Archive for September 2010

Parallel Lives

Thursday, 30 September 2010

Those clever blokes, like Stephen Hawking, believe in an infinite number of universes, even if they have have no faith in an infinite being. The theory goes that for every event each and everyone of us experiences, big or small, there is a separate reality that peels off in the opposite direction.

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K is for Killings

Wednesday, 29 September 2010

Not entirely the gruesome subject you might expect. The subjects come from the area where I live and grew up and the first example shows that killings can be commercial as well as violent. William Kenyon and Son was a company established in Dukinfield in 1866 to take advantage of the cotton driving rope which distributed power from a single steam engine across several floors of a cotton mill through a series of pulleys.

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For the High Jump

Tuesday, 28 September 2010

Our daughter arrived back from her few moths in South Africa yesterday. One of the things we were looking forward to seeing was the DVD of her bungee jump off Bloukrans Bridge. Scary. The gaps in the audio are on the DVD, but the views are spectacular.

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Edlines

Monday, 27 September 2010

You’d think that Labour would have learned its lesson having a leader whose surname was a handy nearly anagram of liar and another where “…is a moron” naturally follows his first. So if f you must choose a new leader, why plump for someone whose first name rhymes with red?

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Happy Christmas

Sunday, 26 September 2010

I can’t believe it is the last week in September and I haven’t yet wished you my season’s greetings. I am such a Scrooge and it’s all the fault of the supermarkets. They just can’t get their commercial acts together. Take our local Morrisons for example. It has just one measly aisle devoted to gift ideas and a stand near the checkouts promoting Cadbury’s selection boxes for £1.99 each, or three for a fiver, and that isn’t nearly enough.

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Sub Sub-editing

Saturday, 25 September 2010

I’m probably the last person to whinge about the standards of journalism today. Shooting Parrots doesn’t claim to be typo free and while I may prefer proper grammar, I don’t feel hidebound by it either. Plus I’m not getting paid and it’s the product of my spare time, so I’ll whinge on regardless.

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Never Look Away

Friday, 24 September 2010

I used to use the I am Reading plugin in my sidebar to feature my book of the moment, but I did away with it, along with all the other unnecessary stuff some time ago. As I explained to a friend just last night, does anybody really care and just what is it I’m trying to say by advertising my latest read?

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Anti Statistical Behaviour

Thursday, 23 September 2010

I was watching Question Time tonight and heard a repeat of the accusation that ASBOs didn’t work “because 50 per cent breached the order.” I thought this was odd first time round. To my mind, that statistic proves the opposite. What it demonstrates is that half of the people with ASBOs stuck to the restrictions imposed upon them. More to the point, the authorities knew exactly who of the other half weren’t and so, presumably, took sterner action. Or is that me being simplistic?

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J is for Jack

Wednesday, 22 September 2010

I’ve never quite worked out whether we chose Jack or he chose us. We first met at the Manchester Dogs’ Home in Harpurhey in 2001 on a family outing to find a companion for Bingo, our other stray. There were quite a few candidates for our canine affections, but they all looked depressed and — there’s no other word for it — hangdog. But Jack stood four-square in his pen and looked us right in the eye as if to say, “And…?”

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