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Author Archives: Nolli
As mad as …
…a box of frogs
1982
It was on the good ship Venus…
But the buggers won’t let you see us,
You won’t see me much on Google+ anymore….
Don’t be evil
More from Haerbin
Cold, cold, cold.
Jilesi – The Temple of Bliss
Yes – I DID make this video.
Polish lawmakers don Guy Fawkes masks to protest ACTA
Dear Sir,*
I for one am disgusted .
How dare these elected officials stand-up for democracy and due process. It is repugnant and perverse in the extreme.
The unelected cabals met, the money was paid, the deal was done. It is high time that these SERVANTS learned their place and do as they are told.
Free speech? Europe’s economy is in the toilet and this shower stand-up for free speech? Where is the profit in that? No profit, no taxes. Work it out, retards!
It makes my skin crawl to think of these be-suited thieves standing up for the people’s right to make duplicates of what they have bought. If people don’t buy the same thing four times, where is the profit?
ACTA is a just and righteous law that will enshrine and protect the profits of hard-working and innovative executives. Without whose companies you will have nothing. Learn on which side your bread is buttered.
Copying is theft. Moving that file onto your HDD is theft. Nothing less. You should be in jail. Each copy of a file costs a starving artist their next meal, you heartless bastard. I hope you can sleep at night with the suffering you cause.
ACTA for profit!
ACTA for jobs!
ACTA for life!
Outraged,
Tunbridge Wells
* This message brought to you by Illuminati Industries Inc.
Morning Night and Day – New Order
No I didn’t make this video.
What I want for Christmas (1976)
Dear Santa,
Please can I have an Electrical Lab 3 for £5.95.
Thank you,
No comments because bots
Tianjin – reflections
'Liberation Bridge' at sunset
Renmin Gong Yuan (People’s Park)
The Fire Station on Hua Yuan Lu
Saltaire- reflections
Mr Flibble is VERY cross
What are we going to do with them, Mr Flibble?
We can’t possibly do that, who’d clean up the mess?
Overland Odyssey to the Orient – The Prologue
The Prologue
The cliche that a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step is misleading. Before I took that first step on my 5,150 mile journey* I felt like I had run a marathon. The list of tasks to be completed seemed endless at first. Obtaining a CELTA qualification and quitting my awful job was the easy part. Sorting through a lifetime’s accumulation of bits and pieces and miscellaneous crap, throwing away what was not required and putting the rest into storage was hard. Everything had to be moved, as much as possible was recycled. The St Gemma’s Hospice and St George’s Crypt charity shops both accepted a lot of my stuff hopefully, they will make some money from them.
Getting my house into a good condition where it could be rented out was even harder. Planning my journey was fun but getting the tickets and visas was less so.
A Citycabs black and white taxi
Before I left I managed to fit in a day at Headingley to watch a county cricket match between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire with Percy, Chris and Cousin Martin. Yorkshire had a bad day at the crease but went on to win the match. A sunny day , the sound of leather on willow, good company, good food and plenty of ale – life doesn’t get much better than this.
The last few days were hectic but on August 7th at 13:00 British Summer Time I found myself standing outside my house waiting for a taxi that would take me on the first part of my journey.
* That’s as the crow flies the actual distance travelled was much greater.
/ðə/ /bɜːd/ /ɪz/ /ðə/ /wɜːd/
Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 – March, 1918
A shrine to war poet hero Wilfred Owen
from The Daily Telepgraph
The forester’s house in which Wilfred Owen took refuge hours before he was killed in 1918 has been re-built in his honour.
The Degradation of Modern Morality and the Debasement of the Person
Wondermark
“Chair-Holding” an ancient sport originating from the environs of Royston Vasey, England.
Many thanks to Mr Rut for this link.
1605 vs 2011
Gunpowder Plot 1605
Or
“A brief account of that bloudy & subtle Design laid against the King, his Lords and Commons in Parliament, and of a Happy Deliverance by Divine Power.”
