Furry Friday/ Saturday: DONKEYS!

DONKEYS are some of the cutest big mammals there are:



Of course donkeys are closely related to horses and can interbrede. The offspring of a male donkey and a female horse is a MULE; other way round is called a HINNY. Both mules and hinnies are usually infertile.




Worldwide donkeys are used as beasts of burden and are often shockingly mistreated. This was the least shocking illustration I could find:



Sometimes they get into comedy scrapes at work:



WHEN I used to clean out my roborovski hamsters and, not too happy with the clean new livingspace they "trotted round and round like a donkey derby". In case they don't have these in your part of the world, it's either a donkey race for kiddies:



Or (more sedately) simply donkey rides on the beach:



Unlike human babies, who are born practically helpless, donkey foals are usually on their feet from the minute of birth. Newly born they're no bigger than a human baby...



... aaah!

Have a cheery weekend y'all!

NON-DONKEY-RELATED VIDEO
JOHN SHUTTLEWORTH INVESTIGATES... is a classic radio programme. The best example being when he went Ghost Hunting with Most Haunted presenter Yvette Fielding. All the voices he does himself. Here he is advertising Yorkshire Tea ("like tea used to be," they always said):



Aye! And here's some outtakes:



John Shuttleworth ~ a modern classic!

RIP MJ

MICHAEL JACKSON IS DEAD.

To summarize:

PARAMEDICS apparently found him "in a coma" and "not breathing" (sounds like dead already to me) at his rented Bel Air mansion. He was pronounced dead from "cardiac arrest" soon after arrival at the UCLA Medical Centre in Los Angeles.

All this despite just having been pronounced fit to undergo a 50-show residency at the O2 Centre here in London.

He had proclaimed: "This is it" ~ that after this he would perform no more ~ words that proved sadly prophetic, although at the time they were interpreted as a sad attempt to fuel ticket sales.

Cause of death? My first reaction: I bet it was drugs.

Well wouldn't I say that? Just bear in mind this is a man who's had (and owned up to) inpatient treatment for "prescription" painkiller addiction several times in the past 15 years ~ a fact totally overshadowed by the wilder controversies that swirled around him up until the end.

The man was an addict! Just like I am. He popped pills; I used needles. The place you end up in is just the same. Opiates become the only thing that make life seem worth living.

Tomorrow's autopsy should shed some light on this sad situation. A full toxicology report isn't expected for several days.

All that talent, all that fame ~ and all those millions he frittered away. And none of it, as the old cliché goes, seemed to bring very much happiness to a man who "had it all".

Goodnight Michael
Peace at last
Michael Jackson 1958-2009


*******


HIStory Vol I was a 2-disc collection. Greatest hits on one; the best set of new songs of his mature career on the other.
STRANGER IN MOSCOW



BILLIE JEAN, Motown 25th
His most famous performance; his first public moonwalk:



Michael Jackson was renowned for his "groundbreaking videos". Perhaps this one characterizes his crazy life better than any other.
LEAVE ME ALONE



With Madonna, 1990 Oscars
The pair, who seem like a living cartoon, were described as "larger than life..." and "the brightest star couple of all"...



This one speaks for itself:
GONE TOO SOON



Breaking news 14:09 hours (London time) TMZ website reports star's death "may have been caused by a DEMEROL (pethidine) injection"...

~ Stern Magazin: "Dramatische Abgang einer Legende"

¡España Por Favor!

THIS MORNING I copied my Mother, who does the washing up listening to The Archers, a soap opera featuring a village divided by class: posh country people and the yokel turnips. Except I was HABLAR-ing away en español at the top of my voice as the dishes (eventually) got cleaner. Some of those stubborn stains were so hard to shift we'd got from hiring a car to calling the emergency plumber by the time they had gone!

The depression I was moaning on about last week finally went ~ as you may have noticed by my daily mentions of Spanish vacaciones (or whatever they're called), rainbow donkies etc. And along with it my ridiculously extended sleep pattern. I'm now back to sleeping 7 or 8 hours.

Last night ITV showed the 2nd of 2 parts of Paradise Lost the TV prog on the nightmare facing an estimated million Brits in Spain alone as the credit crunch plus flagging pound hits the costas.

