Jamie123

Ugh...desecrated coconut!

You're just the Dark Lord!

Total nonsense...it's because they can't get the wrappers off!

Why don't polar bears eat penguins?

We have the best ornithologists in the world, thank you very much. We invented the penguin!

What was that you said, young man?

Hard hard hard hard hard hard hard hard call... I love Star Trek. (In my single days I used to disconnect the telephone whenever Star Trek was on - I hated people calling me in the middle my weekly Kirk/Picard/Sisko/Janeway fix. The trouble was I would forget to reconnect it afterwards and would not be contactable for days. Nowadays my wife doesn't let me do such things as that. She has this idea that "real life" is more important than TV. Women, huh!) But I think my vote goes to Star Wars!

This is Sylvester Sneekly: This is Sylvester Sneekly in his Hooded Claw getup: And this, ladies and gentlemen is Dick Dastardly: I think I've made my point! (OK I've got it out of my system now...I think!) OK just one more picture: Dum Dum from the Ant Hill Mob: (Posted just because I'm bored.)

Well he is Welsh! OK...

I think he says "poem". That announcer by the way is Aled Jones, who was first famous as a boy soprano back in the 1980s. A lot of people will tell you (with an annoyingly knowledgeably air) that he sang the song "Walking in the Air" in the movie "The Snowman". No he didn't. That was Peter Auty. Aled Jones did later release the same song as a single, but that was NOT his voice in the movie! Got it? Also I want to hear no more nonsense about Dick Dastardly being the villain in "The Perils of Penelope Pitstop". That was Sylvester Sneekly, alias "The Hooded Claw". Dick Dastardly was never even in that show, and if (like my annoying brother) you "distinctly remember" that he was, then you "distinctly remember" wrong. You're probably getting muddled up with "The Wacky Races". Anyway, back to Aled Jones... I grant you he did sing the opening song in "Santa Claus the Movie" (the one with the late Dudley Moor, and John Lithgow as the bad-guy): "Every Christmas Eve we are part of a miracle..." etc.

I told her last Sunday. She didn't take it well!

Nothing whatsoever to do with this thread, but... At least the surviving elves found new employment

Why not a "Dear Sarah" letter for when a woman (called Sarah) gets dumped?

From Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" (the book, not the TV series). He's talking about Johannes Kepler: As soon as I read that I got the map out. I can kinda see it - Italy is her left arm and Britain is her right. (Though it seems to have come off!) Either her head is a funny shape or else she's wearing a very peculiar hat.

I couldn't find that exact clip, but here's another (with a similar Hayesque misunderstanding): (Warning - it's not quite 100% politically correct!)

Reminds me of an early Will Hay movie (which I forget the name of): Hay (in this movie) plays a self-styled mathematics professor who runs a very inferior distance-learning school. Opening scene goes something like this: Will Hay (dictating to his secretary): If it takes ten men and six boys seven days to build a wall ten feet tall and 200 feet long, how long does it take 8 men and four boys to build a wall six feet tall and 100 feet long? Secretary: So what's the answer? Will Hay: Well work it out! Secretary (contemptuously): You don't know, do you? Will Hay: OK I'll work it out! (gets pen and paper) - if we call x the number of men..." Secretary: ...and y the boys... Will Hay: And why the boys? What do you mean? Because they're in the question, that's why the boys! (returns to the paper) If we call x the number of men and y the boys... (penny drops) ...and..er..yes, y the boys... (Will Hay, though he always played a bumbling idiot in his movies, was actually a very clever guy. He was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.)

While we're on the subject of Limericks: There was an old man from Nantucket. Who kept all his cash in a bucket. His daughter named Nan Ran away with a man And as for the bucket, Nantucket! Pa followed them all to Pawtucket. (The man and the girl and the bucket.) He said to the man: "You're welcome to Nan!" But as for the bucket, Pawtucket!

