Because I have been busy...
...I've neglected to update LiveJournal in a while properly.
Elsewhere on LiveJournal, I was set a task for this meme: Comment with the words "Top Ten" or "Top Five", and I will reply with a subject for which you will generate a top ten (or top five) list. Post the list and instructions in your own journal
Top Five Bears. Near misses: wombles are not bears but since there are a lot of cuddly toys in here, they feel like morally they should get a mention. Also, my friend Big Jim is a bear, but probably not quite what the question setter had in mind. Oh, the other near miss is my teddy bear Victoria who I no longer have - who was, I assume, named after the name my mother had intended my sister to be given. True story: my paternal grandmother stopped my sister being named Victoria Louise via a covert phone-call to my father because, I'm quite serious, no grand-daughter of hers was going to be named after a train station. But anyway. Bears.
5) WereBears
For most people, the 1980s seems to be the decade they are they're trying to forget. Bizarre big hair, and dancing on Top of the Pops while wearing badly-made suits seem to be just two of the things everyone else is doing their best to mentally bleach. But there were good things in the 80s. Robert Palmer did Addicted to Love. Knightmare was on telly. I was born. (Obligatory "Two out of three ain't bad.") But also were-bears. http://www.werebears.co.uk/ They were ordinary bears that had heads that could be turned inside out, and paws too. Sort of like the bear equivalent of Transformers, only at the full moon.
4) Winnie the Pooh
It is very hard not to have Winnie the Pooh in the list. He likes hunny. He is friends with Tigger. He has a masterful command of Tao and philosophy generally. I never actually was into him as a child. I think I was given a book of stories but never really read any of it until much later in life. I think I embarrassed myself at one point when oldbloke was railing against uneducated youth not knowing who Pooh's best friend was, because we were brought up on Disney. Well, I wasn't. But I still got it wrong. Proof here.
3) Beeblebears
Mine is yellow and black, but they come in all sorts of different colours. This is a fairly good picture of one - the others are much smaller. With two heads, three arms and an eyepatch, what more could you want? Possibly the ability to pull unemployed astrophysicists and steal spaceships, but I think you're just getting picky at that point.
2) Champ Bear
From the Care Bears. A while back, I tried to find out who the creatures who weren't Care Bears but were in a sister cartoon were. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to track down that they were the Get Along Gang. I remembered them chiefly for the words Moose and Caboose. But care bears. Yes, I loved care bears when I was little. And Champ Bear was the one I had the teddy of. So Champ Bear makes the list.
1) Paddington Bear
Obviously. Because he likes marmalade, comes from Darkest Peru (which sounds interesting when you're six), has a great hat and duffle coat, and is all round fabulous. I have memories of reading a Paddington story, or perhaps having it read to me, where Paddington puts on a magic show. He starts the show with the line "For my next trick...", and puts down a heckle from the neighbour with a withering stare. What's not to like about a stand-up stage-magician marmalade eating bear?
Top five things about moving. This one is somewhat harder, and it's harder to assemble an order. So, in no particular order.
I was listening to and reading the BBC News a while back, when Ming Campbell was supporting his new Trident policy at Lib Dem conference. What was interesting to me was that depending on which reports you read, he'd either clinched a narrow but important victory or staved off defeat. And in an absolute sense, both of these things are true - a narrow victory is almost by definition a near defeat, unless you had an unshakeable 51% of votes and the rest is just window-dressing. But it's interesting the way that this sort of thing can distort your perception of the result. Clinching a victory is a good thing, whereas staving off defeat is much more focused on the negative possibilities and the expectation of defeat.
And that reminds me. Stealth taxes. God, I hate that term. I was in a channel of various friends and acquaintances really and people were talking about the proposed road pricing schemes. Now, I can understand that some people are in favour of this and some against. But here, someone came up with the line: "Oh, well, that's just another stealth tax." What? The idea is that you know how much you're driving and how much that costs in order to deter you from doing it. And raise money in the process, most likely. But there's nothing stealthy about this as a tax. The term "stealth tax" does have valid uses, hence it being coined in the first place - dealing with increases that aren't in your face and that catch you unawares, or doing sneaky things like turning the National Lottery into a vehicle for the NHS instead of helping fund days out for old people, or rebuilding a scout hut or something. But these days, it seems to be just thrown around at anything. Say it's a stealth tax, it's inherently bad. It just smacks of intellectual laziness, and I wish people of all political persuasions would stop it.
Elsewhere on LiveJournal, I was set a task for this meme: Comment with the words "Top Ten" or "Top Five", and I will reply with a subject for which you will generate a top ten (or top five) list. Post the list and instructions in your own journal
Top Five Bears. Near misses: wombles are not bears but since there are a lot of cuddly toys in here, they feel like morally they should get a mention. Also, my friend Big Jim is a bear, but probably not quite what the question setter had in mind. Oh, the other near miss is my teddy bear Victoria who I no longer have - who was, I assume, named after the name my mother had intended my sister to be given. True story: my paternal grandmother stopped my sister being named Victoria Louise via a covert phone-call to my father because, I'm quite serious, no grand-daughter of hers was going to be named after a train station. But anyway. Bears.
