1. Morning you lot.2. Monterey sunset. 3. Black squirrel.4. High Five.5 Bali.6. Clouds over Fuji.7. Just stopped by for a bite to eat…8/9/10. Genie, John’s friend’s cat, shortly to be joining them in Bulgaria. There’s a story to this one, which I’ll leave for John to tell.9.10.11. Algarve.12. Well, I’d not get so dirty if luncheon were served on Dresden China.13. I need a haircut.14. Hmmm, I wonder if she’s got anything tastier.15. When you’re as little as I am, and your mummy has that great big horn, you tend to be a good little animal.16. what the butler’s dog saw!17. I gotcha.18. Let’s go for a walk.19. Le jour où la pluie viendra.20. Right, that’s your lot. Munguin says so. See you next week. Don’t be late.
#19: Looks like there’s a part of Paris out on the edge of town that has common looking big buildings. Perhaps a little known and seldom photographed part of town. 🙂
Tris……I see what you mean about Paris. In the “Civilisation” documentary, Lord Clark goes to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the beginning of Gothic architecture. He says that very little of the structure is left, and that it’s located in a “squalid industrial suburb of Paris,” where it’s impossible to imagine its tenth century glory.
I’ve read that after the great fire, Christopher Wren had a plan to rebuild London much the way that Napoleon rebuilt old Paris. Wren’s plan, “inspired by the Gardens of Versailles, imagined a well-ordered London with vistas and wide, straight streets.” But the English government didn’t have a Napoleon to carry out the grand plan; so except for some of Wren’s buildings such as St. Paul’s, London mostly got rebuilt quick and dirty along the old medieval street plan.
Wow! Clouds on Fuji stopped me in my tracks – whata great shot. I keep going back for another look. Thanks for yet another lovely start to a Sunday. Not exactly start – it’s 10:15 here already -but a welcome break from the rather less appealing work I should be looking at.
Anyway, back to the grindstone for you. If Munguin can keep me at it, I don’t see why you should be slacking… I have champagne to chill and Lobsters to prepare!
Please save some for me, or at least the leftovers. I’m sure Munguin can afford the air-freight to Bulgaria – maybe even deliver with his private helicopter?
some comically lovely orangs today. Loved Japan which I initially misread as Fiji! And the otter was sweet too. On behalf of Ed and I – Life re-affirmed and all that.
And another ‘Ah, yes…’ I was supposed to give the background to the photies of Genie, Luftwaffe Rob’s mog. Anyone care to have a stab at identifying what species she is? Genie is now 15 and has been with Rob since he rescued her as a kitten.
She’s currently with him at his base camp in Doha – he’s a pilot with Qatar Airways – but will soon be moving to his second home here in Bulgaria. As I think I said before, being German and a pilot soon got him the ‘Luftwaffe’ tag.
But having the surname Lang, I keep telling him that he’s really one of us and should check if he’s a distant heir to a whisky fortune.
I turn my back for a wee while to attend a mandatory KKK meeting and intake of therapeutics, and suddenly the comments section fills up!
Our Minnie is great at dipping paw into the RS teacup and licking it off. I think she’s already featured on SS because of that, but she’s yet to show the same enthusiasm for or my standard mug of black unsugared coffee – or dip/lick at whisky or G&T. Perhaps I should show her this video as reassurance she’s got it right.
Arabian wildcat of some sort. Rob found her on the streets and she won’t have to do with any human but him. I’m sure John will fill us in when he’s got his head out of The Aeneid.
Rob was living in Abu Dhabi and flying for Etihad when he found the wee and apparently orphaned and abandoned Genie. Lovely name for a charming one who could well have come out of a magic lamp. When the time came for vet and vaccinations, the was told he had rescued an African wild cat, a rare find in the city suburbs of the Gulf.
The clues are in her general shape and colouring, especially the matching horizontal black bars on front paws and the ringed tail ending in a black tip. So what? I thought. Numbi also has a ringed tail with black tip and he was no more than another Bulgarian street cat – or pub kitten.
Ah,but check the rings. Do they go all the way round? Rob said. Sure enough, they don’t – just about three-quarters, and underneath is an extension of the belly colour.
Even after 15 years of domestication, Genie is still very nervous of strangers, he tells me. Even now, he’s the only one of the family she allows close, running for cover when anyone else approaches. Hence her happiness with new Ikea hideaway on the bookshelves.
It came up fine when I clicked on it, but stripping off the stuff after “jpg” just gave an Error 403.
