2. Who’s a cute wee fellow then?3. Who’s a cute wee pussy cat? Pffff… not me!4. They have long straight roads in Western Australia.5. I’m a Northern Quoll. You’ve probably never heard of me.Sigh!6. Munguin Towers’ Grounds.7. I’m a Green Bee Eater… not that I eat Green Bees, you understand.8. Just to remind people in Scotland (and Missouri) that it CAN be cold… You’ll remember how cold in a few months!9. Helsinki.10. I’m a Stick Nest Rat. Now don’t get all upset. Humans are funny about us rats (and we’re a bit funny about humans) but we’re actually quite cute.11. Um, excuse me… do I watch YOU having a bath?12. Show us the sheep.13. I might tell you that I’m less than thrilled about being No. 13… and following dogs too! Jeez.14. Gaborone, Botswana.15. Archer Billabong, Australia.16. Heaven’s sake… now Munguin wants a Billabong!17. If you want to hear me rattle, pick me up and give me a shake… I dare you.18. Thank goodness when Greenland left the EU there was no shortage of fish for us Walruses (or should that be Walri?).19. Meow.20. I’m sleepy now, so please be quiet as you leave… and I’ll wake up in time for next week.
Tris……I got the Open confused. I need to pay more attention. I heard that the Open this year was held at a course with “Royal” in its name, and got it confused with the “Royal and Ancient.” I should have known that “Royal” in the name of something over there doesn’t really narrow down the possibilities that much. 😉
Anyway, they were talking about sunny warm weather, and comparing it with previous Opens. I was surprised at nice weather after all the rainfall and flooding. I do recognize the difference between the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National in Georgia, among the flower gardens and magnolia trees, and the Open, frequently held at a famous links course in Scotland. Entirely different looking places! Georgia gets points for pretty scenery, but Scotland is more difficult golf as I understand it. 😉
As for naming confusion, I’ve noticed that somehow the Brits took back the title “Open” after many years that Americans insisted on calling it the “British Open,” to differentiate it from the “American Open.”
Tris……..I checked this out. In fairness, it’s always been “The Open Tournament” from the time it was first played in 1860. The United States Open didn’t start until 1895, and then the other national Opens came later. The people in Scotland who control golf at the Royal and Ancient are quite insistent that it always has been and always will be “THE OPEN TOURNAMENT,” whatever anyone else wants to call it.
So the business of calling it The BRITISH Open depends on who’s talking about it, and where they are located, and who they’re talking to. An article about it from USA Today:
Danny, if the R&A refers to it as “The Open”, then that is what it is.
If the Brits want to claim it for themselves…well, let them. They don;t have much else to brag about these days, what with a Pound shop Trump as Prime Minister… (5 and 10 style shops)
Yes Tris, Petula has it right. The “five and ten” or “five and dime” stores…..probably more commonly (except in some song lyrics) just “dime stores”…….were an American institution that began with Frank Woolworth in 1878. You could buy all sorts of wonderful stuff at a dime store, from inexpensive clothing and costume jewelry to stationery supplies to small children’s toys….everything really, often having a lunch counter. Sam Walton started business with a dime store in Bentonville, Arkansas. But Sam’s place expanded to became Walmart, and the other dime stores went out of business……maybe going through a period as a big discount store like Sam had……but then finally going out of business. I remember being in a dime store once as a young child. Too bad they’re gone.
The “dollar stores” probably only go back to the 1960’s or later. I’ve only been in one or two, and they just look like big cheap grocery stores. Mostly I’m thinking good deals on toilet paper, plastic clothes pins, plastic cups, cleaning supplies and cheap candy. Dreadful places!
So “dollar store” would be the current term. But people miss the old dime stores. 😉
LOL LOL……..Yep Tris, it isn’t every small town in the Arkansas Ozarks that’s the international headquarters of a world wide retail business empire. They even built a big airport to accommodate business travel into and out of Walmart Headquarters. 🙂
I don’t blame you!
Wiki: Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, with US$548.743 billion, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2020. It is also the largest private employer in the world with 2.2 million employees and stores in 25 countries.
I think Walmart has about 1.4 million employees in the United States, and NOT ONE of those employees belongs to a union. They’ve managed to keep the unions out totally in the US. Not sure about the international operations.
Amazon may be even worse if possible. They are catching heat from a recent New York Times expose:
Hardly ‘taking back’, Danny, just reasserting the status of the event as THE Open Championship as opposed to others that need qualificaton by way of geography. The Scottish Open usually takes place in the week before THE Open, often played in Scotland as well, as you note, so that could account for your confusion.
