weird details

I saw this over at Nicoles blog Nickle Annie and thought I would do my own if you want to do one about you follow the link at the bottom of the page and leave me a comment to let me know so I can nosey at yours ( the information Doris keep it clean lol)

You entered: 1/26/1964
You were born on a Sunday under the astrological sign Aquarius.
Your Life path number is 11.
The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2438420.5.
The golden number for 1964 is 8.
The epact number for 1964 is 16.
The year 1964 was a leap year.

As of 6/28/2005 5:55:06 AM CDTYou are 41 years old.

You are 497 months old.

You are 2,161 weeks old.

You are 15,129 days old.
You are 363,101 hours old.
You are 21,786,115 minutes old.
You are 1,307,166,906 seconds old.

There are 212 days till your next birthday on which your cake will have 42 candles on it.
Those 42 candles produce 42 BTU's,or 10,584 calories of heat (that's only 10.5840 food Calories!) .

You can boil 4.80 US ounces of water with that many candles. ( or start a small forest fire)

Your birthstone is Garnet

The Mystical properties of Garnet
Garnet is used as a power stone
Some lists consider these stones to be your birthstone. (Birthstone lists come from Jewlers, Tibet, Ayurvedic Indian medicine, and other sources)
Emerald, Rose Quartz

Your birth tree is
Cypress Tree
The Faithfulness - Strong, muscular, adaptable, takes what life has to give, happy content, optimistic, needs enough money and acknowledgment, hates loneliness, passionate lover which cannot be satisfied, faithful, quick-tempered, unruly, pedantic and careless. ( sounds nearly accurate. I mean all the good stuff is right and all the other stuff is crap ;) )

There are 180 days till Christmas 2005!
The moon's phase on the day you wereborn was waxing gibbous. ( I have no idea what this bit means but it sounds appropriate)

Click here to do your own

Telephones and pranks

Ok after the last blog and the comments it got, it really got me reminisning about all the daft phone tricks we used to do. There used to be a little group of us always 3 sometimes 4 and we would meet up at a telephone box just down the road from where I lived , remember the ones that had just the 2p and 10 p slots?

We would telephone a random number and when they answered ask for Harry, when they said there was no Harry there we would say "oh ok if you see him can u tell him Steve phoned" and hang up. This would go on everyday for about a week then we would phone the same number and say "Hya its Harry are there any messages for me?" The responces were quite varied, some would laugh and say oh yes very funny, others would scream abuse at you, but we always found it hilarious.

Another one was we would phone up and say we were from the GPO( long time before BT) and say that we had too much wire at our end could they give it a tug and pull some through, now you have to remember that at this time phones didnt plug in like they do now they were actually wired into the wall. Lots of people would say things like oh ha ha do I sound stupid, but I swear sometimes they would agree to do it and then the line would go dead and we always wet ourselves laughing convinced that they had pulled the wire out of the wall.

Talking of walls, another one was to phone up and ask to speak to Mr Wall, they would say " No Mr Wall here" so we would ask for Mrs Wall, Master Wall and Miss Wall all with the same reply and the person getting less patient, finally we would ask "So there are no walls there then?" exasperated they would shout NOOOO and we would shout "Well whats holding your bloody roof up then"!! and proceed to fall about laughing.

Other pranks we would play, today make me squirm and think how would i react if someone did it to me.

Probably the worst one looking back was one which we only tried a couple of times which was to collect dog crap with a shovel until we had a nice little pile then wrap it all up in a thin wrapping of newspaper. We would then place it on the doorstep of a house, set it on fire, knock on the door and run off. Not too far though because we wanted to see the reaction. The person would come to the door and try to stamp out the fire thus covering their footwear in steaming hot dog poo. This we found so hilariously funny that one day we were laughing so much that we couldnt run and nearly got caught by one of our "victims".

