The Wedge

My daughter Annabel turns out to be a bit of a whizz with her camera. This is her photo of one of the local pair of wedge-tailed eagles, taken above my “garden” this morning.

Photo: Annabel Fenwick Elliott

There is a danger, I suppose, of

A (Very Small) Monstrous Regiment

The twittering press has been making a fuss about the US Senate being all-woman on Tuesday this week. For example the headline in the Huff and Puffington Post  ran this:

Alaska Senator Says Only Women Showed Up To Run Congress Post-Blizzard

They quoted Senator Lisa Murkowski as saying

As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female. All of our parliamentarians are female….

What the article did not tell us was how many parliamentarians that was.

It was

I Remember Frank

For some reason, Frank Ifield’s 1960s hit “I Remember You” has been rattling around in my head. The lyric is not exactly the height of gallantry. It goes:

I remember you, ooh

Well, that’s not saying much, is it? Especially since they had evidently been on snogging terms:

You’re the one who made
My dreams come true
Just a few kisses ago

So presumably, the snogging was a while ago, or he would not be saying that he remembers her. But perhaps he had not got had much success in the romantic stakes if he had only had a “few kisses” since their meeting.

She was evidently been quite keen on him:

You’re the one who said
“I love you, too, yes, I do
Didn’tcha know?”

But how thoroughly was this reciprocated by our yodelling minstrel? Not much, it seems:

When my life is through
And the angels ask me to recall

The thrill of it all, then I will tell them
I remember you, ooh

So she was just a “thrill”.  And the most that he can say about her once through the Pearly Gates is that he remembers her. No details apart from that.

Bizarrely, people loved it. It was the first song ever to sell a million copies in the UK and it was top of the charts for 7 weeks. I played it on YouTube, and remembered it really quite well from my childhood.

 

 

Rays are sharp

I thought I should dig out my fins and mask for a bit of snorkelling down at the beach. The first time I have used them in ages.

With a few minutes, I came face to face with a stingray.  This is not

Stand and fight?

Donald Trump is obviously a bigot. He has earned a pile of scorn for saying that most Syrian refugees are men. He reportedly said:

When I looked at the migration, when I looked at the line … where are the women?… There look like very few women. Very few children. Strong, powerful men. Young. And people are looking at that and saying, ‘What’s going on?’

In reality, it appears that about half of the refugees are roughly equally divided between men and women. The men seem to be rather more at the front of queue, but we need to look at the whole queue.  So, as usual, Trump is over-egging the pudding.

But, but, but, he is probably right about the demographic of all those refugees who participated in mass sexual molestation in Germany on New Year’s Eve. And the lefties have a fair point when they say, “Would you not prefer to run away to live in Europe rather than stay and fight for your country”. And they are also right that the refugee men are not properly equipped to fight. But there remain a couple of residual problems with that

Piers Review – A Tale of Two Brothers

Looking at his website, WeatherAction, you might think that Piers Corbyn is a bit of an eccentric. But he is not stupid. His younger brother Jeremy Corbyn has an indifferent academic record, scraping together just 2 bare pass (“E grade”) A levels. By contrast, Piers has a first class degree in physics from Imperial College and an MSc in astrophysics from Queen Mary College.

As I have remarked before, I rather like Jeremy Corbyn, although I agree with the consensus view that he will probably keep the Labour Party out of power in the UK for quite some while. And I do not think Jeremy is wrong about everything. Piers, I like rather a lot. As a Marxist (ex-Marxist?), his politics are even pottier than Jeremy’s (they get it from their parents, it seems), but as a scientist, he is a breath of fresh air. He is not just a global warming sceptic, but an outright denier. Like many of us, he has noted that the predictions of CO² induced warming over the past 18 years are a busted flush – the actual data simply do not support the CO² theory. But unlike many of us, he has answers as to why this is.

These are largely to do with the

El Chapo

So. They have caught El Chapo.

Arrests of El Blokeo and  El Mateo are expected shortly.

Curly red writing

There are those who reckon that a Bristol is just about the best car in the world (albeit currently in hiatus). A lot less flashy than a Rolls-Royce, of course, but a lot more beautiful. A lot less speedy than a Ferrari, but a lot more comfortable. And much more important, in much better taste than any of the “brands” that spend a fortune on the sort of advertising that evidently reaches footballers, drug dealers and other crooks. The most they do by way of merchandising at Bristol Cars is the occasional bone china mug, pin or somesuch.

Myponga Weather I

As the last of the light fades, huge rain clouds are overhead, heading NW at great speed.

Out in the gulf, there is a pale pink horizon, like a child bride about to be over whelmed.

No rain here yet. But somewhere, probably

New Year’s Day at Myponga Beach

Louise was up early, and took some dawn photos, all within 5 minutes of the house, using her iPhone, to the obvious interest of the eagles.

I am not a big Apple fan. But it is remarkable that