Thought for the day:"Prediction for September 2020: Sky and Netflix announce merger - New company name revealed as SkyNet..."
A day for strange things ...
Apparently these are teaching scissors - designed for children who use the inner sections while and adult uses the outer to assist .. Clever!
See something different every day in shut down !!
Well maybe not.. research shows..
There really was once a sleeping system like that. The principal reference I have for it is George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London of 1933: “At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable than it sounded — at any rate, better than bare floor.” It’s mentioned in a work of a century earlier, The Magic Skin by Honor de Balzac, which was translated into English by Ellen Marriage in 1895: “We ... made it a point of honour to find out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elyses, or in one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope.”
The connection sounds pretty convincing, with Orwell actually using hangover to describe the method. But the historical evidence for the word in the alcoholic sense shows that it’s from the idea of something that remains or is left over — a remainder or survival or after-effect — not of a person literally being hung over anything.
Several subscribers have since told me that the same story has also been advanced as the supposed origin of to be able to sleep on a clothesline, meaning to be so utterly tired one could sleep anywhere. There might be an association here, though it’s impossible to be sure. But the image behind sleeping on a clothesline is that one lies along it, as in a very thin hammock, being too dead tired to move about and so fall off. It seems not to fit the situation.
I added a personal message as well ...
In other news Susie has been posting some pictures of the dogs so I thought I would do the same ...
And resulting from the lovely Crete Videos - a Picture of Scarlett
And back to the right order for the Shut-Down Serenades and we return to No 55 - Ye Jacobites by name...
Ye Jacobites by Name is a traditional Scottish folk song which goes back to the Jacobite risings in Scotland (1688–1746). While the original version simply attacked the Jacobites from a contemporaneous Whig point of view, Robert Burns rewrote it in around 1791 to give a version with a more general, humanist anti-war, but nonetheless anti-Jacobite outlook. This is the version that most people know today...
And so - Cheers !
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