$600 Million for 2 Paintings, Anyone?

These are the two Titian paintings the evidently cash-strapped Duke of Sutherland is asking the National Galleries of England and Scotland the "cut price" of a mere $200 million for the pair, a mere third of the expected commercial auction value...
Top: Diana and Actaeon...
Bottom: Diana and Callisto
By the way, I used to think the painter's name was pronounced "Titty-Ann". I was wrong. The BBC say "Tishn". So there!

BLUE CROSS DOG RESCUE

These TV ads are really sad (what an excellent actor Wilfy is though!)



Park action:
Yesterday I saw a real live fight between a magpie and a squirrel!!!

OK I admit this is not it, but a more dramatic version (let it get going)...



GUMBY TRAILER

This purloined from Lu's blog... real surreal... reminds me of that BBC kiddies' TV superstar of the claymation, Morph... anyone remember him?



THE INTELLECTUAL MEANING OF "GLEDWOOD"!!

What Gledwood Means

You are deeply philosophical and thoughtful. You tend to analyze every aspect of your life. You are intuitive, brilliant, and quite introverted. You value your time alone. Often times, you are grumpy with other people. You don't appreciate them trying to interfere in your affairs. You are relaxed, chill, and very likely to go with the flow. You are light hearted and accepting. You don't get worked up easily. Well adjusted and incredibly happy, many people wonder what your secret to life is. You are friendly, charming, and warm. You get along with almost everyone. You work hard not to rock the boat. Your easy going attitude brings people together. At times, you can be a little flaky and irresponsible. But for the important things, you pull it together. You are balanced, orderly, and organized. You like your ducks in a row. You are powerful and competent, especially in the workplace. People can see you as stubborn and headstrong. You definitely have a dominant personality. You are very charming... dangerously so. You have the potential to break a lot of hearts. You know how what you want, how to get it, and that you will get it. You have the power to rule the world. Let's hope you're a benevolent dictator! You are well rounded, with a complete perspective on life. You are solid and dependable. You are loyal, and people can count on you. At times, you can be a bit too serious. You tend to put too much pressure on yourself.

What's Your Name's Hidden Meaning?

... and who'd have guessed all THAT? (Where on earth they summoned that crap from I've utterly no idea at all!!)

(Crap? Actually it's complete horse****.)

ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS IRAQUI "!CAMEL SPIDER"

This came from a feature in the Sun newspaper "Afghan Mega-Spider Killed Our Dog". A desert camel spider. This has to be thee most pantspissworthy creature I have ever had the misfortune to set my eyes upon. The legs exceed human palm size, the body is far larger than my roborovski hamsters. After seeing the video below I spooked myself so badly with the thought of one running up my sleeve I actually had to stop in the park to publicly shake out my jacket. Yes! I got eebyjeebies that bad!!¬

This m*********r is ENORMOUS... yes that is a REAL SPIDER

WHAT AN UKKKY THING!!!

Not Waving But Drowning

I AM DROWNING IN DEPRESSION. I feel it pressing on me like the cold earth on my coffin. Not sleeping; waking at five a.m. like a block of ice and craving heroin (the ultimate body-warmer; junkie's equivalent to an early-morning cup of tea)... so I drink methadone instead, turn on the fan heater that my landlord's too stingy to give permission for me to use (citing "fire hazard")... I stick my head under the sheets and hopefully go back to sleep. I don't actually possess any tea right now TO drink "of" a morning, so that particular remedy shall have to wait till another day ... (next week) when I've funds enough and have not been hitting up "B" in the bushes as wire foxes come terrierorizing past...

My Paris Dream has degenerated into a nighmare of the most degraded kind. Dreaming I was on the train, only it's open top and rollercoastering throughout a large house (as you do in dreams). This house is full of what the French would call "Anglo-Saxons" (that is Brits, Yanks and Aussies: ie Anglophones), all of whom are junkies. Dirt is everywhere. Barely there's a space for any more sleeping bags. And I'm freezing cold, friendless and alienated in this foreign town. Even more rootless than I am over here. Perhaps it's a warning: the grass is darker...

I had a look in at my trotters this afternoon. Great activities have been taking place, with Bashful taking a lead in the newspaper-tearing (home-made bedding: they far prefer making their own to being lumbered with the so-called "luxury" shop-bought cottonwool type), and running from one bedroom to another (they've at least four sleeping places) self-importantly, scraps of the Sun newspaper hanging from her tubby chops.

I've come up with some roborovski songs. Not very original or brilliant, I'm afraid, but this is what I coo to poor long-suffering Itchy on occasion. And no I do not deny I may well be clinically insane...::~~

BABY ITCHY'S TROTTING
Baby Itchy's trotting!
Trotting!
Trotting!
Baby Itchy's trotting!
And she's covered in fur!

...THE TINIEST ONE!
Of all the Little Trotters you're the Tiniest One!
Tiniest One!
Tiniest One!
Of all the Little Trotters you're the Tiniest One:
Baby Itchy's trotting into town!

TROTTING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN
She'll be trotting round the mountain when she trots;
She'll be trotting round the mountain when she trots;
She'll be trotting round the mountain;
Trotting round the mountain
And Bashful's blind and Spherical's covered in fur!

(Well I never did claim to be Shakespeare...)

