SOPPY SUNDAY

For those of us in Scotland, Munguin asked me to remind you that the clocks will change on Sunday morning. (Apologies for the early appearance of SS … not associated at all with the English Government… This was due to clumsiness on the part of Tristan, who will be docked a week’s wages.)

Captured: The moment tiny baby orangutan gently bites his mother's nose | Daily Mail Online
1. Just helping Munguin out with the weeding. Of course he’s actually sitting with a glass of bubbles and Tris and I are doing the work.
2. Dave was over at Aberlemno yesterday.
3. that’s how to get the class’s attention.
4. Supercool hair cut, Robbie.
5. Is that bloke a politician? He looks dodgy enough. You don’t think he eats hedgehog, do you?
6. Awwwww.
7. Nice picnic… Munguin said there would be food…
8. Just practising my scales for a bit of courting!
9. What do you mean, who gave me black eyes? Humans is thick!
10. Sometimes you just have to laugh.
Image
11. Hello Magazine? No? Oh, Munguin’s Republic. We’ve made it!
12. Ben D Tree. Tentsmuir Forest.
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13. Just heading off to the office.
14. Amazon Delivery. Open up or I’ll leave him on the doorstep.
15. Angus countryside on the road to the top of Lundie Crags.
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16. N’Djamena, Chad.
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17. Lunch for a baby penguin.
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18. Grizzly? Not us.
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19. Amazonian Dolphins.
20. It was nice seeing you. You should come back next week and I’ll see if we can find any more photos you might like.

Thanks to Dave and Andi

71 thoughts on “SOPPY SUNDAY”

    1. No, it’s all down to clumsy old Tristan, who managed to load this up when he was trying to schedule it for 11.30.

      GRRRRRRRRRR

      Yep, I love no 6 too!

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    1. Danny, The other stones have boxes to cover them to protect them from the weather, at least in winter, and one is in a museum. For some reason this one is unprotected although the other side, the Christian side, is badly weathered.

      I think the English might have been more inclined to destroy the stones as they were defeated by the Picts at the battle of Nechtansmere, which is not far from Aberlemno. That defeat kept them out of Scotland for several centuries.

      Vandalism is not a problem because the the main road is now down in the valley floor and only locals pass this way. But we shouldn’t give people ideas….

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      2. Dave…..Amazing picture and history! I can imagine that being in a location that’s not near a main road does a lot to avoid vandalism.

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      1. Tris……Interesting! Wiki says that Aberlemno 4, “the Flemington Farm Stone was found 30 yards from the church and is now on display in the McManus Galleries, Dundee.”

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            1. Obviously, Danny.

              You really can’t expect him to mix with the ordinary people.

              Actually Munguin has been in there. We went a good few years ago to meet Abu, who was here from Malaysia on a tour with his family.

              They looked at the museum while we drank coffee and put the world to rights.

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  4. Tsk. A spot early with the life reaffirmation today, Tris! Oh, those orangutans…

    It’s particularly nice to see your pics of the Angus countryside. It was a particularly lovely day today, as I recall, at least looking at it from the inside.

    I love those old Pictish stones, though like everyone else I cannot help but wonder what they mean. Ancient and mysterious, their antecedents and provenance lost in the mists of time… I have a degree of fellow-feeling with them, you see, as I can feel myself drifting rather fast in the same direction.

    I read today that the Metropolitan chattering classes are of the opinion that Alex Salmond named his party after BBC Alba, which some have memorably described as it “Scottish-language channel”. It is so comforting, is it not, that our southern cousins are so weel acquent with all matters Scottish, and will therefore continue to do their usual bang-up job of covering Scottish affairs in the run-up to the elections in May to the Scottish General Assembly at Hollywood.

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    1. It’s unlike me to be in front of myself, but just this once, I was.

      Basically because I made a mess of scheduling.

      They are so knowledgeable are the chattering classes.

      I expect Alister Jackass gave them a quickly prepared lesson on the word ALBA and how the BBC had invented it with the help of Her Majesty the Queen and the Grand Vizier William the Religious.

      Who knows, maybe he turned to Labour’s Sarah Smith for some of the information.

      Pure Dead Brilliant, as Mr Gove is want to intone.

      Orangutans are lovely.

      And the little ones are just adorable.

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    3. Thanks for the reminder, Tris, though most of my radio-controlled clocks do it automatically (I’ve got one that takes its time about it), and all the internet-connected stuff as well. Even my electric smart meter does. That just leaves just the few dozen in the rest of my clock collection to go.

      Doesn’t alter the fact that with the hour’s time change, the jet lag is just awful.

      In that connection (or, as the French would say, when talking French, “dans le même ordre d’idée”), I am thinking of trying to harden myself against the vicissitudes of life by putting a pea under my mattress, though my care assistants may see the bruises and wonder if I’m being domestically abused. I’d blame Kevin as usual, but they might try to get me to seek refuge in a shelter for battered persons. Not worth the bother.

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      1. No. It’s not, Ed.

        And poor Kevin… what would he do without you.

        For the first day of summer time, it was bloody miserable.

        I walked 5 miles in the rain!

