I think it’s due the the restorative power of The Temptations.  I can’t remember the last time I was so happy as in that concert, so I’m treating you to the best cheer me up in town….

Click below for vintage clips that are bound to make you smile.

Get Ready (coz here I come)

Ain’t too proud to beg

My Girl

Half way through the concert, one of them leaning over looking really tired, another came up and said

“what the matter Otis?”

“Oh, I’m tired, so tired”

“Why are you tired Otis?”

“Because I’ve been doing this for 46 years!”

(Audience goes wild).

When I’ve been running The Laundry for 46 years I’m definately going on tour.

Enjoy.

Rachel

I’ve been so impressed with you Launderers’ poetic abilities in haiku that I am setting you another challenge. Palindrome! The curious art of making sentences read the same backwards as they do forwards. The word palindrome is derived from the Greek palíndromos, meaning running back again. Apparently there are a number of folk out there who dedicate a fair amount of their time working these out. Lawrence Levine wrote a palindromic novel of 31,957 words, Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo in 1986.

“In Eden, I,” a poem by Richard Cox published in Word ways takes a traditional palindrome ‘Madam, I’m Adam’ that bit further. Each line reads the same forward and backwards. Here is an excerpt:

Eve. Drowsy Baby’s word. Eve
Madam, I’m Adam
Named under a ban, a bared nude man.
Miss, I’m Cain, a monomaniac. Miss, I’m…
Diamond-eyed no-maid!

Here’s one I made earlier… (Or, more accurately, someone else made it and a mate once told me and for some reason unknown to either them or me, I have remembered it for about 10 years)

I saw desserts, I’d no lemons alas no melon distressed was I.

Your turn!

Some say pah, stupid americanised commercial money spinner (you  could buy a wooden broomstick in my local supermarket this year and a plastic pumpkin to hold your booty of sweets and a teeny-tiny pumpkin for carving for about 4 quid!!), but me? I can’t get enough of these opportunities for ruckus and collective celebration on a theme.

It gets quite good from here on in- a little sweetener to make up for the clocks going back:  bonfire night (simply one of the best, now it’s well into autumn I’ve lost all the despondency about the looming cold and dark after such a bloomin miserable summer and am ready to get cracking with some leaf kicking and smokey bonfire smells, especially seeing as there’s ACTUALLY more sunshine of late than the whole of the summer) , then, if you have any American connections (any! what-so-ever, like maybe you watched Dawson’s Creak once) it’s Thanksgiving, then it’s Chrimbo (and you could even count the first day you get to open your advent calender, and then every day from there on in, popping from its plastic mold a little tasteless chocolate, preferably before breakfast) then NYE (I know big old let down, but still every year I invest so much hope in making it the best night of the year), then after some gloomy self deprivation and whipping of one’s back with birch and things, it’s time for some good extra lovin’ on Valentine’s Day (another contentious issue with lots of people, like it’s just invented for hallmark to make money- I say, who cares! You don’t have to buy expensive pap and intensively grown roses you can just enjoy the moment of a day that celebrates Romance!), then and surely no one can argue with this old chestnut- Pancake Day woo hooo! Love it with lemons, love it with cheese, love it with bananas and chocolate, love the flipping, love the dropping on the floor…

Bung in a few birthdays and some,  you know, unorganised un-national celebrations of your own and that takes you pretty much back to spring and daffodils and little lambs etc where all should feel right as rain. But with no rain (plleeeeeeeease!).

What’s your fave festival out there, have I missed some crucial ones (probably)? Have you got any weird and wonderful traditions that you adhere to each year for Halloween or pancake day or new years day?

This week we are celebrating vegans at BioRegional by joining them in eating no meat or animal products for the whole week- see? Yet another festival to make the year go round!

A short poem for my short comings at not putting enough time aside for the blog - bad planning.

I’d like you to take inspiration from the poem, get your creative juices flowing/rushing/whooshing and tell me about other accidents that inanimate objects might have.

