Dog No 2

Not an exceptional snap but a good portrayal of a dog on a mission.
Mission of what? Depositing pee in as many new places as possible/ a remembered favourite overflowing bin/ distant word-bark of something interesting in the hound-world judging by the ears in full-crank position.

Oh, thank the Lord.

This anxiety has kept we awake off and on for years.
Finally, someone has done it! The fold-phone!
At last, we will be able to hurl our useless, oblong, flat, non-folding phones into the i-bin of time.
I'm even more beside myself with excitement to find out what this new Samsung item is to be called . . . Sorry, just have to sit down - phew, it's all a bit too much really.
So . . . The Fold.
Oh.
What about, The Flexure, or The Double Thickness, or The Plicature, The Rimple - has a certain Victorian edge to it - maybe a version in mahogany with tassels and optional aspidistra. Of course that might set one back a little more than the standard model of around 2,000 quid.
Will we all have to get thumb extensions to deal with the screen width? Will they be annoyingly heavy?
What shall I do with my boring old oblong one? What will everyone else do with their boring oblong ones, and why isn't all this extraordinary technology being put into things that will possibly prolong humankind's life on this maligned sphere.

 wsj.com

In this picture I must say it looks rather cumbersome if that's a real scale person.

Building No 63

Transfixed, I was by this stunning shed (?) very small art studio, club house, whatever.
Especially special were the jutting out sunk pieces of stone - to hold plant pots? religious deities?
How marvellous that someone would take such care to create something so unique.
Noted and snapped on a hike up above Montazels (near Esperaza in the Aude): Bluest of blue sky, hovering birds of prey, wind rustling the pine trees and views across to the snow-covered Pyrenees.

Dog-sub-blog. Dog Number 1

Well, I had to sort one somewhen, along with the buildings sub-blog, and the one about French roundabouts - yet to be started.
I mean dog-blog in an Elliot Erwitt fashion, not a straightforward admiration of dog-kind. Not that they don't need to be admired.

  Wonderful E E image taken I think in the forties.

So many years have passed and so many dog snaps not taken. So here's the first. Not particularly unusual but I love the obviously strong bond between owner and pet.

Climate change, zombie cereal ads and selfi-spoons

After reading a particularly worrying article on melting glaciers in the Guardian this morning I somehow ended up wandering into another piece about food products designed to allow you to carry on instagramming while eating snack foods . . . Yes. In Japan, much thought has been put into creating pre-smashed crisps that you can 'drink' and thus not have to coat your phone in grease.
Mc Donalds has also created special plastic chip-spears to elevate this stress, and praise the Lord, someone has invented the Selfi-spoon . . . Mm-hm, you can eat and snap at the same time.
A hole the size of Manhattan has been discovered in an Antarctic glacier, but don't worry your phone will no longer have to be greasy. Phew.
Highlighted within this article was a link to this scary ad for? I can't even remember which cereal brand as I was so petrified. Says everything about where we are really. Crap food (?) promoted with the most annoying song ever, dumbed-down, pastel tones, glazed/zombie expressions, and a selfi-spoon. Who are all these people and why do they suddenly invade this house owned by a milk-slurping ménage à trois?


selfi-spoon in many colour ways.

Rats, chipboard and turkeys

I'm getting better at French but still, and possibly always will have to, consult online translation - or a dictionary/verb tables - but it's oh, so easy with Uncle Google ready for one's every key-tap.
But the process, if not observed closely enough, is fraught with howlers-waiting-to-happen.
This morning's was concerning a translation of a few phrases concerning rat-extermination. Having read about all alternative methods including getting a cat (not possible in this case) vinegar and black pepper, owl feathers (mm, not the easiest thing to procure,) bay leaves, onions, moth balls, scattered pictures of Nigel Farage's facial expressions, etc, and the situation being urgent, I decided it would have to be a company that do nothing else other than rub out rats. When sending an email about this to our builder friend I used translate and nearly sent him:
'I will be sending a company that fabricates rats to the property.' Useful!

 

                                                         image - knit for victory site 

     

                        The things people will knit ...


Over breakfast this morning Mark told me his latest translation stupidity. 'Carcassonne Agglo,' appeared as the 'chipboard box of Carcassonne'.

Here's a good one - thanks, The Local site - Fabricated in a turkey (Dinde being turkey in French).

Blog Book

or Books, in fact.

Three volumes of this blog (nearly ten years) now safely contained within covers and printed on semi-matt paper.
One tome still in the post somewhere but the first arrivals are wonderful, thank you blog2 Print. Quite an amazing thing - very amazing. Software that just loads up the whole blog and somehow 'melts' it onto the page. Slight problem with matching up photos exactly to each post but that would have been a massive amount more pages and thus cost.
Any bloggers out there who are wondering about doing this - definitely worth it. It's a very different thing to see all that work in a book form.