SONG OF THE DAY:
ELTON JOHN; SACRIFICE
Superman Smallville Vid...



SONG II
ELTON JOHN FT. BLUE
SORRY SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD

This song got really slagged off on its rerelease a couple of years ago... but I thought it was really good. The melancholy tune, not to mention the words: rhyming "word" with "absurd": classic!



Commemorating the shock death of Diana, Princess of Wales that dreadful week at the end of summer 1997...

Wire Fox Park

AN ENTIRE TROTTERY of wire fox terriers just bounded past me in the park. I wanted to take one home. They DO remind me of Itchy when she's been bashed up and licked clean by the others. Everyone is having a go at me and I'm too tired. All I wanted to do was have a hit in a bush, which I just did. It was crap. Those wire foxes in fact were far more interesting. Now I'm off to beg 30p so I can make up the money for a pie so wish me luck!

Roborovski Spin-Dryer (12 revolutions!)

This poor little swine does TWELVE revolutions:

Brittle Bone Unlucky

THANKS FOR ALL THE MESSAGES YESTERDAY: I forgot to mention how decrepit my friend had become in her last months. After leaving an extended detox unit where she successfully came off all heroin and methadone, the inevitable boredom hit and she started dabbling within a month or so. Then she slipped and fell on the stairs and badly broke a leg (she said it was her pelvis, but I'm pretty sure it was a leg break). It was then that osteoporosis was diagnosed and she came home with a walking frame that never left her house. Of course she gravitated back to heroin bigtime during this period, as it is the most efficacious painkiller in the world (though some countries don't use it due to inability to accept that a major "war on drugs" target can also have legitimate medicinal uses. Of course it can. Dur! Of course I am talking about freeze-dried pharmaceutical diamorphine, not street heroin.) So the habit came back. Eventually she did manage to hobble about with a walking stick, but looked so much older than the lady I had first met ten years ago who was so feisty she nearly cut her ex-boyfriend's ear off with a stanley knife on one certain occasion. Anyway, as I said, she barely ever ate anything, bar McDonald's 99p/£1.19p double cheeseburgers or the remainders of other people's takeaways or those legendary crisp sandwiches. No wonder the brittle bones!

I cleaned out all my hamsters with lots of washing up liquid last night. They keep weeing far too much and their home was like a giant urinal. Also Bashful gets bored and chewed giant holes in their bedroom and bathroom walls. Imagine doing that. "What shall I do today? Oh yeah, I'm bored. I know: I'll chew a bloody great hole in the wall!!"

Now I have to go and be bored to death with other junkies in the druggie service waiting room. Boring boring boring!

Bereaved

MY OLD FRIEND, who I always called "Lucky", died suddenly a week ago yesterday. She was so thin and undernourished, when I stayed with her for four days after some Jamaicans bashed into her home and robbed her a few years back, I only ever saw her eat a crisps (American: "chips") sandwich at midday and that was ALL she touched in 24 hours. The rest of her calories came from alcohol, though she would never have admitted she had a habit on that. She was so tiny and thin by the end that she looked like a fledgling bird. She was a heroin addict and sometime smalltime dealer (a fact I could never have mentioned while she was alive). I called her "Lucky" because she funded this habit every day without ever going out shoplifting, or even getting arrested for years on end. Her home, however, was little more than a glorified crackhouse at times. The understanding being that if you used at her place, you paid her a little out of it, and that's how she kept going. She was somewhere between 55-60 years old, had two grown-up kids, a 35 year++ habit on heroin plus daily pipes on the crack. It would have been the latter that contributed to her death. (Heroin, remember, or pharmaceutical "diamorphine" as it's called in British hospitals is given TO the dying to make their last hours more comfortable. So, unless she'd overdosed, which she did not, that would hardly be the thing that bumped her off.)... Unfortunately it seem's Lucky's luck ran out. I feel depressed and sick and her old best friend looked 100 years old and grey as he recounted the details of a 50-minute fight for life with two teams of paramedics. In the end her fragile, tiny body just gave way.

But I'm illustrating this post with a wire-fox terrier, just like one I saw "parked" outside Lucky's favourite offlicence/bottleshop at the weekend. It looked so cute I wanted to take it home...

All In Between

MAYBE I OUGHT NOT to be posting today. Nothing at all's going on and nothing has happened. (Probably I ought to be grateful for that.)

I've had some more dealings with the Indian woman downstairs who demanded that ambulance last week. She is very dependent on people. Needed somebody to come with her to the Social Security office, where her claim appears to be in a complete pickle. Really she wanted me to stay with her all the interminable hours it was going to take her not to get her claim sorted that day but I really couldn't do that and ten minutes later made my excuses and escaped! (I thought I'd done her enough of a favour just taking her there. And I really didn't want to go. Just thought I might do a "good Samaritan" act for once in my life...)

She keeps asking to borrow my phone "just for a minute" to ring somebody she calls "Auntie" then babbles away in what sounded to my ears like Indian Portuguese. But when she read her "Auntie" her own phone number back I realized it was some odd type of French she was speaking. Aparently she comes from Mauritius and that's the local patois, a kind of French creole.

Bashful has been running around in the daylight (because she can no longer see it's not dark and robbies have such an aversion to light. You only have to turn it on them at wheel-scurrying peak hours of the early morning and they're back in bed within ten minutes!)