Rachel

Thankfully, my kitchen stories of horror cannot be paralleled with my colleague Amy, whose kitchen, unbeknownst to her and her housemates, had an enormous hole in the wall through which the kitchen floor would regularly get flooded. When it dried out, it would grow proper mushrooms and everything. The landlord thought the step outside the back door was wonky and that was diverted the rain in…

(That reminds me of my mum’s morris traveller car that grew two beautiful little mushrooms in the back. I’m sure they harboured naughty faeries that made me rubbish at reverse parking.)

Mice, wiggly things, creepy crawly things? Don’t hold back; we have strong constitutions over ‘ere.

Tell us of your kitchen horrors!

I saw a couple of magpies on the way to work this morning, and saluted them both, which is what I’ve always done. But, (after thinking ‘ooh maybe magpie superstitions could make a good little laundry blog’) I looked into the mythology and the rhyme a wee (wikipedia) bit once I got in, and I now have reason to be believe I may have been approaching the whole thing with totally the wrong superstitious logic…

It all has to do with the first line- ‘One for sorrow’. Apparently the bird is associated with all things bad and unfortunate, in part a bit of a harsh judgement not based on anything but a character trait to go after shiny things in a coveting manner and also a bit of a nasty grating call. But this association with bad stuff in general only comes into play when you’re faced with one magpie. 2 is a goody.

Steph really believes in magpies- ‘too sly magpie!’ is what she hollers at him when she comes across one. This is her own take on the much longer and more formal ‘Good Morning Mr Magpie, how are your wife and children? What a fine bird you are!’ I had never heard of this! I’m so out of it, pah, saluting- hardly adequate for protecting yourself against the witchery of a lonelsome magpie. If you want to encourage good luck instead of bad its advisable to say some sort of greeting.

Any magpie stories for us? Come accross three of them and popped out three chicas the next day? Any more orignal words with which you greet the squarky fellas? Wow us with your black and white feathered fables pleeeeaaase!

Should be all whizzy and carefree this week, but it got me thinking about some tooth nasties.

So I’ve wapped teething problems into the search engine and guess what comes up? BBC america (I didn’t know this existed) have made a documentary called “The Worst Teeth in Britain”, the traiters, we all know that the yanks think we have a mouth full of ugly nashers, we don’t need our national treasure confirming the suspicion and I’m not talking about Hugh Grant. 

They say “There is an epidemic of poor teeth in Britain. 1 in 5 people never visit the dentist. 1 in 10 is terrified of the dentist chair. Sugar consumption, eating disorders, and bad diet make Britain’s global reputation for being a nation of terrible teeth completely justified”.

Pah, other shows include “Too Ugly to Love” and “My Secret Female Body”, shame on you BBC.

I had a brace for five long years, my  incisors had to travel a whole centimetre when they decided to yank  four of the out, that’s the equivalent of the moon and back in teeth terms, scientifically speaking. Shame I ruined a good start with excessive coffee and red wine consumption.

Time for the confessional, the worst teeth experience I’ve ever had was when kissing this guy, we sort of slipped and bashed mouths and his false tooth and plate fell into my mouth!  shiver.  Well he was an anarchist.

Teething problem, stories please…

There is some debate about the first ever website, some say Al Gore claimed to invent the www, others say that’s hear say – some people accuse me of not knowing the difference between the internet and the world wide web, some people might be right.But here I can unofficially let you into the secret of the first website and here it is:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

It’s a beauty ain’t it?

Some guy called Tim Berners-Lee (an Oxford grad in physics) invented the web as a way of posting information for physicists at the European Particle Accelerator at CERN.

It’s those trouble makers again.  Just as I had forgiven them when we didn’t all get sucked into a big black hole when they tried to recreate the big bang in a concrete tunnel in France…they get me all riled up again.  They are to blame for my-face, hours and hours of wasted time refining search words in yahoogle and yes, I couldn’t believe this either www.sugardaddie.com.  Pesky scientists and their big ideas.

