"The Sheepdog" - U.A. Fanthorpe

After the very bright light, 

And the talking bird, 
And the singing, 
And the sky filled up wi' wings, 
And then the silence, 

Our lads sez 
We'd better go, then. 
Stay, Shep. Good dog, stay. 
So I stayed wi' t' sheep. 

After they'd cum back 
It sounded grand, what they'd seen. 
Camels and kings, and such, 
Wi' presents - human sort, 
Not the kind you eat - 
And a baby. Presents wes for him 
Our lads took him a lamb. 

I had to stay behind wi' t' sheep. 
Pity they didn't tek me along too. 
I'm good wi' lambs, 
And the baby might have liked a dog 
After all that myrrh and such.

Concrete appeals to cats

Ian has finished laying new concrete in the back yard. Charlie mentioned next door's cat. Ian said cats are attracted to wet concrete. They walk on, stop - you think they'll reverse, but they always carry on. Once it was raining at the end of the day and he covered a conservatory-footing he'd just laid with plastic sheeting. In the morning they took the sheeting off and two cats had been across, under the sheeting, and stopped to have a fight in the middle.

This Russian family was cut off from human contact for forty years

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html

Uncle Podger hangs a picture

You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job. A picture would have come home from the frame-maker's, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would say:

"Oh, you leave that to me. Don't you, any of you, worry yourselves about that. I'll do all that."

And then he would take off his coat, and begin. He would send the girl out for sixpenny worth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell her what size to get; and, from that, he would gradually work down, and start the whole house.

"Now you go and get me my hammer, Will," he would shout; "and you bring me the rule, Tom; and I shall want the step-ladder, and I had better have a kitchen-chair, too; and, Jim! You run round to Mr. Goggles, and tell him, 'Pa's kind regards, and hopes his leg's better; and will he lend him his spirit-level?' And don't you go, Maria, because I shall want somebody to hold me the light; and when the girl comes back, she must go out again for a bit of picture-cord; and Tom!—where's Tom?—Tom, you come here; I shall want you to hand me up the picture."

And then he would lift up the picture, and drop it, and it would come out of the frame, and he would try to save the glass, and cut himself; and then he would spring round the room, looking for his handkerchief. He could not find his handkerchief, because it was in the pocket of the coat he had taken off, and he did not know where he had put the coat, and all the house had to leave off looking for his tools, and start looking for his coat; while he would dance round and hinder them.

"Doesn't anybody in the whole house know where my coat is? I never came across such a set in all my life—upon my word I didn't. Six of you!—and you can't find a coat that I put down not five minutes ago! Well, of all the—"

Then he'd get up, and find that he had been sitting on it, and would call out:

"Oh, you can give it up! I've found it myself now. Might just as well ask the cat to find anything as expect you people to find it."

And, when half an hour had been spent in tying up his finger, and a new glass had been got, and the tools, and the ladder, and the chair, and the candle had been brought, he would have another go, the whole family, including the girl and the charwoman, standing round in a semi-circle, ready to help. Two people would have to hold the chair, and a third would help him up on it, and hold him there, and a fourth would hand him a nail, and a fifth would pass him up the hammer, and he would take hold of the nail, and drop it.

"There!" he would say, in an injured tone, "now the nail's gone."

And we would all have to go down on our knees and grovel for it, while he would stand on the chair, and grunt, and want to know if he was to be kept there all the evening.

The nail would be found at last, but by that time he would have lost the hammer.

"Where's the hammer? What did I do with the hammer? Great heavens! Seven of you, gaping round there, and you don't know what I did with the hammer!"

We would find the hammer for him, and then he would have lost sight of the mark he had made on the wall, where the nail was to go in, and each of us had to get up on the chair, beside him, and see if we could find it; and we would each discover it in a different place, and he would call us all fools, one after another, and tell us to get down. And he would take the rule, and re-measure, and find that he wanted half thirty-one and three-eighths inches from the corner, and would try to do it in his head, and go mad.

And we would all try to do it in our heads, and all arrive at different results, and sneer at one another. And in the general row, the original number would be forgotten, and Uncle Podger would have to measure it again.

He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was possible for him to reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which his head and body struck all the notes at the same time.

And Aunt Maria would say that she would not allow the children to stand round and hear such language.

