h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've just seen a London street I used to drive down several times a week mentioned in the news, but now that I look at it on the map, I can't for the life of me remember why

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2011/04/01/texas-billionaire-builds-giant-nuclear-waste-dump/

For a mere $250,000 (p)Rick Perry lets a company with a long history of environmental damage bury nuclear waste over three Texas aquifers with no regulatory oversight, the company is "self regulating".

Of course it is

"Three months after this episode was broadcast, Clive James wrote about his appearance on it in The Observer, and in particular expressed disapproval of the Sex Pistols, referring to Johnny Rotten - whose name he had evidently forgotten - as "a foul-mouthed ball of acne calling himself something like Kenny Frightful"."
Clive James talking about his appearance on So It Goes which featured the first television appearance of The Sex Pistols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_It_Goes_%28TV_series%29

I wish I'd thought of calling myself Kenny Frightful, either here or on some other website that needs a username

Michael Palin to narrate the new Clangers series http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-29107225

Ahhhh, all's right with the world

This doesn't get repeated very often but it's well worth catching - J Kingston Platt, written and read by Peter Jones (The Book). There's four days left to listen to the first episode http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rr6y0

When a man is tired of The Sweeney, he is tired of life.

Nah.
He is just tired of seeing Ford Granadas drive through piles of cardboard boxes in South Lambeth goods yard.

Used to work next door for a while

When a man is tired of Morecambe and Wise, he is tired of Life.

I'm now (just) older than Eric Morecambe was when he popped his clogs. I'm not sure why I find that compelling, nor why I feel that I've passed a certain milestone and that I don't feel short-changed if I should die tomorrow.

He died aged 58, my computer tells me. But he is definitely not forgotten. That is what you can strive for now. (I'm way past that milestone, and have tried to make this a new beginning rather than an end)

Good luck with the second 58 years!

If I ever write my memoirs I'm going to call them 'I Wonder Where Mother Kept the Clothes Horse?'. Leastways, the first volume.

In the airing cupboard.

No, it couldn't have gone in there - there wasn't enough room. Also the broom cupboard and the cupboard under the stairs. Those were my first three thoughts. I know it didn't go in the garden shed, and she didn't tuck it behind the sofa.

You can see now why the title is apt.

This is one of those things that is rather foreign to me. I never saw or heard of clothes horses (other than in the context of sharp dressers) until recently. We only had clotheslines in our back yards (n.b., not gardens, that would imply flowers or vegetables).

I'm curious to know if it might be worth building a new clothes line in our yard. It typically takes me 3-4 hours to dry my clothes in the dryer. Sure there's more physical labor involved, but I don't imagine that it would take more than say 20 minutes to hang my clothes and maybe ten to take them down. In that same 3-4 hours my clothes would be dry (on a nice day) and I wouldn't have to keep checking on it or trying to listen for the buzzer from another room.

I know it is much more economical and ecological, but just how practical is it? I know my father wouldn't want to have one in the yard. It would be another obstacle for his riding lawnmower.

I wonder if the clothesline poles were sold commercially when I was a kid. I never saw any being installed. I just remember most yards had at least one T shaped pole made from iron pipe. I only vaguely remember the ones in my yard, but I vividly remember my great grandmother hanging clothes in her back yard. My uncle has one pole still standing in his backyard. It came with the house. He uses it now to hang plants and wind chimes.

I wonder if they were sold at hardware stores or if you hired someone to weld and install them? I do seem to remember seeing some made from wood, but mostly I remember the ones made from iron pipe that was around 4-6 inches in diameter. Sometimes sparrows or wasps would build nests in the open ends of the top bar.

Any open pipe left outside in my area was prone to be have "mud dawber" wasp nest in it. The typical way of clearing it was to bang the pipe against something a few times then sling the loosened, dried mud out.

We kids were all more frightened of wasps than bees but I've never actually been stung by a wasp or personally known anyone who was, well other than yellow jackets. Those were the most frightening. Well, at least that was what I was told. Yellow jackets were the most aggressive and had the most painful stings. That was "common knowledge". I thought I was stung by a yellow jacket once, but now I'm certain it was just an unfortunate honey bee. I was racing down a hill near the Guadalupe river on my bicycle and a bug hit my lip. I first thought it was June bug as it was the season. I wiped it away, but then I thought it had left a "leg" stuck in my lip. I reached back up to my lip and pulled out this stinger and squeezed the whole load of toxin into my lip. Wow, did that hurt. I thought someone had hit me with a bat. I crumpled and wrecked.

But did I really think someone "hit me with a bat"? Or do I say that just because my dad always said when he got stung by a yellow jacket it felt like getting hit with a baseball bat. That's probably why I thought it was a yellow jacket because of this association of stings and great sudden pain.

Anyway, I digress...

But isn't that what this thread is about?