HA!  I wonder if this blog spot will cause as much controversy as the big cardie commotion. I hope so, winky winky wink.

Of course the web isn’t all bad; it has all the answers, all of them.  These are the questions I’ve asked it…

How was bread invented?
How was butter invented?
How was cheese invented?
How was cake invented?

Ok, so maybe I’ve only tested it out on food innovation, but I’m sure there are more answers out there.  Please ask the web something and post it for us.

And finally here are my current favourite websites:

www.last.fm

www.freecycle.org

http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/ivor/makeivor.htm

and of course the new

www.thelaundry.biz

Tell your www.blues.com and www.hurrahs.com

The quantities are open to interpretation,

So, Put the chocolate in a heatproof bowl.

Measure the butter/margarine and add it to the chocolate in the bowl.

Then, spoon the golden syrup on top.

Put the heatproof bowl over a pan of boiling water on the hob and let it all melt, stirring occasionally.

While you are waiting for it to melt you can measure out all the other ingredients. The biscuits need to broken up, as do some of the nuts (such as pecans and walnuts) and if you use larger fruit (like cherries and apricots) they might have to be cut in half.

Once the chocolate mixture has melted completely, and is lovely and smooth pour it over the dry ingredients and mix it all together. All the ingredients should be coated in chocolate and stick together. Basically stuff as much in as possible J

Line a 23cm square tray (that’s just the size those standard square cake trays come in, I think) with cling film, or greaseproof paper and pour in the cake mixture.

Spread the mixture out and squish it down a bit.

Put it in the fridge to set.

Leave it for 3-4 hours, or overnight is easiest.

Take the cake out of the fridge and cut into as many pieces as you want

Eat it!!!

Commingled collection systems that gather a range of different materials in one bag or bin and then compact them frequently create materials unsuitable for reprocessing. ‘Source separated’ collection systems, however, produce materials that can be reprocessed, usually in the UK, creating value and benefits for everyone.

You can read more about this by following this link:

http://www.realrecycling.org.uk/home.php

4 Haikus about rain

Portrait Painted By Rain
Liquid diamonds drop,
The juicy green grass glistens
In age-old beauty

Hesitance
Liquid diamonds cling
To the leaves green tips in vain –
Fate has plans for them.

- Melanie Bartelt

Haiku on Rain
Gray clouds race above
Driving slanting sheets of rain
Buffeting the land

Steady autumn rains
Slowly drain color from earth.
It is a sad time.
- Paul Kester

The rules of a haiku are three lines with 5, 7, then 5 syllables.

Get your creative juices going and whip us up some of your own, please.

So, I try to beat the system by rushing to Victoria Coach station, but alas coaches to Northampton only go every 3 hours or so, and I’ve just missed one.  I try to get on the tube at Victoria to go to Euston but have a claustrophobia/ I’m in such a hurry semi panick attack and have to get off and get a taxi. Harrumph- feel rubbish and poorer just because I can’t conquer my fear of small dark tunnels.

Get to Euston £11.80, get the train as far as Bletchly £18 return (that’s where they broke the world war two code enigma whatsit- as the town’s sign proudly announces- ‘the home of code breaking’- I wonder if it’s a fair claim and they’re still at the top of their game in the code breaking world…) then get a coach to Northampton through the too beautiful Milton Keynes. Arrive at Northampton; get ANOTHER taxi (£17.40) to Stoke Bruerne. Which is on the canal and finally I’ve made it to my Dad and his wife and the canal boat. This is mode of transport No. 4 of the day.

And I have to say it takes a while for my whirlitzing limbs and brain to get used to travelling at 4 miles an hour, kind of back down the country to where I’ve rushed from but at a much slower pace. Then we got stuck in a canal boat traffic jam, as some holidaying family’s dog has gone over board and they have to drain the lock of water and try and rescue them. Ah, would you believe even the slowest form of transport in the country has got its bank holiday breakdown…

Tell me your bank holiday stories… did you get caught up in the carnival and trampled on? Did you try to go camping and get flooded? You know, happy stories welcome as well.