        If this is summer, bring back winter of two weeks ago when Munguin was sitting on the beach at Tentsmuir in glorious sunshine.

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      2. Ed……This has been a stressful time on both sides of the Atlantic. For your American cousins, the time shift happened LAST Sunday.

        Except that is in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and most of Arizona, where daylight saving time is not observed at all.

        Except that is on the Native American tribal lands of Arizona which DO observe daylight time.

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          1. Or maybe better yet…..local solar noon, with a clock in a town’s church steeple indicating local solar time. Didn’t work out very well with railroad schedules I guess. 😉

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                    1. Ooops, sorry to call you so late… I didn’t know it was the middle of the night in Forfar… it’s only half past 4 here in Dundee… sort of thing.

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                    3. Enjoyed the video! The International Date Line (and the Pacific time zones) are crazy. The way it zigs and zags has only a passing acquaintance with the 180th meridian.

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          1. LOL…..yes Tris, you always have to figure out what time it is where you’re phoning within the USA anyway. I always forget exactly how many time zones the country covers if you count the territories and dependencies as well as the states.

            For the states and the District of Columbia there are certainly six standard time zones, which in the summer months become eight different clock settings and seven different named time regions, with the complication of Hawaii Standard Time verses Hawaii-Aleutian Daylight Time.

            Then….even leaving the daylight time complication out of the equation, if you move out into the near Atlantic and far Pacific non-state territories, there are a total of AT LEAST nine different standard time zones. BUT if you count two uninhabited islands…….Howland Island and Baker Island……..that brings the USA territorial total to 11 time zones.

            BUT……as it turns out, since Howland Island and Baker Island constitute the world’s westernmost landmasses in relation to the International Date Line, making them the last two places on Earth where ANY date exists, they are sometimes assigned a theoretical 12th time zone called Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

            Truth is I don’t really understand the Howland and Baker thing, so I just figure that the territorial USA spans somewhere between 9 and 12 standard time zones and leave it at that. (How many daylight vs standard time variations there are among the 9 or 11 or 12, is anybody’s guess.) 😉

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            1. Oh, BTW, did you know that “America’s day begins” on Guam in the far western Pacific and not where you might think, in the near Atlantic, in maybe the American Virgin Islands for example. So how does that happen?

              Well as you go farther and farther west across the Pacific, it gets earlier and earlier by the clock, with the sun already having passed over all the lands to the east. But then you come to the 180th meridian on the other side of the world from Greenwich, which is the International Date Line. So when crossing the Date Line east to west you gain a day, and since Guam is on the west side of the line, the earliest time of a new date on American territory occurs in Guam. So Guam is “where America’s Day begins.”

              HOWEVER, NOT REALLY!…….never mind the Guam tourist brochures. “Fifteen-hundred miles east of Guam, but still west of the International Date Line, there’s a tiny speck of land — a military base, where the sign on the airstrip once read “Where America’s Day REALLY begins.” This is Wake Island, now home to only four permanent American servicemen, where the dawn’s earliest light — the first rays of sun on a new calendar date fall on U.S. soil.”

              https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wake-island-where-americas-day-really-begins/

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              1. I’d forgotten about Guam and Wake, Danny – unlike the Aleutians and Little Diomede, they’re not attached to any American state, though.

                As the Date Line is kinky, you’re not restricted to travelling E-W or W-E to cross it: for example, if you head south from Hawaii’s Big Island about 1200 miles, you’ll encounter Kiritimati, an island in the Republic of Kiribati. The Date Line swings out far to the east of Kiribati so that the whole of the widely-dispersed island republic -Flint Island is the furthest east, about 30° of longitude into the Western Hemisphere – is all in the same day, and the time in Flint Island is UTC +14.

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                1. Yes Ed……the International Date Line and the standard time zones in the Pacific are very convoluted. Even the standard time zones of Alaska and Hawaii look somewhat screwy. The time zone immediately west of California swings far out to the west to encompass almost all of continental Alaska as “Alaska Standard Time”, while the far western Aleutians join Hawaii two time zones west of California to form Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time.

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                1. LOL Tris…….I think that there are usually non-resident contractors on Wake, building and maintaining things for the military. So the night life may be just a little bit more lively than a population of four would suggest. 😉

                  Baker and Howland are uninhabited though. Wiki says that someone from the US Fish and Wildlife service visits Baker and Howland every year or two to check on things. 😉

                  Howland Island once had an airstrip that Amelia Earhart was to use for the Pacific hop of her round the world flight in 1937. She and navigator Fred Noonan never found the island and disappeared. The last time she and Noonan were seen was their takeoff from Lae, New Guinea on July 2, 1937.

                  Howland Island today:

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                    1. Tris……I hadn’t appreciated how hard it would be to see the island in good weather on a partly cloudy day.
                      Since 1937, Howland Island must surely be the most famous uninhabited island on earth. The transcripts of Earhart’s last radio calls, heard by the Coast Guard ship Itasca, which was stationed at Howland to monitor the Pacific leg of the flight, show that she was repeatedly calling out her compass heading and saying that she must be positioned right above the island, but can’t see it. For reasons still controversial, two-way radio communication was never established between the plane and the ship, possibly due to a mix up in radio frequencies.

