Monday 28 November 2011

Pipped at the post: You pays your money: Washington water feature: Cut to build: Mobile rabbit: Bad advice: Adventurous Aussies’: and Time to tell.


More than cold at the Castle this morn, white crusty stuff all over the Honda as well as on the inside, the study is rapidly filling up with extinct enumerators and the butler is out gathering fat teenagers for the furnace.
I watched the final Grand Prix of the season on BBC1 yesterday, because of the cuts next year Auntie will only be showing ten of the twenty races live-the other ten will be “highlights”, but they have managed to “save” enough dosh to continue to pay ‘celebs’ to dance around at our expense.


For certain readers-Pippa Middleton has signed a six-figure publishing deal worth £400,000 to write a guide to party planning, which will be released in time for Christmas next year.
The book will be a guide to being the perfect party hostess. It will include recipes, anecdotes and details of how to throw a range of different types of event.

 Can’t wait....



Click on the link above to find out if you will be dying to get out again....



Apparently “our” man in Washington “Sir” Nigel Sheinwald has splashed out £2,644 on a fire place and water feature to spruce up his office.
As a man who was brought in to preside over a new period of austerity, Sir Nigel raised eyebrows within the diplomatic world with his sumptuous office. “It looks like a James Bond villain’s lair,” whispers one. “It had to be refurbished in the final days of his predecessor, Sir David Manning, causing him great inconvenience.”
It remains to be seen whether Sir Nigel’s successor will retain the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, with its white leather seats and built-in passenger television sets, as his official car.


All together now....”we are all in this together”...



Son of a B....aronet (and alien reptile in disguise) George (I can count the number of cock ups on all three hands) Osborne is expected to announce another £5bn in spending cuts to pay for new building projects.
Badfart Snufflebum as he known among the rest of the extraterrestrial sideboard is to set out plans for a £30bn national infrastructure programme as he tries to breathe new life into the stalled economy.
A deal struck with pension funds will see £20bn invested in the decade-long programme, with the remaining cash coming from further spending cuts.
The first £5bn will come from spending cuts during the current spending period - up until the financial year 2014-2015.
A further £5bn will then come from spending cuts in the following spending period.
Schools, roads, power stations and high speed broadband will be some of the areas to receive a boost.

 There go even more of our pension funds....



Lakeysha Beard, talked for more than half a day while on an Amtrak train going from Oakland, California, to Salem, Oregon. The loud mobile conversation lasted sixteen hours last Monday, after which police stopped the train for twenty minutes to arrest the woman.
In the train's car, a few passengers asked the woman to put the phone away or to stop a few times during the conversation prior to notifying the train staff. Staff members were unable to convince the woman to end the conversation and stopped the train to arrest the woman and halt the disruption.

 I just want to know which mobile has sixteen hours talk time....



Is allegedly taking beauty tips from her stepmother-in-law, Duckess Kate has been receiving treatments from Deborah Mitchell after Duckess Camilla, the old nag wife of Prince Charles, recommended the beautician's bee sting facial.
Apparently Deborah has been treating Camilla for six years now. Like any customer who finds something good, Camilla has told her friends and in-laws, including Kate. Now she visits the Royal Family wherever they are in residence.

Which explains quite a lot....



Traditional beer sales are dropping as Australians are tempted not only by wine but by an increasingly varied range of other alcoholic drinks like trendy ciders and locally brewed ales.
Beer consumption per head has now slumped to a 60 year low according to recent figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
It was the Foster's TV ads of the 1980's featuring actor Paul Hogan as the stereotypical Aussie bloke, which helped plant the image of Australian men being huge fans of the "amber nectar".
However even that iconic Australian brewer has hit on tough times and Foster's now looks set to be sold to a London based company, SABMiller.

Do I give a XXXX...


And finally: 

Did you know?

As far as we know, time began with the formation of the universe in the instant of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

 Our Sun is about five billion years old. The Earth is estimated to be 4,540,000,000 years old.

Earth was created on the evening of Saturday, October 22, 4004BC, according to James Usher the 17th Century Archbishop of Armagh who came to this conclusion by adding up the family histories mentioned in the Bible - such as Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

The oldest rocks yet discovered on Earth are crystals of zircon from Western Australia, which are more than 4.4 billion years old.

Between 1929 and 1940 the Soviet Union changed the length of the week t h re e times. In 1930 Stalin abolished weekends to fulfil work quotas. In 1931 it went to a six-day week and back to a seven-day week in 1940.

In the International Fixed Calendar, invented by Englishman Moses Bruine Cotworth in 1859, there are 13 months - with the extra month called Sol.

In 1836 John Belville began to sell time. He set his pocket watch at the Greenwich Observatory where he worked every morning and would sell the precise time to clients in the City. The family business went on until 1940.

Mice normally live to a maximum of three years of age, chickens to 10, cats to 21, horses to 40, goldfish to 49, elephants to 70, giant tortoises to 150 and whales to 200.

 A nanosecond is one billionth of a second... a long time compared to the femtosecond, the attosecond and the shortest possible unit of time - known as Planck time.

 The Julian calendar assumed a year is exactly 365.25 days - about 10 and three quarter minutes too long. By 1582, it was 10 days out of sync, so Pope Gregory XIII decreed that 10 days should be lost to put things right.

 Rock beneath Niagara Falls is worn away at a rate of about a metre a year by the flow of water from Lake Erie 165ft above.

 When the railways first reached Bristol trains seemed to leave 11 minutes early. The problem was the drivers had come from London, 200 miles west, where sunrise is 11 minutes earlier. The only sensible solution, applied in 1940, was for all UK trains to use London time or "railway time".

Beans, peas and tomatoes are said to grow best if planted in the second week after the new moon.

Count the seconds between seeing a flash and hearing thunder. Three seconds' delay means the lightning strike is 0.6 miles away.

Hummingbirds beat their wings 90 times a second when they are hovering. Flies can beat theirs more than 1,000 times a second.

Legend says the first Roman calendar came from Romulus, who was raised by wolves with twin brother Remus and founded Rome in 735BC. He was keen on the number 10, so his years had only 10 months.

At Julius Caesar's command in 46BC two new months were introduced - July named after him and August after his successor Augustus. This Julian calendar also had leap years.

Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

If Earths history were compressed into 24 hours then the first humans would appear just 40 seconds before midnight.

Bristlecone pines are the oldest single organisms on Earth. Some have lived more than 5,000 years.



Info from The Book of Time, published by Mitchell Beazley, £20, www.octopusbooks.co.uk





And today’s thought:




Angus


2 comments:

CherryPie said...

I wonder if there is enough time in the day to read a book on time ;-)

Angus Dei said...

Tempus fugit CherryPie:)