I'd never seen a lizard in a rose before!

By the pond...

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

🤞

I have one currently. Works very well and seems incredibly economical to run.

I miss our old Canon color laser printer, because, well, color, but not the $400+ for a set of cartridges.

Christie's had the world's only matched pair for sale at auction, at an estimated price of $2.5 million in 2012.

The original post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7129905894238105602/

Written and posted by Robin Horsfall, on LinkedIn

The consequences of my aging process is that I make comparisons with the past. My mother was born in 1940 and gave birth to me when she was seventeen. At that time every adult over thirty remembered world war two and was familiar with early death, hunger, disease and risk. Most of all risk.

I rode my bicycle two miles to the cinema on Saturdays when I was eight years old. It was too big for me so I had to scoot it to start and get off to stop. My mother didn’t tell me to be careful she just gave me sixpence and I came home later. If something bad happened, it made absolutely no difference whether she knew immediately or an hour later.

The idea that I would be damaged in anyway by her behaviour was ridiculous. So long as she fed me and made me go to school, her job was done. She was female, this was dictated by the very obvious fact that her chromosomes were XX and she gave birth to children and breast fed them. Only a complete fool would have questioned that she was female. No one taught me that girls were different from boys, it was self-evident, girls in my world were and still are mysterious and overwhelmingly controlling. They knew what was right and held almost all the authority where my standards of behaviour were concerned. My mother sent me to church on Sundays but I think that gave her a private morning to cook dinner. When I was sixteen she slapped me across the face for being rude to her. I think she was right to do so.

I have a degree in literature and people tell me that I cannot use certain words because they offend people even when my intention is to be clear not offensive. I have to choose different adjectives or use alternative descriptions such as ‘not white’. If I have one apple it is singular, if I have two it is plural, that is without question, correct grammar. One of the greatest attributes of language might be using it to offend people, rather than attacking them.

Offending people is absolutely essential to stop insane, inane people from taking over the world. If I offend someone with my objections to their detrimental effects on my life I hope I will provide them with enough negative consequences to go away.

The world continues with wars. I wonder if at this moment an officer in a trench in Ukraine is worried about his use of pronouns to his soldiers, or if a mother in Gaza is worrying whether she should insist on carrying a weapon to be equal to her husband, or if her little boy who seems quite effeminate needs hormone treatment. She would probably slap me for my idiocy. Just like my mother - she would be right!

Is the world madder? Yes, but it is the affluent, over indulged, people who indulge in this madness, because they have nothing really important to do. The truth is offensive sometimes. Too much ice cream makes us obese, so the answer has to be ‘No you can’t have another one. too much will mess up your life and end it early.’ if that upsets you tough!

Who Dares Shares.

"I don't need "Thanks". It was the first time a clerk did not say thanks."

Please don't take my comment as any form or criticism, certainly absolutely none was intended - merely an observation.

I have the utmost respect for anyone who puts on a military uniform (or civilian one for that matter, such as police, fire etc).

I wouldn't have written anything but for the current events in the Middle East making the military, in the broadest sense, top of mind.

Wonderful that the school did that.

As to the Lowe's encounter, a couple of thoughts. It may not have been relevant to the conversation, but it's also (apparently) a cultural and age related thing.

Thanking veterans has really only been a thing since the late 1990s, and seems to have come from the Vietnam war when so many returning military personnel were treated appallingly. Whether they should have been there in the first place is a different question, but they did as their government commanded and were rewarded despicably.

According to polls, about 49% of all veterans don't want to hear "thank you for your service" while 40% do.

My own father, a very highly decorated submarine Captain, never ever wanted to refer to WWII at any time. He only described it to me once as a an awful, hideous thing. Sleep was evasive for many years.

I've since read about some of his activities in Navy chronicles, and some books in which he is mentioned.

I'm extremely grateful for what he and his generation did.

He also taught me that only a few are at the sharp end of the stick, and in a functional cohesive society everyone (other that a few parasites) plays a critical role, the infantryman, the teacher, the factory worker, the garbage man, the doctor and the lawyer.

To that list, I'm happy to add us energy industry folk - upon whom the globe's population is totally dependent and without whom most people would be dead within 3 months. But that's an entirely different topic.

For me, 11/11 is Remembrance Day, the one day of the year that I pause for a few moments and reflect on what brave people did so my life is as it is.

It has always horrified me that it has been turned onto some meaningless bullsh*t commercial opportunity.

Regrettably true.

I didn't mean it as a compliment.

The last bastion of Puritanism...

Of course, it depends on how long the general population of the US wants to remain second worlders, in contrast to the smart first worlders in the same but different country.

The consolation is that the dinosaurs are already old and will die off in a few more years.

To me the most entertaining part is that everyone in the US - even those vehemently against a metric system - uses a decimal system every single day of the year, and doesn't even think about it.

The US dollar, made up of 100 cents.

And of course, those who drive will easily recognise the readings on their odometer, with 176 yards or 528 ft being recorded as 0.1 miles.

Paper is a perfect example of the ridiculousnous of the SAE system compared to the European system, which is just SO simple.

A4 paper is very similar to US Letter size. A3 is exactly double A4, and A5 is exactly half; the system extends from there, A2, A6 etc. Envelopes work similarly.

Unnecessary complication and information overload are banes of modern life. I understand MS Word allows you to paginate document in more than 200 ways - how utterly pointless. Likewise the construction company's pickup truck, going the same speed a traffic, with it's yellow flashing lights. What purpose does that serve??

Again, nothing magical about the existing sizes used for drywall, all rather arbitrary.

As a previous poster noted, the issue is retro fitting, but at some point, hopefully we'll drag ourselves away into the 21st century.

If we are too lazy to do that, at least simply by using feet and decimal feet.

Elimination of fractions would be a useful, and attainable, goal.