Real IRA Plot 2011
The planting of bombs and buying guns is an example of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, although the sentences for those arrested are now much less severe:
The plotters were hung, drawn and quartered and their heads displayed in Westminster
A Google news search for ‘terrorist plot’ gathered 2,110 results. In 2011 the alledged perpetrators of terrorism are:
an ex-Soviet officer in Columbia, the ‘Real’ IRA, various Islamist conspiracies, two Swedes found to be innocent, Iran & the USA making accusations and counter-accusations … and the list goes on.
To Autumn
Ode to Autumn
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells”
John Keats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Autumn
WSJ China Real Time Report
A good source of news about China with an American slant.
For random recitiations from real-life read Renrut’s World – Gallery 7
The mark of truth, as guaranteed by Mr Rut himself.
Gallery seven featuring:
Shit God
A tale of parental betrayal foreshadowed by the apparition of a fecal-deity.
This has to be one of my favourite cartoon sites on the web and I have been reading it for years now. Mr Rut and I have visited many of the same places and have had lots of adventures often with similar events and themes.
Enjoy!
À la recherche du temps perdu…
"Warning: may contain trace levels of sarcasm"
'They were born and then they lived and then they died, seems so unfair I want to cry.'
Stumbleupon Groups were great places that were first crippled then killed off by the cruel alien overlords that run the StumbleUpon Empire.
I started and ran three of them: China, Second Life and Sock Puppets.
Today, I has mostly been eating…
煎饼果子 (jian1 bing3 guo3zi)
With quite a long history, “jian bing guo zi” is something quite unique to Tianjin. It is a kind of Chinese pancake that is usually sold as a fast breakfast food on the streets. “Guo zi” refers to the deep-fried dough sticks made in some places in northern China. Prepared on stalls on the street it comes with a variety of garnishes and relishes – very tasty.
They cost 4RMB.
for the longer HD youtube version click here:
How to drink vodka…
http://www.russianvodka.com/how_to_drink_russian_vodka.html
“Russian starters, or zakusky, include pickled and fresh vegetables, baked potatoes, bread, cheese, salted fish and other readily available snacks suitable to accompany the shots of vodka.”
Russian Vodka With Onion, Garlic, Bread and Pickled Cucumbers
Russian Vodka With Bread, Herring, Baked Potatoes, Onions and Pickled Cucumbers
Chipping Norton Invitation Aunt Sally League
http://www.chippyauntsally.co.uk/
Aunt Sally is a traditional Cotswolds/Oxfordshire summer game, still played in many pubs in the area.
The dolly (a 10cm high ball or skittle) is placed on a metal spike normally around 3 foot tall. Players (typically two teams of 6) take it in turns to throw 6 sticks at the dolly. The aim is to knock the dolly off the spike, without hitting the spike.
It is a fun way to spend a lunchtime or an evening outside at a pub, as you discover just how hard it is! Well worth trying if you’re in a pub with a court.
The game of Aunt Sally goes back at least as far as the 17th Century. It may have been introduced by Royalist soldiers during the English Civil War when Charles set up court in Oxford.
Two teams of eight players throw six sticks each per leg. The game is played over three legs. The largest number of dolls scored per team wins each leg. If there is a tie in the decisive leg, each team can throw three sticks and then one until there is a decisive result. In the league system, however these days legs can be tied, with two points being awarded for a leg win and one for a draw. If a player fails to score in a leg, it is called a blob with the ultimate embarrassment of a three blob game often being published in the local newspapers sports section. It is a custom that the winner of the fourth (beer) leg is bought a drink of their choice by a member of the opposing team.
Fire! , 着火了！, огонь!
Luckily, we didn't die in our beds
As I was surfing the web last night I casually asked my wife if she could smell burning plastic. She said she could and said she thought it might be coming from the bathroom. I looked in and light wisps of smoke were curling around the ceiling light, the source was a light switch. I warned her quickly and ran pell-mell down the stairs to alert the block warden and grab a fire extinguisher. When I returned there were flames that were starting to lick at the plastic ceiling. I had caught the fire just in time.