I know, I know I should be ashamed of myself and I am but I must admit to a little titter as I typed this

What pranks did you get up to as a kid? I would love to know

Doris over at Grans on bran got me thinking with her post about phone boxes.
I can remember when my Dad told us all if the next phone bill wasnt smaller then he was fitting a lock to the phone. So when the next bill came we were all prepared for the lock to be fitted
We had a trim phone

and not to disappoint us Dad sent the lock home with Mum with instructions to fit it straight away.
The lock was fitted but the hilarious thing was mum fitted it in the zero which meant you could still turn the whole dial round it took about a week for Dad to realise and fit it properly in the number one.
I dont know how we found out but someone must have told us that you could tap the lever that disconnected the call when you put the phone down, so we did that everytime we needed to use the phone. It was a case of tap it once for 1 twice for 2 and so on up to ten for a zero. It would have been easy if everyones number was 1111111 but when you tried to tap out a nine or a zero it got quite a bit more difficult which resulted in lots of wrong numbers each time we tried it. The best part of this was the look on Dads face when the next bill came and it was more than the last one! so of course we then blamed Dad for running up the phone bill.
Needless to say he took the lock off.

Why?

Just a quick comment.
Caught about 10 minutes of Celebrity Love Island last night and only one thing occurred to me.............WHY?

I cant understand the person that came up with the concept, can you picture it?
"Well the general idea is we get a load of Z-list celebrities and put them on this tropical island resortfor a few weeks where they will be pampered and waited on hand and foot( I am summising this bit from what has appeared in the newspapers), pay them more for doing it than most people earn in a year and put it on TV"

Even worse is the TV executive who said " thats bloody brilliant why haven't we done this before"
I'll tell you why mate cos its crap

Big Brother ?

I have just had an epiphany, bear with me and I will explain;-
The government has announced that it would like to charge us for driving our cars(like they dont already i hear you cry), but by a fairer system or a sort of pay as you go type charge. So the more you drive or the more popular the road you drive on, the more it will cost you.
They say we can put a tracker chip in each car so that we can see where the car is and where its been at any time ( cue George Orwell screaming " SEE I TOLD YOU, I DID WARN YOU, BUT DID YOU LISTEN")
I can see a few flaws in their thinking not the least of which is that all the little b roads, they built the motorways to get us off, will fill up again.

But its the technology that has brought me to my epiphnical (is there such a word?) thought. If they can tell you where any car is at any time I have a different or additional application for their technology.
I think that everything touched by children should be fitted with a similar chip, for example the TV remote; so that when they move it, hide it or just put it somewhere it shouldnt be we could just phone up and say in true British form
"sorry to trouble you but could you tell me where the remote is please" and they would look at the tracking map and say " of course sir , its just behind the curtain on the window ledge in the first bedroom on the left as you come to the top of the stairs". I am telling you I would happily pay a small fee for that service.

What a time saver it would be in the mornings too, just picture it, instead of 20 minutes frantic searching you could just telephone and say "hello its me again, sorry to trouble you but could you tell me where Little Johnnys left school shoe (this could actually be school tie, homework book, reading book, PE kit,or anything else) is please" and they would say " Oh certainly sir, its in the rabbit hutch at the other end of the garden" ........You think I'm kidding don't you? Well I can assure you I am not, things dissappear from where the kids " definitly Put them" and reappear in the weirdest places.

As in most households these days we have remotes for just about everything TV, DVD Video, Stereo, Sky and at any one time I would say at least three of these are missing and always the one that you need.
So i am going to write to the government department and tell them I have an idea I am certain 99% of the population would support, but then again that would probably put them off.

Meme's

Since I posted about the stuff I miss from being a child that Cheryl put me up for I kept meaning to Google (oops is that an advert? I must say for balance that other search engines are available, but the fact I have to use google to find them defeats the object somewhat) the word to find out what it actually meant, but you know how it is, things, annoying things get in the way of blogging, like work, kids, sleep.
So thank goodness for Doris over @ grans on bran who has done all the work for me,this is the definition she found

Pronounced: `meem

What is a meme? A meme is an idea, or a particular way of thinking about what an idea is. A meme is a unit of mental information in the same way that a gene is a unit of biological information -- a metaphor of an idea as a transposon, a pattern of thought as a virus, a knowledge structure as a chromosome.