My abscesses are going down. I was trying to say the other day that I've been lucky in that, with the one exception of that dreadful "barb burn" from February and two cases of cellulitis, my abscesses have all been babies. So tiny in fact that only one has ever burst through the top like they're meant to do; they just rise up red (very painful at first) then go hot and itchy and sink down, healing themselves. Mother Hubbard says it's because I eat lots of vegetables...

... which reminds me, she has the most shocking case of laryngitis. Sounds like she's got a throat full of dried cornflakes and razor-blades. My other friend Valium Marilyn's got it too, and has been really hamming up her already-powerful Cockney accent to sound extra-vulgar..(!)

Righty-ho. It's a gorgeous day. I wrote my Gran another letter last night. (She is very poorly and in a nursing home these days.) And a long weekend. But as I promised yesterday I'm going nowhere near that Notting Hill Carnival, which, apparently is indeed the second-biggest street-carnival in the world, attracting crowds of nearly a million a day two days in a row. (No wonder it feels so opporessively crowded!)

Righto then, have a lovely weekend, y'all...

Not the Notting Hill Carnival

OK, so no more stuff about boils.

I don't know what is wrong with me. I spent most of the night freezing cold and now I'm boiling up.

It is midday and I'm very impatient. Too many things to do and I just want them all done.

Bank holiday this coming Monday, which means the open hell of the Notting Hill Carnival for anyone wishing to participate. I don't wish to be negative, but this, the 2nd biggest carnival in the world, brings back memories only of being jostled, deafened, hemmed in by walls of people (albeit many in exotic dress)... then getting back and so exhausted it's unreal. One year in particular I got extremely ill and had some sort of a breakdown. Yes: from a mere carnival!

PS I just altered my page length to LONG... will anybody please tell me if this gets exceedingly annoying for them..?? THANK YOU.

Gone-out roborovski: I hope this is what Baby Itchy's like at age 90

Abscess Pus and I Know the Bach Tune Now...

I DRAINED THE FOUR baby abscesses on my thighs the other day. I didn't even know anything was wrong until I clonked into something on the bus and went YAROOOO!! in full Billy Bunter fashion. Closer inspection later on revealed a lovely boil-sized hot-spot on my right thigh. A couple of celulitis attacks aside (and not to mention the great barbiturate burn of February that I thought was going to put my in hospital) I've been very lucky with abscesses. You have to realize these can get bad enough to hold literally 100s of mls of pus. I went to a draining session at my friend Rebsie's house and the abscess had burst already the night before: all over the carpet. It looked like somebody had been violently sick all over the place and that was the pus! Mother Hubbard did the kneeding and squeezing whilst I was the one who dashed to and from the kitchen boiling up sterile saline to "irrigate" the newly emptied cavity in Rebsie's thigh. She was lucky, for though it was big (like a packed-out wallet under the skin) it hadn't tunneled inwards towards the bone. I've seen one that had, both pre and post surgery. This had to be packed with tampon-like material and I saw for myself two pus-tunneled "fingers" (that you could literally have stuck your fingers down, had you felt so inclined)... stretching right into the flesh of the thighs and dangerously close to the bone. Bone infections are the very worst kind (apart from bacterial infection of the heart)... they really can call for amputation. And I've met anough people with missing legs in my time...
... yes this was all down to my "skinpopping" habit, which is what you do when you can't get a vein. The gear is injected under the skin rather than direct to the bloodstream, which gives any nasties a longer chance to fester, and just occasionally they do...
... do I drained all four of mine with a giant blue needle and got nowt more spectacular than a few beads of pus and some runny bloody weepiness, all of which I carefully mopped up with alcoholic swabs and lots of tissue paper...
... Hmmm.

Poor Baby Bashful's still lost and peering fruitlessly in the dark. Makes me want to cry...

I've been researching my new literary project. My longest cherished ambition in life has always been to be a writer of fiction. My trouble has been that as a youngster I just didn't have the inspiration of anything much to say. Now I'm older (though I won't claim to be wiser) I do feel I have a certain grasp of human nature. This I shall apply to my story (an historical tale)... and let's see where it takes us!

I was inspired today to dig out my old poem tome and if you click herebelow you can read three of my works on Gledwood's new Poetry Blog!
Please comment profusely under each "work".. many thanks!...

All this talk of pomes and tomes has made me starving hungry for cod in batter with intellectual tomatoes and oven chips, so I really must dash now...

VIDEO:
I had been wondering for AGES what on earth this tune was called. It sounds fantastic when played any way except in that dirgy off-key cello style (which I think it was written for) but really ruins the potential of the tune...
This is well worth some moments of your time...
BACH'S PRELUDE played by the most sublime guitar...

The Mystery of the Disabled Hamster

I'VE A NASTY FEELING I've discovered the cause of Bashful Roborovski's strange behaviour: all this leaning back and falling over, staring into space and wandering off in the dark. I only realized what it was the other day when, putting my hand inside her domain she "peered" up at me, then I moved, yet she continued peering into the same bit of space. She is blind. This makes me feel so sorry for her. Such a tiny, innocent animal. No wonder she's been acting so strangely of late; I'm convinced she has gone blind and wasn't born so. Blindness would explain everything. I do hope I'm wrong.

