don't confuse the narrator

going home

Many years ago I used to regularly read the Peanuts cartoon in the Sunday colour supplement; occasionally, I would cut one out and put it with other bits and pieces in a scrapbook. I remember the last panel of one of these cartoons showing a fairly despondent Snoopy saying, “Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again.”
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a choice of viewing

The marvels of technology allow us to watch TV even if we don’t actually have a television set, and to watch programmes at times totally unrelated to when they are actually broadcast. I found this film on offer recently:

"The Thing from Another World" listing on iPlayer

What really caught my attention was how close I had come to missing it after all these years:

First shown 1951: available till Tuesday

I wonder if they really did keep their word and remove it on Tuesday or whether, like David Bowie, they decided they “might be able to stretch it till Wednesday”:
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the real thing

Browsing the online sales pages, I came across this:

I’m glad the description warns me that it is an imitation. But I would rather like to know what a real Mongolian cushion looks like.

On the other hand, years ago, an American colleague assured me that faux pas was pronounced “fox paw”. So perhaps this cushion is made from the fur of the Faux Mongolian – a relative of the Siberian Fox, I suppose, but adapted to a grassier terrain if the colour is anything to go by.

hot and cold

However bad the weather is when you’re reading this, I doubt any UK readers will be witnessing anything quite as extreme as that shown in the video of this news story:

BBC News story Yellow River waterfall turns to ice in China

What struck me, of course, was the “read more” headline at the end of the story. Why has the year 2014 been so hot?

no poetry

Traffic delays possible - road warning sign

There’s no poetry
in traffic jams:
we edge forward
foot by foot. Caught
behind a juggernaut
with no opportunity
to scan ahead for a turn,
we’re stressing
in the fast lane,
going oh
so
slow,
syncopated with
the nearside flow;
we can’t even
reverse.