Lilac-breasted Roller

The Lilac-breasted Roller, Coracias caudatus, is a member of the roller family of birds. This one lives at Chester Zoo. The Lilac-breasted Roller is widely distributed in sub-Saharan Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula, preferring open woodland and savanna; it is largely absent from treeless places. Usually found alone or in pairs, it perches conspicuously at the tops of trees, poles or other high vantage points from where it can spot insects, lizards, scorpions, snails, small birds and rodents moving about at ground level. Nesting takes place in a natural hole in a tree where a clutch of 2–4 eggs is laid, and incubated by both parents, who are extremely aggressive in defence of their nest, taking on raptors and other birds. During the breeding season the male will rise to great heights, descending in swoops and dives, while uttering harsh, discordant cries. The sexes are alike in colouration. Juveniles do not have the long tail feathers. it is the national bird of Botswana and Kenya.

Happy Monday - Time for that old person's home?

During a visit to my doctor, I asked him, "How do you determine whether or not an older person should be put in an old age home?"

"Well," he said, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the person to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," I said. "A normal person would use the bucket because it is bigger than the spoon or the teacup."


"No" he said. "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?"

How would you like your hair cutting?

There is an old joke that goes:-
Barber to customer: “How would you like your hair cutting, Sir?”
Customer: “In silence, please.”

I have yet to meet a barber who doesn’t remind me of that joke every time I have my hair cut. Perhaps it is merely some development of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and all taciturn barbers have become extinct. And are there any greater repositories of useless information than hairdressers?

But what really annoys me is being required to respond all the time – often having been asked personal questions that anyone else meeting you for the first time would blush to ask. I wrote in my diary about one trip in 1995 which showed how adept I had become at dealing with them. I simply sat down in the chair and before he could even put the towel around my neck I asked “Have you had your holidays yet?”

During the next fifteen minutes (I had more hair to be cut in those days – nowadays it only takes ten minutes) I learned that Corfu is 40 miles long and 10 miles wide; that the Tour de France had been won by the same guy for the last five years on the trot; that a certain bike – whose name went over my head (if you’ll pardon the expression) was the lightest touring bike; and that Ted the barber once saved a man from drowning.

Robert Lynd once said that “Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother about”. Presumably that makes barbers pretty powerless. Meanwhile, it was Napoleon who commented “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas”. Barbers, it seems to me, have gone more than one step beyond the sublime.

Blogger goofed

Blogger decided that one of the comments on my blog was potentially spam. So it didn’t publish it but gave me the option to moderate it. Fine. I did so and it was OK. But what Blogger didn’t tell me was what particular posting it related to. The commenter had asked a question – but how was I to answer it when I didn’t know where the comment had ended up! Why didn’t Blogger think of things like this.

So if the person who asked the question about Exchange Flags reads this let me know by commenting on this posting and I’ll try to answer your question...

Florida

“This is a bit of the continent, sticking out into the warmer sea to the south-east. Most of its inhabitants call it Florida, actually, they don’t. Most of its inhabitants don’t call it anything. They don’t even know it exists. Most of them have six legs, and buzz. A lot of them have eight legs and spend a lot of time in webs waiting for the six-legged inhabitants to arrive for lunch. Many of the rest have four legs, and bark or moo or even lie in swamps pretending to be logs. In fact, only a tiny proportion of the inhabitants of Florida have two legs, and even most of them don’t call it Florida. they just go tweet and fly around a lot.

Mathematically, an almost insignificant amount of living things in Florida call it Florida. But they are the ones who matter, at least, in their opinion. And their opinion is the one that matters. In their opinion.”

                                            Terry Pratchett – “Wings”