The Republicans have an uncanny way of staying on message.  However, a wide spectrum of the media (liberal and Gawd-fearin’) have locked onto a particular phrase that should be a talking point: “Disillusionment with Obama’s curiously frigid administration is a pervasive theme, but his rivals for the greatest office on earth look like competitors in [...]

This is a grab bag of stuff from this month, maybe becoming a recurring feature. The concept of ‘Qualifications’ is a funny one in Britain.  To be qualified to do something doesn’t mean that you have the skills to perform a task, but rather that you have “done a course” at the end of which [...]

So it has come to this…1000 posts in less than 3 years (975 days, to be precise). In that time we have come quite far together:  712 pub stops, 4025 miles running (1740 unique miles in the UK, at that), almost 96000 views of this blog  (averaging about 200/day the last few months after slow [...]

The last time I tried to get a beverage at the Bell it was temporarily unable to sell alcohol…in the states they pull your license for good, here they do it for 5 days and waive this penalty if you can argue undue hardship.  Funny. I ran the hill into Old Town a couple of [...]

Americans, like myself, spent much of the past week playing a macabre version of Six Degrees of Separation…I was loading luggage for a trip to Scotland when the first plane hit, but my closest real connection was my boss’s neighbour who lost his son, daughter-in-law and grandkids to the Pentagon flight.  Very depressing.   {New [...]

On Tuesday, my local paper made me laugh out loud on the bus ride to work with the page 3 article above. 1: The rivers around here can be waded across by small children. 2: A substantial fire brigade response seemed warranted. 3:  Animal rescue specialists were found and dispatched to the scene. 4 (and [...]

The kids got married, Americans were quite embarrassing on tele, and Prince Phillip stayed alert (my bet failed) and as far as we know he didn’t hit on any of the bridesmaids. We went to the Glue Pot for a celebratory drink and found that the topic was off limits…fair enough, we are all sick [...]

Update 8 Sept 2011: This article seems to indicate the Bulldog is already closed (and attracting corpses). Last Wednesday’s Swindon Advertiser had a disturbing article indicating that the council was considering demolishing the Bulldog.  The Bulldog is a big house in a nice neighbourhood of large homes with pretty gardens, and you would reckon that [...]

Okay, this made me laugh out loud and I’m glad I didn’t have food or drink in my mouth when it happened. The Oxford Literary Festival gets thousands of top-flight authors and sponsors hundreds of scholarly lectures each year.  The Swindon Literary Festival, on the other hand, is proud to present this: I, for one, [...]

I thought this would be a really ill advised Google photo search, but I just came up with things about Willie Nelson and a woman walking her dog.  I was amused into trying this when I heard this chant on the news last night and nearly spit out a mouthful of wine.  Here’s an article [...]