It depends what you mean by "immoral". Is it immoral of me to: Take the last chocolate biscuit when I've already had five, and some people haven't had any? Remain seated on the train when there's an old lady right next to me standing? Not call my mother on her birthday (not because I've forgotten, but because I simply can't be bothered)? Leave toenail clippings on the bedroom carpet for my wife to clear up? Pull ugly faces and make rude gestures at BMW drivers, despite the fact that I know it gives my wife palpitations? Well yes and no. These aren't the sort of things you see on lists of "grave sins", but I still think they're still things Christians should at least try to avoid. (It's hard to imagine Jesus "flipping the bird" to a BMW driver, however obnoxious, and however badly he cut him up at the roundabout.) I do kind of agree though - getting engaged to someone you're not going to see for another 2 years is a recipe for disaster. (It's not even like the military where you get leave once in a while.) Anyone older than 25 would expect the "Dear John" sooner or later: but these are kids...they think their love-for-the-very-first-time will last for ever however long the separation. Experience, as Vort says, is a cruel teacher - but of course you learn. But bugs me most though is the way this couple flaunted their new relationship straight away. They didn't even leave a respectful few weeks gap. Was that immoral? Well again, yes and no. It certainly wasn't Christlike. And for the OP, who obviously cares about this young man, it had got to be distressing.

True, but can we fly? (Except in aeroplanes.) (OKOK...neither can turkeys! Haha!)

How did Isiah get his name? One of his EYES was 'IGHER than the other! How do you make a small room seem bigger? Use thinner wallpaper. How do you catch a rabbit? Hide in the grass and make a noise like a carrot!

I remember a few years hearing Susan Greenfield on the radio saying something like "one day we will understand what causes this experience we call 'consciousness'". I don't think that makes any sense: for consciousness to be an "experience" requires someone (or something) to experience that experience, and would not that someone (or something) need to be conscious? I always had the same sort of problem with Freud and Jung, splitting the pyche into parts (Freud's "complexes" or Jung's "archetypes") and talking about how those parts interact to create personality and behaviour. As a student I always found myself thinking "yes, but..." and lacking the language to go any further. The best I could ever manage was "...but where is the actual person?" I could never buy the notion that "that" (the model for want of a better word) was the person. If a conscious mind (whatever that actually means) could be reduced to an explainable model, what would stop you creating such a thing artificially? That may be commonplace in science fiction, if anyone claimed to have done it in reality I would find myself saying "Yes, but whatever you say that thing is, I know its really just an assembly of wires and transistors. Where is the....(I would struggle to find a better word and fail miserably)....soul?" At which point I would have to explain what I meant by "soul". "Souls are what human beings really are" would only prompt the AI-scientist to point back at the model and say "So you mean this!" And then the cycle would repeat.

I take it it's a power mower then, not one you have to push. We had a push one when I was a kid - you had to give it a good hard shove and then keep the momentum going until you had come to the end of a strip. Then repeat. It took a long time. I remember when I was about 10 mowing the lawn on a Saturday and I was so pleased I went inside to tell my mother that the lawn was mowed. My mother was asleep, and I got the dickens from both parents about the wickedness of going inside talking about lawn mowing when parents might (possibly) be having a siesta. "Try to be a bit more thoughtful!" they told me. Well I had thought I had been thoughtful by mowing the lawn, but I guess that didn't count. Helpfulness isn't always appreciated. Just this afternoon I've been ejected from an exam hall by an irate chief invigilator who didn't appreciate my idea of "being helpful". I've a nasty feeling he's now going to make complaints about "academics" (by which of course he'll mean one particular academic - me) "interfering with and disrupting his work" - or at least write nasty things about me in his report and get me into deep, deep trouble. Which on top of all the other cock-ups I've made recently might be the straw that breaks camel's back. Anyone would think I didn't have enough to stress me out right now... Maybe if I worry about it enough it won't happen Still I mustn't complain: a colleague of mine has had a complaint made against him because he told a particularly obnoxious student who had his feet on the table: "We don't do that in this country!" Seems that you can't say that to a Muslim without it being considered racism.

Nor would I really, but he was certainly expressing an idea. The "soul that rises with us" is really only incidental: what I get from Intimations of Immortality as a whole (and to be honest it's a while since I last read the whole thing) is the poet longing for a time when things were new to him - before they became familiar and ordinary - and suggesting (perhaps wrongly) that the excitement he felt - or at least remembered feeling - was some residue of what had gone before. I think Wordsworth was wrong: common things might seem heavenly in the memories of the older person of when they were young: when you left your college for the last time, did you not look around the familiar dreary lecture halls and think wistfully of how exciting they had seemed to you as a freshman? But things can be "appareled in celestial light" for many reasons. When you first realized you are were love, did trees or paving stones or door handles still seem the same as before?