On the other hand, blindness in a hamster is nowhere near the disability it might be in a larger animal like a dog or cat. Roborovskis live in pitch blackness anyhow ~ up to six feet underground in their burrowy nests. And, of course, being nocturnal their eyesight is far from the premium sense (they rely on hearing far more, and sensations: not only vibrations on the ground from larger bufoon species such as humans but their sixth sense, "whisker sense". In human terms their gigantic whiskers stuck out a good eighteen inches either side, allowing them to bolt full pelt into a complex network of tunnels without ever crashing into the wall...)

I got so used to observing them by "fireglow" red light that I forget their frenzied dashing, pinging and wheel-ramblings are mostly conducted, in robo-terms, in the utter pitch dark; and yet their behaviour barely alters one little bit between darkness and light. (Red light to hamsters and most other tiny rodents is equivalent to infra-red light to us: so installing a fireglow lamp beside their enclosure enables one to view them undisturbed. If I want them to go to bed even in the middle of the night-time, I need only switch the main light on and, hilarious as clockwork, within ten minutes they're all at the nest, all three of them, snuggling and preening away, the most natural thing in the world...

Little else to say about Bashful. I do hope it is just blindness and not some sort of brain tumour. As I say, her behaviour has been a little... aimless and odd. I can think of no other explanation for it...

Video:
John Denver: Leaving on a Jet Plane
You may well consider this sentimentalist tosh, and I aplogize for the blurry picturing but a few glances and you'll get the gist... this tune's been going round and round in my head for a bit so I thought I'd post it up here for yous...


Babylonian Mystery Religion

"Help! Call an Ambulance! I'm Neurotic!!"

IT'S BEEN ALL GO AT MINE. I innocently clambered down the stairs the other day with the intention of re-joining the library and glugging some cyder, yet this was thwarted by sheer emergency in the hall. The Portuguese cleaner, and my Abyssinian neighbour were crowding around the Indian lady from the front room who was howling protestations of how ill she was. "Please get me a doctor! Please come with me!" (All this focused now on me.) I said well none of us has a car so we'll have to get an ambulance. Bear in mind the woman was on her feet, complaining of "heart pain" and "vomiting" (though no vomit to be seen anywhere)... I quickly sussed what the other two aparently hadn't: that she was talking about emotional symptoms. At one point she even wailed out that her "heart was breaking". Anyway, not being a doctor (and she was after all in great distress: I just didn't believe it had a physical cause) I did ring for an ambulance. The woman who answered was obviously used to dealing with crank calls and timewasters and asked some stupid questions in a highly cynical voice. When she misheard the woman's age she said "what? One?" NO FIFTY-ONE. Dur. The ambulance crew, when they arrived were equally puzzled (not wanting to waste an ambulance). One turned to me and said "do you know anything about this?" I glanced to the woman, who was looking away, tapped my finger to my head and said "it might be..?" then the crew nodded and said "ah!"

Honestly! And this "dying" soul was at home the next day feeling "very much better"!

No wonder the ambulance service get sick and tired... (but what else could I do? Walk away on someone who obviously believed she was ill... plus it all fell down to me to use the phone as I was the only native English-speaker.

Apart from that I'm sweating so hard I may as well have showered and dressed without drying. That's how wet I am (forgot to take METHADONE. Dur!x3607!!)

And my roborovskis slept in their diggery last night (only because I konked out forgetting they were in there...) they came out with the softest show-combed fur I've ever seen...

Happy Weekend to y'all!

Video:
Raymi: "Cuts own 'bangs'"... (that's called a "fringe" in plain English...)...

Fresh, Clean Hamsteries in a Horrid World...

LAST NIGHT at long last I cleaned out my hamsteries, both the roborovskis' fishtank and Pingpong the Chinese hamster's crappy Habitrail cage. (It's crappy because it's self-assembly (not recommended for the housing of rodents) and is so fragile it's basically falling apart. The more vigorously tubby and weightier Golden Hamster would get out of there within nary an hour's bar-worrying (you know, that "nibbling the bars" they can tend to get up to all night long when they're proclaiming their wheel's too small and they're bored!)) I don't remember shoving it in there but Pingpong had such a massive mound of chewed-up newspaper nesting material it filled nearly an entire carrier bag. Yes he is absolutely fine. I just don't mention him very much because he is so shy I barely see him and so exceedingly laid-back he never seems to do anything (except sleep a lot...) As for the robos: I replaced their newspaper floor with a single layer of pizza-box cardboard, which I'd written some erstwhile post on. I was hoping this might be cleaner and easier to replace... As usual the three swines went nuts, performing a donkey-derby in miniature then clambering on their wheel all three at once and pinging most determinedly as if in protracted attempted escape from the vulgarity of their horrid new home. They didn't even forgive me when I put down mounds of wild bird seed. Bashful bit me twice (though the teeth never sink in), Spherical lived up to her name: a gargantuan tubby football full of pouch-packed seeds. She glared at me balefully and with virulent suspicion then pinged rapidly out of the way whenever my horrid hands threatened to encroach too near. Itchy just curled up in a ball eating said seeds and ignored all the fuss of the other two...

What a horrible world this is. And how I hate living in it. I had been intending to write something "thoughtful" upon the subject but the inspiration's gone...

