Clarity

Everyone who knows me will know that me and my family have got a bit of a thing with talking about poo. Well, now there's a poo exhibition!!!

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"Poo on view at animal exhibition

The free Zoo Poo exhibition is on at the weekend. A lot can be learned about animals from their toilet habits, according to a free exhibition at London Zoo. The Zoo Poo event, in Regent's Park, central London, promises to answer why Macaws do it while flying and why sloths are limited to once a week. Visitors can also see exhibits of various animals' excrement - from mice to rhinos. The exhibition, which also explains how vets use droppings to diagnose animal ailments, runs on Saturday and Sunday. The zoo will provide a fact sheet to help identify night-time garden visitors by what they leave behind."

That's right - I'm not a freak! It turns out that there are people out there - many people, with funding - who are just as interested in this subject as I am. I'm impressed.

This weekend we were humbled by the sheer competence of our very good friends, Jan and Neil: 



when they showed us graphically how a barbeque can be done, if you can only be bothered to do it Properly!  We arrived to be seated at a lovely chair-and-table set, in the shade, and our attention directed to the Menu (the idea of which I was particularly taken with):



from which we were urged to order any and all delicious items that caught our fancy whilst being plied with tea and coffee and various yummy fruit juices!  We then grazed at our leisure whilst the ever-hardworking Neil worked his magic at the chimenia.  As you can imagine, time flew by with much belching and laughter, until dusk fell and we stayed outside chatting by firelight (the jury was out; but no longer, Neil really is a pyromaniac!!!): 



until it was getting a bit nippy.  Tea was then served with chocolate cake whilst we reclined on leather sofas of truely epic proportions until my yawns could no longer be ignored and we were dispatched home with hugs!

Caps off to you Jan and Neil - you really know how to do a barby!

It's Day 2 of the Farnborough Air Show 2004 now, and I have to say, the lineup this afternoon was terrific.  Here's my favourite piccie of the afternoon. It's an F/A-18F "Super Hornet", so I'm told.

Yuck, last night my other half came downstairs into the kitchen to find the wall near the back door "black" with ants.  He turned the Raid on them and became a one-man massacre.  I thought it was really humid and uncomfortable last night - obviously the ants thought it was a good time to have their Annual Ball. 

Outside, that's fine!  But in the kitchen?  Really not!  I asked him what he meant by "black" with ants.  He explained that a large portion of the wall was black with them, whereas the rest of the wall "just" had them crawling all over it.  Horrible!  He did hoover it all up and make it look nice again when the culling was over, which made it a bit more bearable.
 
Does anyone else have problems with annual invasions?  Are they living in our foundations or something?   Please feel free to comment!  Just click on "comments" below and then on "Post a comment".

Still not smoking after 24 days. The video is really good and the DVD is on it's way. I had to stop using the Step 1 nicotine patches last Saturday as I ended up with a nicotine overdose which was very nasty. That's 4 weeks earlier than I should, so am using up the Step 2s too fast, but never mind.

Taste gamut is widening and I find I can take deeper breaths that seem to taste better somehow!

It seems for some reason that I have not been smoking for ages, on the other hand I am surprised when I work out how many days it has been!

Treated myself to a small bottle of "Sunflowers" perfume today as a reward.

For those of you in the Know, (and you Know who you are) this is the definitive answer to that question that everyone who is a fan of John Boorman's "Excalibur" has always wanted to know.....

The mystery of Merlin's Charm of Making is, alas, no longer a mystery.

Although Merlin and Morgana both pronounce things differently from each other, and even Merlin has two sounds which to me sound like phonemes but which must be allophonic, I get the following from the Charm of Making in John Boorman's film Excalibur:

/a'na:l naθ'rax, u:rθ va:s be'θud, dox'je:l 'djenve:/

It's certainly not Welsh. It looks very much like an attempt at Old Irish. (One wonders where Boorman got it.) Following is the best I can do at reconstructing reasonable Old Irish from it. It is probably a defective reconstruction. I have normalized to Modern Irish orthography to indicate lenition.

In Old Irish Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha In Modern Irish: Anáil nathrach, ortha bháis is beatha, do chéal déanaimh

In English: Serpent's breath, charm of death and life, thy omen of making. anál nathrach = breath of serpent orth’ bháis ’s bethad = spell of death and of life do chél dénmha = thy omen of making anál fem. -á stem 'breath, breathing' nathair fem. -k stem 'snake, serpent' g. sg. nathrach ortha fem. -n stem 'prayer; incantation, spell', from Latin oratio bás masc. -o stem ‘death’ g. sg. báis ocus conj. ‘and’ here shortened to 's betha masc. -t stem ‘life’ g.sg. bethad do prn. ‘thy’ Usually unstressed cél masc. -u stem ‘omen, augury, portent’ dénumh masc. -m stem 'making, doing' g.sg. dénmha

Modern Irish would have the -is in bháis as a /sh/ sound, but it might not have been so palatalized in the Old Irish period; and the nonpalatal ’s of ‘and’ ought to reinforce that. The third part of the charm could also be dochél dénmha 'an evil omen of making', but that suits the sense badly. The word do ‘thy’ is usually unstressed in speech but what can you do... Note that Merlin says dénmhe, which ought to be dénmha; perhaps there is some sort of 'incantation register' in which a final vowel can be altered in this way.... In any case, I am less than happy with the third part of this. I'd like to have seen an imperative or hortative, but verb-first syntax precludes even dénae, the imperative of do-gní ­ (from which the verbal noun dénumh is formed), which anyway doesn't have the nominal formative -mh.

I would be interested in hearing from specialists in Old Irish as to their opinions of this. There are other possibilities for the retro-translation, and indeed the use of a Latin loanword, given the context, is problematic.

(credit to Michael Everson for this masterful investigation!

BBC NEWS | UK | New 'Right to Roam' Code Launched

Question - are people clever enough (or sensible enough) to use this in a good way to everyone's advantage, and hopefully learn something, or will it be used as a "right" to intrude, litter, make noise, injure themselves and their children, distress wildlife and farmyard animals, and generally be obnoxious??

Only time will tell.

Another huge life-changing decision was to join a leisure club. Of course, being us, not just any leisure club would do - it has to be pretty too! It had to have tennis courts, a pool, a gym, a bar and somewhere nice to walk, all in one package, no more than half an hour's journey from where we live. Well, we found it, in the personage of Cranleigh Golf and Leisure Centre.



So far, we're going to gym and swim three times per week, and I am looking forward to using the tennis courts as well. Personally, I'm feeling more alert, have more energy, and am starting to get some flexibility back, which makes me feel so much younger! I'm looking foward so seeing what effects there may be after 6 months or a year.

I'm loving my time in the swimming pool, and specially the spa pool which has jets so strong that you come out feeling like you've had a body-massage!

I've found it! The video that my Mum says is so brilliant, and that helped my sister stop smoking after one viewing. Everyone's been asking if they can have it, so here it is, including a DVD version to buy on the internet. It ships from Montreal, Canada, but the P&P is very reasonable and I received mine extremely quickly.

I've viewed it once now, and have found it extremely good so far. So stop asking about it! Click on the picture of the video to visit the site and buy one.