So I Google searched the image, and came up with a “jpg” (without the other stuff at the end of the URL.) You can often Google up a “problem” picture (encrypted or whatever) that’s been posted on Twitter as a simple “jpg” as this one was. Lots of Twitter images are jpg.
Scottish National Dictionary gives ‘thunder-plump’ which I remember as common usage in my Highland youth. My full-edition OED has ‘thunder-plant’ – close to your ‘plout’ but no relation. Still interesting though. Never heard of thunder-plant as another name for the common house leek. Do we have any Welsh Munguinites who could help? Gave up digging out dictionaries after that. Don’t think Webster, Funk & Wagnall, Collins, Chambers etc could add much more.
Ah, but what am I doing with old dictionaries when I have the internet to hand? There I did find a reference to thunder-plout. Won’t let me cut and paste but here’s the link (if it works)…
Ed, yes I’ve heard thunderplout but not for a long time. More often the word used in my area was thunderplump. My Dad would say things like, “Looks like we’re in for a real plout” or “It’s ploutin doon oot there”. Both words are Scots – plout, v splash and plump n cloudburst; cluster; plopping noise , v rain (Scots-English English Scots Dictionary, Lomond Books, 1998)
Ah, that makes sense. I could have tried looking for “plout” on its own. I’d jalouse that “plout” is a Scoticisation of “pleut”. So maybe a petty plout would be a small rainstor[Kevin! That’s quite enough nonsense out of you for one day. Talk about folk etymology!-Ed.]m.
#2 is an amazing picture. Although the image file is titled “monteray-sun.jpg” that must be the full moon setting in the Pacific just before sunrise. I assume that’s a part of Bird Rock that you see from the famous 17-Mile Drive at Monterey. (Where for $10.50, you can drive along the road where fabulously wealthy people live on the Monterey Peninsula, and where they play golf at Pebble Beach.) Hard to tell exactly where it is on Bird Rock, but the size of the birds and the size of the moon in the image means that a humongous long lens was used and a small area is shown. The rock is quite a distance out in the water and the birds actually appear tiny.
Bird Rock with tiny distant birds (except for a couple of nearby seagulls) :
The history of the fabulous 17-Mile Drive at Monterey: 😉
Yes Tris, beautiful! It would be nice to have enough money to live in Monterey. I imagine that Harry and Meghan would be able to afford a place there with a nice view of the Pacific, if they want the cooler climate of northern California. On the other hand, if they prefer warm sunny Southern California, a beach home at Malibu would be just the ticket……and every bit as costly. Decisions….decisions……. 😉
Poor things. Life isn’t easy for ex-princes and princesses.
I noticed last week that the other one, Kate Middleclass, was moaning about how difficult it was to be a working mother.
Up in the morning, get chambermaid and dresser to make sure the nannies have got the kids up breakfasted on stuff sent up by cook, ensure husband’s footman has got him up and dressed in the clothes that they washed ironed.
Then chose a costume from the thousands in her walk in wardrobe the size of a small street. Choose hats, bags, shoes, perfume, wait for chauffeur to come round… take 2 minutes to kiss the kids goodbye before they are driven to school. After all, if she’s late it’s not like she’s going to get the sack.
The poor woman hardly has a minute to herself all day… what with peasants trying to touch the hem of her Gucci… life is just a misery for Kate Middle-Class.
For me, Monterey will always mean John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, and Doc, Mack and the boys. Hilarious, heart-warming, tear-jerking, and philosophically very profound. One of the very greatest books. With more in the same vein from Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flats. If you’ve yet tor read them, time to catch up and give yourself a real treat.
John…….That’s interesting. I’ve not spent any time really in Steinbeck country, except briefly while motoring between San Francisco and L.A. I’ve stopped for gas (petrol) in Salinas, and driven the 17-Mile Drive at Monterey. I’ve read Cannery Row, but not Tortilla Flats or Sweet Thursday. I must do that. Although the last cannery closed in the 1970’s, Ocean View Avenue in Monterey was renamed “Cannery Row” in honor of the site of Steinbeck’s novel.
I come from Missouri (which touches Oklahoma,) where the name Steinbeck more often evokes memories of “The Grapes of Wrath” and the Oklahoma/Great Plains “Dust Bowl” of the 1930’s. The original alignment of the Missouri part of old US highway Route 66 bisects the state (now mostly I-44 (an “Interstate” superhighway,) along which, west from Oklahoma, Steinbeck’s dispossessed “Okies” headed for California on what he called the “Mother Road.”