But don’t worry, golf is confusing for many people. I was once asked by someone who should have known better why the Masters has such a long history in a former Communist country (Georgia!) where golf would surely have been considered a bourgeois pastime.
The Open is the oldest golf tournament in the world, first played in 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club on the west coast of Scotland. Later the venue rotated between a select group of coastal links golf courses in the UK, as it does now, under the auspices of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the game’s governing body (apart from the US Golf Association which is responsible for your part of the world). The R&A is not a club in the sense of being a course, although based in St Andrews which does not carry the ‘royal’ tag, being a municipal course despite its status as golf’s ultimate destination.
The name derives from being ‘open’ to all, professional and amateur alike, although the first event was restricted to pros and only a year later became truly ‘open’. In fact the ‘open’ part did not feature at all originally, being simply ‘The Championship’.
The first US Open was not played until 1895, a whole 35 years after THE Open. It took place at Newport Country Club in Rhode Island and was contested by 10 professionals and a single amateur. The winner was Horace Rawlins, a 21-year-old Englishman who had arrived in the US earlier that year to become pro at the host club. His winnings? $150 cash out of a prize fund of $335, along with a $50 gold medal.
I’d be interested to know what became of that medial and if it’s still to be seen, but my Googling skills cannot produce an answer. I’d love to think that such a great piece of golfing history has not been lost.
John…….
I think the media and internet chatter some time back about “The British Open” henceforth being referred to by the name “The Open,” was just an American media thing. It’s a big event on American TV, and for years the American TV networks had called it “The British Open,” following informal usage by golfers and others in America. But for some years now, it’s been “The Open” on TV and other American media.
The confusing business of the two places named “Georgia” prompted me to do some Googling. I was pretty sure that the American State of Georgia was named after one of the British King Georges; and sure enough, the southern state is named after George II, who granted the colonial charter in 1732. The Brits got involved with the Russian Georgia naming too. Russian Georgia is named after the patron saint of England, and back in the middle ages, the English started calling Russian “Gruzia” by the English name “Georgia.”
Interesting history about Horace Rawlins! (As you reported, his cash prize of $150 for winning the 1895 US Open, reflected a $200 prize, with $50 deducted to pay for the medal he received. Poor guy had to pay for his own gold medal! 🙂 I found a couple of articles (which might open for you below,) and located that long lost gold medal, with a picture of him wearing it. The medal was found by his grandson in 1974 in a bank box in England. It’s now owned by the USGA, and is in the USGA museum in New Jersey. In case the articles won’t open in Europe, here is the relevant information:
Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Decades later, Rawlins’ descendents knew nothing of his Open victory. And when a sportswriter phoned Springhaven in the 1970s to ask about him, the response was “Horace who?”
That began to change in 1974, when his grandson opened a long-neglected safe-deposit box. There he found photographs, golf memorabilia, and, most intriguing, a beribboned gold medal.
Unsure of its origins, he contacted a local collector.
“[He] came by to see the medal . . . told me it was perhaps the first official award ever made to a professional in the United States,” Michael Rawlins told the Inquirer in 1995.
Eventually, the family presented the historic award to the USGA, where it’s now displayed in that organization’s Far Hills, N.J., museum.”
Rawlins barely escaped gunfire before the 1903 US Open:
“On June 25, 1903, the night before the first round of golf’s U.S. Open, the young man who had won that tournament eight years earlier lay sprawled in a gutter, trying to escape incongruous gunfire.”
You’re correct; we’re on their list of no-gos. Incidentally, I think that the red ship’s the icebreaker; it keeps the channels clear in winter. I remember seeing the 3-master that’s moored in front of it.
Lovely. What sorta wee monkey is no2? Cute as anything but weird as well. Munguin Tower’s gardens are looking lovely. I case anyone is wondering my contribution was the Scots born Amur tiger from Kingussie, part of a letter of two girls and one boy.
I don’t need to mention that the orangs were adorable but it seems like I just did!
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Nice to think of winter in the heat of a Missouri summer. Did I read that there was uncharacteristically warm weather at the Open?
#17…..Definitely a Diamond Back rattler…..for obvious reasons.
I like the cat, and the views of Munguin Gardens. I finally looked up what a billabong is and ran onto this:
(A billabong, by the shade of a Coolibah tree.)
