Today I mowed one of the gardens. Yeah, you read that right 😉
It took several hours for two reasons. One, it was covered with twigs and pine cones, including a lot of twigs with several pine cones attached. The best way to stop a cylinder mower dead in its tracks is to drop a pine cone in front of it. I took a wheelbarrow full of pine cones off that lawn and there were still traps lying in wait.
Two, all I have at the moment is a £30 push mower from Aldi. It’s a good mower, it cuts very well and it will be very useful in the more remote parts of the garden but still… I was exhausted by the time I finished.
I have to get an electric or petrol one for the bulk of the grass and use the push mower for the more remote areas. It avoids the problem of multiple extension cables, it’s light in use and easy to maintain. It’s just very hard to push through even medium-length grass. There is, I think, still an electric mower in the lab. It’s cheap but easy to use and is still in its box.
So I missed out on the Internet today. I heard about the Westminster attack, and read the articles. Nobody wants to admit who was responsible. Well, ISIS are happy to shout about who was responsible but even an attack on Parliament in the heart of London is silenced in the media by political correctness.
I bet the IRA wish we’d had this political correctness in the seventies. Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten would have been killed by men without accents. They would have thrived, as do our current terrorists, knowing they can do what they like and nobody dares name them. If that doesn’t change, and very soon, we won’t have to worry about smoking related diseases at all. We’ll all be dead before they have a chance to get us. Even now, even with a direct attack on Parliament, the arseholes in government can’t see it.
Speaking of the IRA, it seems Martin McGuinness died a hero in the media’s eyes. He was a violent twat and the world is a better place without him. That’s my standard eulogy for any mass murderer. I see no need to say any more.
Like Lawnmower Man, I have moved from cutting grass to the Internet. I’ve started on the back cover for the Easter anthology.. Longrider’s recommendation was a good one, I’ll use the photo of the trees at the bottom of Garden 3 for the cover. It will look something like this –
I’ll use a text box for the back cover blurb. As I did with ‘The Goddess of Protruding Ears’. It’s the easiest way to make text clear on a multicoloured background.
I just have to work out what to say…
underdogs bite upwards 
Hi Legs. Get yourself a 4-wheel, rotary petrol mower. It should be well worth the expense in time saved. My Honda mower can drive itself, but you have to hold onto the handle, which is probably a good feature, especially with a mad dog running around. I rarely use this feature due to extra petrol consumption and I need the exercise.
As for the other sort of mowing, the latest attack (assuming Westminster is still the latest), is something else which will be glossed over. The dead bodies will be disposed of like the grass cuttings and then forgotten. While the Puppeticians were kept behind to do detention in the Palace of Westminster’s drinking dens, the proles lay outside bleeding to death because practically none of the elected psychos has stood up to the bleeding heart liberals, or objected to the funding of the thousands of special interest groups, or represented their constituents, but rather indulged in their parties’ various obsessive compulsive disorders in the search for their smoke-free, fat-free, braincell-free Utopia.
As usual, we are bombarded with nonsense about how ‘Hate’ will never win. In my opinion, mass immigration and the LGBT agenda and the fake outfits like ‘Hope Not Hate’ and the smoking bans and the MSM and the fake libtard petition sites (Avaaz, Change.org, etc.) and the fake ‘human rights’ industry have all been promoting ‘Hate’ for years.
When I lived in London in the 80s and 90s, I don’t really remember anyone giving a fat rat’s patootie about any of this stuff. The ‘Hate’ I remember from those days was felt when your train was late or you forgot to buy milk. I hate when that happens…
Then the social engineers went to work and turned society into a game of ‘Top Trumps’ where some people are rated highly because of a certain belief or behaviour, while people with other beliefs or values are trumped and beaten: divide and conquer.
The ‘Hate’ (like in ‘1984’) is necessary for controlling the people and that’s why government (or rather, those who control governments) invented feminism and the rest.
And the politicians are clearly chosen for their inability to do the right thing. Take my MP (please; take him), who I have met a few times and had some huge arguments with. He told me that he only became interested in politics due to the 2014 ‘independence’ Referendum, yet the SNP obviously fast-tracked him to be their prospective parliamentary candidate in the 2015 General Election. Why?
Well, you have to see this bloke in full swing – PC-mode extraordinaire – to believe him. His ‘New Year message’ in the local paper had him lamenting Brexit and Trump’s win by saying we live in an “increasingly intolerant world”. Being a lawyer, he’s careful the way he phrases things, so I will be too, but in my opinion, he then seems to be suggesting that the 47% of his constituents who voted for Brexit have a mental illness called ‘Xenophobia’. Nothing hateful about slagging off half the people you represent in your goodwill message, eh?
I don’t believe that many people go into politics to make the world a better place.
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XX The ‘Hate’ (like in ‘1984’) is necessary for controlling the people and that’s why government (or rather, those who control governments) invented feminism and the rest.XX No. That was also in “1984.” Remember “The anti sex legue?” Where, IIRC Winston and the grassing cow met?” (Whether they met there or not is irrelevant, point is, Orwell invented it.) Right at the beginning.
NOW I must go. I have a maths lesson… RATS!
