what are YOU wearing to the street party ? union jacks are everywhere in jubilee year but there are better looking materials ( from an occasional series, fashion fabrics to die for, part 99 )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly_Olbion

about ten years ago, i stripped a dilapidated old english country chair and re-painted it ... the wood seems to have shrunk and i'll have to re-glue it

quoted on BBCradio2 earlier this week ... "if i were two-faced, would i be wearing this one ?"

neuro images ... not to be viewed at meal times

http://neuroimages.tumblr.com/

found with the help of the always excellent ...

http://mindhacks.com/

they've installed new webcams in yosemite valley

http://www.yosemiteconservancy.org/webcams/high-sierra

stop press: burly trucker's top-secret aspirational slimming programme revealed

daniel pink ... fascinating animated run through some counter-intuitive discoveries about what motivates workers and innovators

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u6XAPnuFjJc

link provided by lucy at "being of sound mind"

http://lucewoman.blogspot.co.uk/

regellers at prince's ... provoking a short meditation on welshness and non-welshness

i suppose that, from having spent a part of my childhood amongst people with a welsh way of speaking and thinking, i must have become both sensitized and de-sensitized to some aspects of welshness

consequently i was neither dismayed by the people i encountered last week, nor downhearted by the dilapidation of the towns

indeed, i found myself thinking how much fun it might be to live in a nice little terrace with welsh neighbours on either side ...

tom jones on the one side, perhaps, and catherine zeta-jones on the other !

bruce hood's "meet your brain" lectures

http://richannel.org/christmas-lectures/2011/meet-your-brain#/christmas-lectures-2011-bruce-hood--whats-in-your-head

i hadn't realized that the cortex is only three to four millimetres thick !

... and if you're already up to speed with cognitive science and with philosophy then you might enjoy a long interview on a lot of subjects and ideas that he's done quite recently for edge

http://edge.org/conversation/essentialism-

and i shall tell my grandson that they leap straight in to the tins ...

aunt mavis ... my trusty native guide in the valleys

i do hope the loved one remembered to plump my pillows

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw126774/Herbert-Westfaling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Westfaling

tom denny's celebration of thomas traherne's ecstatic mysticism ... small windows in a tiny side chapel at hereford

tom denny's left hand window at great malvern

with some explanatory notes ...

tom denny's right hand window at great malvern

more of the same details from tom denny's left hand window at great malvern

to prince's ...

.. where i encounter one of ponty's most magnificent old boilers !

its a traditional welsh unicorn trap, mr spock ...

... they used to bait them with maidens back in the day


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn

are we adrift in some kind of time warp, scottie ? or have we strayed in to an unfolding alternative universe, spock ? .... the federation's clear-desk policy clearly isn't holding

i've been reading about all the methane in the farts of the herbivorous dinosaurs ... but what about the stench from the carnivores' ?