Wednesday 28 November 2012

Happy Monday - Nine shattered childhood illusions

From Journolists in the Daily Mail:-

The cast of Thunderbirds are really puppets.
The cast of Neighbours aren't.
The tooth fairy doesn't actually use your old teeth for anything.
Michelangelo wasn't a turtle.
The presenters of Blue Peter read from a script.
Eating crusts doesn't make your hair curl.
The pop charts are based on returns from one shop in Goole.
The contestants on Blind date are all unemployed actors.
Avoiding the cracks in pavements doesn't necessarily mean you won't have bad luck.

Monday 26 November 2012

Monday Meanderings



Ivy - a creeper and climber
 Hide and seek on top of the freezer!
"There's not much space for my ears in here!"
 Ivy, plural ivies (Hedera), is a genus of 12–15 species of evergreen climbing or ground-creeping woody plants in the family Araliaceae, native to western, central and southern Europe.  On level ground they remain creeping, not exceeding 5–20 cm height, but on suitable surfaces for climbing, including trees, natural rock outcrops or man-made structures such as quarry rock faces or built masonry and wooden structures, they can climb to at least 30 m above the ground.




The Last Leaf
 The last leaf of the year on the cherry tree.

New Boots
Who's got new boots, then?



 The Kitchen Cometh
My brother-in-law is changing over his whole kitchen so we are having his ‘old’ appliances.  (They are only old in his eyes – they are new to us and our appliances have seen better decades; better millennia even.)  That means re-sizing cupboards, sawing worktops, installing outside electrical fittings (don’t even ask…) plumbing; gas installation and so on.  And while all this is going on the kitchen contents have to live somewhere – chaos reigns.

I'm a Deltiologist
Postcard 105 from Anouk 25th June 2012
 
Thanks to Dawn Treader I have discovered I am a deltiologist.  I quote -

Deltiology (from Greek δελτίον, deltion, diminutive of δέλτος, deltos, "writing tablet, letter"; and -λογία, -logia) is the study and collection of postcards. Professor Randall Rhoades of Ashland, Ohio, coined a word in 1945 that became the accepted description of the study of picture postcards. It took about 20 years for the name to appear in the dictionary the first time.



Thursday 22 November 2012

Liverpool Museum (part 2)




Our trip to Liverpool Museum in October has provided me with enough items to keep posting until Christmas.  (Only about 32 shopping days to Christmas – if you want the time to the second click here).  




The second floor has some traditional glass-fronted cases with a Liverpool Timeline shown through various objects.  As usual, Partner-who-loves-tea and I played the ‘Gosh, do you remember those’ game as we looked at the memorabilia from the 50s and 60s.


The museum also has computer maps of old and new Liverpool and some other fascinating computer programs that can accessed through a number of terminals.


There is a wonderfully painted picture of Liverpool that GB and I saw in the Walker Art Gallery a couple of years ago (I think GB may have blogged it).   This close up shows the outside of the new Museum.


This gives some idea of the scale of the picture.


 This is a carriage from the Overhead Railway or Dockers' Umbrella as it was locally known.


I remember the Overhead Railway.  I rode on it with Dad a couple of times as he came home from work on a Saturday lunch-time, having taken me to work with him.  


 It ran along the outside of the docks above the Dock Road on an elevated rail about thirty feet in the air, all the way from The Dingle to Seaforth.  




 Sadly in 1956 it was closed due to the discovery of structural faults.  Even more sadly it was demolished the following year.  What a tremendous tourist attraction it would make nowadays.  Instead we are limited to seeing one lonely carriage in the museum.  


This is the Lion Locomotive – one of the world’s earliest surviving railway locomotives.  It was built in 1838 to haul luggage trains.




 There will be other odd items from the museum in future posts...

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