What is Wrong With this Picture?

I wonder if any of you can spot what's wrong with this picture?

Max?

...My Momma Said to Me

When I was a young boy, my momma said to me:
There's only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti
Or maybe in the Bahamas
Where the Caribbean sea is blue
Weepin' away in the tropical night
Because nobody's told her 'bout you

I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
Just to find her
I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
To find out where they hide her

Why am I hanging around in the rain out here
Tryin' to think of a girl
Why are my eyes fillin' up with these lonely tears
When there's girls all over the world?
Or is she lying on a tropical beach somewhere
Underneath the tropical sun
Hiding away in the heat wave there
Hopin' that I won't be long?

I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
Just to find her
I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
To find out where they hide her

I'd go the whole wide world

Striped Paint

See! You CAN get a can of striped paint! 

 

"Cleavage Check"?

Seen in the staff-area of a retail establishment. 

I'd be interested to hear my readers' views on whether sales-staff cleavage leaves you upset, distressed, disgusted, envious, titillated, or delighted.

I'm all for it.

 Good grief! I'll take my business elsewhere.

Ahhh. That's better!

I Like a Girl in Satin, Who Talks Dirty, in Latin...

Naked or Nude?

The Naked and the Nude  
by Robert Graves

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!

Ladies! Professor Souberquit's Patent Boobie Enhancer!

Ladies, the perfect bosom is absolutely within your grasp, right now! All you need to do,  is to send a small sum, (less than the price of a medium sized family car!), to Soubriquet Labs Inc., and you will receive the Prefessor's patented 'booby-moulder'. Just fill it with industrial-grade silicone, (supplied), connect to a standard wall-outlet, and delight in its wonderful massaging powers as it rebuilds your profile to the 'Marilyn', 'Madonna', or any one of a hundred settings.

As you will see, from our ad in French, below, using it is sheer and utter delight.

 

So, it's the fourties, and it's the future and we'll all have flying cars!

Not so much, then.

R.I.P. the 1947 Convaircar.

I Had, of Course,

....never heard of Ingrid Michaelson, until I clicked on a link on Metafilter. 

Metafilter is a source of hours of diversion for me, and allows me to pretend to myself that I'm learning new stuff, so it's not really procrastinating. I feel guilty about it, but otherwise how would I learn stuff like "A genome-wide association study has linked a dislike of cilantro with a variant of a single nucleotide in a cluster of olfactory receptor genes. The palatability of cilantro has previously been a divisive subject on the blue."?

And how, otherwise, might I have heard this? Well, I'll bet there is a whole heap of other procrastinators who justify their vice by imagining that blogging is not really just a pernicious propensity toward temporal profligacy. Dammit, that's a nice sentence, "Pompously bombastic claptrap!", shouts my greatest critic,  throwing sharp-edged peanuts at me. 

 Oh look.....  there's a link to a study on whether spiders abhor conkers..... wait a while, I'll be back, I promise, but I've just got to head over there and read it.

Listen to Ingrid Michaelson singing R.E.M.'s 'Nightswimming', with an a-capella choir of her own voice multilayered on looping tapes. I love it. There's someone in the live show audience I want to bash over the head with a frying pan though. Why do audience members think the song will be greatly improved by their random squeals and whoops?

Oh. Still there, are you? Well the Royal Society of Chemistry's foray into the world of arachnids versus the fruits of the horse-chestnut tree remain inconclusive.  Conker season is almost here, so I might try an experiment or two myself.

At my friend's house, a few days ago, something huge with eight legs scuttled up the wall. Before the humans could trap it, with a view to release outside where it might eat pigeons, or some other flying nuisances, there was a snap, the dog swallowed with a gulp, and lolloped back to her bed. 

Here, have a quick toccata and fugue. What? No, it's free. no charge, no, I'm not trying to make you do something nasty.

Good night.

Biff! Pow! Whack!

An update, don't-cha know.

 

Scaffolding arrived. 

(Bloke is a random passing stranger, this blog does NOT pay extras)

Got to miss all the phone lines. Why doesn't someone invent a wire-less telephone?

Isn't this the future? Don't we all have flying cars and pocket communicators now?

Beam me up, Spotty.

I bet they've seen a lot of bottoms in their day.

Bash thump.

 

And, new timber purlin, steel brace, bolts, and glue. 

Yes, glue.

Single-skin brick, I bet it was cold in there in winter. You wouldn't loiter, oh no, straight back to those nice warm machines!

Can has bukkit?

 So far, no unscheduled plummeting, neither of bricks nor of humans.

The mortar on the roof's from the ridge tiles, another job on the never-diminishing list of things to get around to, someday.

Oh. and I spent some time tracking pipes, for another job. 

 The pipes are colour-coded. But sometimes the painter makes it up as he goes along.

Yellow denotes gas. 

And there's a specific code for the EXACT shade of yellow.... Or you can just use whatever you've got in the van, can't you?

And I was crawling in a dim space where water's coming out of the wall. It's a spring, it comes and goes with the weather. Have to invent a cure for it. 

Or plug it. Or dig a drain. Or install a sump-pump. Or dark-adapted penguins. Whatever.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain?

When people ask me what music I like, well, I'm at a loss. Who's my favourite musician/ Depends what day or hour you ask me, the answer is not constant. Country and western is not my thang. decidedly not...

But there are exceptions to every rule, so Epimenides said.  Willie Nelson's my exception. Way back, in 1971, I bought Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Pendulum', which had "Have you ever seen the rain' on it. 

Willie, I first heard in 1979, or 80.

This video unites the two.

Next Project...

 

The gable wall has been moving outwards.

The disused toilet block is pulling it outwards.

The floor is dropping away from the wall.

In both of them.

The wall's been damp, and the timber purlin is rotten, just where it should be strong, tying the wall and the roof together.

The steel's pulled out by an inch.

See that iron bar, holding the bricks?

And this is what's pulling the wall outwards.
Scaffolding coming tomorrow,
We'll probably go with Plan B.

A Message From Above?

Lunchtime today.

But isn't that....?

I hear you.

Roffle. And loll. I'm good at lolling. Especially after I've had my lunch... Char-siu fried rice today. No time for lolling though. Things to bash, steel to chop.

Recent Work Activities.

Repurposing space in an 1860's weaving mill. The brackets on the ceiling were installed in, I think, the 1960s, to strengthen and stiffen the great timber beams which support each floor, when new, heavier machinery was being installed.

Each iron pillar, in the centre of the room, supports two beams, which span to the outer walls. In the squared tops of the pillars, there are slots, which, long ago, held brackets which supported rotating shafts the full length of the mill (about three times the length of this room). The shafts, in turn, supported numerous pulleys, which turned long leather belts, to pulleys which powered the looms.

 

New walls, new windows, new heating, new kitchen area, water supply, electrical distribution boards, lights, power sockets....

Busy busy busy, hurry scurry...

Windows are in, walls up, it's coming along.

I try to be neat and tidy, even though these pipes will be hidden.

The big red pipe's there to stay, it's part of the automatic fire sprinkler system, shifting it would be a major job in itself.

Completion by the end of the month? What? A week earlier?

They're moving in.

Transformed, and tranquil.