bigbluemeanie

Navigation

Home | Links |

About This Site

About | Bluemeanie | Scarlett
A personal weblog with photographs and comments. Quiet ramblings, quite rambling...

• Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own - Chinese proverb

Members

Login | Register | Why?

Most recent entries

• What really happened in Croydon?
• Rearranging words
• Lost dog in Oxted area
• The times they are a changing
• Zen of Airports
• Brandenberg Gate
• Walls of Separation
• Bike hire in Berlin
• A small German beer
• Graffiti tags in Berlin
• Filming in Berlin
• Charles James Fox
• Here we go with Leeds United
• The British Bunker
• The Wall

Recent entries with comments

• What really happened in Croydon? - (1)
  
• Bike hire in Berlin - (1)
  
• Brandenberg Gate - (1)
  
• Three Way Chess - (1)
  
• Gamelan instruments - (2)
  
• Oh no! John! - (2)
  
• “Bells and Smells” Mass - (1)
  
• Turn cash into less cash - (6)
  
• And there was light - (2)
  
• Cycling - (3)
  
• Not a Squirrel - (9)
  
• Eurostar breakdown - (2)
  
• Price per litre - (2)
  
• Our House - (2)
  
• Public displays of drinking - (3)
  

Feeds

• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• Atom

Categories

• Europe
  • Czech Republic
  • England
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Luxembourg
  • Netherlands
  • Scotland
  • Sweden
  • Switzerland
  • Wales
• Asia Pac
  • Australia
  • Indonesia
  • Japan
  • Middle East
• Americas
  • Cuba
• Africa
  • South Africa
  • Swaziland

Monthly Archives

• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005
• November 2005
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• July 2005
• June 2005
• May 2005
• April 2005
• March 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• September 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• May 2004
• April 2004
• March 2004
• February 2004
• January 2004
• December 2003
• November 2003
• October 2003

Links

• Full linklist
• Bluemeanie.org
• Scarlett's weblog
• GeoURL
• Blogflux
• LS Blogs
• Blogwise
• Wikablog
• Technorati
• Blogarama
• Oxted Frappr
• Bloggernity.com
• The Blog Directory
• 
  
• 
• 
• 
• The Green Providers Directory

Lately listening to

Site Statistics

• This website has been viewed 344910 times
• Page rendered in 0.6990 seconds
• 43 queries executed

Site Credits

• Powered by: ExpressionEngine
• Based on a design by:
  BlogMoxie
• 
  The original content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

This is the interesting question posed by UK Commentator. The papers have all reported that a crazy crowd attacked and injured two “brave” police officers in Croydon recently.

I notice that the police, like soldiers, are always brave in our newspapers’ view of the world. Somehow this only applies to those wearing the uniform of this country and that of some of our allies.  Strange that.

Anyway, are we certain that the media got this story right? Could our “brave” police officers be capable of the kind of brutality that provoked community riots in previous decades? Shurely not!

Regarding the photo above: I spent the day in Croydon at a friend’s house-warming party. On a shelf in the kitchen he has an array of religious symbols to appease him.

Here at the “Top Hand Car Wash” in Nuttall, it’s a quiet day with the rain. There is normally a long queue of waiting customers. And yet I notice service is good because they don’t have to spend as much time drying your car. (One could also make the opposite case).

Something makes me want to rearrange the words on the smart new sign, even if these guys do have “top hands”.

This is a public service announcement.

Although I’m tempted to comment on some of the spelling in this poster, I am reminded of my own lapses in this area.

as funny as the New Yorker wasn’t

This is Dublin airport. If there’s zen here I didn’t notice it, and thanks to British Airways I had a long time to look. There is a lot of stuff on the internet concerning their unhelpful approach to customer relations and complaints. For example here and here.

This is the history Brandenberg Gate, where Barack Obama is reported to want to make a speech during his forthcoming tour of Europe. This is news which has divided German politicians along party lines (no change there then).

Here’s another more intact section of the Berlin Wall. Looking at it, so low in comparison to say the Palestinian Wall, one is surprised. My colleagues told me that originally there were two rows of walls and the ground between them was mined, and of course watched by guards. Nevertheless this wall resulted in 80 officially recorded deaths in 28 years, and possibly 200 according to unofficial sources. Without belittling this, this is the same number killed over just a few years at the electric fence built between South Africa and Mozambique in the 1970s in order to keep the “communist revolution” out. Of course South Africa has a great history of separation barriers, and possibly the earliest was the almond hedge planted by Jan van Riebeck in the 1660’s. According to The Cape Town Pass it was “to protect the cattle of the Cape colonists”. (From the people who were living and farming there before the settlers arrived). This hedge (although it still exists in part today) quickly fell into disuse when the colonists rapidly expanded out from the settlement at what is now Cape Town.  As distasteful as these separation barriers are, it is also interesting to note how many of them there have been through history: Hadrian’s Wall, Offa’s Dyke, and The Great Wall of China to mention a few.

Link: The Berlin Wall at Wikipedia.

Seems like a good idea. I’m going back to Berlin in a few week’s time so I might have a chance to hire a bike.

They also have these quaint looking but not so quaintly priced cars for hire. The luxury model has rear window heating so you can warm your hands when you are pushing it.

After our meeting we walked around Berlin and had supper. I asked for a small beer and the waitress brought this. I queried this and she clarified “Yes, 500 ml”. This is what I call the egg size or pop-corn carton size descriptive framework.

There’s nothing striking about this, except for the characters with diacritics.

Walking back to the hotel on Thursday night in Berlin we walked into this film set. According to the usher who steered us around the action, they were filming a commercial.

This is the statue of Charles James Fox in Chertsey, Surrey.  He lived from 1749 to 1806 and his wikipedia entry describes him as being a Whig politically.

He came from a family with radical and revolutionary tendencies and his first cousin and friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald was a prominent member of the Society of United Irishmen who was arrested just prior to the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and died of wounds received as he was arrested.

Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant, and a supporter of the revolutionaries across the Atlantic, taking up the habit of dressing in the colours of George Washington’s army. Fox served briefly as Britain’s first Foreign Secretary in the ministry of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782, and returned to the post in a coalition government with his old enemy Lord North in 1783. However, the King forced Fox and North out of government before the end of the year, replacing them with the twenty-four-year-old Pitt the Younger, and Fox spent the following twenty-two years facing Pitt and the government benches from across the Commons.

Though Fox had little interest in the actual exercise of power and spent almost the entirety of his political career in opposition, he became noted as an anti-slavery campaigner, a supporter of the French Revolution, and a leading parliamentary advocate of religious tolerance and individual liberty.

I am guessing that the nearby Fox Lane in Chertsey is named after Charles James and not Martha Lane-Fox.

I found this Leeds United Matrioshka in Prague recently. I left it there.

Meanwhile the football team returned to training recently and they play their first pre-season match tonight against York.  Here’s the 2008 season’s fixture list.

The British Embassy in Berlin must be one of the ugliest buildings in the world. The high security means it is inaccessible and unfriendly. Why does it have cold war level security? The French Embassy around the corner doesn’t and is slightly less ugly. It doesn’t have any visible security outside.

Walking around after our team meeting and before supper we came across these remnants of the Berlin Wall, preserved in this cute state. This is just around the corner from Checkpoint Charlie. Berlin feels to me like the other German cities I am familiar with. Comfortable. The little German I know is dangerous, but one does not need it. In any case although none of us are German, I am with four fluent German speakers.