However, on my arrival I was told that our neighbours were having a problem with their water mains, and during the repairs silt and mud began to appear in our water supply.
So within 5 minutes of getting home, I was in overalls and gumboots, trying to get the stuff flushed out, with little success.
So we had dinner, with all the taps in the house running, and getting lower and lower flows.
By the time dinner was finished, so was the water, except for one garden tap out at the front of the house.
We contacted the plumbers (actually our neighbours did)and they promised to be out at 8:30 am tomorrow.


So until then it's back to settler days.
Huge pot of water boiling on the gas stove.
Garden hosepipe rigged to the one working garden tap, for kettle filling, hand washing and toilet flushing.


Sponge bath with lukewarm water rather than a long hot shower.


Brushing my teeth with our emergency earthquake water supply.
And so to bed.

Just one footnote. While I was trying to get suitable images for this blog, I was shocked, shocked to discover that lots of men seem to find getting a sponge bath rather erotic.
Mostly Brits and Germans by the nature of the sites.
Must go back to some childhood neurosis.
Glad I'm sane.

Richard almost with a Brown Paper Bag

Richard as never seen before

Second and I were commenting on the ability of Photoshop to create artistic renderinng of a simple picture of Richard (of RBB) holding a cat. Some of the results can now be shown.

Colour Pencil



Cut Outs


Daubs


Fresco


Patchwork Quilt


Palette Knife


Under Water

Better Fuzziness

As requested.

Pet Sunday

Richard (of RBB) started it.

This is Samo

This is me and Samo. After a few drinkies. Me I mean, not the dog. Drinkies I mean.
Oh, you get the drift. O.K.

EXTRA Richard (of RBB)'s Watercolours

Richard and Fluffy



And for his pretty daughter (and Fluffy)

Serendipitous Sunday

We went to a Birthday party yesterday, and didn't get back until later. Then the Boks were playing the Wallabies so the rest of the evening was all set, so no time for blogging.
But a strange occurrence at the party. The birthday boy (BB)was celebrating 90 years, and had about 30 odd friends and relatives around. Plenty of food and drink. Later many of the other guests had left, and 3 or 4 of us sat down with him for a little drink of whisky.
I always enjoy talking with the BB. His memory is sharp, and he can tell a good story. We were talking about travel.
One of the party recounted his various trips to Europe, and all the Kiwis chipped in with various stories about Big OEs to Europe, mostly the UK. BB then told us of his first voyage to the UK, at the start of WWII, when he joined the RNZN. He was telling us of his journey via Canada, and of travelling then to the UK on a ship, the SS Ceramic, going up the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland.
Now what is weird is the name of the ship.

The SS Ceramic entering Lyttelton.



I had never heard the name SS Ceramic before that day, it's a bit unusual.
It's so unusual that I remembered reading about it that morning. In another blog, Clive had mentioned that he travelled back to NZ from the UK on the SS Corinthic, and when, out of interest, I had Googled the name, it led me to a site http://www.ssmaritime.com/corinthic.htm. which showed that the 4 ships, operated by the Shaw Savill shipping line included the SS Ceramic (all the ship names ended in ic).
I'm in my late 50s.
I had never read or heard about that ship before Saturday.
Yet had a discussion on it by two completely unrelated people on the same day.
Weird.

BTW The BB told me that the SS Ceramic did not survive the war, being torpedoed on a return voyage to NZ.
Sad.

German Style

Recently,
one of the regular bloggers restarted a slightly heated discussion of differences between Scotland (the land of my birth) and Germany.
He alluded to that item of Scottish National Dress, the Kilt, as being slightly odd.

Lets just look.

Which one do you think looks sillier.

German



Scotland



German



Scottish



German



Scottish



See it doesn't matter what they wear. GIRLS LOOK GOOD

Boys in Lederhosen just look daft.

Boys in Kilts look great.