“Steinbeck writes: ”Highway 66 is the main migrant road. … 66 is the path of a people in flight. … 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.” Route 66 represents flight, or migration. The migrants are ”refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership.”
The old 1920’s and 30’s alignments and bridges of US 66, are often maintained by state and local jurisdictions as historic highways, and I’ve seen European tourists who’ve come to America to drive stretches of old 66 to California. (The local view is often that these are people with more time and money on their hands than common sense, but to each his own. 😉 ) I’ve read about the hostility that Steinbeck received from California agricultural interests when Grapes of Wrath was published, with its account of the mistreatment of the agricultural field and orchard workers in what is still California’s largest industry. John Steinbeck’s boyhood home is still maintained in Salinas, in Monterey County.
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MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
These pictures are pretty amazing. 6 and 19 are just incredible.
Thanks.
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#19: Looks like there’s a part of Paris out on the edge of town that has common looking big buildings. Perhaps a little known and seldom photographed part of town. 🙂
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LOL. Yes, well, not all of Paris is beautiful, Danny. Some of it is downright ugly!
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Tris……I see what you mean about Paris. In the “Civilisation” documentary, Lord Clark goes to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the beginning of Gothic architecture. He says that very little of the structure is left, and that it’s located in a “squalid industrial suburb of Paris,” where it’s impossible to imagine its tenth century glory.
I’ve read that after the great fire, Christopher Wren had a plan to rebuild London much the way that Napoleon rebuilt old Paris. Wren’s plan, “inspired by the Gardens of Versailles, imagined a well-ordered London with vistas and wide, straight streets.” But the English government didn’t have a Napoleon to carry out the grand plan; so except for some of Wren’s buildings such as St. Paul’s, London mostly got rebuilt quick and dirty along the old medieval street plan.
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Yes, true, Danny. Largely the Brits do things as cheaply as possible with absolutely no mind for any kind of future.
That said, they don;t mind spending money when it’s for royals, lords , MPs, top brass military, etc.
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🙂 Munguin says “you are welcome”.
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Wow! Clouds on Fuji stopped me in my tracks – whata great shot. I keep going back for another look. Thanks for yet another lovely start to a Sunday. Not exactly start – it’s 10:15 here already -but a welcome break from the rather less appealing work I should be looking at.
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Yep, I was seriously impressed by that photo too.
Anyway, back to the grindstone for you. If Munguin can keep me at it, I don’t see why you should be slacking… I have champagne to chill and Lobsters to prepare!
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Please save some for me, or at least the leftovers. I’m sure Munguin can afford the air-freight to Bulgaria – maybe even deliver with his private helicopter?
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🙂
He says, if you want some, you get over here.
Luncheon is served at 1pm Scottish time.
Be there or be square!
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some comically lovely orangs today. Loved Japan which I initially misread as Fiji! And the otter was sweet too. On behalf of Ed and I – Life re-affirmed and all that.
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The otter was my fav.
You say Fiji, I say Fuji… Let’s call the whole thing off!
But always good to know that life has been reaffirmed.
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And another ‘Ah, yes…’ I was supposed to give the background to the photies of Genie, Luftwaffe Rob’s mog. Anyone care to have a stab at identifying what species she is? Genie is now 15 and has been with Rob since he rescued her as a kitten.
She’s currently with him at his base camp in Doha – he’s a pilot with Qatar Airways – but will soon be moving to his second home here in Bulgaria. As I think I said before, being German and a pilot soon got him the ‘Luftwaffe’ tag.
But having the surname Lang, I keep telling him that he’s really one of us and should check if he’s a distant heir to a whisky fortune.
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Erm, nothing at all selfish in your desire to find out if Rob has a connection with a whisky empire, John, is there? 🙂 🙂 😉
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Dum spiro, spero… semper!
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I don’t know about you imbibing John but this kitten seems to have been on the whisky.
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Oh that’s hilarious. I’ll have a pint of what s/he’s on.
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Aye, keep hoping…semper! 🙂
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I turn my back for a wee while to attend a mandatory KKK meeting and intake of therapeutics, and suddenly the comments section fills up!
Our Minnie is great at dipping paw into the RS teacup and licking it off. I think she’s already featured on SS because of that, but she’s yet to show the same enthusiasm for or my standard mug of black unsugared coffee – or dip/lick at whisky or G&T. Perhaps I should show her this video as reassurance she’s got it right.
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She’s young yet… with you there to guide her paw, she’ll soon learn that tea is a liquid best used to keeping the plants wet.
