Sunday, December 23, 2007
Small amimals
War on same continues. One dead rat is now buried in the compost heap, more or less where he (or she) dropped. Surprised to find it well hot a foot down, despite the cold outside. Much steam rising. We hope that rat poison does not do in the worms which make the compost work.
To add to our problems, mice are now visiting the vegetables which live in the garage but have now caught two in two days with a bread crust baited mouse trap. A better trap (a Little Nipper) than our rat trap in the sense that it is possible to set it on a much lighter touch - something which might not be too clever for the fingers in the case of the much more powerful rat traps. One might have an accident.
Blair2 continues to annoy. He is now quoted by the DT as saying that he never even thought of resigning. Moving into the land of options we have option 1: the DT has got it wrong. Option 2: Blair2 is lying. Option 3: Blair2 is even more arrogant than I thought (perhaps he is a shy man. The shy can be surprisingly brutal). How can he say this when a third of his governing police authority voted for a motion of no confidence in him? To my mind, either of the last two options disqualifies the man from public office. Depressing how people in power cling on well past their sell by date - while most sports people, who are often thought of as a bit dim and uncouth by comparison, manage to get out a bit more gracefully.
But the DT may well have it wrong as I see in the Metro that a lady was charged an interest rate of 2.6m% for a modest loan, a rate to which the accompanying sums bore no resemblance. Perhaps the reporter responsible came from one of those bog standard comprehensives which Blair1 was going to abolish and which continue to fail to teach arithmetic. One might have thought that newspapers would bother to check their headlines with a bit more care, but no.
I continue to wonder in a seasonal way why it is that bears are considered so cuddly. As the DT pointed out a few days ago, bears are a fairly violent lot and most of them are big and fast enough to be very scary. So why are childrens' book and festive occasions full of kindly bears? Even the bears in Goldilocks are reasonably domesticated. Is it a hangover from those distant days when tribes had totem animals which did not have to be cuddly? Just important or significant for one reason or another? Not convinced by the whole business being invented by whoever invented teddy bears or A A Milne. To my mind, they must be symptoms of something deeper. Is it that we want to identify with big scary animals? Or what?
To add to our problems, mice are now visiting the vegetables which live in the garage but have now caught two in two days with a bread crust baited mouse trap. A better trap (a Little Nipper) than our rat trap in the sense that it is possible to set it on a much lighter touch - something which might not be too clever for the fingers in the case of the much more powerful rat traps. One might have an accident.
Blair2 continues to annoy. He is now quoted by the DT as saying that he never even thought of resigning. Moving into the land of options we have option 1: the DT has got it wrong. Option 2: Blair2 is lying. Option 3: Blair2 is even more arrogant than I thought (perhaps he is a shy man. The shy can be surprisingly brutal). How can he say this when a third of his governing police authority voted for a motion of no confidence in him? To my mind, either of the last two options disqualifies the man from public office. Depressing how people in power cling on well past their sell by date - while most sports people, who are often thought of as a bit dim and uncouth by comparison, manage to get out a bit more gracefully.
But the DT may well have it wrong as I see in the Metro that a lady was charged an interest rate of 2.6m% for a modest loan, a rate to which the accompanying sums bore no resemblance. Perhaps the reporter responsible came from one of those bog standard comprehensives which Blair1 was going to abolish and which continue to fail to teach arithmetic. One might have thought that newspapers would bother to check their headlines with a bit more care, but no.
I continue to wonder in a seasonal way why it is that bears are considered so cuddly. As the DT pointed out a few days ago, bears are a fairly violent lot and most of them are big and fast enough to be very scary. So why are childrens' book and festive occasions full of kindly bears? Even the bears in Goldilocks are reasonably domesticated. Is it a hangover from those distant days when tribes had totem animals which did not have to be cuddly? Just important or significant for one reason or another? Not convinced by the whole business being invented by whoever invented teddy bears or A A Milne. To my mind, they must be symptoms of something deeper. Is it that we want to identify with big scary animals? Or what?
# posted by Jim @ 3:05 AM 
