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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s it: I’m orf to the Robot
Olympiad.
And today’s thought:
Angus
2 comments:
I wonder if there is enough time in the day to read a book on time ;-)
Tempus fugit CherryPie:)
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