Happy Birthday, Elvis

It’s a nice age, 72. A nice round figure, probably along the lines of his figure now. I’m quite sure he would have lost all those pounds he was carrying 30 years ago, (well he has, hasn’t he?)

My friend Reg who knows a lot about fillies is 72. It’s not a bad age for a man as long as they aren’t too fit if you know what I mean. Nothing worse than having some old codger try and chat you up, why some of them bother I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t know how some of them can live with themselves, all carpetslippers, cardigans and clacking teeth.

There’s an otherwise charming gentleman who goes to Bingo who keeps asking me out dancing -ha! I know what that means - a lady can always tell if a chap is being fresh.

But I forget what I’m writing about.  Ah yes, Elvis. I wonder what Elvis would be doing now if he weren’t 6 foot under? Singing awful Gospel songs? Now if he asked me out dancing I might consider it.

Beautiful Cleo

I still say that Cleopatra was beautiful. I know there’s been disparaging remarks made about her nose before, but this coin reveals that she had a pointed chin, thin lips and sharp, aqualine nose. Somewhat like myself in fact.

Better than Marc Antony anyway, with his bulging eyes, thick neck and nasty-looking hook nose.

This tiny coin shows the head of Marc Antony, while Cleopatra is on the reverse. The image on the coin is far from being that of Elizabeth Taylor, but old Marc bears a strong resemblance to Richard Burton.

Roman writers merely said that Cleopatra was intelligent, sharp-witted, possessed of good humour and that she was charismatic. Her voice was known as seductive, and she had a wonderful laugh. Isn’t that beautiful enough?

Suspicious smiling

I know what to do about the poor soldiers in the impenetrable forests of giant marijuana. No one has told their superiors that marijuana combats Alzheimers disease. The effects are only beneficial for older people, or so I’m told, and that explains the preponderance of smiling old ladies you see around such dense forests.

THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana, has been used for some time to help reduce agitation and increase weight in people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. And now researchers have shown that cannabis can help older subjects perform better on a spatial memory task.

I wonder where these tests have been carried out? And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the ladies at my Lawn Bowls Club have been subjects in this research. A couple of them are always smiling. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?

Soldiers going potty in Afghanistan

I’m a bit worried about the soldiers. Apparently Canadian troops fighting in Afghanistan have encountered an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of 10-feet-high marijuana plants.

These forests are used as cover for both sides, soldiers slip in and out and armoured cars are camouflaged with giant plants. They tried burning the foliage but successful incineration has its own drawbacks.

“A section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and we decided that was probably not the right course of action,” said an Army spokesman.

Ill effects? Perhaps nobody wanted to do any more fighting.

It’s true, I didn’t make it up

… And not a drop to drink

“I think it’s time we started taking notice of a grave threat to the environment. The consumption of bottled water in this country has grown in the past 25 years from less than a million bottles a year to more than a billion per annum.”

It is estimated that about one-fifth of these bottles are thrown away with the top screwed tightly down and an average of one ounce of water remaining inside.

Given that these plastic bottles are airtight, nonbiodegradable containers, this means that the water contained inside is withdrawn from the planet’s hydrosystem for the next 10 million years.

If present trends continue, it is estimated that within the next 400,000 years, not only will all the planet’s carbon be tied up in the plastic of these discarded water bottles, but also the entirety of the world’s oceans will be locked up inside these bottles.

The result is that humans of that future era will spend their lives swimming through an ocean of plastic water bottles, continually opening bottles to scavenge water, one ounce at a time.

Petropavlosk Kamchatsky

I had another little look at the Clust’r Map in the right hand column over there, and found that there was someone in Petropavlosk Kamchatsky reading this.

Of course I had to look up where Petropavlosk Kamchatsky is. In my day that was ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ and you would be blasted by a lightning bolt if you even looked it up on an atlas.

My school atlas didn’t even have regions marked in those days, just a big fearful red blotch of colour behind the Iron Curtain. But times have changed and we are now allowed to look at the Soviet countries, talk to the people in them, sell them dodgy hamburgers, move next door and marry their daughters.

The world is very small up there isn’t it? You don’t realise how crammed together those places are, everyone is crowded in a little circle around the North Pole, you could take a canoe around with no trouble.

It’s a wonder they aren’t better neighbours being so close, but that might be the problem. Living too squashed together causes outbreaks of name-calling and petty insults, you know what the High Rise are like.