Clothes horses would be far less common in Texas because, I reckon, of the climate. It's far warmer and less changeable here so the clothes dry more quickly on the line and there's less chance of a shower. One of my strongest memories from childhood is seeing all the women (we lived in a low-rise block of flats with a communal back garden, and it was the 60s so most women where I lived were housewives) rushing out in a panic as it started to rain, pulling down the clothes props and getting the washing in a bit smartish before it got too wet. Then it'd be hung over the clothes horse and dried in front of the fire.

My mum's clothes horses (there were two of them) were wooden, home-made and looked exactly like this http://www.oldandinteresting.com/images/woodenclotheshorse.jpg Although you can't see it in that image, the hinges were made of webbing that was tacked to the uprights, like this http://cdn0.notonthehighstreet.com/system/product_images/images/000/604/335/original_ClothesHorse_DSC3983.jpg?1335127232 If I remember rightly, they were made of beech.

Clothes props were also wooden, sometimes home-made, sometimes bought, and mostly they looked like this http://www.1900s.org.uk/life-times-images/clothes-prop.jpg They'd have been sold at hardware shops. I can't remember what kind of wood they might have been made from but something at the back of my mind is thinking of birch bark. Birch would fit the bill, being a fairly straight-growing timber and quite common, but I don't know for sure if that's a genuine memory or my old mind conflating one thing with another. Some folks had one that was made from 2" x 2" timber with a notch cut in the top for the line to slot into.

It wasn't until probably the 70s that I remember more people having those folding metal clothes horses, which even now I can't actually think of as a clothes horse - those are clothes driers. A clothes horse has to be wooden and like the ones in the images above. They are incredibly useful though, having so much more hanging space on them than the old ones.

I know at least one person here in the complex has one of those - I've seen it on their balcony. The people who run the place take a dim view of that - we're only supposed to have a very small list of things on the balcony, including (but not limited to) live plants, garden furniture and bicycles. I should get one though because I still do a fair amount of hand washing, to cut down on the number of times I have to go to the land that time forgot, aka the laundry room. It would be handy to have one that I can stand in the bath while the washing drips.

And yes, drift is, well, not exactly de rigeur in this conversation, but definitely not frowned upon in any fashion.

Hmmm, one other memory this conversation has just triggered is the almighty trouble you'd be in if you and your mates were out playing while all the clothes were hanging up and you accidentally pulled something down off the line as you ran underneath it Worse than if you came home muddy; not as bad as if you came home with wet shoes after stepping in the local stream or in a pond.

It's a curious feeling, to read something and realise that it must have been researched from (among other things) something you wrote. Unfortunately I can't post links to either piece, or even just the newer piece, because my own one carries my real name (something I wasn't keen on but it was a condition of publication), and the subject matter is pretty obscure so it'd be far too easy, therefore, to find my one.

It's also curious to find ones-self in the position of those who sometimes complain they haven't been credited or received proper attribution for something online. It's really not as bad as most of them make out, but on the other hand I don't depend on my living for it.

See-saw, Margery Daw,
Johnny shall have a new master.
He shall have but a penny a day,
Because he can't work any faster.

See? Even when we were kids the Christian/capitalist work ethic was being drilled into us.

Listen with Mother my arse. Listen with Gradgrind from't big house what owns't mill, more like, and if tha don't like it tha can bugger off or I'll set't dogs on thee.

This is Unit 4 Plus 2 lipsynching along to their only hit - Concrete and the Clay - while mincing around the building site that became the Barbican, in 1965 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAICRqPA5ns

That tall building in the background, the one that looks like a hi-rise block of flats is a hi-rise block of flats - Great Arthur House on the Golden Lane Estate which was built about ten years earlier than the Barbican (and designed by the same firm of architects, it says here).

Great Arthur House was built with a roof garden which was open to all residents but which, naturally, has now been closed to stop people falling off or doing anything they might sue for.

The building to the left of Great Arthur House is the Cobalt Building in Bridgewater Square http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.520812,-0.095369&spn=0.000735,0.002064&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=51.520898,-0.095414&panoid=mBvHAxBdmwfwfDqTYfW77w&cbp=12,7.24,,0,-18.77 The only thing I know about that pile is that whatever it was in 1965, it's luxury flats now.

So if that was the Barbican while it was being built, the lads must have been standing somewhere on the southern half of this black line while they were pretending to play their song, with the camera pointing north-west, in order to get that angle on the Cobalt Building (yellow circle) and Great Arthur House (red) http://i1376.photobucket.com/albums/ah35/splashesca/Barbican_zps580aa0de.jpg which is here http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.520373,-0.090938&spn=0.005881,0.016512&t=h&z=17

The view from the roof canopy atop Great Arthur House is pretty spectacular http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.522166,-0.096007&spn=0.005881,0.016512&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=51.522166,-0.096007&panoid=LVZjIZlGOAAAAAQYKITaHQ&cbp=12,109.16,,0,5.73 Yeah, I wouldn't mind living there.

Fry bacon. Cut bread. Make bacon sandwich. Eat same. Cut another slice of bread. Dip in the fat left in the frying pan. Eat.

You don't do that?