You hear all about a place called "Benidorm" and I always wondered why I've never met a single person who's been there. The mystery came a little clearer last night with a couple who bought a bar called The Rusty Nail. Takings were so poor, on a bad day they might make 3 euros! Soon as the narator mentioned "Benidorm" I thought I bet they're Northern ~ and sure enough they were. For some reason that particular area, which is just south of Barcelona, attracts holiday makers from Birmingham up (or to put in American-friendly terms, Brits who speak "with an accent").



One particular couple ~ I wanted to scream it at the television set ~ you could see exactly why their bar attracted nobody. 1. as they admitted they hadn't a word of the local lingo and so were utterly unable to serve locals, even though locals came in 2. the very plainness of the place was unbelievable. TART IT UP! I wanted to yell. Even if that means festooning the bar with sombrero-sporting donkey souvenirs (which must always be on sale ~ merchandising is the key!!). Anything! However tacky. But not just bare walls, bare bar: bare bare bare!

And that was another thing: EVERY single Brit interviewed was laughing or even half-PROUD about barely speaking a word of Spanish, which is one of the EASIEST languages to learn. Far easier than French, which can take an age to learn how to read aloud (so many silent letters). Plus the "gender" of nouns ~ masculine or feminine ~ is almost always immediately apparent in Spanish; that's why you say los maños and las palmas. In French, whether a word is male or female is often purely a matter of memory-work. I don't know. I just don't understand how you can splosh out £350,000 or more on a house and yet resent paying £50 on a few books and CDs!

Apart from Barcelona, the bit I would naturally gravitate to would be the Costa del Sol. This is the most easterly mooring point for yachts and cruisers of the Mediterranean and so attracts super-rich as well as more ordinary citizens. Not surprisingly the credit crunch isn't biting quite as hard here. They featured an East European lady who employs nearly 130 staff selling high-end properties, some in the multi-millions of Euros. I carefully took down her name. I actually dream at night of wandering the corridors of palatial mansions. I love architecture. If I were rich I would collect homes (nothing as vulgar as cars). So the idea of being an estate agent or "realtor" (as they don't call them here or in Spain) still appeals. Though they do have a shockingly bad reputation.

So you see my Spanish dream is still alive. I'm sure that where you have a million Brits seemingly drowning ~ for want of an interpreter as much as anything else ~ there must be a living to be made SOMEWHERE... Plus, incidentally after British the most common nationality living in Spain is GERMAN ~ so you see where this sudden language-study is going...

... and I've barely even mentioned las Islas Canarias yet ...

WHILE we're on kitch music from my childhood...

RENEE AND RENATO: SAVE YOUR LOVE
A huge hit, Christmas 1982
Yeah yeah I know this is all "Italiano" but it's all white buildings and old ladies drest in black... PS one Brit I do know who is mistress of the Italian language is Welshcakes Limoncello ~ à la Sicily Scene blog ...
Renee's "Pavarotti light" style voice was a huge hit. In my opinion he's far better than Paul Potts:



JUST ONE CORNETTO ~ CLASSIC TV COMMERCIAL ~ SUNG BY RENATO
Cornetto was at the time the most premium quality ice-cream available from ordinary shops. The tune is "O Sole Mio".
This, featuring a Cornetto-snatching singer (voiced by "Renato") is one of the most classic British telly ads of the early 1980s:



Pictures~ top: Spanish beach-donkey; a typical sight at Benidorm, note the transfixed local little boy; Fuertaventura, Canary Isles (somewhere I'd really like to go) inside the Rusty Nail bar, Benidorm from se vende site; foam party, Club Amnesia, Ibiza (Balearic Isles); Marbella, Costa del Sol

3 Spanish Songs

THESE are pretty much the only three "Spanish" songs I know. Apart from "la Bamba" which just annoys me:

UNA PALOMA BLANCA una paloma is a pigeon. Which means Paloma Picasso is called Pigeon Picasso. So una paloma blanca, of course, is a dove. This topped charts around Europe in 1975:



JEANETTE: PORQUE TE VAS
Jeanette is a musician with a genuine cult following. Described as "the eternal 16-year-old" after the sound of her voice, this was her biggest hit in 1976, from the film Cria Cuervos, which means "Cry of the Crows".



