bluebottle

Liz was fond of quoting the mnemonic that she learned as a girl: 'tites come down, and mites grow up ...

Snopes say that they get a lot of calls from people asking if the story is true, and those people are usually incredulous when told: "No!" “It’s a totally bogus story, but over the last four months we’ve gotten at least 12, maybe 18 calls from different media sources trying to confirm that,” said Cmdr. Kevin Wensing, an Atlantic Fleet spokesman in Norfolk. “Unfortunately, some of them don’t check it out. They just repeat it. “The first time I heard of it was — oh, let’s see, how long — about 10 years ago or so, I think. “That story’s so old,” Wensing said, “it probably started out back in the galleon days, or back when there was a big lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt.” I'd guess that Allan first told the story about that time.

Someone mention bishops?

Typo or pun?

There's a wonderful family named Stein, There's Ep, there's Gertrude, and there's Ein. Ep's statues are junk, Gert's poems are bunk, And nobody understands Ein. Edit for typo.

TBH, Peter, my first thought when looking at the photo was "Oh, well..." Then, noticing the line added underneath, I had to laugh! Neat!

Hm... I noticed that Sherry's avatar was among the names listed as browsing this forum, a minute or two ago; its gone now - maybe she's hovering? Ah - back again!

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh - Ken Cheng has won this year’s "Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe" award with his one-liner on the UK’s redesigned currency: “I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.” ' After that, I don't think that we should be too quick to demand a "GROAN!' button on this forum ...

Not being that way inclined, I'd rather bait the trap with a glass of bubbly and drink the beer while I waited for a bite.

Daughter Helen found herself in something like a North vs South situation when she went to FE college - and that was just a bus ride from Wadsley Bridge here in the northern Sheffield suburbs down to leafy Norton in the south. Them southerners got the rough edge of her tongue for asking her what it was like to live among the Chavs ...

I was under the impression that it was the submariners' job to see to it that the other lot's ships didn't stay on the surface ...

A young Novocastrian, resident at Sheffield Uni's Stephenson Hall in the seventies, made that delicacy sound even less appetising by his pronunciation of it as "turd in the hole ..."

A happy ending to the tale! BTW, Bob, what blood group and Rhesus factor are you? No particular reason ...

If steam locomotives have souls, 8624's must be in purgatory!

I think that it may have been Frank Muir who claimed that the stone marking the grave of a noted toper in his local churchyard was inscribed: "Hic(!) iacit J___ S____"

To nitpick: 'Come home to a real fire. Buy a holiday cottage in Wales' ("Not the Nine O'Clock News").

Perhaps George made the same mistake as the young lady from Riga?

As the actress didn't say to the Prince...

A receptacle in the form of a wire sculpture of a rhinoceros, I have been informed, for the deposition of rubbish. Lots of bottle tops giving a colourful effect. Judging by the general tidiness, a highly successful item of platform furniture. https://www.morris-leisure.co.uk/edith-the-rhinoceros.htm

Emily, Helen and Richard back this evening from the Firbeck sailing club's annual holiday at Abersoch. A couple of Helen's snaps: Scots Guardsman hauling The Welsh Mountaineer through Betws-y-Coed, Tuesday 25.07.2017 I'm told that Emily has a couple of presents for me. Here she is testing them. Edit: larger file for Bettws-y-coed snap.

RE: "Sailing" Agree that the Sutherland Bros version is better. One thing that puzzles me is that where Gavin is given credit for the song on Wikipedia and other websites, Iain is named on the inlay of their "Very best of" CD. I read some years back that Iain (or Gavin) was trying to play the traditional-styled "Mingulay Boat Song", played a few wrong chords, and finished up with "Sailing". Here's Richard Thompson's version of "Mingulay" -

Well done for not playing the idiot Irishman card!

I remember a BBC TV programme in the late 50s/very early 60s which recreated such a drill during the Ist century AD. Remarkable historical authenticity then, especially for a comedy series, with Jimmy Edwards playing the centurion: "Are you a legionnaire?" "Yessir." "Well get your legion 'air cut!" Happy days...

I don't know anything about the chap, but I'm intrigued by the large helping of spaghetti spirals he's modelling.

From another funny lady: "My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is." (Ellen DeGeneres)