Shooting Parrots

Monthly archive for September 2010

Page 1 of 3123

Parallel Lives

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.

Read the rest of ‘Parallel Lives

K is for Killings

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.

Read the rest of ‘K is for Killings

For the High Jump

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.

Read the rest of ‘For the High Jump

Edlines

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?

Read the rest of ‘Edlines

Happy Christmas

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.

Read the rest of ‘Happy Christmas

Sub Sub-editing

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.

Read the rest of ‘Sub Sub-editing

Never Look Away

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?

Read the rest of ‘Never Look Away

Anti Statistical Behaviour

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?

J is for Jack

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…?”

Read the rest of ‘J is for Jack

I ♥ NQ

Having not had a holiday this year, we’ve been pondering whether we might get a week away in the next month or two and Mrs P has suggested New York.

This might have been a good idea a few years ago when the pound was strong and air fares were cheap, but that isn’t the case now. However, it seems that Captain America may have come to the rescue of my wallet and brought New York to us.

Read the rest of ‘I ♥ NQ

Page 1 of 3123

September 2010
S M T W T F S
« Aug   Oct »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  

Old stuff & Categories

Categories

My Flickr Stream