Silvia Y: Viva Espana!
Classic "we're going to Costa Blanca!" song from 1974, a time when Spain was still considered exotic:

Aprendo a hablar español

YESTERDAY I RAN to the library with a pocket full of pound coins ~ because they CHARGE for language courses ~ and got out two from-scratch ones in Spanish. I was looking for one that would take me as far as possible and foolishly picked an outsized Berlitz 4-CD one with outsized blown-plastic moulding and two flimsy books that could be reprinted on the amount of paper that would fit in a cigarette packet. In other words hardly anything is explained properly. The other, a CD-only Teach Yourself Spanish Conversation is excellent as you never have to refer to any booklet (in fact I think there was one, but it is no more and the man at the desk, who looked like he yodelled in lederhosen in his spare hand, was far more indignant than I, who would suffer more from its loss.

Frustrated by the lack of grammatical explanation in Berlitz, I've now changed it for Routledge Colloquial ~ only 2 CDs but a nice fat explanatory textbook (I'm such a swot). Incidentally these loans cost £2 a time ~ now isn't that taking the peepee? On the other hand it's good because it keeps them on the shelves for people who actually want to use them, which is something, I suppose...

My Mum got me a bargain-basement CD-player (called a Tesco Value Boombox ~ that wording alone is classic). I had been saving the moment of unwrapping until I had something new to play on it. O man! I couldn't believe it! Even though this was the cheapest budget CD player-cum-AM/FM radio you could get, it was more beautifully designed than almost any other small electrical item I've ever come across. It could barely have been any funkier if when you punched PLAY and the CD started to whirr and prattle una habitación individual por favor... etc a rainbow of mouse-sized miniature donkeys didn't irridesce from the speakers in a blaze of stardust and take to clopping round the CD-closed lid in hoof-waving formation.

I am having lots of fun with the Spanish language and have no inhibitions about yelling out things like "I want another hire car that doesn't smell of sick!" in those "listen and repeat" exercises ~ in the stately language of Cervantes and Lorca. I'm polishing up the most ridiculously posh Castillian accent I possibly can muster ~ lots of lispy Ss and Cs and B and V pronounced the same... por fabor, theñorita! Probably sounding like I've had too much BINO...

Before I fell asleep last night I had a go on the AM radio and was amazed to get a jabbering 20 to the dozen channel in German on medium-wave with elementary Spanish lessons bleeding in on the side... what kind of cosmic coincidence is that??!?

In the end I got fed up with interference in my ear all night and so set the Spanish dialogues on play. This is supposed to embed the language deep in the subconscious. What I can say is I dreamed of old donkeys pulling carts up narrow alleys of the old town...

Illustrated top and bottom you see the Andalucian clifftop village of Rhonda ~ yeah man I've been there. The clifftop is inland and so the soaring town walls go plummetting down to ordinary farmland... quite an amazing place... like a location from a dream...

Vorsprung Durch Technik!

I AM READING, or rather ploughing painstakingly slowly, through a mercifully short German novel I got from the public library called Evas ungewaschene Kinder by Sonja Ruf. In English the title means Eva's Unwashed Children but there isn't an English translation and I'm wading through it ever so slowly with a notebook and a dictionary, looking up an average of one word in ten (on a bad page) to one in twenty (on a good page). Everything I look up I carefully note down, complete with page number. And of course the translation. Here's my amateur translation of the blurb:

ONE DAY God came to visit and when Eva showed him her children, he felt full of hope. But some of the children she kept hidden because they hadn't yet washed and she was ashamed of showing God her unwashed children. God knew this and said, "What is hidden from me shall be hidden from humankind also." So ever since, these children have been invisible and live in cliffs and rocks, in hills and stones. Only when they wish it, can they be seen.

Here's what Google translate makes of it:
God once came to visit, and Eva showed him their children, he was quite hopeful. But some of the children kept them hidden because they were not washed, and she was ashamed to God their unwashed children to show. What did God, and he said, "What I should remain bent, will also remain hidden from the people." Since these children for their siblings, the people, invisible and live in cliffs and rocks in the hills and rocks. Only if they wish, they can be seen.

