Category: admin

Searching, for that something that I’ll never find…

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(with apologies to China Black)

Just occasionally, I check to see what serach terms have been used to find 6000 miles… over the last few weeks. They’re usually pretty obvious – this time there was a lot of stuff about load-shedding, that concert “next year”, the inevitable weeing on your bougainvillea and, as ever, some queries on who will be playing at Kirstenbosch this Sunday (it’s Zahara (TBC) with Claire Phillips, by the way).

And then, amongst all the one and two-word search terms, this:

lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, fairtrade, brown-stained, mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere

It sounds like some sort of Jeremy Clarkson diatribe that he’ll get into trouble for.

And then I remembered, that’s because it is and he did.

The answers to that Excellent Quiz Question

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IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THE ANSWER – CLICK HERE NOW!

 

 

 

Last week I posted an Excellent Quiz Question which evidently got a lot of people thinking. This is a good thing.

Now, I’m going to post the answers, but on this separate post so that the question remains “live” for those who want to have a go at it. If you want to have a go – click the link above rather than scrolling down for the answers below. If you want the answers, then scroll down rather than clicking the link above. If you can’t understand this simple choice, give up and go home.

Please now enjoy a photograph of Coldplay to fill up some space.

And now your winner and those who came close:

With 4/4: @jeremysetzer

With 3/4: Graeme Broster & Daniel McEwan

There were numerous entrants with 2/4.

Thanks to all that had a go. Without further ado – the answers:

There are four countries in the world which end in a letter which no other country does. Can you name them?

  1. Iraq
  2. Denmark
  3. Luxembourg
  4. Bangladesh

Cue a multitude of lightbulb moments, I would imagine…

Cute gets hits

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Think of this as some sort of web-based experiment. And yes – if you’re reading this, you are one of my experimental subjects. If you don’t want to take part, you can always close this window, but actually, in just being here, you’ve already taken part. Thanks.

Bizarrely, one of the posts which recurrently scores the highest number of hits is this one from June 2009, which features a baby pygmy marmoset. There’s nothing else of interest in that post, so I’ve formulated the hypothesis that “cute gets hits”.

That being the case, have some baby platypi platypuses:

    

Cute, hey? Yeah, cute until they get you with the pair of short spurs tucked away on their back legs, each of which is hooked-up to a venom gland that makes a viciously painful toxin:

Platypus spurrings of people are rare, but the select group who have survived the trauma (often fishermen trying to free irate monotremes from their nets) report pain strong enough to induce vomiting which can persist for days, weeks or even months. The pain is resistant to morphine and other pain-killing drugs and anaesthesia of the main nerve from the spur site is often the only way to relieve the patient’s suffering.

Or, of course, brandy:

“… the pain was intense and almost paralysing. But for the administration of small doses of brandy, he would have fainted on the spot: as it was, it was half and hour before he could stand without support: by that time the arm was swollen to the shoulder, and quite useless, and the pain in the hand very severe.” – W.W. Spicer (1876)

Mmmm….. Brandy….

But I feel we’re drifting away from the original idea of this post, so for more cute pictures and all you need to know about baby platypi platypuses head here.

Lack of action

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There have been a number of different issues that have prevented me from blogging over the last couple of days, none of them your fault.

I’ll try and get some postage done later this evening or tomorrow or maybe some other time.

Regular readers [in unison]: “My goodness – he didn’t even have time to do a quota photo!”

Indeed. So now you know it’s serious!