                      It’s not hard to imagine now how she might have missed it visually, but also how easy it would have been to entirely miss that little speck of land in the vast Pacific, using only solar navigation and crude radio direction finding. It’s known she didn’t have much knowledge or skill with radio direction finding.

                      Liked by 1 person

            2. It must be difficult to test people on the date line for dementia and brain injury, because they’re always asked what day it is.

              I kinda like the idea of standing on one side of the date line, looking to the east and saying, portentously, “I can see tomorrow”, but my vast erudition and peerless googling skills tell me that although the antimeridian line at 180°E/W passes between Amatignak and Semiprochnoi islands, both are part of Alaska, and the date line has been diverted to the east of Attu island, the last of the chain belonging to the US. So the furthest point in the US Aleutians is actually in the Eastern Hemisphere.

              The point of closest contact between the US and Russia is actually further north, between Little Diomede island and its bigger neighbour, called – astonishingly – Big Diomede. They’re between 2 and 3 miles apart. With the Date Line passing between them (though they’re both in the Western Hemisphere), you really can shade your eyes with your hand and say “I can see tomorrow” – if, of course, the sun is up.

              In the past, the sea would reliably freeze between the two islands in winter, and people were accustomed to walk between the two over the ice for at least part of the year. However, global warming is putting paid to that. Here’s an article about the Bering ice, dating from last September, in Science News: https://archive.ph/ZxAy1.

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                1. Ed…..So I’m confused now…..LOL. The farthest point in the US Aleutians is Attu, which is EAST of the date line……that is, the date line is WEST of Attu?
                  So that makes it OK as far as Guam (or Wake Island really) being the place “where America’s day begins.”

                  But going farther (and I don’t have a map in front of me), are we defining the “eastern hemisphere” as being west of the 180th meridian….and NOT necessarily west of the International Date Line? In other words is Atu WEST of the 180th meridian (which would put it in the eastern hemisphere) but EAST of the International Date Line, and therefore on the other side of the date line from Guam and Wake Island?

                  When I’ve looked at a suitable map, I’m surprised at how screwy the date line and the time zones are drawn in the western Pacific.

                  Several years ago, the date line was reconfigured in the southern Pacific so that the Independent State of Samoa would join Australia and New Zealand west of the date line, leaving American Samoa east of the line with Hawaii and the USA.

                  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16351377

                  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/09/136142635/samoa-decides-to-leap-international-date-line-into-the-future

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            3. As long as you aren’t planning on phoning them all… and there certainly wouldn’t be much point in the two uninhabited islands… it really doesn’t matter a jot!

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          2. Tris, I believe I shall start a campaign to have the Greenwich Prime Meridian moved to the longitude of the Hilltown Clock, just round the corner from Schloss Freeman. I have decided that in these days of GPS, this will inconvenience no one, and it will be helpful to futureproof the thing as rising sea level will undoubtedly do for the current site before too long.

            Royal Observatory, eat your heart out!

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  6. Something big happening

    Must be something to do with this Mexican

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  7. Well those were delightful and very cheering. What a lovely bunch. Hard to pick a favourite. I have to say though that’s a well fed Robin. It was nice to see Tiddles too, have we ever had a hedgehog before??? I know I shouldn’t really boast but don’t I look lovely in pic 9.

    Anyway thanks SS you were great as ever. And just a wee reminder that next week is Easter and perhaps a bunny or two could hop onto the list of cute animals and interesting places.

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        1. I would too, Tris. Apart from anything else, Dead Sea mud would be very good for my skin, but I have quite a lot of it, so it would obviously be better to go to the source for it.

          I’d dearly love to go travelling again..

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    2. I’m not sure that we have had a hedgehog before. Certainly not one as cute at that one.

      Munguin is in negotiations with chicks for an appearance next week. It is always hard negotiating a fee for an appearance on MNR… and do chicks have enough money to pay what Munguin is asking?

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    1. Aye… Munguin have given permission for funnies to be posted early.

      Thousands have died and thousands more have lost their lives.

      In the fairy tale world of Willie Rennie, there probably is a difference between dying and losing your life.

      What a muppet”

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      1. Muppet Indeed Tris.

        “…Thousands have died and thousands more have lost their lives…”

        I had to scroll back to make sure he actually said it.

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        1. Aye well, when it’s wee Willie, you’re fairly safe.

          I don’t know why they haven’t got rid of him…

          Oh yeah, I do. The few other ones they have are even worse.

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  9. #18…….The brown bear cubs are cute. They remind me of a favorite brown bear video (perhaps previously posted.)

    The place is Katmai National Park in southern Alaska, southwest of Anchorage on the western shore of the Gulf of Alaska. The park has an area of 6,395 sq miles, making it larger than the State of Connecticut but a little smaller than New Jersey. The place is known for its 18 volcanoes, seven of which have been active since 1900. It also has lots of salmon and brown bears. In this video clip, tourists unexpectedly found themselves sharing a beach with a BIG brown bear and her cubs.

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