And the original text:
Einmal kam Gott zu Besuch, und Eva zeigte ihm ihre Kinder, die er recht hoffnungsvoll fand. Aber einige der Kinder hielt sie versteckt, denn sie waren noch nicht gewaschen, und sie schämte sich, Gott ihre ungewaschene Kinder zu zeigen. Das wußte Gott, und er sagte, "Was mir verbogen bleiben soll, soll auch vor den Menschen verborgen bleiben." Seither sind diese Kinder für ihre Geschwister, die Menschen, unsichtbar und wohnen in Klippen und Felsen, in Hügeln und Steinen. Nur wenn sie selbst es wünschen, können sie gesehen werden.


I don't get the phrase, "ihre Kinder, die er recht hoffnungsvoll fand" and had to follow Google's idea because translated literally that would say, "her children, who he found full of hope" which doesn't really make sense. Can of you Deutsch-ssprechender readers enlighten me here please?

The German language is closely related to English. In fact, 2000 years ago, so I read, there was only one Teutonic language named proto-Germanic. But this doesn't make German anywhere nearly as easy to learn as you might expect. The grammar is very complicated (far more so than English's. E.g. adjectives don't take inflexional endings in English...). It has fewer idiomatic expressions than English and far far fewer than French, which is strewn with them. Perhaps its biggest Verwirrungspunk or confusion point, as you might say, is its vast number of words that are so very similar to one another and yet widely divergent in meaning. E.g. Käfer means "beetle" but a Käfig is a cage. Fahren means "to drive", vor means before: but a Vorfahr is an ancestor! But vorfahren means to drive ahead and a Vorfahrt is a right of way! There are gerzillions of seperable verbs, even more than our "phrasal verbs" in English (e.g. to pick up: aufheben) and those can portray confusing shades of meaning. Plus you have to remember to look for the separated bit (e.g. the auf)before you search for it in a dictionary, else you'll get totally lost.

On the plus side, many German words echo English ones and have a lovely onomatopoeic quality, e.g. schmutzig = "dirty", die Verschmutzung is pollution. Others, like Geduld/geduldig (patience/patient) just sound to me like they mean what they do even though they're nothing like any word in English ~ and that I can't explain.

When I was little I thought German was incredibly funky for its pageoverspilling portmanteau nouns e.g. Unterbewusstseinstrauma = subconscious trauma, mysteriously dotted vowels and that weird blobberous ß-thing you find splurged in the middle of the linguistic entertainment.

Though most English people call it an "umlaut" the two-dotted vowelly thing, as it appears in English is usually actually a diaeresis ~ a vowel-separator in words like "naïve". The German umlaut marks a change of vowel that hit the langauge in a famous late-medieaval sound shift. It only ever appears over the letters A, O and U. Ä is pronounced exactly the same as E; Ö and Ü are oo-ey sounds English-speakers must work at to get right.

English, incidentally, underwent a comparable vowel-shift a couple of hundred years later; it was then that the so-called "magic E" appeared in English spelling, so "bake", which had been pronounced something like "bakkeh" became pronounced as it is today.

The blobberous ß-thing is called "ess-tset" ("SZ") after the appearance of a ligatured long S and Z in blackletter type, though it actually represents a double S. It used to appear in many words, but a still-unpopular 1996 Official Spelling Treaty signed by the German, Austrian and Swiss governments abolished this, the German language's funkiest feature from more than half of them, rendering the language vandalized and forever dullened. My very favourite word, "bloß" which means "naked" or "nearly" (such a German combination!) is now boringly rendered "bloss". The only gains in funkiness were the addition of treble consonants in compound nouns such as Balletttanzer, but that hardly makes up for the lost blobberiness. The disblobberation was challenged in a German court of law, which ruled that no government could tell anybody how to spell, except in school ~ though government departments were allowed to specify their own styles of spelling for official documents.

Anyway my German is still so retarted it's taken me ten hours over three days to muddle through eighteen pages of Eva's Unwashed Children. I shall let you know when I finish!

