I had a friend Rudolph who was a fervent communist but worked during the day selling umbrellas, macs, Wellington boots and other stuff designed to keep you dry. He was a real expert and would tell customers “Rudolph the Red knows rain gear”.

Don't cry-ee! Don't sigh-ee!
There's a silver lining in the sky-ee
Bon soir old thing! Cheerio, chin-chin!
Nahpoo! Toodleoo! Goodbye-ee!

From the popular WW1 song Good-bye-ee, by Weston and Lee. Look out for it in Oh What A Lovely War.

What does chin-chin mean though? I always vaguely imagined it was an English-Languge expression for "cheers" and to do with two people holding glasses to their chins to toast one another.

But no! It seems to have come into English and many other languages from Italian cincin (pronounced the same). I found several explanations, such as it being derived for the name of the famous vermouth, or the sharp sound made when two drinking glasses gently collide.

But these informal etymologies, though appealing, are almost certainly wrong. The word appears to be from a Europeanised version of Chinese quing-quing,請請, which means something like "please, welcome". Why it came first into Italian I don't know.

Napoo is for another day.

My gardening companion was recently donated a garden bench which may have woodworm, so I looked up The Common Furniture Beetle. Turns out the woodworm is almost certainly not active and if it were then the wood can be treated in an ecologically friendly (except to woodworms) way.

Woodworms are larva of the CF beetle and spend three to four years eating their way through wood in a fairly haphazard way. They then come close to the wood surface (how do they know where it is?) and become a pupa for some weeks, finally emerging as adult beetles. From then on they don't eat, just mate if they can, and then the females lay their eggs in any cranny she can find in the wood, and the cycle starts again. Like many insects the adult we see is just a final short-lived phase at the end of a much longer life as a larva.

That's fascinating, that such a life-style has emerged, and in fact there are a fair bunch of other wood-borer insects apart for the CFB.

This all set me thinking about beetles. Famously there are many different kinds, about 400,000 known to date, and they constitute 40% of insect species and 25% of all animal species. Think of that; pick a random animal and there is 1 in 4 chance it will be a beetle.

A note to end on (The American Naturalist, 1959):

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

See https://www.jstor.org/stable/2458768

For years I was just an amateur crastinator. I knew I ought to turn pro but kept putting it off.

Geology rocks.

There’s a legendary story of a question in a philosophy exam

Is this a question?

To which the top-scoring student simply replied

If it is, then this is an answer.

Irrefutable, if you think about it.

A funnier but less deep variant is

Why?

Because!

Climbing the stairs at night

An old loose floorboard

Groans like a ghost.

Goodbye, old friend

We, the living, are the losers

Who must learn to bear that loss.

This plant is prunella, AKA self-heal. I found it growing at the side of a lane and didn't know what it was, but Bing 'Name that plant' came to the rescue.

Apparently the name means 'quinsy" a throat infection, and is derived from brunella, which is a diminuitive of brunus = brown. The plant was a traditional remedy for quinsy.

It's said to be edible and you can add it to salads but I'm not keen.

This is one they told when my daughter was in primary school.

Why do elephants have big ears?

Because Noddy won’t pay the ransom.