Sweet Mulberries

MYSTICAL MULBERRIES! I picked some ripe ones this afternoon from a mysterious tree I know... jazzy bloodstains ran down my hand, bright scarlet juice... well yummie. (This is not a picture of the actual tree, though it does look just like it...) If only I could get a ladder to it I could make a pie (or even better a crumble. If you don't know crumble (do they have it abroad? I've never heard foreigners talk about it;) it's pie filling in a casserole dish with sand-like floury stuff on top which is really nice. For a recipe clickonthis...

... erm~ and that's about all I have to say for today. I'm packed out with plans for the future, too excited to sleep and coasting on the (natural) high that results. Quite extraordinary!

Intellectual Librariantics

A DAY OF INTELLECTUAL DISCOVERY. I have so many ideas... I have been trawling the library to pursue them... research... (I have to research this book that I'm determined to write down. Determined.) ... Languages of the world... there are so many countries I want to visit and so many different languages I've wanted to speak... I have an abiding interest in antiquity, especially the ancient Near East... My study of the Bible piqued an interest in this, particularly Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah (the Jewish exile) which were set in Babylon and the Medo-Persian empire... fascinating. I spent ages copying out the Hebrew alphabet but there weren't many good sourcebooks for studying that language (I think I'm going to have to seek out a specialist Jewish shop...) Then I got waylaid by showbusiness. Madonna. The library has barely anything about Elizabeth I and yet they have two volumes of Jordan's autobiography. Priorities, please! Also I got tired of the security guard prowling around like we readers were trespasssers on his private domain (and perish the thought that we might want to take a dreaded mobile phone call~ oo no that is too much) but the man who spent half an hour in the upstairs toilet with a queue of African exchange students rat-a-tatt-tatting ever more desperately on the door and then fled leaving it blocked with diarrhoea and the most gruesome pong rolling in an invisible putrid cloud past the Britannicas and into the maps reference section. Only when it reached the enquiry desk did loud exclamations arise and a large sign go up saying toilet out of order. Ooer I've got thoroughly waylaid now but it was a good day. Cheerio everybody.
Till tomorrow!

VIDEO:
Bringing to life surrealist art, this supposedly cost $5 million (I don't believe that)... it is one of Madonna's best though...

School Dinners and the Schizophrenic Crackhead on the Stairs

I MADE OVEN-READY FISH AND CHIPS at 7am... but the fish was the cheapest breaded cuts of pollack (and only 47% there...) and the chips got burned... all in all it was like school dinners when you're on last sittings... very reheated and not very nice. The fresh tomato salad that went next to it went some way to redeeming the situation ...

For the past few days we've had a schizophrenic crackhead sleeping on our stairs. This is the black lady who's about 60 and has crack lung. She took me for a total innocent, so when I asked for a bit the other day (came out of my room and there she is smoking) she didn't believe I even knew what the stuff was called. Then she put on four whopping great pipes, probably hoping I'd be vomiting everywhere. But I had a lovely time ~ so har!

Last night she knocked on my door at about 3am. I was awake anyway and so not really annoyed. She was obviously off on one, rambling all over the place with paranoia and irrelevancies, asking the most intrusive questions about my life yet telling me to mind my own business if I dared ask about hers. She offered me sexual favours in return for sleeping in my room but I told her to sleep in her own. This she will not do either because (1) some paranoid idea tells her there's a ghost in there or something like that (she kind of hinted at this) or (2) she's actually got chucked out (which she also hinted at last time we spoke) and is just using our hallway as a dosshouse, which wouldn't surprise me at all. I knew someone who was sleeping for several weeks in the upstairs bathroom of a house share. Because nobody knew each other very well in the house, nobody quite twigged that this constantly occupied bathroom (with strange white smoke coming from under the door..!) was actually inhabited by a crack-addict prostitute who spent the other half her time accruing "business" up the high road...

O well enough of the sordid stuff, I'd better go. It's a lovely sunny day now but man! It was raining cats and dogs earlier. Take it easy everyone!

VIDEO:
CHRIS DE BURGH: LADY IN RED
The Lady in Red blog reminded me of this tune... and isn't it amazing..?
Even people who cannot speak English have come up to him and said (through an interpreter, I'd assume) that though they could not understand the words ever bit of emotion comes through... and of course it does...

General Anaesthesia

IT WAS A GENERAL ANAESTHETIC of a weekend. All I seemed to do was sleep wake up for more oven chips and chicken pies (upturned, cut open, piled in with buttery mixed vegetables and showered with gravy)... then sleep once more. Once all this sleeping finished I was convinced I would be left wide awake all Sunday night and unable to sleep till too late Monday morning when I was due to be up anyway... but no! General anaesthesia took me yet again and I sloomed blissful as a baby till my alarm clock (yet another function of my mobile phone) intruded ungraciously at 08:44am.

No news of any tubby critters. I was heartily depressed when conscious and too leaden to do very much of anything. I didn't want to do anything and spent some gloomy minutes wondering how on earth "normal" people manage to work, have any semblance of lives plus do all the sleeping I have to do (which I don't want to do yet have to, simply to restore sanity...)

... and so I despaired ~ and slept once more.

Pingpong the Chinese hammy plus my robos urgently need cleaning out because they smell of wee-wees (too much scent-marking on the newspapers...)