Furry Friday/Saturday: British Wildcats

THEY LOOK just like a deranged tabby, but these bigger and far fiercer wildcats still live in the wilds of Scotland:



They never eat Whiskas Complete and survive solely on self-caught small mammals and birds. Look at those killer eyes:



In Britain they survive only in Scotland, but they're also native to much of Europe, into Asia and even Africa. They avoid approaching human habitation and have an average territory of about 3 square km or 2 square miles. See how much bigger they are than an ordinary house cat (though I suspect this photo actually shows 2):



Think of a ferral cat with attitude multiplied by 1000 and you'll see why the kittens are totally untameable. Picking one up is said to be like attempting to cuddle a bagful of claws and needle-sharp hissing teeth!



(But they do look cute.)

I'm Rich!

... RICH IN INFORMATION, that is. For today I joined the library! And because this is a new borough, where I don't owe massive fines from ten years ago, the application went straight through! I wandered about like a lottery winner in a department store thinking: Any of these books could be mine!

Little things little minds ~ yes.

Also I get free internet time ~ wahey!!

VIDEOS OF THE DAY ~ UK ANTIBINGEDRINKING CAMPAIGN
"YOU WOULDN'T START OUT A NIGHT THIS WAY SO WHY END IT LIKE THIS..?"

BINGE-DRINKING BOY:



BINGE-DRINKING GIRL:

¡Vamos a hablar español!

OK RATHER than bang in another post about how tired I feel I decided to go with an idea I had from (actually quite a depressing) TV prog last night entitled Spain: Paradise Lost. Now what you must understand about Spain, if you're not British or North European is that it's always been the short-haul sun-seeking destination of choice for Brits, Germans, Beneluxians and Scandinavians (with Greece a close second). From an American viewpoint you might say it's our Mexico. In recent years, the coasts have been deluged by mostly British but also a lot of German ex-pats wanting to start a new life. For this reason the Spanish Costas are sometimes called the California of Europe.

I've been to the Costa del Sol and it was pretty mental. People pack up and just go, get jobs in bars or restaurants or set up places of their own ~ most never learn a word of the local language.

Buying property in Spain is fraught with dangers ~ and this was the topic of last night's docu. Land laws are VERY different out there ~ and not having a clue about the language you're basically at the mercy of fate unless you're very careful.

Then I realized that because I speak German as well as English I'd actually be in quite a strong position to deal with a great number of these ex-pats, if I chose to go. I've always wanted to speak Spanish anyway (just never had a strong enough excuse to learn). If I DID get good Spanish ~ wow! I could start up a sunny new life. And act as an interpreter for folks taking sewerage-spouting rivers of diarrhoea running down the embankment like volcanic lava whenever it rains never finished la urbanización property developers to court!

An urbanización is a new development, usually of holiday apartments with bars areas, restaurant, swimming pools etc for lobster-red Northern European tourists to splurge life savings on...

... the problem being that the credit crunch has left many such places that were bought and paid for off-plan utterly unfinished. Or even worse the towering Euro and cowering pound credit-crunch interest-rates type situation has left many in negative equity and faced with losing everything.

Well it's only an idea. But as the saying goes, where there's trouble there's dosh to be made. So maybe I shall end up in the environs of Malaga rather than Vienna-Berlin...

The local fresh sardines are really nice. So long they flop each side off the plate. And local lemons to squeeze all over them. Not like the tinned variety at all...

... that's if I can stop myself sleeping 14 hours a day first!! I did 9 hours straight last night and woke up unhappy to be disturbed. Got back early afternoon and did another 3 or 4 ~ that's 12 or 13 already and the day is yet young.

Right I've got to ping else I'll be terminated.

*photos: self-explanatory except: towering hotels ~ Benidorm; top pic Costa de la Lux, said to be Southern Spain's undiscovered treasure... the secluded beach is Tenerife's Playa de Antequera (Canary Isles)...
... o yeah, and the painting's of Miguel de Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE...

Sheer Exhaustion

IT'S NOT THAT I've been running along hot desert roads ~ but I'm still utterly exhausted and sleeping hours at night AND during the day. I hate having to rouse myself for anything.

Sorry I have not yet replied to yesterday's comments. My mind is a bit scattered.

You know I still have not been to that diagnostic psych appointment. I had the "every few months how are you doing you sad druggie" check-up but my worker was there and that inhibited ANY conversation off the doctor's script. I just wanted to get out of there as quick as possible.

