(no subject)

[essayel]

You know you have too many keys when the weight of them turns off the ignition when you go over a speed bump.

Do you have speed bumps? AKA sleeping policemen. We have masses because we are speed fiends intent upon killing the nations children. Drivers hate them. The tyre and exhaust shops love them because thier business went up by 50% when they put the speed bumps in.

St George's day today. Our nation's Turkish saint who has a care for Englishmen, Portuguese, archers and sufferers of syphilis [known as the English disease from the latter part of the Middle Ages] so he's a very busy boy indeed.

Gordon Brown, a Scot, says we should wave our English flag on St George's Day but if we do that we'll be accused of overwheening national pride so we'd best leave it to the Scots, Welsh and Irish. At least he can't demand we wear roses - people would think we were all waiting for blind dates [meet you at ten under the clock, I'll be wearing a pale pink rosebud].

This totally random post was brought to you by Bran Flakes, tea and a dog dribbling on my foot

Comments

[erastes.livejournal.com]

*waves flag*

[essayel.livejournal.com]

I've been doing tiny unobtrusive waves so not to offend the locals who take that whole dragon killing thing a bit personally in some cases.

[katbeseroc.livejournal.com]

So it IS true! I had wondered when I heard the legend of St. George if the Welsh might feel a bit miffed.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

It's also St Ibar's Day, which amuses me deeply as I'm from Wexford and could see where his island was from the sitting room window in a house I lived in as a child.

[essayel.livejournal.com]

St Ibar of Bergerin sounds so much better than St Ibar of the Relaimed Sloblands!

I much prefer the old Celtic saints. I feel they had a lot more love and a lot less evisceration than the ones in the Roman church.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Please, get it right. St Ibar of the North Slob, which just sounds classy.

[essayel.livejournal.com]

That is just the BEST address!!

[gonzothegreat.livejournal.com]

Yea... Speed bumps are an odd thing. The old, short, ones mangle your suspension unless you gun it over them (purpose defeated) while the new ones are so large that you slow down to the pace of the Donner Party to cross them. :\ There's some egg-head group of traffic scientists (wow, better than paint, less exciting than nukes) who are trying to change several US municipal traffic laws/ideas. Like stop sign reduction. Turning residential and low traffic intersections into yeilds so that when you see a stop sign you, well, um, STOP! :P

As for saints... I picture a flag clock with the four saint's flags which rise and lower respective to when their day is coming up... So Georgie-porgie would be tops today and Andy would just about be at the lowest point. :P

[essayel.livejournal.com]

That is such a cool idea! We could expand it to a digital display that shows different saints days for every day of the year. There's enough of them! And only fun ones and useful ones - the tedious "treat me mean and cruel" ones need not apply. Anyone can die for their faith - it takes cojones to live for it.

[casfic.livejournal.com]

I think it's far better for English people to wave St George's flag, and think it would be a jolly good thing if people's idea of England could be reclaimed from the loony right.

It's a pity though, both the Scots and the English have national saints who probably never heard of the countries they're saints of, if they even existed that is. The saints, not the countries.

[metallumai.livejournal.com]

Exactly. What's wrong with St Cuthbert or somebody?

[essayel.livejournal.com]

I think St Cuthbert would be brilliant. And we could have the ox-eye daisy (http://www.british-wild-flowers.co.uk/D-Flowers/Daisy,%20Ox-eye.htm) as our national plant and otters as our national animal.

Cuthbert wouldn't have stormed the ramparts of Harfleur, he'd have knocked on the door and borrowed a cup of sugar.

[celticangel76.livejournal.com]

Speed bumps are of the devil. Hate them. Though that's probably because I tend to drive fast. But not in residential areas.

I know nothing about the saints and their days. Stepmum is Catholic so I hear about things from time to time. Dad - who was raised Baptist - said something about communion and getting a 'cookie' and stepmum nearly took his head off. He knows better than to call the communion wafer a cookie now. Was so funny.