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“Anyone care to have a stab at identifying what species she is? ”
fluffy cat? I even tried matching to id photos and she seemed to resemble a few of them. So no clue. Moggy?
https://www.catbreedslist.com/all-cat-breeds/list_1_2.html
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Arabian wildcat of some sort. Rob found her on the streets and she won’t have to do with any human but him. I’m sure John will fill us in when he’s got his head out of The Aeneid.
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Rob was living in Abu Dhabi and flying for Etihad when he found the wee and apparently orphaned and abandoned Genie. Lovely name for a charming one who could well have come out of a magic lamp. When the time came for vet and vaccinations, the was told he had rescued an African wild cat, a rare find in the city suburbs of the Gulf.
The clues are in her general shape and colouring, especially the matching horizontal black bars on front paws and the ringed tail ending in a black tip. So what? I thought. Numbi also has a ringed tail with black tip and he was no more than another Bulgarian street cat – or pub kitten.
Ah,but check the rings. Do they go all the way round? Rob said. Sure enough, they don’t – just about three-quarters, and underneath is an extension of the belly colour.
Even after 15 years of domestication, Genie is still very nervous of strangers, he tells me. Even now, he’s the only one of the family she allows close, running for cover when anyone else approaches. Hence her happiness with new Ikea hideaway on the bookshelves.
Aillurophiles or are we not?
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Thank you. You tell it better than I do. 🙂
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cloudburst over Austria
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Oh heavens… I wouldn’t want to be out in that, bu as the comments said, that would have come in handy in Australia.
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Definitely what I’d call a thunderplout – except I can’t find the word in any dictionary. Any input from fellow Scottish Munguinites?
Pretty life-affirming today, Tris.
The lenticular clouds over Fuji are beautiful – so I looked for some more photies of them, so here’s one I found, which, with any luck, will show up in line: https://external-preview.redd.it/1Xq2EyNH6Ly7PJQkXykaXvIprPAad2Myx-N2rf1LUGc.jpg?width=1024&height=536.12565445&auto=webp&s=54ddef743d6c42fbb3234ae9cc6fecde2f95cdbb
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That’s even more spectacular, Ed.
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1. Yes, I second PP’s motion on affirmingness,
2. Let me have another go with that photie: https://external-preview.redd.it/1Xq2EyNH6Ly7PJQkXykaXvIprPAad2Myx-N2rf1LUGc.jpg
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It worked fine for me, Ed. Whereas the second effort says it’s “forbidden” .. Exciting!
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That’s another great shot of clouds over Fuji Ed.
It came up fine when I clicked on it, but stripping off the stuff after “jpg” just gave an Error 403.
So I Google searched the image, and came up with a “jpg” (without the other stuff at the end of the URL.) You can often Google up a “problem” picture (encrypted or whatever) that’s been posted on Twitter as a simple “jpg” as this one was. Lots of Twitter images are jpg.
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Spectacular!
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Scottish National Dictionary gives ‘thunder-plump’ which I remember as common usage in my Highland youth. My full-edition OED has ‘thunder-plant’ – close to your ‘plout’ but no relation. Still interesting though. Never heard of thunder-plant as another name for the common house leek. Do we have any Welsh Munguinites who could help? Gave up digging out dictionaries after that. Don’t think Webster, Funk & Wagnall, Collins, Chambers etc could add much more.
Ah, but what am I doing with old dictionaries when I have the internet to hand? There I did find a reference to thunder-plout. Won’t let me cut and paste but here’s the link (if it works)…
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AiLDDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT50&lpg=PT50&dq=thunder+plout&source=bl&ots=5EN5rzHrVR&sig=ACfU3U3IOymb4xzcsGhL06XMHnlvNjNRyA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi3t9OVmvnnAhXAwcQBHcp9ARwQ6AEwAXoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=thunder%20plout&f=false s
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It does come up, John, although it took some time.
I see, though, you’re happy to do anything except that work that you’re supposed to be doing.
Anyway, Munguin’s expecting you for lunch any time now.
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Ed, yes I’ve heard thunderplout but not for a long time. More often the word used in my area was thunderplump. My Dad would say things like, “Looks like we’re in for a real plout” or “It’s ploutin doon oot there”. Both words are Scots – plout, v splash and plump n cloudburst; cluster; plopping noise , v rain (Scots-English English Scots Dictionary, Lomond Books, 1998)
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Ah, that makes sense. I could have tried looking for “plout” on its own. I’d jalouse that “plout” is a Scoticisation of “pleut”. So maybe a petty plout would be a small rainstor[Kevin! That’s quite enough nonsense out of you for one day. Talk about folk etymology!-Ed.]m.