I've had a skinpop of heroin so I'm feeling far better than yesterday. Also a drink down my throat did a similar trick...

At Mother Hubbard's there's a film on UKTV History about "the Forgotten Prince"... one of the Edwardian era's royal children who was epileptic. I do not know the names of any of the sonorous Shakespearean actors cast in this costume masterpiece (each shot framed like a Victorian oil painting)... yet Miranda Richardson appears to play the role of Queen...

PS: Does anyone know of any better clips of the 2008 Opening Ceremony to the 29th Olympiad at Beijing? Serves me right for posting without viewing all the way through: I had assumed my own clip (see next below) would progress beyond two metallic gentlemen in their underpants ... sadly not so!

PPS: Have a clickonthis: Sparkle Seahorse Shining :: a fantastic arty blog!

VIDEO:
NOT FROM ANY OLYMPICS... yet surely worthy of the greatest opening ceremony of all... this the THOUSAND HAND CHINESE DANCE ~ from my Random Vid Clips Blog is AMAZING... have a look:~

Woody Woodmouse Weekend...

BABY ITCHY, かゆがってさん (Kayugatte-san) is looking particularly touselled, tawny and harvesty this afternoon. My robbies were even starring on the radio the other day (OK, slight correction ~ about two and a half months ago!) The world's tiniest dwarf hamsters: fully grown and the size of my thumb. If an ordinary solitary hammy's a Transit van; my three social hammies were Nissan Micras. The host Ray Khan was in thrall. A "regular" hamster curls into a furry tennis ball in sleep. I have three roborovski pingpong balls. Their cuteness perked up the waves just like their pink noses and perky ears. That was until a savage Peta-style environmentalist declaimed semi-sobbingly my "gerbils" and how when they did grow up and get more than thumb-sized and huge I would inevitably get bored of them and that's when animal shelters get full and the robos' home is left empty. Poor swines! As if I would ever do that to them! This morning as I stroked a furry hipopotamus lookey-likey who peered up at me moo-cow style and lowed ~ I promptly realized this was Baby Bashful and not Itchy. Just as she sunk razor-sharp dental stubs (worn-down from all that seed-nibbling) into my thumb and bit me!

I think she is angry with me for keeping her confined in a nest with an increasingly fractious Itchy. Many a honk I have heard squealing from their tubby domain as they squabble over who goes where in the hamster hierarchy. A vigorously honking hamster-chase sets off across the roborovski-garden, Itchy pursuing Bashful until she overpowers her sister, pushing backwards so the Daz-white belly's on stark display. This she grooms vigorously in a compulsory preening ritual. It's usually cut sort by shrilly honking cries on Bashful's part as the naughty Itchy takes to biting her, the swine! It's all such a shame as they used to get on so well. If they really did fight I would have to separate the offending Itchy character out, but it never gets blood-drawingly bad... and always, by evening, in the peace and dimness of the end of day I see three furry pingpong balls a-dozing all together in sleepy harmony.

I saw Woody Woodmouse yet again this evening, and so Google Images have provided lookey-likey photographic commemoration of his furriness for this weekend... Have a charming one won't you, y'all...

PS Bashful didn't really fall over on "furballs of birdseed" day. But she didn't pack her pouches. Which made her look really tiny and weird...

PPS How many of you numbered among the reported 4 billion ~ that is close-on two-thirds of the planet's population ~ who watched some or all of the opening ceremony to the 2008 Beijing Olympiad? Was it any good? I feel like the only person among those 4,000,000,000 who missed it!

For anyone like me, or anyone who wants a recap, have a look at this, some live highlights from the event "the greatest show in history" according to the (London) Independent newspaper:~



And on that note I shall have to love you and leave you...

HAVE A SUPERIOR WEEKEND, FOLKS!

Furry Balls of Birdseed

AS WELL AS GORGING MYSELF ON INDUSTRIAL BATTERED FISH, I have bought my tubbies more "wild bird" (also I might be putting up a feeder; if I can find a place outside my upstairs window that will hang one...)

The Roborovski family went mad when the seeds came out. Momma Spherical led the way and soon was looking like a furry football; Baby Itchy followed and swiftly resembled a miniature version of the same... Bashful was too busy craning her head backwards to peer a look at me (and falling slapstick right over with sawdust all over her head) to bother filling up...

My mind is all set on my latest literary "scheme"... I have embarked upon my gargantuan mountain of research... Fast-paced pop fiction of heartrending intensity is what I intend to serve up to the world on the golden platter of my glittering prose (as if!)... All I am saying here is that I want to write popular fiction, not the ponderously "literary" time-wasting type... If I ever get nominated for the Booker prize or anything similar I shall commit suicide! And that's about all I have to say about writing "write" now...

