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?

Pensioner turns vicious

I see that Rosemarie Hamilton-Meikle, a normally placid pensioner of 80 good years, attacked 3 wild boars in Dartmoor, sending fear into the hearts of the savage beasts. The brutes had the ill-luck to come across her dachsund as he scuttered around under a bush.

” I heard a terrible screaming noise and I thought my Bosun had got into a fight with some other dog”, says Rosemarie, “then I saw my little dog lying down on the ground with three wild boar in front of him. I thought he was dead.”

Justifiably angry, she launched an attack with the dog-lead, frightening off two of them, but a large male boar stood his ground. Undeterred, the fighting pensioner swung the dog-lead again. “The dog-lead has a heavy metal clip so I swung it and caught him on the nose. Then I picked up Bosun and walked away. Fortunately the boar did not follow.”.

Too bloody right! Fortunate indeed the boar didn’t follow. Those things can weigh 440 lb : 200 kg, and can grow to 6 feet : 1.8 m long.

It almost puts Rosemarie into the Darwin AwardsThe dachshound was unhurt.

Finally …

After over a month of fires, I have retuned to my little cottage. In the old days, I would have been standing there with a wet bag on my head and another in my hands beating at the embers on the firebreak, but not these days.

Now I get sent away instead. For safekeeping. Parcelled off. Shipped out. Evacuated.

I’m not complaining, I frequently need a wet bag on my head, bushfires or no bushfires.

Time changes

I get so confused with my modern appliances. Especially when I have to adjust the time. I can change my bedside clock, that’s just winding a few knobs at the back, but I don’t even know how to open my kitchen clock.

And I have just noticed that everything has a little clock in it! The video, the DVD, the burglar alarm, the stove, the hose in the garden and the (new) microwave oven, and I may have to ring up an electrician to come over and adjust my time settings. Time was never so confusing when I was young. Why do they all need to tell me what time it is?

But what actually is time? Does time exist when nothing is changing? Is the future infinite? Was there time before the Big Bang? What role does time play in our reasoning? What are the neural mechanisms that account for our experience of time? Does time exist for beings that have no minds? Does anyone care?

It’s all too much for me, I need a small glass of sherry while I wait for the electrician to come and move my clocks forward. Or is it backward?

Lock up your livestock

Beryl, who goes to Bingo with me, firmly believes in the recent sightings of Blessed Virgin Mary, but she’s worried that her framed velvet Mary art and hot pink plastic rosaries won’t save her budgerigars from the Chupacabra.

Granted, the reports of mysterious Goatsuckers in my neighbourhood are few and far between, but all the same I intend to keep my Border Collie inside at night.

Dreadful attacks have been perpetrated by the Chupacabra, which always involve slain livestock with telltale marks on their necks. The victims, most often goats and chickens, are reportedly drained of all their blood, but are otherwise left intact.

I tried to tell Beryl that these creatures only plague various regions of Puerto Rico and other faraway places of a similar rural nature, but she says the Chupacabra has kangaroo-like qualities, so they must be local.

I may borrow a set of rosaries myself.

Blame the genes

My Grandma could stop a brewery horse dead in its tracks.

The havoc this caused is a story for another day, I only mention it because, although Grandma was a fine figure of a woman, she had a nasty reptilian look about the eyes.

Now my numerous cousins tell me that I am beginning to look like her.

“You’ve got her look about the eyes, Queenie. Pity you couldn’t copy her smile.”

Well I have news for them. Just like you, I didn’t copy my frown from my father or unconsciously pick up a grimace from Grandma. Conscious or unconscious has nothing to do with it

(I had plenty of chances to learn from my Grandma, she was just plain unconscious at least once a week)

Scientists at the University of Haifa have concluded that facial expressions are genetically determined. You can’t beat your genes. And it’s too late to beat Grandma.

All this time I thought if you pulled an ugly expression, the wind might change, and the expression would stay forever. Grandma told me that.

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

Thoroughly Modern Queenie

I’ve joined the modern age at last. I have a mobile phone, a DVD player and now a microwave oven.

I resisted the oven for years. All those microwaves flying loose about the house, who knows what damage they could be doing and what awful consequences of random radiation?

Would it reverse the air conditioning? Turn on the garden sprinklers? Give the budgie a brain tumour?

But my Council Home Help Girl insists the oven is safe and it wouldn’t matter if I became suddenly sterile anyway. So I now have this white box on my kitchen bench and the Girl is bringing me a little bag of wheat that you pop into the microwave, enter a PIN number or something and there you have it — a sort of waterless hot water bottle.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Naps are fashionionable these days

I’m sure I read about these little napping machines in a sci fi novel many years ago when I was young. But this is a real appliance for people who are too busy to go to bed. Or for people to sleep at work. Before you wonder why people would be encouraged to sleep at work (this is what they do at my phone company, I swear the skeleton staff are all half-asleep) I will show you the advertisment urging us all to nap.

Naps have been shown to benefit almost every aspect of human wellness. The benefits to the body include better heart functioning, hormonal maintenance, and cell repair. They help you live longer, stay more active, and look younger.

Look younger? I’ve been napping all over the place for years and I can tell you right now it hasn’t done anything for me.

Only yesterday as I was taking the bus to the podiatrist I had a refreshing little nap and woke up with the busdriver asking me where I wanted to go…. Kindly chap, he knew I had missed my stop. I hope he didn’t see the dribble on my blouse.