Personal Blogs

It's only me worries

Why the sky is so blue.

The lark doesn’t care.

Last weekend next door had a big do; marquee, live band and so on. As midnight approached the music was still very loud, so I went round and asked the band if they could turn it down a bit.

They immediately agreed, and when I got home it was noticeably quieter, although not as peaceful as I might have wished. But I left things at that, remembering Gran's wise saying: “Never fight the band that heeds you.”

Anyway I gave it a shot.

“Were they the ones that hung out with the Persians?”, I said.

Apparently this wasn’t the right answer.

Sow.

What?

Notice me, oh! notice me, they screamed.

And yet, I felt, ... not all was as it seemed.

I started a company selling origami. It's making a profit on paper.

A Spoonerism, named for the Rev. Spooner of New College Oxford, who is supposed to have often made this kind of speech error (or maybe he was just making jokes), is when the first letters of two word phrases get swapped, with amusing resuts.

For example Spooner allegedly said to a wayward student: "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain."

I've long wondered if there are any triple spooners. These would be three words for which shifting the first letters of each word in a cycle gives a different set of three words.

These seem quite hard to think of, so today I concocted a computer program to generate them. It generates plenty, but so far none have been all that memorable or funny, and many include very unusual words, so they don't really work.

The best I have so far is this. It's not too bad, although there are probably better ones out there.

A regular newspaper columnist referred to plans to grow watercress in allotments.

Another paper commented on the article under the headline

PRESS SLOT CITES CRESS PLOT SITES

I realise many people think Cats are better than Dogs but to them please let me say,

This verse is proof they are wrong, because it’s doggerel, OK?

Wildflowers are one of my passions. Yesterday I spotted this beauty in a hedge near where I live.

This lovely climbing, or at least scrambling, plant is Solanum dulcamara. Dulcamara = Sweet-bitter (think 'La Dolce Vita', and 'Amaretto'). A common English name for it is Bittersweet. 

Solanum seems to come originally from Pliny but I think he confused it with a different plant¹. Both come from the family that includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines, and if you have ever observed the flowers of those plants you will see the family resemblance. Similarities in flower structure are what allows botanists to classify plants, rather than size, leaf and stem structure, habitat and so on.

My mother use to call this (or a very similar plant) deadly nightshade, but although the fruits of bittersweet are toxic, deadly nightshade is Atropa belladonna. Deadly nightshade has a rich folklore and history ², including being used for poisoned arrows, so it was literally toxic, because toxic comes from the idea of poisoned tips, via ancient Greek τοξον toxon = bow.

¹ "The solanum, according to Cornelius Celsus, is called "strychnon" by the Greeks; it is possessed of repercussive and refrigerative properties."

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D27%3Achapter%3D108

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna

I hate air travel. I tried to sleep on the aeroplane, but I just fell off.

Only a rose

But what an only!