A week or two ago I got a letter advising me an appointment had been booked for me the day BEFORE the letter came. This was the dreaded appointment. I didn't bother rebooking as at the time I thought I felt fine ~ fine enough to reinterpret my entire past as the results of someone not willing to try hard enough.

But now I'm wading through honey (or worse) again and what goes around comes around again and again and again. I'm OK though I'm not going to hang myself I just feel sick, tired and depressed. And I've got to go because the evil cybercaff's about to time me out for dawdling ...

Feats of Accomplishment

AWW! WHAT can I talk about? My head is done in having posted about "depression" ~ just thinking about it makes it worse. I know it's for real because as well as feeling peed off all the time I've been sleeping ridiculously long amounts of time.

It's not all down and doom though. The "invigilator" or whatever he calls himself ~ the guy in charge of yesterday's group ~ said I made a most profound statement when I piped up my Former Philosophy of Life (before I got sucked into junkiehood) ~ this was that you cannot change everything in life, can't necessarily avoid it, whatever you do, or defeat it. What you can change is your attitude to things ~ and THAT makes a massive difference.

If I cannot think my way out of these pits, surely I should be able to ACT my way out of them (that is by actions not pretence). Putting drugs well and truly behind me would be a good start. But that's a massive one. So you see I'm shot in the foot before I start because my Task To Do is far too huge.

I think that's why NA say "just for today" ~ ie live your life a day at a time. Sometimes the best way of not getting scared is just not to look down. Sometimes NOT seeing the bigger picture may actually help. Then perhaps afterwards we can marvel at the feats and accomplishments we might achieve.

MILES AWAY
I heard this playing over Morrisons' PA and thought "that sounds like Madonna, but it's good"...



PS: CAN ANYONE GUESS what's the famous mountain illustrated?

Lost (again)

I WENT TO MY COMPULSORY DRUGS MEETING (if I don't go I get it in the neck off my Hitleresque drugs "worker") and despite the usual happening (a small collection of folks not nearly as long or as sorely addicted to drugs as me ~ even talk of needles leaves them out cold as they tend to cracksmokers and not junkies and so, in this "therapeutic" setting I must constantly check myself for what I say ~ very healthy) I decided to put out (for once again) exactly where I was coming from and how off I felt this past week and how it's called "depression" and comes in waves and comes back back back and predated my drug problem by over 15 years and how the Mental Health Operative seemed to think certain of my experiences denoted "bipolar" disorder rather than straight depression (though I really, in personal actuality, see depression as personal weakness and my more extreme experiences as evidence of spiritual warfare against me. Psychiatry is a religion just like Roman Catholicism with its own sacraments and "holy" grail. And personally I do not believe in it.)

I don't feel too bad when I keep moving. But once I stop, the blankness and meaningless of nonexistence hits me hard to handle...

So now they're on to re-book my missed psychiatric "picking over my open-hinged sinister worm-a-wriggling-strewn brainbox with psychological chopsticks and soy sauce" session that I only heard about the day AFTER it was booked for me.

Like most religions and their pantheons and philosophies, the great gods of Psychiatry are after me to confirm and prove I'm an irredeemable nutter or (as experienced more normally these days) to devalue my current suffering and put it all down to drugs. Even though it all began more than fifteen years before I ever was into heroin. And ten years before I ever smoked a spliff or dropped acid.

In other words all is meaningless.

On Margate Sands
I can connect...
nothing with nothing...

as the poet said.* And that's about all I have to say....

"Cheer"-io folks...

*T S Eliot The Wasteland III "The Fire Sermon" 301 ...


Does anyone know anything about "la lingvo internacia ~ Esperanto~??"
Here's a filmclip, starring William Shatner, speaking in the international dialect ...

Furry Friday/Saturday ~ Dormice!

THESE TUBBY critters were introduced to Britain by the Romans who liked to EAT them ~ yuck! ~ (hence the name of one species: "edible dormouse" (the other is "fat dormouse")). They look more like hamsters than any other British rodent:



Despite their tubby frames, they make quite agile climbers in the undergrowth:




They keep tubby and fat by nibbling as many wild seeds and berries as they can find:



They are called dormice because they sleep deeply and hibernate all winter long. And of course the babies are cute:



... and occasionally oblivious enough to let cynical photographers pose them atop daffodils:

New (old) Trainers!