Well, gulp, this is when you really hope the subject of the email doesn’t happen to now work in an office in central London and organise said office’s recycling.

Harry: I went Interailing when I was 19 with my friend Abi. We started in Amsterdam, we finished in Amsterdam but managed to cover quite a distance in between. In fact we both managed to detour to places where the boys we had crushes on were staying. Well, stop No. 1 (my fancy-man), San Sebastian, lead to nothing but heartache. At stop No. 2, a campsite outside Florence, however, we both got lucky. Oh dear. Perhaps because of the heartache and the view over the city, and the wine drunk straight from the bottle, and the fact that Abi would rather share a tent with the boy she had travelled hundreds of miles to see, (you know just ‘cos he happened to be there when she was…); I ended up locking lips with the mate (for purposes of anonymity all names have been changed). Except it wasn’t really locking lips, more like my face being mauled by the tongue of a cow- in the dark and dank of the canvas … ooh it makes me shudder even now. Poor Gary (names, changed), he probably thought he was being romantic and rugged. I left in the morning very early, on my own to Rome, where I ran out of money and got stuck in a train strike in a torrential down-poor. That I’ve come to think of as my penance for my ‘kiss and run’ antics.

Steph: I’ve only had one holiday romance, when I was a pretty young, and it was really only because my mate had hooked up with his mate. We rejects were left, then, to discuss the finer points of why the whole world was against us when we realized that actually, we could join forces, stop complaining and just get down to some serious snogging (interspersed with musings on the nature of injustice, naturally). Result! So, for a week every night me and my mate would sally forth to the beach (where our bad-boy Brummies had set up their dwellings) and make an evening of it. Exchanging addresses at the end of our holiday may have seemed like the end of it for the lads, but we were smitten and determined to see them again. Telling our olds that we were going into town for the day one Saturday, we got the train to Birmingham and somehow navigated our way across the city to Rowley Regis where a really disappointing hour of tea, telly and twitchy silence ensued before we went home, mightily aggrieved.

On a more lovey note, a family friend from France (I already wrote a blog about limericks, so I’ll not take this one any further) was sitting on a train going back to rainy Paris and got chatting to her neighbour. They got on like a house on fire but she, a shy beauty, got off the train without exchanging numbers. However, unwittingly, she left her brolly on the train and, it being a rather nice one, had her name and address on it. The young man, Pierre, was clearly delighted and he proceeded to get in touch again at the first opportunity. They are now happily married with two children! Ain’t that sweet?

Come on, dish the dirt on your holiday fling-flops…

It got me thinking about the likelihood of things.

In probability theory the birthday problem, or birthday paradox is the probability that in a set of randomly chosen people some pair of them will have the same birthday. In a group of 23 (or more) randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will both have been born on the same day. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%, tending toward 100% as the pool of people grows. The mathematics behind this problem leads to a well-known cryptographic attack called the birthday attack.  Pow pow! Someone always bakes a cake here when it’s someone’s birthday and in our charity of 40 people, there are a pair with the same birthday, fancy that.  Ker-slam!

Unlikely ways, to do die are “geographic tongue”, no it’s not some sort of Gaia’s revenge on carbon rich backpackers.  It’s a disease in which the raised lesions on the tongue look like the contours of a country, 1,700 people per year die of it.

Also 17,000 people since 1900 have died by toothpick.  Enthusiastic hors d’oeuvres eating, will no longer be an amuse bouche.

And finally, back round full cycle, According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (American) your overall odds of being a lightning victim are 1 in 280,000,000.  I wonder if there’s less chance of getting stuck in the states, with all that open space, that’s, well, not a human.

HA, I knew it, 14,000,000 to one, with such good odds, better get those numbers in quick for next week.

What unlikely things have happened to you?