5) WereBears
For most people, the 1980s seems to be the decade they are they're trying to forget. Bizarre big hair, and dancing on Top of the Pops while wearing badly-made suits seem to be just two of the things everyone else is doing their best to mentally bleach. But there were good things in the 80s. Robert Palmer did Addicted to Love. Knightmare was on telly. I was born. (Obligatory "Two out of three ain't bad.") But also were-bears. http://www.werebears.co.uk/ They were ordinary bears that had heads that could be turned inside out, and paws too. Sort of like the bear equivalent of Transformers, only at the full moon.
4) Winnie the Pooh
It is very hard not to have Winnie the Pooh in the list. He likes hunny. He is friends with Tigger. He has a masterful command of Tao and philosophy generally. I never actually was into him as a child. I think I was given a book of stories but never really read any of it until much later in life. I think I embarrassed myself at one point when oldbloke was railing against uneducated youth not knowing who Pooh's best friend was, because we were brought up on Disney. Well, I wasn't. But I still got it wrong. Proof here.
3) Beeblebears
Mine is yellow and black, but they come in all sorts of different colours. This is a fairly good picture of one - the others are much smaller. With two heads, three arms and an eyepatch, what more could you want? Possibly the ability to pull unemployed astrophysicists and steal spaceships, but I think you're just getting picky at that point.
2) Champ Bear
From the Care Bears. A while back, I tried to find out who the creatures who weren't Care Bears but were in a sister cartoon were. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to track down that they were the Get Along Gang. I remembered them chiefly for the words Moose and Caboose. But care bears. Yes, I loved care bears when I was little. And Champ Bear was the one I had the teddy of. So Champ Bear makes the list.
1) Paddington Bear
Obviously. Because he likes marmalade, comes from Darkest Peru (which sounds interesting when you're six), has a great hat and duffle coat, and is all round fabulous. I have memories of reading a Paddington story, or perhaps having it read to me, where Paddington puts on a magic show. He starts the show with the line "For my next trick...", and puts down a heckle from the neighbour with a withering stare. What's not to like about a stand-up stage-magician marmalade eating bear?
Top five things about moving. This one is somewhat harder, and it's harder to assemble an order. So, in no particular order.
- The estate agent. No, really. I know what you're all thinking. Estate agents, scum of the earth, would sell their own mother to make a deal. And yes, they probably would. But! The estate agent I lucked on happened to be bloody attractive, which makes everything all right. Following one of my established types, he's a dark-haired jockey. There's a thought. Recently, both sillytrippy and cerberuspuppy have made hideous, hideous mistakes when trying to work out who I'd fancy, and I only made one significant mistake when doing the reverse to sillytrippy, when suggesting Moira Kelly, who plays Mandy Hampton in the first series of The West Wing. Tch. Peoples.
- Curtains. Living in rented accomodation, you have to put up with a lot of the owner's foibles. The bedroom has thin curtains, and everywhere else has roller blinds. Even in the living room. It's very odd.
- Finding things. Because I am a messy sod, I lose things in amongst piles of everything else. Moving has meant that I've stumbled across stuff I knew I had, but couldn't for the life of me think where I'd put it. So, finding things again has been good.
- Tiles. Like the curtains, you have to put up with the owner's foibles. One of these foibles is carpets in bathrooms. Having grown up with this originally, I found it not too weird until after I lived in places without carpet. I mean, what the hell is up with English people putting carpets in bathrooms, so that dirt, grime, and other assorted filth can congregate in its furry depths? Tiled bathroom = win.
- Being lucky on the stockmarket. Well, not lucky. Because I was initially very unlucky. When younger, I had a significant injury to my arm which resulted in compensation being paid into a court account. When this matured, I needed to put it into somewhere safe. Thing is, money and me get on okay. I'm not utterly stupid. But I do spend it a little too easily on fripperies. So, moving several thousands pounds away from my savings account into something a little harder to access was good. Unfortunately, the maths behind this is that I ending up putting the money into a PEP towards the height of the dot-com boom. Oh well. Anyway, money saved up for exactly this purpose (making significant deposit on flat) was extracted recently, and I managed to do it just before the stock-market did its mini-nosedive recently, rather than after. That's a good thing, right?
I was listening to and reading the BBC News a while back, when Ming Campbell was supporting his new Trident policy at Lib Dem conference. What was interesting to me was that depending on which reports you read, he'd either clinched a narrow but important victory or staved off defeat. And in an absolute sense, both of these things are true - a narrow victory is almost by definition a near defeat, unless you had an unshakeable 51% of votes and the rest is just window-dressing. But it's interesting the way that this sort of thing can distort your perception of the result. Clinching a victory is a good thing, whereas staving off defeat is much more focused on the negative possibilities and the expectation of defeat.
And that reminds me. Stealth taxes. God, I hate that term. I was in a channel of various friends and acquaintances really and people were talking about the proposed road pricing schemes. Now, I can understand that some people are in favour of this and some against. But here, someone came up with the line: "Oh, well, that's just another stealth tax." What? The idea is that you know how much you're driving and how much that costs in order to deter you from doing it. And raise money in the process, most likely. But there's nothing stealthy about this as a tax. The term "stealth tax" does have valid uses, hence it being coined in the first place - dealing with increases that aren't in your face and that catch you unawares, or doing sneaky things like turning the National Lottery into a vehicle for the NHS instead of helping fund days out for old people, or rebuilding a scout hut or something. But these days, it seems to be just thrown around at anything. Say it's a stealth tax, it's inherently bad. It just smacks of intellectual laziness, and I wish people of all political persuasions would stop it.