@Bluesqueakpip

Ceres isn’t a space dragon egg. Don’t be silly. It’s where the Clangers live.

Of course (slaps forehead), how could I have missed the obvious!  And clearly it is no coincidence that, just as the probe Dawn approaches Ceres, the Clangers are back on our TV screens!

Re the Canaries:  all credit due to Alex Neil; the tur…[Read more]

Wakes up and responds, somewhat belatedly

@Bluesqueakpip    re FIFA, yes! an excellent, if long overdue development.  What next for an Augean cleansing? the IOC?

In this neck of the woods the delight was compounded by football euphoria of a rather more parochial nature.  The Canaries are going up, back into the Premier League   🙂

Exc…[Read more]

@purofilion

erratum:  Nigel Hawthorne played Georgie in the 1980s adaptation; Benjy was played by Dennis Lill,

I trust that you got the joke about the Beethoven.  The first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata was Lucia’s party piece at the musical evenings where she entertained her social circle, but you may note that she never played the seco…[Read more]

@purofilion

Has anyone seen Susie Liggat’s production of Mapp and Lucia?

Yes, I saw it when it was shown on BBC last year, although the fact that it was produced by Susie Liggat hadn’t registered with me.

Have you read the books by E F Benson on which it is based?  I enjoy them as delightful social satire, skewering a certain kind of middle…[Read more]

@Arbutus  @todeledo    The Morning Glory which is most widely grown here has large, bright blue flowers which last for only one day and is an annual, so only lives for one season even if there is no frost to finish it off.  There are related species, also known as Morning Glory, which are short-lived perennials, but none of them are fully hardy.…[Read more]

@FatManInABox   Lovely photo of the Botanical Gardens.  I lived in Brum for a couple of years in the 1970s, but have no recollection of ever visiting them – which is odd, because my flat was little more than a mile away.  I have clear memories of visits to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Belfast when I lived in those cities, so maybe it is…[Read more]

@FatManInABox  May I add my congratulations and a  toast to your future career!

And when it comes to combatting things like post-election depression, there is nothing so therapeutic as gardening and the cultivation of plants – or so I find, at least!

@purofilion  If you do read any of the output of the Daily Mail (aka Daily Wail, Daily Heil, Daily Hate) I hope that you fumigate your eyeballs and seek counselling afterwards.  They seem to want to keep their readers in a constant state of fear and anxiety, and when it comes to things like social services, benefit claimants and the NHS any h…[Read more]

@janetteB  Holding elections on a Saturday or Sunday might have its advantages, but I don’t think that holding them on a Thursday has ever acted as a deterrent to voting here in the UK.  For a start, polling stations are open from early morning to 10PM, so unless there are people working 15 hour shifts, they should have time to vote before or a…[Read more]

@purofilion

they do have a mandate. A majority constitutes that regardless of seats.

Well, 11334726 votes were cast for the Conservatives, but 19011810 people voted otherwise, so although they have a majority in terms of seats, they certainly cannot claim the support of a majority among the voting population of the UK.  Even if you top up their n…[Read more]

@PhaseShift   My reaction was rather stronger than ‘Oh bugger’ and I am still alternating between steam-coming-out-of-the-ears angry and a mood of profound despondency at the prospect of (probably) at least five more grim years of this incompetent and economically illiterate shower doing their best to finish destroying all the good that was es…[Read more]

Turkey Constituency

Christmas            X

The only small spark of consolation as far as I am concerned is that the Labour candidate in the constituency where I live took the seat from a Lib Dem who got in last time by the squeakiest of narrow margins, and all I have seen and heard of him so far leads me to hope that he will make an excellent co…[Read more]

@steve-thorp

I am not sure that Monsieur Farage looks human

Well, according to a headline in today’s Independent, Farage wants to stop the BBC from producing programmes such as Doctor Who (UKIP frowns on all that extreme leftist propaganda, you know).  So obviously he is the worst kind of alien.    EXTERMINATE!

@purofilion   Although, as I said, I would struggle mightily to read it now, I have still a couple of lines of the Aeneid Book II by heart

O miseri, quae tant isania cives? Creditisne avectos hostes? Aut ulla putatis dona carere dolis Danaum?  Sic notus Ulixes? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Laocoon to the Trojans, warning them not to be fool…[Read more]

@purofilion

How does conjugate turn into conjugal?

Both come from the Latin  coniugere  – meaning: to yoke together, to connect  (from iugum, a yoke, and by extension, a yoked team, a pair, the marriage tie)

I studied Latin up to the age of 18 – it was one of my GCE ‘A’ level subjects.  Sadly it is now very rusty indeed, and I am certainly no lo…[Read more]

@purofilion

it is from the latin ‘to snore’ -I think

Yup! sterto  stertere  stertui  (you really shouldn’t feed my inner pedant 🙂

@ichabod

  For humans, trying to act ethically has been supposed to earn a “reward”

I was thinking more about things like people paying to build cathedrals in order to offset their various murders[Read more]

@purofilion   ‘stertorious’ strikes me as possibly a rather useful addition to the English vocabulary; a conflation of stentorian (from Stentor, the Homeric herald) and ‘stertorous’ – normally used for the laboured breathing of someone suffering from respiratory disease, but could, I suppose, be applied to a husky, rasping voice :-…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip    Thanks for the book recommendation.  That’s another one on order to be added to the tottering ‘to be read’ pile 🙂

I was a bit wary of Ehrman’s arguments, knowing his background, and it certainly looks as if he might have developed a tendency to overstate his case, to say the least!  To be fair, though, in ‘Who’s Word…‘ * at…[Read more]

@ichabod  @purofilion  I hesitate to jump in here, since I am very much an amateur student of Biblical history and textual criticism, but as far as I know, the main debate concerning Mark’s Gospel is not new, and it relates to the account of the resurrection.  The nativity doesn’t come into it, since Mark’s account begins with the appearance of J…[Read more]

@janetteB

it struck me that the Arthur stories were taken up by the Normans to legitimise their rule over the Saxons

So it seems.  As Geoffrey Ashe argued, they needed something corresponding to the Matter of France – the cycle of stories concerning Charlemagne and the heroes such as Roland who fought against the Saracens.  And Geoffrey of M…[Read more]