The good news is that we put it out quickly, nobody was hurt and no real damage was done but those powder fire extinguishers cause a dreadful mess and we were without power for a while. The most worrying thing is the ‘What if?’ questions – what if it had caught fire at 4:00am?
…sometimes I go out by myself…
"Well sometimes I go out by myself and I look across the water, And I think of all the things, what you're doing and in my head I paint a picture "
Header pictures
So far I’ve added seven ‘Header Pictures’ all taken by me on my travels:
International Test Match Cricket at Headingley Cricket Ground, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.
Yurts at Buuveit Camp, Terelji National Park, Mongolia.
The Vltava (Moldau) River in Prague, Czech Republic.
A tugboat on the Angara River, Irkutsk, Russia
Train number 362 from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator
County Donegal, Ireland
Zhongshan Park, Qingdao, Shandong, China
Enjoy!
Life after the Stumble Button
The StumbleUpon blog has been exported and uploaded, tweaking is occuring, friends, followers and fans are being notified. Groups are being archived, screenshots taken.
This flurry of activity is due to the developers of Stumbleupon deciding to stab their loyal userbase in the back and remove all the blogging features on SU like photoblogging, using html and being able to post single ‘blog posts’ i.e. all the bits that made it fun.
I will continue to use the SU messaging features to keep in contact with some of the many friends I have made during the last seven years.
Let’s hope that things get better from now on, update your bookmarks.
ARCHIVES NORMANDIE 1939-45
Archives Normandie 1939-45 was a good French language website with free resources about Normandy in WW2. It seems to have stopped being active sometime in 2012.
http://www.archivesnormandie39-45.org/
Now available with very limited functionality using the ‘Wayback Machine’:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120530082030/http://www.archivesnormandie39-45.org/
http://www.archivesnormandie39-45.org/
“sur le premier site au monde
Looking for more history?
Update December 2024 – for some reason bots like this page so here’s a little spam poison.
Eatliver.com
http://eatliver.com/i.php?n=594
Update 2022: couldn’t find the original link on Eatliver.com but glad to see the site is still going strong so I randomly linked something I found amusing:
With apologies to http://granolagirl.stumbleupon.com
Are you good or evil?
http://quizilla.com/cgi-bin/result/result.plhttp://quizilla.com/users/daddysgirl/quizzes/Where%20Did%20Your%20Soul%20Originate%3F
Update Can’t find the original so here’s something approximately the same:
https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=are-you-good-evil
“You come from Heaven. You’re the purest of pure, a saint. You’re probably an angel sent directly from Heaven.”
Chinese New Year 2005 : Year of the Wood Rooster
http://www.chinapage.com/newyear.html
2005 is the Year of Yiyou, popularly known as the Year of the Rooster
2011 is Year of Rabbit.
2010 is Year of the Tiger.
2009 is Year of the Ox;
2008 is the Year of Rat;
2007 is Year of Pig or DingHai –
2006 is Year of Dog.
2005 is year of the rooster
2004 was the Year of Monkey.
2003 was the Year of the Goat
Air Buccaneers UT2004 Mod
http://ludocraft.oulu.fi/airbuccaneers/
Update: Now available on steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/223630/AirBuccaneers/
I would have liked Air Buccaneers to have won the Make Something Unreal Contest but third place is good.
View the trailer – http://ludocraft.oulu.fi/airbuccaneers/video/AirBuccaneersUT2004.wmv it’s worth it
StumbleUpon User Baggpuss
http://baggpuss.stumbleupon.com/
Accessible using the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050327145145/http://baggpuss.stumbleupon.com/
Another bloke from God’s own county (Yorkshire of course) who takes us on a trip down memory lane with some links to quality children’s animation.