The following was posted on a mac laptop discussion list:

Dear Listers,
Could someone tell me what is bad in broccoli for dogs?
Thanks,
Jocelyn

Of course the list nanny shut this thread down, saying

I cannot even hazard a guess as to why you would feel compelled to post this sort of question on the G-books list so I have to assume (and hope) that it is simply some sort of mistake.

Either way, I am asking that you find a more suitable forum to discuss the dietary limitations of animals from this point forward. You ask a seemingly genuine question but it simply doesn’t belong on this list.

Diplomatic in extremis, methinks!

The vegan society emailed its members, asking us to describe ourselves, to show that there is no such thing as a typical vegan.

Here’s my

Hi there

I’m a 39-year-old living in the wilds of St Andrews in Fife. I work as production manager for an educational publisher and in my spare time am a member of the local Community Council and Treasurer/Webweaver of the local Fairtrade Town Campaign.

What else: one of a vocal band of folk who think that the Mac is best. (However all OSes suck but this page is wrong about classic mac OS sucking that hard.)

Why am I vegan? When I was 17, I learnt that it’s far more efficient to feed people directly (by growing crops that humans eat) than to feed them indirectly (by growing crops to feed to animals which are then killed to feed humans). Efficiency was highly desirable to the fascist I was then.

Four years later, I had ceased being a Nazi and was talking with a friend who was high priestess of a Wiccan coven. She said that becoming vegan would give me a tremendous spiritual lift. I’m still waiting for that psychic orgasm but for around 20 years (admittedly with some non-vegan patches) I’ve had the quiet satisfaction of knowing that with every mouthful I’m doing the right thing without even having to try. After all, what’s more natural than eating good food?

Favourite food? So many! In no particular order

• Peanut butter sandwiches
• My mate Will’s curries
• My mate Adriani’s padang-style tofu and sambal
• My channah dahl
• Tacos (quick and simple!)
• chewing on the end of hand-rolled cigarettes
• my fingernails
• soya yoghurts
• beans on toast with ribena
• pizza with soya cheese melted all over it
• raw peanuts and pumpkin seeds
• hummus and salad sandwiches
• my mum’s rice concoctions
• baked potatoes with sweetcorn, baked beans and soya cheese
• sweetcorn cakes
• anything thai with tofu
• peanut butter and salad-cream toasties

More info my website and blog.

Grab any picture of me you like from these. Pics of other folk may not be used without their consent. I quite like
work christmas 2004 party
in a pub on Skye, headbanging away to Sweet Child O Mine

all the best

Bruce

Atypical enough for you?

First and foremost, I was visited by Craig, his wife Claudia and their 18-month-old son Dylan. Craig is a friend and former flatmate from when we were working on our PhDs. I think we’ve seen each other maybe twice since he moved on from St Andrews, but it’s the sort of friendship that can take pauses because we’ll know that it’s there, that we’ve done enough to rate each other highly from hereon in. I can still picture him sitting at the table in our flat trying to make sense of data from a dodgy spectrophotometer and then throwing his pencil over his hear, shouting ‘Aarrgghh! Nothing makes any frog!

Dylan was a bit cranky through teething and a disturbed sleep pattern but we all had a fun time on the Cockshaugh Park swings and slides, a good natter about our different plans and life-stages. It was lovely to see that Craig is still the same interesting, fun, irreverent person. I’m sorry I haven’t got to know Claudia so well … yet.

Oi you three, when you read this, send me a photo that you don’t mind being on this blog or my website!

Their visit also facilitated a few other good things:

• I was able to try out the hand-operated coffee-grinder I’ve been given.
• It made coffee that Craig and Claudia didn’t appear to dislike.
• Since Craig is interested in taking his digital photography further with some photoshop twiddling, I gave him one the the Macs that work wants rid of – and has been infesting my lounge – with a legit copy of photoshop 5.
• In return for the mac, Craig’s giving me his old (but far from shabby) digital camera – top timing because mine has just died. I’ll put its eBay value into the work office party fund, so all three parties will have benefitted.
• We ate lunch at the very child-friendly café on South Street that used to be called ‘The Ark’.
• The Fairtrade secretary has sent out a bunch of emails showing progress towards the declaration event

So all very satisfactory. I had been concerned that I wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye properly to everyone. I’m sure that while I will meet some very interesting people out there, it’s lovely to know that folk from my past are still about and doing OK and thanks to today, Craig, Claudia and I were able to catch up before I leave.

At last Monday’s Community Council meeting, the convenor of the planning committee announced his resignation of this post. He’d held it for 12 years, I believe, during which this he and committee continually opposed Fife Council’s proposal to site a new hospital on the southern hillside. They feared that this proposal, if passed, would be a trigger for development on this hillside. This fear was recently accentuated by the current draft local plan: if passed, this plan will zone much of the hillside for development.

Of course, he and the committee produced detailed and (in my view) cogent arguments against this site – and for alternatives which would avoid such development and yet suit this town in other ways.

However, recently Fife Council granted planning permission for the southern hillside proposal. The convenor felt that this (and many other instances of FC deciding planning questions against the advice of CC*) showed that he was wastign his time and energy. Hence he announced his decision to resign the convenorship at the end of this evening’s planning committee meeting and invited all community councillors to attend this meeting to elect a successor. The committee is composed of any councillor who chooses to attend its meeting.

*Fife Council has a statutory duty to consult with Community Councils representing areas that will be affected by any planning application. However, it does not have to follow such CCs’ advice or objections.

So who turned up? The about-to-be-ex-convenor, I and four of the six committee stalwarts. (The other two sent apologies due to illness.) A further councillor was due to give birth yesterday and so has an excuse. Where were the rest of the councillors? I had said that I couldn’t take part in many planning committee events because of needing time to work on my impending move but I felt the election of a new convenor demanded attention from all councillors. I ended up taking minutes and writing a planning objection this evening.