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My MSP, also SNP (there may soon be more politicians than people), who is also politically-correct up to her eyeballs, assured me that young people were having less sex than for a long time.
Maybe the constant media barrage was to make people disgusted by sex, especially with the LGBT stuff thrown in, if you call that ‘sex,’ plus feminism has perhaps lured women into becoming members of an unofficial ‘anti-sex league’. All part of population reduction for a “sustainable future”?
From what I hear about younger people, they seem far more interested in smoking weed and playing computer games.
Winston grassed up Julia too (there’s lots about grass in this thread), so that’s a regular fixture of modern life too, but who needs rats? Some people love it.
I have a hunch that Orwell knew from his sources what the future would be like. He believed in socialism, after all, so was his book the ‘warning’ that people think or part of the indoctrination process?
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I used to have Mountfield petrol mower, like the one you describe but not self-propelled. That was the last time I lived in the country and had a big lawn. Then I moved into town and had a lawn the petrol mower could deal with in seconds. It fell into disuse, I could do that lawn with a cheap electric hover mower.
Time to move back up the mower ratings 🙂
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Perhaps I should charge for consultancy 😀
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One day I hope to be able to pay 🙂
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Needs mo wing. May I suggest an airstrike?
Meh….Go Green if you are gonna chop up plants.
Not to change the subject or anything, but I’ve been thinking quite a bit about “the micro/nano/pico regulation of water/moisture content” and how science seems to fail to apply that/those to the macro. I was noticing “the moss” on the trees in your pics, and have noticed a HUGE amount of Mistletoe in the trees around here this year. Of course, I am thinking of moisture movement AND preservation, but in more of a line of how these systems and processes relate(s) to membranes of all kinds.
EX: Does Mistletoe facilitate not only a balance of moisture/fluids in trees, but also have the effect of a barometer of sorts that acts in symbiosis to let the tree know as to the changes in the environment over the period of late fall/winter/early spring? And also, does the tree return that favor. Meaning…do trees actively solicit a need to host Mistletoe or other “parasitic” plantlife?
I’m thinking about leeches here, but I’m thinking contextually with respect to other physical forces. Namely…Gravity. But I’m also thinking of information preservation and mutation, and starting to form a radically different picture as to what genetic mutation really is. Especially with respect to DNA in humans and other animals, simply because science seems convinced as to some sort of information change = information loss. And thinking further about the way that flexor/tensor systems work within the musculature, that there are all kinds of similar systems within what I call “The Membrane System” that are very similar to the musculature…and yet radically different.
The need unmet = The need met…just…not yet maybe.
I watch the winds and cloud movements pretty regularly, and now that I have some feeling in my feet and legs again, I’m starting to pay more attention to the dew. Especially since where I live…we tend to cover everything in cement and mow and cut the living shit out of everything that remains which is green. That makes me think of “The Dust Bowl” and how constantly growing/harvesting crops of any kind may make the hydrosphere a little…schizophrenic. Not that there is any sort of…ahem…other goings on there that are…very binary in a push/pull kinda way. And I would think very much so with crops like Cotton that are VERY hardy plants in semi-arid conditions. Nevermind man’s rerouting and diverting and destroying of all kinds of waterways, and arbitrary creation of new ones.
That’s a fuckton of information for The Environment to adapt to.
Sounds almost like a chess match.
/me shrugs
I dunno. I still operate under the “life exists for a reason” kinda thinking. Life exists for reasons…even.
/redundant shrug almost avoided
^Ween – Roses Are Free^
I think about mosquitoes a lot too.
Thanks for allowing me to rant my nonsense.
🙂
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Moisture levels are vital, and also relative. Jam seems pretty wet but it has so much sugar dissolved in it that bacteria can’t grow. They can use the sugar, but the water around isn’t available to them. They can’t pull it away from the sugar solution – in fact, the sugar in the jam will pull more water from the bacterial cell and dehydrate it.
Some parts of the garden are very wet at the moment. I left the grass long there for now, so it can get some of the moisture out of the soil through transpiration. Short grass can do that too but with less leaf area it takes longer.
Plus, of course, some bits can’t be mowed until the snowdrops/crocuses/daffodils are finished for the year. I’m not a herbicidal maniac 😉
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“in fact, the sugar in the jam will pull more water from the bacterial cell and dehydrate it.”
I recently found an interesting thread on Quora where someone asked why sugary treats would make someone’s teeth hurt. Well, yeah, cavities… but WHY? Cold stuff is kind of understandable, but why sweet stuff?
The answer seemed to revolve around osmotic pressure (?) or whatever it is that we normally think of when salt is involved. What surprised me was that sugar works the same way: the pressure of the liquid around the exposed tooth nerves gets unbalanced by the sugar and that’s what causes the pain!
🙂
MJM, sharing a teachable moment….
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“I just have to work out what to say…”
Leg, somehow I think you’ll find something perfect!
:>
MJM
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Probably at the last minute. That tends to focus the mind remarkably!
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Waaay up here, in the far NW, where ‘rough ground’ is a bit of an understatement, we use strimmers for absolutely everything. They work. They’re effective. And if you have a petrol version, there’s no need to worry about cables and extensions and things. You can even, with practice, get a nice lawn effect. Best of all, they’re not too expensive either!
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