FaceBook Privacy Settings in “English Pirate”

September 19, 2010 by lizpanton

Prompted by “Facebook Places location-aware service launches in UK” on Amplify: http://bit.ly/9ZDXun

AAARGH! International Talk Like A Pirate Day – Sept 19th

September 15, 2010 by lizpanton

Talk like a Pirate on Facebook – this is so funny!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Having-your-language-as-English-Pirate/10856292…

PROVERBS FOR PATHETIC MEN – How even the most hopeless man can learn some basic housekeeping skills.

September 15, 2010 by lizpanton

“A watched pot never boils”

Men think that this proverb is something to do with science. Hopefully something thermonuclear. Though possibly related to that weird thing about the cat in the box falling out of the tree when no one is looking.

Despite being told that, “a watched pot never boils” and thinking that this is Science, and therefore Manly, most men take no notice and just keep staring at the kettle until it eventually boils.

Wanting to improve on the basic science, a man will sometimes stare extra hard at the kettle, to see if this does actually slow down the rate at which it boils. At same time, he suspects that if he really wills it hard to boil faster that this might just work, what with him being secret master of the universe and all.

At this point, a kindly woman in the vicinity might be driven to give the man a gentle clue as to the true meaning of the proverb. This is often, but not always, preferable to taking an axe to the pathetic creature.

Unfortunately, even the bluntest of women is as subtle as the silken wing of a moth compared to the average pathetic man, whose thought processes are akin to slowly dropping a pile of bricks down a chimney until a single, solid “thought” builds up at the bottom.

So, the woman might say, “A watched pot never boils – and there’s plenty to be getting on with in the meantime”.

Some men will be so confused by these two, seemingly unrelated strings of words that they will just turn and stare into the corner of the room to avoid looking at the kettle. Although this might not seem a great improvement on the original situation, it is a start. Firstly, the man has realised that he should not stare at the kettle. Secondly, the woman can creep up behind him with the axe.

However, like most pathetic men, our pathetic man will realise that the kind woman who loves and adores him, has cleverly found a way for him to indulge his interests in the more important things in life. He will continue to stare at the kettle, and there will be no outward sign that, in the dark recesses of his mind, the bricks are starting to pile up at the bottom of the chimney.

Being a man, he is now compiling and prioritising a mental list of all the things that might be conjured up by the phrase, “there’s plenty to be getting on with in the meantime.” For example:

1) Start a new air-fix model (I’ll finish the old one another time)
2) Make mental list of all wife’s friends, ranked by E-Scale Number.
3) Have a wank.

Naturally, a very sophisticated Pathetic Man, or an engineer, will quite quickly see a pattern that can be exploited to maximise use of his precious time, set things in their proper order in the Universe and also satisfy his “inner imp”, so:

“If I just get out the air-fix kit, then I can combine numbers 2) and 3) AND have a sniff of glue at the same time!”

If he is lucky, the pathetic man will awake with a jolt as the kindly, loving woman finally realises that gentle hints are as moths crushed beneath the heap of crap piled up at the bottom of the man’s mental chimney, and she yells, “do the fucking washing up while the kettle is boiling!”

If he is unlucky, there is always the axe 🙂

The Price of Coal

September 11, 2010 by lizpanton

GresfordDisaster.mp4
Watch on Posterous

If anyone can identify the haunting music here I would be grateful if you could let me know. I have emailed the Welsh NGfL to see if they can help. If they can’t, then I will try to contact the drama teacher from Flint who put together the teaching materials where I found the audio track and many of the photo’s.

The Gresford Disaster – Sept 22nd 1934

I made this slide show because, when I searched for the song “The Gresford Disaster”, I was amazed how little information there seemed to be on the internet about the disaster itself.

The audio (original is about 17 minutes – very haunting and does not include the song) plus many of the photos are from the Welsh National Grid for Learning site: http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/ngfl…

Most of the other photos are from pages on the Wrexham website:

http://www.wrexham.gov.uk/english/her…

I think that there might also be a couple of images from this website:

http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk

There is also a short BBC news story from a couple of years ago about “Mine disaster documents found – Historic documents uncovered by chance record the inquiry into the 1934 Gresford mining disaster” including an interview with possibly the last remaining survivor of the disaster:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/news…

I have never liked the song, “The Gresford Disaster”. It is a bit too close too home and rather mixed up in my mind with Aberfan, which happened when I was at school in North Wales, and both events were rather terrifying as a child. That said, I have very happy memories of being a bell-ringer at Gresford church in my teens.

I hope this video is moving and informative and just a little bit terrifying, as it should be.

There are some other videos about The Gresford Disaster on YouTube already, some with the song as the soundtrack and with photos not included here.

Read more at www.youtube.com