I still have my iPod Classic from I think 2007 - I even found a Bluetooth gadget that plugs into the headphone jack so I can listen on my hearing aids. The battery life is indeed awesome. I also use it in my car, which has a usb slot. I dread the day it dies, they stopped making them years ago.
Especially ancient Africa! Look up Mansa Musa, king of Mali. Carthage too. Zimbabwe. Benin. Egypt too, it’s in Africa.
With my luck I’d die of a katipo spider bite in the first month lol. Also, I’m minded of the scene in the film Boy, where said boy is cooking tea for the family. “Ah no, not crayfish again!” whines his sister. (Though I can’t imagine getting sick of crayfish.) Ask yourself why the Māori started eating tītī/muttonbird…. that smacks of desperation. Pack a few kūmara in your bag, maybe an axe and a box of matches?
Gigi. Absolutely fucking horrified when I watched it as an adult. “Thank heavens for leetle girls.” Yikes. It’s all about a courtesan (high class prostitute) bringing up her daughter to also be a courtesan. Happy ending: she gets married!! Phew!
Actually my first movie might have been a Shirley Temple one. I remember her singing Good Ship Lollipop on a plane with a lot of grown men. At some point her mother got run over - they didn’t show the accident but she was carrying Shirley’s birthday cake, with a plane on it, and you saw the cake crashing to the ground and the plane smashed up. I haven’t seen it since so I have no idea what was going on.
I’m really old btw. All us kids used to go to the pictures every Saturday morning. First up were cartoons, then maybe a serial (Tarzan), then an interval, then the main feature.
It’s even more mildly infuriating for us across the pond… we don’t have Thanksgiving but we now get the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday nonsense. Grrr!
I stopped using Chrome a while back, but still use Gmail because I’m lazy. Every time I crank open Gmail in another browser, Google whines at me to use Chrome. That grizzling pop-up is now the main reason I don’t use Chrome, and it will eventually drive me to migrate away from Gmail. DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!
Yak. Had a delicious yak goulash in a restaurant in Thimpu, Bhutan. Very similar to beef, hard to tell because of the spicing.
I bought a (nearly) 1Tb thumb drive for £10 last week and copied all my music onto it. I’m thinking of getting a few more for docs and other media and leaving them in my keysafe.
Ha ha! We are beginning to wonder. My late mother would have been over 100 if she was still alive; he was her toyboy, lol. He’s fit and active, has lots of hobbies, walks everywhere and has opinions about everything. We love him a lot, and hope he is indeed immortal.
My stepfather Skyped me recently to introduce me to his new girlfriend. He’s 91. So no, it’s not too late for you to find someone to love. It sounds like you’re doing well at being social. Don’t worry too much about it, just be genuine, open, and interested in the people you meet.
Oh this gave me a nice nostalgia hit! Back in the late 60s I think it was, there was a similar scheme where you sent a dollar to the address at the top of a list of ten names, added your name to the bottom of the list and sent the list to ten other people. There were various other chain letter things going around, threatening a curse if you didn’t pass them on, but this was a specific cash one. I had quite an argument with the idiot who sent it to me - he said the chain wouldn’t work if I broke it. You were supposed to end up with hundreds of dollars.
Two things helped me: learning not to listen to the “noise” (it’s not truly noise, it’s a kind of nerve damage), and hearing aids. When I first put the aids in the tinnitus vanished. The downside is that all the work I’d put in to not listening was overturned, because I “heard” the sounds again when I took the aids out. Still nice to have that respite though.
Training yourself to not listen to the racket isn’t easy, but it is so worthwhile. Turn your attention away to something else - a smell, a photograph, your pet, anything. Focus away. Just thinking about tinnitus is making it “audible” to me, lol! It’s not real sounds, it’s your poor abused nerve endings firing off random signals. White noise works for a lot of people, but it never has for me.
Visit https://tinnitus.org/ for more info. There’s a download section where you can get a pdf of a scientific paper describing the method.
My bad knee is now titanium and my good knee has become my bad knee.
Young dandelion greens are delicious. You can also roast the roots to make “coffee”, but I can’t really recommend it. It’s like coffee in that it’s dark and bitter, but it has zero caffeine (which is why I used to drink it) and… well, it tastes horrible. Young nettle leaves are also good as cooked greens or tea, wear gloves to pick and process them of course.
I like having house spiders, they are quiet and clean, and their webs are fairly discreet. My main interaction with them is helping them out of the bath before I have a shower. I offer a flannel, spider climbs aboard, I lift the flannel to the windowsill, spider exits. Another place I appreciate spiders is inside my beehives - they help keep wax moths at bay.
I grew up in the southern hemisphere and have lived in the northern hemisphere for 30+ years. Going back for a holiday can be weird - one time it was snowing when I left home & hot hot hot when I arrived. I was pale as a fish’s belly, plus the coinage had changed shapes while I was away. I joked that people probably thought I was on day release from an institution. But I did get the fun of sending selfies from the beach while my friends were suffering arctic blasts, so there’s that.
It’s interesting going back - I sound local but feel like (and often act like) like a tourist. But I’m always happy to get home.