Which leads me back to Paris. The guy on late night talk radio was chundering on about the British government and local authorities' surfeit of roadway speed cameras and how dangerous these are (actually causing motorists suddenly to break, sending those behind smashing into one another)... good driving is about keeping distance far more than it's about reducing speed... (surely?)... This and stories of local councils fining innocent families for over-packing dustbins or (crime of the century) leaving them out on the wrong day... Spy (sorry "security") cameras everywhere (4,000,000 and counting)... No smoking anywhere ~ except the government won't just ban tobacco completely as they are too addicted to the multibillions it rakes in in taxes they can mis-spend... innocent people slapped with £80 spot-fines for dropping litter as inconsequential as a single match stick, or in one case the end of a sausage roll that wasn't even noticed dropping by the hapless eater (it was, however filmed by an undercover local authority "enforcement officer")... and an £80 fixed penalty that couldn't even be contested as within 30 seconds the local pigeons had eaten all the evidence... this and the poll tax (sorry "council tax" (poll tax by another name though even worse as inhabitants of a house share are "jointly and severally liable" ~ ie the authorities are fully within their rights to bulldoze an entire house's bill on to just one poor resident and to hell with the consequences... all this and parking charges, jobsworths, rude kids, knives and the ineffectual Gordon Brown (yes our prime minister though I'd forgive you for never having heard of him: we wish we never had too...)... all this and I so badly want to flee this country!

Not that I think life is all rosey-tinted abroad or that I shall somehow escape my problems. I'm just fed up of living with this set of national problems and want to be somewhere where other people are complaining about other politicians and I want to be able to give even less of a damn about them than I do nowadays...

And back to cooking: my next ambition is to make my own pizza ~ from scratch (meaning concocting bases from flour, water, sugar, yeast (at least that's what I was told was the recipe))... nearest I've come thus far is buying vulgar value margaritas and chucking veggies of my own atop...

OK gotta go the day is sultry and stormy ~ amazing horizon lightning last night that never fulminated into a full electric storm... is that what they mean by "heat-lightning"?... it was forking sideways horizontally over the rooftops... quite impressive... Have a nice day everyone and don't get too hot and sweaty!!

Fish Repast

AN UNACCOUNTABLE CRAVING for cod in batter led me into Sainsbury's where I spent £2.99 on "4-6 pieces" of Birdseye's best... Two of these with oven chips and baby tomatoes sprinkled with black pepper. I crisscrossed the batter with a knife and drizzled with lime juice (nicer than lemon and stronger, so you need less of it, which suits an old skinflint like me down to the ground...) The tomatoes were lovely too and contributed to my "five a day" portions of fruit and vegetables, as the packaging handily reminded me. I really need to learn proper cooking one day, but industrial fish and oven chips is a start (I suppose..(!))...

No other news except I think my middle roborovski hamster Baby Bashful has a genetic fault! Don't cackle at this, but when I coo her name from on high she peers up at me craning her neck back and back and back... until she literally falls over backwards! She has done this several times and it looks hilarious. I know that roborovskis are prone to a breeding fault where, due to faulty balance, they spin furiously round and round in a tight circle. I wonder whether Bashful doesn't have a shade of this... it's a shame as I won't be able to breed her now and had always thought it might be fun one day to have an entire basketful of rambling roborovski pups...

And that was MY day: how was yours?

Mon rêve parisien: la vie en rose

ZUT ALORS!!... last "night" I slept in (and in; and in...) longer and longer until it was past 3pm. I must have needed the sleep... and my dreams! I was dreaming galore! My heart tells me to up and flee to Berlin or Paris. I am in a quandry as to which, but as I know Paris a little, I dreamed about there...

Illustrations: top: metro map and RER map below that ... (click twice to see in vast detail); left: Paris nightscape; right: Galleries Lafayette, view up from the perfume hall...)

Galleries Lafayette (Parisian Harrods).. Shakespeare & Co. (English language bookstore providing free accommodation to anyone willing to muck in int shop that day...) the pursuing aroma of doggies' diarrhoea from Parisian pavements (all those pampered pooing pooches...) and the most luxurious of luxury goods I have ever seen (on the Champs Elysees)... only place in my life I've ever glimpsed a genuine crocodile-skin bag! And I'll never forget the amazing Egyptian room in the Louvre. Or the assistant who directed me there, stopping my dead half way through my "excusez-moi madame; où se trouve le département des antiquités égyptiens et orientales?" with a halting hand and a businesslike: "what language?"!

... and later following signposts to La Joconde... eventually to file amonst a transcontinental crowd into a chamber where from about 4m or 12 ft away and through the bulletproof sheen of several smoked glass coffee-table-tops I was at long last able to glimpse the tiniest and most famous painting on earth: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa!

The best art in Paris is to be found in the Orsay museum. A bright, light and airy former railway terminus, this features a room packed with about 20 Van Goughs. All I could think as I craned to within inches of the legendary brush-strokes ~ and how they stick out! ~ and through no glass, no barriers bar an ankle-height metal string... This was the late 80s/very early 90s when Sunflowers and Irises had sold for upwards of £50m each or $100m a piece (in today's money) ~ I was in the presence of over a billion dollars' worth of modern art!

The Mona Lisa, incidentally, was vlued by would-be insurers at $100 million at the turn of the 20th Century. So costly in fact was the premium that the Louvre baulked at sending it on an American voyage and, one adventurous theft aside, it has remained at home in Paris ever since... Where its value has surely surpassed the one billion dollar mark...

My Mum, who spends some months a year in a 2nd home in the French countryside (where I've never been invited) described an hilarity moment back here in Angleterre when, caught up amongst a roomful of babbling fellow-humans, she quite unexpectedly realized: wow! I can understand every word they're saying! She's definitely a chip off the same block as me: my lifelone obsession with acquiring exotic languages stems from a sheer repulsion of not being able to understand similar crowds of foreigners from my own childhood as they blibble-blebble-blobbled in "foreign" ~ a tongue I had decided I should master so that nobody would speak over my head ever again!

