Always good to make sure that you check up on your health – and your hands should no exception.
Right little finger – fine
Right ring finger – great
Right middle finger – all good
Right index finger – no problems
Right thumb – healthyLeft little finger – ok
Left ring finger – feeling good
Left middle finger – no issues
Left index finger – fine
Left thumb – two splinters from firewood; last week’s parrot bite still very sore
Don’t ask.
Sometimes, people send me stuff and I just have to blog it.
It’s UK election day today, and there’s basically no question in my mind who would be best at leading the country:
If you know, you know.
And, because I did a Manx post here and I did a Tour de France post here, this week, I was sent a suggestion that I had to combine the two and do a Mark Cavendish post here today.
I don’t follow cycling, but apparently he did a thing yesterday. And yes, he did:
Incredible scenes.
3:20 if you want to cut to (beyond) the chase.
And with many apologies for the errant apostrophe in the thumbnail.
Thanks Footy Group
The plan to revive Manx Gaelic and bring it back into routine use (at least on the Isle of Man) received a big boost in the last week, when the language was added as an option on Google Translate:
There are only about 20 native speakers of the language, and it’s been completely impossible to communicate with them since forever*, so it will be fantastic to hear what they have to say after all this time. Possibly, anyway.
Agh shoh naight mooar da’n cheshaght Manninagh.
One thing you can’t do on the site (yet) is listen to the translated phrase. That’s not great from the point of view of learning how things are pronounced, but it’s actually ok, because – and I’m being nice here – you might think your laptop had been drinking.
It does all sound (no pun intended, Manx people), as if everything is a little slurred and words are running into each other a bit.
As with any language, to really learn it properly, you need to spend regular time with someone who is fluent. I think that I’m unlikely to find anyone that fits that bill here in Cape Town, but maybe that’s something that I should be doing – goaill stiagh ma t’eh goaill stiagh deayrtey!
Hahaha!
* I made this bit up.
I found a map of antipodean points. It’s both interesting and disappointing.
The purple is the world map. You may recognise it from geography lessons at school.
The yellow is the world map superimposed upside-down on the purple map. Thus, you can see pretty much where you will come out if you were to dig a tunnel straight through the core of the earth and out the other side. Let’s ignore the science and heat and death and stuff for the purposes of this blog post.
The first thing you’ll notice is that wherever you live (unless it’s half of China or most of Argentina), there’s not much chance of you hitting anything but ocean if you give it a go. That’s because the surface of the earth is 70% water, so there’s not much land on land overlap.
And there’s no overlap in SA at all. Dig through from Cape Town and you only reach somewhere Pacific, rather than somewhere specific. In fact, the only “local” place worth tunneling from is Ngamiland South District in Botswana. Next stop: Hawaii.
Have shovel. Will travel.
Aloha.
Our winter duvet was causing us all sorts of problems. Mostly warm enough, but with a lot of patches that weren’t, super heavy and bulky, rather uncomfortable, generally getting old and falling apart.
It’s basically me, but in duvet form.
It was affecting our sleep, and that is never a good thing.
So, time for a new duvet inner, but OMG, the choices, and THE PRICES!
Having gone through a rigorous process of elimination on the price front (not difficult, we’re not remortgaging the house again), we found ourselves staring down the beak of the Hungarian goose. Despite being a bit of a bird nerd, I’d never heard of a Hungarian goose before, although using some basic etymological, geographical and biological knowledge, I had kind of worked out at least the basics.
But why Hungarian goose and not any other goose stuff?
Well, here’s a Hungarian goose, and wow, just look at this bad boy:
But I still had to consult the experts:
The simple difference between Hungarian goose down and other goose down is that it is from Hungary.
Thanks, Einstein.
Hungarian goose down has many characteristics that make it a superior option to other types of goose down. It provides superb insulation properties, exceptional comfort and high-quality durability, thanks to larger natural cluster sizes, greater resilience and high fill power.
I have no idea how natural cluster sizes work or what fill power is, but they’re large and high and that sounds good.
Hungary faces long, freezing winters each year, and Hungarian goose down is sourced from the coldest parts of the country.
It’s also more humanely produced than many other goose downs.
There’s a whole world out there that I had no idea about. But now I do and the Hungarian goose down is clearly the premium goose down that there is in that world. And this is coming from a company that sells a lot of other downs as well.
So we ordered. And it arrived. And it was SO DISAPPOINTINGLY THIN.
“That’s going to have to go back,” we thought.
But we gave it a try with some Egyptian cotton covers. At this point, it’s important to note that good cotton is Egyptian and good goose down is Hungarian.
DO NOT MIX THESE TWO UP.
Hungarian cotton is (possibly, I haven’t really checked) generally of decidedly poor quality, and don’t – DON’T – get me started on damn Egyptian geese.
But I digress. Often.
Incredibly, when it comes to the sales pitch on the Hungarian goose down thing, all that stuff that they eulogised about is absolutely true. So warm, so nice, so light.
In a competition that I never thought I’d be dull enough to judge: Best Duvet Ever.
I am planning on test driving it plenty more over this weekend, specifically investigating if its thermal loveliness can last well into the late mornings on Saturdays and Sundays.