At last, Uncle Podger would get the spot fixed again, and put the point of the nail on it with his left hand, and take the hammer in his right hand. And, with the first blow, he would smash his thumb, and drop the hammer, with a yell, on somebody's toes.

Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he'd let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done.

"Oh! You women, you make such a fuss over everything," Uncle Podger would reply, picking himself up. "Why, I like doing a little job of this sort."

And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it, and Uncle Podger be precipitated against the wall with force nearly sufficient to flatten his nose.

Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up—very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake and everybody dead beat and wretched—except Uncle Podger.

"There you are," he would say, stepping heavily off the chair on to the charwoman's corns, and surveying the mess he had made with evident pride. "Why, some people would have had a man in to do a little thing like that!"

From 'Three Men in a Boat', Jerome K. Jerome

Christmas 2012

What my mother said too

"No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them." Alan Watts

Sparrow Aviation Administration Blames Collision On Failure To Detect Pane Of Glass (from The Onion)

PIERRE, SD—Sparrow Aviation Administration officials are calling the Monday collision of a westbound sparrow with the window of a Mitchell, SD home a clear case of "controlled flight into glass," after the bird failed to detect a transparent windowpane directly in his flight path.

SAA officials describe the crash at a press conference.

Howard R. Trojanowski, a Pierre-bound 2-year-old field sparrowwho had been licensed to fly since two weeks after he was hatched and had logged over 60,000 flying hours, departed from a ledge near Sioux Falls Regional Airport at 11:04 a.m. CST. Trojanowski never reached his intended tree branch, instead striking a tempered-glass picture window 2.5 miles northwest of Mitchell 74 minutes after takeoff at an estimated speed of 39 mph.

There were no survivors.

SAA Commissioner Vincent Stivolo said the crash was likely due to glass, a "common, yet not fully understood phenomenon" in which an area normally blocked by such barriers as curtains, blinds, or shutters suddenly appears to be an open passage to an indoor facility or an unobstructed extension of the outdoor environment.

Conclusive explanations have historically eluded sparrow-crash investigators, some of whom have themselves apparently fallen victim to the phenomenon. Three investigators dispatched to the Mitchell site failed to show up and have since been reported missing.

"Flight records indicate that Mr. Trojanowski unexpectedly diverted his route above the corner of St. Ray Street and Longfellow Drive, and began a slow descent when he noticed a colorful hanging potted plant about 15 feet below SAA-regulated minimum flying altitude," said Stivolo, a sparrow. "It is at this point that we believe he made the fatal decision to make an unscheduled landing on the plant."

A chart of Trojanowski's flight path.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Trojanowski's wife and four eggs," Stivolo added.

The SAA has officially ruled out sparrow error, finding no evidence that Trojanowski tried to swerve out of the way. Additionally, his Glass Proximity Warning System failed to activate until 0.001 seconds after he came into contact with the glass.

An autopsy performed late Monday evening suggests that Trojanowski's crown struck the impenetrable transparent terrain first, followed by the left wing, which snapped in half on impact.

According to sparrow coroner Stephanie Barlow, an inspection of the scattered wreckage at the crash site revealed no prior damage to the wings, tail, or any other part of Trojanowski.

"This bird was in good, airworthy condition before takeoff for this routine flight—one that he had made literally thousands of times before," Barlow said. "But unfortunately, this happens all too often, even with the most experienced fliers."

"Should birds stop flying? No. But we need to raise awareness of this invisible killer."

Since the advent of the clear glass window in the 16th century, untold billions of birds have been lost or severely injured in similar incidents. In the early 1940s, thousands of brave bluebirds were sent on risky solo missions to break the glass barrier, resulting in the largest full-scale loss of bird life in over 50 years.

The worst individual crash, however, came in 1896, when a flock of migrating birds collided with the bay window of an East Texas mansion, killing all 167 passenger pigeons.

In a ceremony scheduled for Friday, a red and green plastic seed dispenser hanging on a tree at the crash site will be renamed "The Howard R. Trojanowski Memorial Feeder."

As news of the tragedy spread, the SAA reported no drop-off in sparrow flights since the fatal crash.

"Of course it's scary, but I'm not going to stop flying because of it," sparrow Darryl Beardsley said, echoing the apparent sentiment of millions of other sparrows worldwide. "I guess it's just my nature."