No-one was elected as convenor, ostensibly to give the other two stalwarts a chance to volunteer.

I think you can tell I’m rather disappointed with around three-quarters of my fellow community councillors. Planning has to be just about our chief responsibility: trying to ensure that development is suitable for this town. After all, a new building might last 100 years, so it’s vital we at least try to say the right things to Fife Council. Encouraging pretty gardens, running bandstand concerts, ceilidhs and parties for senior citizens and organising grants for worthy causes are all worthwhile but I think they’re rather ephemeral compared to planning questions.

So I’d have hoped for a better turn-out and at least one volunteer to try his or her hand at convening. Oh well, my optimism and naïvity bit the dust – again!

A demo version of Retrospect Remote came with some software I bought ages ago. Finally got bored enough with manual backups using Silverkeeper to try it.

Pros

• It’s fully automatable…
• …so it can use just about any media.
• …and can be set to back up to differenct media sets on different days, so that I can avoid obliterating yesterday’s backup
• If I wanted, I could use System Preferences to power up the G4 in the middle of the night, then have Retrospect Remote run the backups, then use System Preferences to power off the mac. However System Preferences only offers one power-up/power down cycle per day, so I’d loose my get-to-work 8·55 am alarm.

Cons

• When it’s running, it slows the mac to a crawl – but I should I really be using the mac (and hence possibly altering data) when a backup is in progress? Er, no.

I’ll keep on with it unless anyone has a better – ideally free – solution.

Which Survivor of the Impending Nuclear Apocalypse Are You?
A Rum and Monkey joint.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!

A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other’s language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry’s underskirts.

This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.

In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout “boo!”, upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.

A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.

I’m an apparently intelligent, liberal, tight as fuck, pathetically simple-minded, dribbling child!
See how compatible you are with me!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

I’m not but…

Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

Which Horrible Affliction are you?
A Rum and Monkey disease.

Enough? Enough!

The thing that will kill me is almost certainly nicotine. So I found and friended purely so someone with this lj-name was on my friends-list. The results vary depending on whether I say I do or don’t want a boy- or girlfriend.

I do

Which Lj friend will kill you? LiveJournal Username What is your full name? What sex are you? Male Female how old are you 0-15 16-25 26-35 35+ Do you have a gf/bf? Yes No Do you want a gf/bf? Yes No Where do you live? What was the last thing you ate? Who do you think will be the answer? The Person who will kill you… angela_x The person who will dance on your grave… ggreig The person who will write your obituary… msinvisfem The person who will dig up your bones to use in a strange voodoo spell to resurrect you… angela_x The person who won’t realise your dead… orbstravels The person who will change your will to get all your stuff… scottymcleod THe person who will hide a second body in the coffin with you… msinvisfem The chance this will happen? 80% This Fun Quiz created by Robin at BlogQuiz.Net

Free ringtones and wallpapers! Click here!

 

I don’t

Which Lj friend will kill you? LiveJournal Username What is your full name? What sex are you? Male Female how old are you 0-15 16-25 26-35 35+ Do you have a gf/bf? Yes No Do you want a gf/bf? Yes No Where do you live? What was the last thing you ate? Who do you think will be the answer? The Person who will kill you… msinvisfem The person who will dance on your grave… thelastdalek The person who will write your obituary… silverwhistle The person who will dig up your bones to use in a strange voodoo spell to resurrect you… ggreig The person who won’t realise your dead… orbstravels The person who will change your will to get all your stuff… orbstravels THe person who will hide a second body in the coffin with you… scottymcleod The chance this will happen? 19% This Fun Quiz created by Robin at BlogQuiz.Net

Free ringtones and wallpapers! Click here!

 

I celebrated my 75th birthday at the wheel of double-decker bus

BY DAN KENDRICK 01905 742253 dk AT thisisworcester.co.uk

A 75-YEAR-old thrill-seeker fulfilled a lifelong ambition when her family organised a special birthday present – for her to drive a double-decker bus.

Lena Ryan, of Hallow Road, Worcester, had wanted to take the wheel of an Aston’s coach since her early days as a teacher at the city’s Sunnyside preparatory school.

She remembers vividly how much she wanted to ask the driver if she could take the wheel when the coach came to take the children swimming each week.

She even considered writing to Jim’ll Fix It – the popular TV programme where Jimmy Saville helped people to fulfill their dreams – until someone else beat her to it.

However, on her birthday on Friday, Mrs Ryan’s son, Bruce, finally arranged with Aston’s, on the A38, near Kempsey, for her to put a double-decker and long-distance coach through their paces.

Mrs Ryan said: “It was a complete surprise. My husband told me we were going for lunch and I said ‘We are going the wrong way’. When we turned into Aston’s I finally realised.”

Mrs Ryan kept to the private land at the coach park and said the experience was every bit as good as she had hoped.

“It was just unbelievable. I’m still on cloud nine,” she said.

“The double decker was easier to drive and the coach was so specialist. They pointed out all sorts of additions for driving on hairpin bends and tight corners.”

Aston’s even suggested a donation to St Richard’s Hospice instead of payment for the gift.

The surprise celebrations continued when her husband, Jack, said they needed to attend an important scout committee meeting at the Portobello pub, in St John’s, that night.

“We arrived and the room was full of friends and wellwishers for a surprise party,” she said. “It was amazing.”

Mrs Ryan even joked that with one son in the Army and friends in the Navy, perhaps she might be flying a helicopter or plane this time next year.

However, she is no stranger to extraordinary birthdays, having arrived in Dover on her eighth as an Austrian refugee escaping Hitler’s regime in 1938 and on another occasion, having an Indian elephant adopted for her as a gift.