Miscellaneous Forum

Your welcome..the thunder and lightning was right over our house on Monday morning and the poor kids had to run for the bus in the pouring rain that followed...the windows and the roof of the inside outside room was rattling badly..and its suposed to be even worse coming on Thursday....hope you get a nap!

Oh dear. Inclement weather for you both. Warmish and cloudy here, perfect for a brisk walk. I hope your roofs hold :))

We had baseball-sized hail in Dallas itself last week - a historic district of old mansions with slate roofs was destroyed...yikes! Wanna trade? Happy birthday! Bill

My aunt lives in Arlington - has replaced a couple of hail-destroyed roofs! But how are the gnats and mosquitoes down your way? I will cheerfully trade ours for some mothball-sized hail. No kidding, I can't be outside on a windless day at all right now.

You're welcome!

Oh no! I missed yours and Sir Paul's birthday yesterday!! Well at least we celebrated your birthday in person in Chicago last year.

You're off the hook, Rich. :)

Yeah, we all have seen old composition roofs replaced...but these were slate, you know, stone...the tiles on the houses are usually impervious to small hail, but these were smashed and shards were all over the yard and piled up in the corners of the valleys on the roofs. AND since there aren't that many people who work with slate roofs, that really makes things tough to fix. Because of all the rain this spring (the drought is over, yay!), the skeeters are back, although mostly at their usual times of early evening. Since we live on two creeks, we have plenty. Worse, West Nile virus has been found again, so the cities are going around spraying for mosquitos on a as-needed basis. But moth-ball sized hail? Aw, come on, that's peanuts to what hit Dallas last week...you hear about baseball-sized and softball-sized hail, but watching it destroy cars is impressive. People driving on Central Expressway, the main north-south traffic artery, simply stopped under the nearest bridge to avoid their windshields being smashed...which forced the people behind them to wait out on the highway in the direct path of the ice bombs. The Lakewood Country Club was supposed to kick off some amateur golf tournament the next day, so a lot of golfers had driven into Dallas for the opening dinner and reception the evening before - only to see their cars pummeled. Worse, the storm let thousands of divets in the greens of the course, and even with dozens of landscapers roaming the course on their hands and knees, they couldn't repair the course fast enough for a start the next morning. I guess I should mention the Chihuly sculptures...yeah, we have an outdoor exhibit of a shop of these glass sculptures at the Arboretum. Incredibly, only one was damaged...either ol' Dale makes some tough glass, or the Arboretum caught only the edge of the storm (it was quite localized). nbcdfw.com/weather/stories/H... Bill

Happy belated!

Sorry darling Kate,I missed your birthday and also other members I think,my mind is chokka full with other things these days,so happy belated birthday mate!! Hope you have many more. Here's your birthday hug(((((( Kate )))))) D xx

You have your hands and head plenty full and better things to do right now, Dory dear.

Bill, everything is bigger in Texas. I assume that by Skeeters, you mean Mozzies. Damn languages, same thing, different words. Fishypoodles, have you tried earplugs? I don't mean for you to juggle them during a hailstorm to fend off the hail, but stuff them down your lugholes to keep out the noise. Dorrise, you make sure you look after yourself and get your rest, the strain you are under is imnmense. Forget about everyone else, you come first.

You are welcome :-))

Sorry you all seem to be copping it a bit. Stormy Monday, what an excellent song, I've sung that once or twice.

"The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday I go out to play...." Fergy , I wore out my Allman brothers "Live at the Fillmore East" LP with that one on it. Eva Cassidy did a killer version too. Suet, I tried earplugs but they're uncomfortable.

You're welcome :-) Stormy Monday - fabulous song! We have a Live at the Fillmore East 1970 CD by Ten Years After which is superb, Allman Brothers CDs we have too!

Suet, before VT, I had never heard the word "mozzies"...and even now, I don't know how you pronounce it...is it "moe-zees" with a long o on the first syllable, or "muh-zees" with a short o/uh sound? I ask because we say "muh-SKEE-toe" here, so the abbreviated version would be "muh-SKEEZ", which would sound weird...at least "SKEE-ters" doesn't change the stress on the syllables... Bill

Kate, I DID find earplugs uncomfy but funnily enough I used plugs last night to great effect. They had a music festival on last night in Paris and the noise was indescribable I can't remember rock concerts being that noisy. Thank heavens for double glazing. Anyway, these plugs are squashy orange ones, not rounded at the endm the kind you roll up and shove deep in the ear canal and they expand to fit. Perfect. Bill, its MOH-zees. Skeeter reminds me of a cartoon character in an old comic book, he has a baseball cap and typical american teenage clothes. Talking of which, I saw a boy yesterday with his jeans halfway down his legs so that his bum and underwear was showing. Paris is a walking city or a Metro city. How on earth could wearing your trousers like that have been comfortable?