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Stopped in my tracks twice in one day!! That cloudburst vid is something else. I’m still gaping in wonder…
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#2 is an amazing picture. Although the image file is titled “monteray-sun.jpg” that must be the full moon setting in the Pacific just before sunrise. I assume that’s a part of Bird Rock that you see from the famous 17-Mile Drive at Monterey. (Where for $10.50, you can drive along the road where fabulously wealthy people live on the Monterey Peninsula, and where they play golf at Pebble Beach.) Hard to tell exactly where it is on Bird Rock, but the size of the birds and the size of the moon in the image means that a humongous long lens was used and a small area is shown. The rock is quite a distance out in the water and the birds actually appear tiny.
Bird Rock with tiny distant birds (except for a couple of nearby seagulls) :
The history of the fabulous 17-Mile Drive at Monterey: 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17-Mile_Drive
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Yes, I see what you mean about the lens they musta used.
Pretty picture though on these long cold nights in Scottish wintertime.
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Yes Tris, beautiful! It would be nice to have enough money to live in Monterey. I imagine that Harry and Meghan would be able to afford a place there with a nice view of the Pacific, if they want the cooler climate of northern California. On the other hand, if they prefer warm sunny Southern California, a beach home at Malibu would be just the ticket……and every bit as costly. Decisions….decisions……. 😉
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Poor things. Life isn’t easy for ex-princes and princesses.
I noticed last week that the other one, Kate Middleclass, was moaning about how difficult it was to be a working mother.
Up in the morning, get chambermaid and dresser to make sure the nannies have got the kids up breakfasted on stuff sent up by cook, ensure husband’s footman has got him up and dressed in the clothes that they washed ironed.
Then chose a costume from the thousands in her walk in wardrobe the size of a small street. Choose hats, bags, shoes, perfume, wait for chauffeur to come round… take 2 minutes to kiss the kids goodbye before they are driven to school. After all, if she’s late it’s not like she’s going to get the sack.
How on earth does she manage?
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LOL….LOL……Yes Tris, managing a staff of people who do everything for you must be terribly burdensome. 😉
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The poor woman hardly has a minute to herself all day… what with peasants trying to touch the hem of her Gucci… life is just a misery for Kate Middle-Class.
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For me, Monterey will always mean John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, and Doc, Mack and the boys. Hilarious, heart-warming, tear-jerking, and philosophically very profound. One of the very greatest books. With more in the same vein from Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flats. If you’ve yet tor read them, time to catch up and give yourself a real treat.
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Maybe time for a re-read…
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John…….That’s interesting. I’ve not spent any time really in Steinbeck country, except briefly while motoring between San Francisco and L.A. I’ve stopped for gas (petrol) in Salinas, and driven the 17-Mile Drive at Monterey. I’ve read Cannery Row, but not Tortilla Flats or Sweet Thursday. I must do that. Although the last cannery closed in the 1970’s, Ocean View Avenue in Monterey was renamed “Cannery Row” in honor of the site of Steinbeck’s novel.
I come from Missouri (which touches Oklahoma,) where the name Steinbeck more often evokes memories of “The Grapes of Wrath” and the Oklahoma/Great Plains “Dust Bowl” of the 1930’s. The original alignment of the Missouri part of old US highway Route 66 bisects the state (now mostly I-44 (an “Interstate” superhighway,) along which, west from Oklahoma, Steinbeck’s dispossessed “Okies” headed for California on what he called the “Mother Road.”
“Steinbeck writes: ”Highway 66 is the main migrant road. … 66 is the path of a people in flight. … 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.” Route 66 represents flight, or migration. The migrants are ”refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership.”
The old 1920’s and 30’s alignments and bridges of US 66, are often maintained by state and local jurisdictions as historic highways, and I’ve seen European tourists who’ve come to America to drive stretches of old 66 to California. (The local view is often that these are people with more time and money on their hands than common sense, but to each his own. 😉 ) I’ve read about the hostility that Steinbeck received from California agricultural interests when Grapes of Wrath was published, with its account of the mistreatment of the agricultural field and orchard workers in what is still California’s largest industry. John Steinbeck’s boyhood home is still maintained in Salinas, in Monterey County.
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A lot of wows! today, but the best was the otter. Amazing to get so close
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My favourite too, Tatu.
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