Photo-blog of the Day:
Misty's Musings www.mistysmusings.com
... fantastic wildlife shots...

Accidental Post

I'M ONLY POSTING BY ACCIDENT as I was stuck on a bus so desperate for a (cyder-induced) midday pee, I ended up jumping off here by the cybercaff instead of anywhere near home...

Now I had fantasized about posting something intellectual or sociologically meaningful today (but when has THAT ever happened?)...

So I shall keep this post mighty short and wish y'all (as per usual)


An exceedingly charming weekend!!!!


PS: Why is it, looking at a little boy peeing is somehow "cute" yet ogling a little girl doing the same might be equally well construed as faintly disgusting or even pervy..??

And now on to music. This first one reminds me of those summer evenings that seem to last for ever... reminds me of feeling genuinely happy ... (not drugged-up the way most "rave" music does...)

VIDEO:
KAOMA: LAMBADA
... isn't this one classic..?!?...
... The video's dated 1989... surely it came out in most Anglo-Saxon countries a long time after that..? I seem to remember it from the mid-1990s...



Those shots of kiddies dancing reminded me of this one... it's from a Spanish film called Cria Cuervos (Cry of the Crows)... this track was a hit all over Europe.

JEANETTE: PORQUE TE VAS

African Pygmy Mouse; Mongolian Pygmy Hamsters...

JUST NOW I have cleared out my robotrotters' tiny toilet, the Italian Grated Hard Cheese (ie own brand Parmesan) tube latrine with washing-up liquid and lots and lots of water.

This I rinsed out into my own toilet's cistern until that was brimful with bubbles and yet the fresh water running out was foam-free and clear. It took a lot of rinsing...

Now the Trotters are glaring at me suspiciously and rambling 21 to the dozen on their wheel. Not even Baby Itchy will go into the latrine tonight (where she has been known to sleep on occasion ~ tawdry little swine that she is!) ~ it is too clean for them all and they do love scent-marking. My squealy observations, "you smell like a wee-wee!" are taken as compliments, pink ears and pink little noses all a-twitching...

Gazing at these ovel furries from on high, I see they are hammy equivalents of hatchback cars. A stubby of build and a little too short-looking for their own good. Makes me wonder how they ever balance, though they do. And their rotundness of body never stops them pinging about like crazy...

It is, after all, the Chinese year of the Tubby Hamster. In Vietnam they've gone so very crazy with the new trend of pet hammykeeping that the Communistic national government has actually banned these pets, saying such verminous face-pouched mini-rats do nothing for the good of society (what about shining the sunlight of joy with their nocturnal entertainment escapades~??) and harbour only diseases and fleas...

(These are the 2/3-of-a-rat-sized Syrian maxi-hamster, the traditional tubby so many of us kept in schooldays.)

I saw Woody, my personal wild Woodmouse again this evening. Pinging along the pavement and scurrying into a bush.. The European woodmouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, has bigger, poppier eyes than the common housemouse (mus musculus, the common housemouse, also the common white labmouse beloved of testers-on-animals worldwide and the same species as the "fancy mouse" of varied coats and colours so popular as a pet in times not too long past...) Woody Woodmouse has perkier ears and a droplet, rather than a bullet-shaped little body; and his natural coat is a chestnut mouse rather than the duller, more greyish mouse of the house mouse. To my eyes Woody appeared enormous ~ almost the size of a rat. But then again everything of the rodent persuasion appears enormous now I'm so fully roborovski-ized. Roborovskis are the smallest of all pet rodents, the tiniest (not to mention quickest and most highly-strung) of all hamsters. The African Pygmy Mouse is one of very few rodents who is actually smaller than the roborovski. In fact African pygmy mice are the tiniest rodents in the world... yet even these are no shorter in body length than a fullgrown robbie. They are only smaller because they're far, far slighter of build than the oval-tubby robo. You can watch one timidly testing a tidbit of cheese below...

VIDEO:
African Pygmy Mouse ~ the world's tiniest rodent ~ Nibbling Cheese. 4 or 5cm in length, these are just a little shorter than the 5cm/2in-long roborovski hamster. Being far thinner, however, they're far lighter and slighter than the tubby roborovskis.



Another mouse-like critter has hit the headlines of late thanks to a scientific study on its drinking habits. The Pen-Tailed Tree Shrew. This is a tropical tree shrew, who seeks out alcoholic beverages in the form of fermentingly ripe berries by sniffing out their yeasty aromas, scuttling up to the groaningly over-ripe bush-bar and squatting on it's branches where he laps up the goodness with his tiny tongue until he has imbibed the equivalent of nine glasses of wine in human terms... Scientists are intrigued: how on earth does such a tiny furry hold his drink so well..?!?

VIDEO 2:
Sinead O'Connor: This is a Rebel Song (live)
This is one of my favourite Sinead vids.
(Ignore the title, btw, if you don't know it: this is NOT commie protest music, it's a song about being in love yet unable to share feelings... both nationally and personally...)



Food blog of the day: Debrueil Family Cookbook debreuilcookbook.blogspot.com