WILL these posts starting with almost exactly the same sentence never cease?? Yesterday I found new trainers (sneakers if you prefer) by a bin where I used to meet my old dealer. They weren't as nice as the one illustrated (I would luuurve a pair of runningshoes like that).

I'm not ordinarily one to go through trash or other people's skips ~ unless I see something I particularly like. Last week, by somebody's gate along my road, I found an enormous bag full of crockery, saucepans, ashtrays, mugs and plates. What I particularly liked was one plate made of glass (I love transparent things) and another two and a mug made out of that enamelled metal (in white with blue highlighting) ~ the type you'd take on a 1950s caravanning holiday...



So America has analogue television no more! Across the entire nation, so I hear, old-stylee signals have switched off, leaving apparently two million or more Americans who can't afford digiboxes in the televisual dark.

Britain is in the midst of a characteristically longwinded tv-switchover. Digital terrestrial is broadcast just about everywhere, so in London you get about 40 channels through an ordinary aerial. At least two thirds of households are said to get tv in this manner already. The Rupert Murdoch controlled Sky satellite system has more than 10,000,000 subscribers (just over one household in three) offering 200 channels+; cable (now run nationwide by Richard Branson's Virgin group), which ironically has more "bandwidth" actually offers fewer channels ~ so no wonder they get less than half as many subscribers as Sky. Cable's biggest advantage is that finally, at long, long last they offer video-on-demand and the TV broadcasters' catch-up services direct to the TV which otherwise you'd have to watch online. After ridiculous delay, the BBC finally unveiled a satellite service ~ Freesat HD ~ to rival Murdoch's Sky. This one beams 150 channels subscription-free ~ again outdoing Virgin cable in quantity at least.

Once analogue transmissions are closed down we should have room for 200 channels free via the rooftop aerial. But knowing how crap modern Britain is, I'm sure this won't happen...

I would love to get one of these multichannel services but Sky, the best one, demands access to a telephone landline, which costs £10 a month on top of the £20 a month subscription fee for all the channels except movies and sports. For them you pay about £20 more ~ not cheap. I'm afraid if I did have all this I'd do nothing but watch tv. I was also interested in going to a specialist satellite shop and getting a dish for German and French TV. Lots of immigrants get Turkish, Arabic, Polish etc telly on giant dishes. As far as I know you can get this set up for not much more than £100 ~ though knowing my luck just as it was done my evil landlord would want to move me on yet again ..!

Anyway I'll get German telly when I move to Berlin/Vienna ...

Pickles galore - Whiskey Galore ~ this is a famous classic Britflick about a ship running aground off the Scottish islands ~ a massive cargo of whiskey washes up on the beach ...



Bananarama: it ain't what you do (it's the way that you do it)...
A classic tune used in adverts all the time...

Pickles Galore!

WILL THE WONDERS never cease?!? I am now proud owner of so much pickled baby corn (found in an outsized metal wheeliebin) I could barely carry all the jars home.

I love baby corn, but this stuff (labelled in Polish) reeks of vinegar even if you soak it in water for ages. I'm sure there's some nice way of cooking it, but it's hardly going to go in my faux-takeaway-style Chinese efforts, is it?

Having said that, once a jar is opened, I can easily do the entire thing in front of Eastenders...

I'm only posting this because I've **** all else to say. I'm depressed out of my mind (yes of course it came back; it always does) and as usual all I have planned has gone pear-shaped...

PS: NO! I did not nick yesterday's salad tomatoes. I found them in a puddle at the back of Morrisons in the rain. Along with 3 packs of 4 kiwi fruit...

ROBERT DENIRO'S WAITING...
Only tune by Bananarama I like (or remember ~ apart from "luurve in the 1st degree")



OK here we go ~ I wasn't gonna put this up but why not...
I like the wording:
And the judge and the jury
They all put the blame on me
'Cause I'm guilty (guilty)
Of love in the first degree..!
And how 80s are those hats and stripey tops:



pps ~ finally I went down my sidebar again ~ all my MAMAS AND PAPAS videos now PLAY...