It is a very nice day and there is nothing harrumphable in the Telegraph again; also I am, despite the earliness of the hour, starting to get the usual eyeball-collimating problem. Usually this gets better with the weather but since the condition is progressive its mark-space ratio steadily changes for the worse.
Accordingly, before this develops into the usual blinding headache, I forswear the computer until later on and am going out into the garden to exhort and encourage the worms, and to attempt to protect them from the war of extermination being waged by Dangerous Cat (who rushes about like a maniac, stopping every now and then to hammer the ground frenziedly with both front paws; this tactic is sometimes varied by the strategy of digging a hole and sitting smugly with her front paws in the said hole, which she clearly considers to be a credible deterrent posture).
You have just missed the chance to harruumph this:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/g20-summit/5076245/G20-bomb-plot-uncovered-by-police.html
See our entry about it here:-
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/theyre-looking-for-a-way/
I do hope you will be feeling better as soon as poss. We here and elsewhere all really need you to stay alive and able to type. That will do, for as long as it takes to do your work for liberty (it may be a rather long time.) You now, in the blogosphere, are widely regarded as performing the following functions:-
(a) You spot so much vital stuff, so you have an honourary position in the War Room of “Revenge”. or on the “foremast director tower” – take your pick of station.
(b) Your humorous and levelling approach to all that the Enemy Class tries seriously and gallumphingly to say, and to do, to the rest of us, is a credit to the Pusser’s Office. Or the senior ratings in the Beef Flat. Again, take your pick.
(c) Your identification and ranging skills fit you also for the position of “Guns”. Please specify your preferred method 9with whatever backups are needed) to electrically-fire all four turrets simultaneously, from either your “aloft” position or the WR
It is Spring in these parts of south-central Minnesota (sort of) and weekend before last when it actually got up to fifty-something temperatures (no joy since!), we let Them Cats all four out at once in the garden. Immediately (!), three started in on stalking one of our “robins” (the rusty-breasted thrush, I mean.) The operation had every aspect of a Coherent Plan, including a Stalker Cat, another Leading Cat easing down a deflection vector ahead of target. And One In Reserve Abeam, finally giving into the impulse and running to beat Hell right at the bird from the flank, when it spotted the Lead Cat at two o’clock and momentarily froze. Only momentarily, bird got away, Special Squad got…embarrassed.
They really do hate to be looked at when there is some sort of screw up!
DD: I am still alive and able to type, thank you; the doctors are unanimous in the view that this condition will not kill me, though some have said that were I to live to a ripe old age I will probably wish that it had. I have merely been having a bit of a day off. I shall probably have another ere long, possibly involving preserved steam engines. I worked for it; I owe it to myself; and nobody is going to deprive me of it, etc.
As to the naval stuff I have to admit to knowing about it little more than I read in the likes of O’Brian, which is why your kind remarks would probably make more sense to me if they were expressed in the eighteenth-century idiom (or, given that I often prefer pirates, perhaps the late seventeenth) but please don’t suppose that I don’t appreciate it. I just don’t really do WWII, except in the limited context of scientific intelligence, radar and other secret weapons. And my own military training, of course (one always equips to fight the last war, and trains to fight the one before last).
Emmett: our cats would probably do stuff like this if only they could resist the temptation to bitchslap one another instead.
Lydia, our newest, has been declawed somewhere along the line, has installed herself atop the fridge as Queen Empress and Mother Superior (we are at home in an old convent here in southern MN) — and Lydia bitchslaps the other three cats here with abandon! She gave me a HARD /whap/ the other day, when I reached to dethrone her before she should send all of the bread loaves and Weetabix flying. Then, on this last warmish and sunny Saturday afternoon, from the limestone crown of the brick walled porch she glared down with fierce disapprobation at Miss Emma Pouncer, leaped down all of a sudden to rush over and positively cuff Emma “up ‘longside her haid!” Lydia keeps lists and holds grudges, and she well may have been reproving Emma for /her/ untimely rush at the Horrid Robin on the previous Sunday, as it was Lydia who was the Leading Cat in that operation….
Emmett ought to pen a book.
Indeed.
Ah, Hell, I steal it all off of Bea Potter…and Murray Ball.