John 'Calgacus' Kidd

Before you marry - find OUT if your wife is 'horsey' and no circumstances ever let your Daughter near a Pony or you will end up having to .... Buy a brute for £5,000 buy its tack, saddle, reins, noseband, stirrups, English egg-butt Pelham's, martingales = £1,000 buy riding hat, crop, jodhpurs, boots, and goes knows how much paraphelia of lead ropes, curry combs, sweat bands = £300 You ll have to buy the horse a new Zealand rug - make that rugs - one for winter, one for summer, one for sweating all cost £100+ plus the £20 a month cost to stitch them for every tear on a barbed wire fence = £500 Then the annual costs - paying for its VET insurance £35 per month and pay for wormer and injections at £100 more = £450 inusre your self and third party agianst the horse sitting on a car = £350 rent it grazing at up to £250 a month = £3,000 buy it Hay at £5 a bale a day per horse for up to 6 months = £1,200 buy it feed (Oats, chaff) at £25 a month = £300 you may even pay out for a ...

Mozart effect ... The Mozart effect is a term coined by Alfred A. Tomatis for the alleged increase in brain development that occurs in children under age 3 when they listen to the music of Wolfgang Gottlieb (now trans. 'Amadeus') Mozart . The idea for the Mozart effect originated in 1993 at the University of California, Irvine, with physicist Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher , a former concert cellist and an expert on cognitive development. They studied the effects on a few dozen college students of listening to the first 10 minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448). They found a temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ test. No one else has been able to duplicate their results. One researcher commented that the "very best thing that could be said of their [Shaw's and Rauscher's] experiment—were it completely uncontested—would be that listening to bad Mozart enhances short–term IQ" ( Linto...

You've got to wonder why people continue to write reviews of Miyazaki movies, since they almost all end up sounding the same in the end. "Wow," "magical," "he's done it again" "sure to be the biggest movie of the summer," on and on it goes, and then after recycling the same words of praise and amazement in a slightly new order for a few paragraphs you come the inevitable five-star rating. So why am I adding to the pile? In the words of Raphael See in his Laputa review , "Because that way, I get to watch the best animated stories in the world..." The story begins with our main character, the young and scrawny Chihiro, becoming trapped on one side of a river after walking through a dark tunnel. She finds herself in a town normally invisible to humans, one in which various gods, from local deities to goblins and monsters, are quite visible. After she is trapped in this town with her parents, who are turned into pigs for eating the...

Whats with the Guardian crossword compilers - why have they started allowing complete nonsense to start being part of the cryptic crossword? I am collating many examples of the kind of clue that gives a solution that is neither clever or logica - and will be filling in this blog with these in the next few days.l And to state succintly the Laws of Cryptic Crosswords ; 1.Every clue must offer two routes to the solution word, including at least one straight definition. 2.There are no extraneous words in the clues. 3.“The clue writer may not mean what he says, but he must always say what he means.” Lets start with Araucaria.. Executed agitator keeping revolutionary Western idol (6,3) = SACRED COW How workers in two shifts smile crookedly at one on river quiz (3,5,2,2,1,11) = WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE It becomes us all and, ungrammatically, on the contrary(4) = DUST No further charge on the Blaydon Races? (4) NETT Actor in boot? (4) TREE Relating to a branch that causes alarm (5) RAMAL ...

Could it be that many moribund pop acts of the 1980s have only recently brought out new records for the first time in over a decade (not including the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger solo album, - Madness, Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Kate Bush,Enya, Simple Minds, Bananrama etc etc - Could this be in order to cash in on the mushrooming market in download i-tunes for the middle-aged online savvy population? Another theory closely related to the Abba and Mamma Mia smash success and re-vival could be linked to same effect in the USA in the 1980s - a country humiliated by Iran hostage takers (although Jimmy Carter did do the right thing and stop propping up the Shah dynasty) and we could still be suffering the ripple effects of this with Iraq and Afghanistan being convenient stepping stones to invasion. In a world of uncertainity the USA (see later blog - USA Quo Vadis) looked to a historical certainty of childrens saturday morning movies (Indinana Jones) and the iconically titled BACK TO THE ...

Why evolution has no 'other side' It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the heart. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong." to analyse controversies is of enormous value to education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or " intelligent design" (ID )? Why would we join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong ...

http://www.itaweb.it/startrek/papers/coldwar.html - saw this and loved it! - Okay, here's the deal. You guys remember when we all knew who the bad guys were? No matter what the movie was, the bad guy always wore a black hat, or was a Russian, or spoke in any foreign accent other than American. The Bond series thrived during the heat of the Cold War 'cause everyone was scared to death that, in the ink of an eye, we'd all be eating borscht and standing in lines for toilet paper. Fear came in the form of the Iron Curtain. But, whoopsie, thanks to great Gorbachev ,the Berlin Wall fell down one night, and with it, Hollywood lost its bad guys. Gorbachev said—apparently with wisdom—after the breakup of the Soviet Union, that the United States would now need a new enemy. To me this means that nationalism is nothing more than ego extrapolated to identify with the image of a country, that is, the U.S. Every nationalist thinks that their country represents the ideal. Nationalism fun...