Sue, gangbangers in the US wear their pants like that to mimic what they have to do when under arrest. Their pants are loosened so they hang down and the suspect can't run. It is a sad testament to a certain subculture that they glorify being an unsuccessful criminal underclass. Bill

We call it 'pants on the ground' and it's utterly stupid. Fortunately it's only a small faction of nimrods who still do it. You should see some of the ridiculous few who have them clear down around their knees.

I take your point Bill but, in one of those liguistic twists the term "gangbangers" has a very different meaning in the UK! It did give me a smile.

fergy, wasn't it easier when we all spoke Gaelic? Oh, wait, there's Munster Gaelic and Connacht Gaelic and Ulster Gaelic...not to mention Scottish Gaelic which is barely intelligible to the Irish.... hahaha! Bill

Scots Gallic actually, you see we cannot even agree on a word for the language and aren't you forgetting Breton, Cornish, Manx, Wesh and probably a few others that I believe are all from the same linguistic group?

Nah, most of those guys are Brythonic not Goidelic, so I don't count them ;-) As for "Scots Gaelic", I guess I avoid that because "Scots" by itself means a dialect of English (like the poet Burns). Hey, I'm not crazy...my copy of "Gaelic" by Roderick Mackinnon (Teach Yourself Books) refers to the language always as "Scottish Gaelic". I guess even in the UK, there are different ways of referring to it ;-) Bill

Bryth what? Lost me there mate! Seriously, I was always taught that Irish was Gaelic and Scots was Gallic, no idea where it came from. Perhaps I should research more but I still can't speak more than about six words of whatever it's called and most of them are either obscene or to do with drinking so probably I best I leave well alone.

>most of them are either obscene or to do with drinking AHA! Something else to learn when we finally meet up in some dark corner of London!

Believe me fishy, I know all the darkest and most sinister corners! Incidentally, did you know I already have your name tattooed on my arm so if anything nasty happens in the aforementioned corner the cops will think I'd been stalking you for years?

Which name? Fishy or Kate? My real name is actually Bubbles LaRue Ruby Begonia but don't tell anyone.

I hate to interrupt this love fest, but there are two major surviving branches of the Celtic language family: Brythonic and Goidelic. Brythonic includes Welsh, Breton, and Cornish, while Goidelic includes Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx, although whether that's really a surviving language is up in the air. The difference is that the Brythonic family was already in British Isles (I think Brythonic and British are related words lingustically) when the Gaels (Goidelic) showed up. The first Gaels showed up in Ireland sometime near the end of the Roman Empire. These Gaels were called the "Scots". For this reason, in the early "Dark Ages", Ireland was known as "Scotland" because it was indeed the land of the Scots. Whatever Celtic language was spoken in Ireland before the Scots disappeared in favor of Gaelic. Later (8th Century? earlier?), a large number of Scots decided to go visit that big island to the east and landed in what is now southwest Scotland. They co-existed and fought with the indigenous Britain, Picts, Welsh, and Danes, until finally Kenneth MacAlpine, who was heir to both the Pictish and Scottish crowns, bumped off relatively few rivals and became the first king of a united Scotland. Over time, the Gaelic spoken in Ireland diverged from the Gaelic spoken in Scotland, although they are easy to recornize as related, just as Spanish and Italian are. OK, history lesson over :-0 As for your knowledge of dirty words in Gaelic, this reminds me of a character in an old science fiction book that I read. It seems that he, too, knew only naughty words in Venusian...as he pointed out, those are the words "you learn the first and remember the longest". ;-) Bill

Bill, believe me you are not breaking up anything. I was teasing slightly insofar as I have a tattoo saying Fish on my arm. It is merely the logo of my favourite singer as designed by another personal friend (Mark Wilkinson, look him up) and put there by a really good guy in Cyprus (yes, I've written a tip, look under Larnaca). I thank you for letting me know things I never knew before. I had read and heard various things about the Celtic languages but much of this was completely new to me. Bear in mind, I lived in Northern Ireland for the first 28 years of my life! I have a very dear friend who has an excellent saying that I resort to in times like this and it is, "Every day is a schoolday". I had an idea that I knew a fair amount about the Celts but it appears I have a lot to do. I'll be doing a bit of research when I sober up!!