But I say wave your flag proudly! :)

[essayel.livejournal.com]

"Cookie" *giggles*

They've dropped the speed limit to 20 MPH around all the schools and have put in speed bumps too which reduce your speed to 5 mph. So we crawl around the place at weekends and during school holidays as well as the 2 hours, morning and afternoon, on school days when we would really NEED to moderate our speed if it wasn't for the masses of cars and horrendous parking of the school run Mums that reduces our speed to less than walking pace.

However, it IS a public demonstration that the council cares about kids so ...

[bitchy-brat.livejournal.com]

we have speed bumps, and the complete opposite of them - pot holes! haven't figured out what's worse though because there are some speed bumps you have to go over one dang wheel at a time and some pot holes that can take the wheel off your car if you hit them wrong.

though for half the year we don't worry about them since everything is under snow until the plows decide to clear off the roadways. and the speed bumps are more of a feature around the shopping centers as opposed to in our roadways. accompanied by ten million stop signs!

[essayel.livejournal.com]

Eurgh pot holes, we have those too. Wouldnt it be a good idea if they just scraped the speedbumps into the potholes and evened it all out?

[open-the-blinds.livejournal.com]

It's said around here that you can tell how wealthy a neighborhood is by the number of speedbumps you have to go over along the way.

[essayel.livejournal.com]

*giggles* the howls of a Porsche owner who has wiped off his exhaust on one are excruciating. So they tend to put them round the schools and where the 'poor ignorant people' might drive too fast.

[yakalskovich]

I think sleeping policemen are going out of fashion here, or I simply don't go to the sort of neighbourhoods where they have them any more. I don't even remember if Sphinx' neighbourhood has them...

Instead, we get raised interesctions meant to slow people down before barrelling into each other. Those, we have a lot of.-

[essayel.livejournal.com]

Traffic calming is the term they use now. There are lots of ways they do it. Speed bumps are the most annoying but they also put 'rumble strips' and have places where the road chicanes between bollards that you can only negotiate very slowly or where it narrows to single track with right of way signs.

Basically there's just too many cars.

[metallumai.livejournal.com]

Thanks to you and Copperbadge, it dawns on me that Shakespeare's birthday is on St George's Day. I always sort of vaguely was aware of both dates but never actually juxtaposed them. Just as, you know, you can make dates for May 1 with one person and blithely make another date with another person for next Thursday-- and it's the same DAY and they hate each other and they'll never forgive you if you cancel THEIR date to keep THAT ONE. :D

Nice to know, in any case.

[essayel.livejournal.com]

Oh lord I've done that!! So embarrassing. The only thing to do is cancel both and take to one's bed pleading illness.

[katbeseroc.livejournal.com]

I've got two speed bumps to the enterance of my complex. They made it tall because people with SUV's were just rolling right over and ignoring them. Now with them taller they are complaining they have to slow down to go over them. Which I thought that was the point.

Then agian it's so tall for my little compact car that unless I go over them at a snails pace I'll disembowl my car :)

Another special day today. It's National Professional Adminstrators day in the US. So we are to show love to the people who order the equipment to let me do my job. I usually try to do something nice for those who are my Admins when I can. It means that I can get the really awesome equipment fast.

[essayel.livejournal.com]

Ours have just delivered us a handy-dandy pen shaped text reading device, that is supposed to scan text and copy it to a page. You have to hold it absolutely vertically and move it very very slowly over the text - one line at a time. I can type faster. Also this is what you get:

The scanned text is sent to the PC with the following r~s~lj. The scanned text is sent to the PC with the tallowing result: In non-Auto SEUq u~oqe eelecilu~ eeuq ~h!~~ es~t~ ~~e sexy ~o SVS bC. The hglowirig a~rj~ r~xs~ awesome) 4**~- J; 1f~a~~ 3,. Make sure the same Microsott Woro lae aS ursule lb uVeu uul Lue rL. 1~xa

Maximum size font is about 16pt. What we'd ASKED for was an A3 flat bed scanner but hey!! I'm sure this will be very useful.