Men in Black - Nation in Black

We lost, 20: 18 to France. This is the second time the All Blacks has been pipped by France. Oh dear!

I would like to see a Fiji/France final, and see Fiji win, say 30:28

Not that I'm a prophet or the daughter of one!

If Fiji wins the World Cup, the South Pacific will be an earthquake zone in more ways than one. You will hear the roar.

And the rest is silence

Sunday mornings are usually pretty quiet in our town, but this morning, we couldn’t see a car or any movement on the motorway. It was beginning to feel like Yom Kippur.

France is playing the All Blacks and the whole nation is glued to its TV. The national grid is probably on overload at halftime, as we all go and make Chernobyl strength coffee to calm our nerves. We could be invaded by Australia, and no one would notice.

More later with the score.

Brain flexing

It is sobering to realise, reluctantly, that brain cells really do die or play hide and seek as you get older. I don’t consider “almost 46” old, but I sure don’t retain things in the cranium the way I used to. Supposedly, you can keep the brain agile with crosswords and sudoku. I am hopeless at both, so I’m trying the next best thing – Hebrew.

It’s a pretty language – all those squiggles, and for someone who is left handed, amazingly comfortable to write. Also, for a mobile txt freak, the absence of vowels is comfortingly familiar. At the moment, I have 100 words to play with, a bit like the magnets you see on some fridge doors. I hope to be able to string a sentence together by the New Year, but it is unlikely that I will be able discuss Coleridge, let alone find my way safely out of a paper bag.

In order to attend a language school to study this language, I had to fill in an online questionnaire about the level of my language skills. I dutifully filled it in, but put in the comments section. “I am a complete beginner, I know NOTHING. The only two words I understand are Shalom (Hello) and Balagan (Chaos/Nightmare). I believe both words are quite well used, so I started with them first.”

I think they got the picture, and are probably digging out their kindergarten books for me as we speak.

The answer is blowing in the wind

There’s a new Kit on the Block. We have seen her nervously tiptoeing about under the trees at the back of our house. She obviously knows that she is treading in the path of lions, because she sniffs the air all the time and looks timidly about her. She’s a beautiful Siamese. I’ve called her Ching Ching.

Minutes after she disappeared through the hole in the fence, our female cat wandered along the deck, stopped dead in her tracks, sniffed the wind, then shot off to the exact spot Ms Ching Ching had just vacated. An orgy of sniffing the bushes / flowers / grass then commenced.

How weird it must be to have such a sensitive nose.

But then yesterday I smelt gas in our kitchen. We’d moved the stove so the plasterer could finish off a wall. The hose had become loosened very slightly. Hubby couldn’t smell anything, but I stopped mid kitchen and knew something wasn’t right.

Perhaps I’m related to my cat?

And speaking of “something in the air”, it is reported that during Yom Kippur last week, the pollution in the air over N. Israel was 100 times less than normal. Imagine, if it were possible to make this happen once a year worldwide. No cars, or factories or planes emitting poisonous gases. Perhaps the ice caps wouldn’t melt as quickly? Logicians would have fun with that.

“A one day fast equals lower temperatures and saves the world” Discuss.

Universe stuff

A newish bookshop in town offers discounts every week on certain items. Today we had a 25% off voucher. Hubby got first refusal. We came away with the Sunday Times bestseller “The Road to Reality – A complete guide to the Laws of the Universe”. It’s a modest tome of 1096 pages.

Now, I scraped a CSE in Maths. I didn’t study Physics, Chemistry or Biology beyond the age of 14. I have a respectable O level in Geology, but there is where my scientific education ends. This hasn’t stopped me being blown away by the sensational universe we live in. I still get all excited about the natural world; it has never become passé.

So, I’ve been balancing this brick of a book on my lap and grappling with the contents page (grin). I went straight to the section on Fibre Bundles (I used to call them Fur Balls to a former boyfriend who lectured on them). An aside, he was a brilliant theoretical physicist and rather good oboist to boot. Funny how clever scientists are often musical too.

Back to fur balls. I had no idea how much our universe twists and turns about. Even if you leave black holes out of the picture, there’s an awful lot of movement going on, and you can’t see any of it. And what amazes me even more, if you subtract a letter out of one of those long “in parenthesis” equations that mathematicians are so fond of, we could all vanish / get sucked into a black hole or meet ourselves coming backwards. And speaking of meeting myself coming backwards, I nearly met Mary Poppins today. We’ve had wind gusts of 78 kmh.

Lumps and Bumps

Now I know why I was struggling to hold flowers in the last week of the semester. I have a ganglion on my right paw. The lump is a jolly nuisance as it is on the palm of the hand. Perhaps I just need to get someone to whack me with a large protea?
We had an earthquake a few days ago in the southern ocean (6.8) , which sparked a local tsunami warning for the west coast of the South Island. There was a stand down soon after. This from the website which is at the top of my “Favourites”

“EARTHQUAKES OF THIS SIZE SOMETIMES GENERATE LOCAL TSUNAMIS THAT CAN BE DESTRUCTIVE ALONG COASTS LOCATED WITHIN A HUNDRED KILOMETERS OF THE EARTHQUAKE EPICENTER. AUTHORITIES IN THE REGION OF THE EPICENTER SHOULD BE AWARE OF THIS POSSIBILITY AND TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION.

Well, the “authorities” didn’t bother to call us, so I’m assuming that its still safe to paddle and make sand castles.

Redundant?

You have to laugh at some signs. Today in the bank, I noticed four massive safes side by side. On each was the notice

“Please keep the safe door shut”

I wonder how many management meetings it needed to come up with that one?