Memes compete to spread their information though a social population in the same ways genes compete to spread their information content through a biological population.

from http://www.meme.com/memedef/

Ok so is that all clear now? No me either but at least we tried and please dont complain to me it was Doris's definition ;o)

Is it art?
I think sometimes I am what some people might call a fence sitter, I always try to see both sides of an argument or point of view. This can be refreshing but it can also be very annoying for those with strong views one way or the other. Which brings me to my point ( alright alright I got here eventually didnt I?)
I saw an article the other day in the news paper about Tracy Emin and an exhibition, now I know lots of opinions have been shared about Ms Emin and her " pieces" but what I am confused about is the very question Is It Art? or do I think it is to be precise

An umade bed with condoms and tampons and soiled knickers on it
is this art?
or a sheep pickled in formaldhyde


or even the " room Installations

.

I can understand some unusual paintings like Picasso's marie

.

when you compare "modern" art ( its called Stuckism or re-modernism I believe)
to great classics like Constables Salisbury cathedral



or van gough's sunflowers



I dont think I need to go on I have just answered my own question, To me no its not art I think its just a case of the emperors new clothes the wonderful art glitterati tell us that it is so we are supposed to believe them. But then again each to their own

Came across this today whilst meandering through the blog lands, I started off at my mate Cheryls and saw a comment from Adrian at sirharris.com who had a link to the piece on renewable energy.
An informative piece on the use of solar panels and wind turbines, we all know that eventually the resources we are using will run out and that alternatives are available but will take quite a lot of investment .
Government initiatives to increase the awareness of valuable resources and increase the levels of recycling are all very well but we need to start to use the new technological advances we have made.
I know of a plant in Wrexham that solely manufactures solar panels to export them all to Germany where the government subsidises the cost of the panels and installation by 50%. I believe the cost of the panels and installation would cost somewhere around the £10,000 mark over here which is just too much to make it viable as it would take too long to recoup the costs from the savings you make on your electricity bill. So obviously government subsidy is needed
Sorry I must get off my soap box its giving me vertigo

Cheryl over at madbaggage has seemingly tagged me for something called a meme! I must find out what these terms mean one day lol
Well the subject is 5 things I miss about my childhood
here goes

1 Watching TV on a saturday morning in your pyjamas sometimes even with your pillow and quilt. In the days when kids didnt have 200 channels to watch in the morning. I mean we only had three channels and really BBC 2 didnt count cos that was full of boring programmes about weird things on Open University introduced by men with long hair and beards. The real programmes to watch were those like double deckers and white horses ( a really badly dubbed foreign programme) then later on Multi coloured swap shop.

2 All day bike rides..... First thing in the morning during the summer holidays, our Mums would make us a packed lunch of sandwiches, a packet of crisps, a chocolate biscuit and a bottle of squash and off we would go for the whole day with the only instruction to be back for tea. we got up to the usual stuff that lads get up to, nothing malicious or illegal just boys being boys. Like the time we made rafts to sale on a pond we "found" not realising that the bottom was full of broken glass and rusty metal which caused some real damage to our feet when our raft sank mid way across and we had to wade to the side. Still at least we had each other for company when we were waiting in casualty. And the time when I wasnt fast enough to escape when scrumping apples and got shot in the behind with a salt cartridge. I can remember the sting even today

3 Sunday afternoon visits to Grandparents........ I suppose part of this is that I miss my grandparents but its not just that, it was the tinned ham sandwiches my Nana would make the chocolate marshmallow biscuits, just playing in the garden, washing the car with my grandad, everything about the memories of the afternoons brings a smile to my face.

4 Birthdays...... do you remember when birthdays were special and you looked forward to them for weeks? I miss the anticipation of the excitment, I honestly think that if people didnt remind me I would forget my own birthday

5 Family weddings........ I come from a large family who used to have some fantastic family gatherings especially the weddings where just with family there would be hundreds of people but all people you knew, Fantastic times that dont seem to happen these days what with the cost of weddings and how spread out people are.



When you play, just knock the top link off the list (yes you have to include the live links), and add your own blog address at the bottom.
Chaos Theory
Wired
Bad Aunt
Mad Baggage
Wittering Heights

If five people play at each level then top of the list finds themselves with something like 800 links to their site, amongst other bloggers. I can see this catching on if it works. Its also fun to go see who tagged who and check out the sites.