There's a story about the origins of the song in the 1964 Mary Poppins movie, 'A Spoonful of Sugar' by the son of one of the Sherman brothers, that they were trying to come up with the song, and he came in from having his polio vaccine on a lump of sugar, and, BINGO! there was their song.

Okay, they changed it to spoonful....

The concept of ' ( Read more... )

Possibly a more succinct way of putting what I was thinking yesterday about Men's Righters:

There's a saying/proverb about better to light a candle than curse the darkness*;

The punchline to the Real Men version of the lightbulb joke is:

'Real Men aren't afraid of the dark!'

*Said to be ancient Chinese, but I am always dubious about such ( Read more... )

Was given to think, today, of the ambiguities of the term 'not working'. It may mean just what it says, as in, not doing what it is intended to do, but sometimes, it seems to me, it tends to mean 'not working in the way I want it to' or 'not doing what I would expect it to do'.

Whence my title, which is from a collection of selections of winners of ( Read more... )

Just now I was googling something that I recollected rather vaguely as being an Arabian or Persian proverb, possibly a bit of Sufi wisdom even, 'If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a [flower/lily/hyacinth/something to feed the soul]'.

And much to my amusement (and not really any surprise) find that this is attributed to the timeless ( Read more... )