Keys Corner

So you know there’s a word to decribe it, but you’ve completely forgotten what it is? Then you need OneLink’s reverse dictionary.

For example, what do you call a cat with no tail?

I mentioned last December, that a dissatisfied customer of one of the large asset management specialists in Germany had parked their car, covered in protest slogans, right outside the entrance to their building. The car is still there, but last week the subject of their protest reacted and placed some bushes in pots between the car and their entrance. A day or so later, the car owner mounted a bike-rack, complete with a bicycle. On the bike he placed a large board adorned with protest slogans.

The following day, the bushes were replaced with taller trees:

We are waiting to find out what will happen next…

We went for a walk in Bad Homburg this afternoon. It was nice to see that, even if they are not out in Schmitten yet, the crocuses are out down in Bad Homburg – we have had enough snow and ice this winter, and are looking forward to some spring weather at home now. In the mean time, we have picked a springtime recipe (couscous and peas) for supper tonight.

Our pond never ceases to surprise us. This is the view that confronted us when we got up on Thursday last week after the snow and ice started to melt. At the moment there is still a lot of melt-water flowing in, so it’s difficult to say whether the level is holding steady or whether the melting snow from the neighbourhood is the reason it suddenly looks healthy again. What we have seen, however, is that the fish all seem to have survived, which given the picture a week ago, we weren’t expecting.

A web site for cat lovers – an infinite series of pictures of cats watching cats, watching cats…
(click on the picture)

We just received these Q&As by e-mail. It has cheered me up – I didn’t notice the steps to our front door (see the photo in the previous post) were icy this morning and managed to hit my back on every step-edge on the way down to the ground. Feels like I may have cracked a rib, but for now I have decided to avoid going to the doctor on the basis that at this time of year I am likely to get flu and still suffer from the cracked rib…

The questions below about Australia are from potential visitors. They were posted on an Australian Tourism Website and the answers are the actual responses by the website officials, who obviously have a sense of humour.

Q: Does it ever get windy in Australia? I have never seen it rain on TV, how do the plants grow? (UK).
A: We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around watching them die.

Q: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? (USA)
A: Depends how much you’ve been drinking.

... and the icicles aren’t getting any shorter!

Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University warned today that British government estimates of 50 000 deaths from avian flu are based on enormously optimistic assumptions (that the death rate is no higher than for normal flu and that there is only one wave of flu) and that the government is making a mistake similar to the one made 10 years ago regarding BSE. He believes a more realistic figure is around 2 million deaths, many from pneumonia, for which there is still no effective treatment.

In the last week, 2 nurses in Vietnam have caught avian flu. Infection of health workers is a first indication, according to health experts, that the virus has become capable of jumping directly from one person to another.

The British government has ordered over 14 million doses of an anti-viral drug for delivery in two years time, which can be used to treat avian flu (at the moment there is no vaccine available, although tests are being made on experimental vaccines which are expected to offer some protection against the flu). A marginally better situation than in Germany, where risk of avian flu has been played down, with the government focussing more on the danger to German poultry, than on the risk to the human population. (I don’t recall seeing any reports in the German press about measures being taken to protect the local population against avian flu, despite the World Health Organisation’s latest warning that “The world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic.”).

The current status of influenza infections in Europe is available here, by the way.

You may remember, we had to have a new pond liner put in last September?

Well, the above is the picture that confronted us when we looked out of the kitchen window yesterday at 6:30 in the morning. The evening previously, everything looked normal. At the moment, we can’t see what or where the problem is – apart from that the fish probably aren’t too happy at the moment. We have snow and storms forecast for the weekend, so it will probably be a few days before we, and the firm that did the work in the summer, can figure out what has gone wrong.