Category: Provisions and utensils of the household and the fields

Here comes the bike

I finally married my bicycle on Saturday in a ceremony celebrated by a minister of the little-known but damn handy Carpathian Independent Church, and we have both been seriously well-oiled ever since. The downside is that my Ugandan friends have disowned me, quoting this Acholi poem: I hear a bicycle bell, The bridewealth of Laker,…

On yer bike

The polls are fine, but Blair secretly expects to lose: he now has an official spokes-man. (OK, so you’ve never heard of Norman Tebbit.)

The hole that rockets the cradle

Karim has published an interesting photo illustrating the latest advances in Tunisian motoring technology. Cars are to be fired vertically from secret underground silos in midtown locations; airborne, their trajectories will be managed using GPS. Plans for 2006 include roll-up-and-down of the product to the baby’s pram and market trader segments.

“Breaks Slammed on Railway Privatization”

Right headline, wrong story from Deutsche Welle: what the DB Vorstand really wanted to communicate is that German rail privatisation will proceed according to plan, and that under a new CEO, one Kurtis Blow, trains will be marketed to a wider public by using them at night for 70s-style hiphop parties.

Wells Fargo

It may come as something of a surprise to Europeans that Geoff Pullum and Prentiss Riddle expect a bus company to provide clearly articulated, comprehensive information.

Reduction in free public transport

Andreu@Raïms notes moves by the local train companies to crack down on the 60% (source?) of travellers who under-declare the number of zones crossed, to say nothing of the large number who don’t pay anything at all. What surprises me is that I haven’t yet heard anyone use the words “fascist aggression”.

God’s fish

When the inspector calls, the chief weapon of fundamentalist fishermen–particularly those with long white beards–is Genesis 1:26-28: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all…

Belgian pie

I reckon Gayle Tomlinson has let herself be suckered for the purposes of this story in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, passed along the counter by that notorious pie-lady, Margaret Marks: Belgians are turning their backs on the traditional buns and taking the Geordie stottie to their hearts. Greggs [a] has launched its fourth shop in…