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I thought it was a pond, Danny. but I see it can be a dry bed…
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/billabong
After a horrible start to the summer, it has become hot and mainly sunny to the point where people are complaining about it…
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I was thinking that I read about a warm sunny day at the Open, with comments about it not being your usual weather for an Open in Scotland.
I actually had no idea what a billabong is. Clearly I need to study the lyrics in more detail 😉 :
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Waltzing_Matilda
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Nothing to do with weed consumption in Norn Iron….
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Is Orange Blossom a weed? You give a new twist to King Billa and the Battle of the Bong.
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True, Danny. I guess people are used to watching wet windy opens.
Fascinating lyrics. Actually a foreign language to me!
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Tris……I got the Open confused. I need to pay more attention. I heard that the Open this year was held at a course with “Royal” in its name, and got it confused with the “Royal and Ancient.” I should have known that “Royal” in the name of something over there doesn’t really narrow down the possibilities that much. 😉
Anyway, they were talking about sunny warm weather, and comparing it with previous Opens. I was surprised at nice weather after all the rainfall and flooding. I do recognize the difference between the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National in Georgia, among the flower gardens and magnolia trees, and the Open, frequently held at a famous links course in Scotland. Entirely different looking places! Georgia gets points for pretty scenery, but Scotland is more difficult golf as I understand it. 😉
As for naming confusion, I’ve noticed that somehow the Brits took back the title “Open” after many years that Americans insisted on calling it the “British Open,” to differentiate it from the “American Open.”
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Ummm… typical, Danny. They think everything is about them.
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Tris……..I checked this out. In fairness, it’s always been “The Open Tournament” from the time it was first played in 1860. The United States Open didn’t start until 1895, and then the other national Opens came later. The people in Scotland who control golf at the Royal and Ancient are quite insistent that it always has been and always will be “THE OPEN TOURNAMENT,” whatever anyone else wants to call it.
So the business of calling it The BRITISH Open depends on who’s talking about it, and where they are located, and who they’re talking to. An article about it from USA Today:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/golf/2016/07/09/the-open-or-british-open-depends-on-whos-talking/86891412/
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Danny, if the R&A refers to it as “The Open”, then that is what it is.
If the Brits want to claim it for themselves…well, let them. They don;t have much else to brag about these days, what with a Pound shop Trump as Prime Minister… (5 and 10 style shops)
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“Pound shop Trump”………LOL!
(You have pound shops, we have dollar stores. 😉 )
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LOL, It figures, I guess. I thought that Five and Ten, or Five and Dime, were your equivalent.
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I think this is where I got that:
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Yes Tris, Petula has it right. The “five and ten” or “five and dime” stores…..probably more commonly (except in some song lyrics) just “dime stores”…….were an American institution that began with Frank Woolworth in 1878. You could buy all sorts of wonderful stuff at a dime store, from inexpensive clothing and costume jewelry to stationery supplies to small children’s toys….everything really, often having a lunch counter. Sam Walton started business with a dime store in Bentonville, Arkansas. But Sam’s place expanded to became Walmart, and the other dime stores went out of business……maybe going through a period as a big discount store like Sam had……but then finally going out of business. I remember being in a dime store once as a young child. Too bad they’re gone.
The “dollar stores” probably only go back to the 1960’s or later. I’ve only been in one or two, and they just look like big cheap grocery stores. Mostly I’m thinking good deals on toilet paper, plastic clothes pins, plastic cups, cleaning supplies and cheap candy. Dreadful places!
So “dollar store” would be the current term. But people miss the old dime stores. 😉
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Well, Danny, if you used to get stuff for a dime… having to pay a dollar must make you miss them.
We have Walmart here, but it is called ASDA (Associated Dairies). It’s pretty grim, but maybe not as bad as this:
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Introduced in the Broadway musical “Billy Rose’s Crazy Quilt”, which opened in May, 1931, where it was sung by Fanny Brice.
From 1931…….Bing’s crooner period:
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LOL… That was not half bad, Danny.
Very amusing…
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The song became a popular standard. Nat King Cole in a different style from 1958.
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Wow. That man had some voice.
So much better than Bing Crosby (imho)
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Indeed!!!
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What’s the difference between Bing, Walt and Emmanuel?
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Bing sings, Emmanuel Kant, but Walt Disney!
(Requires a Scottish reading. 😉 )
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I’m seriously impressed, Danny!
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Tris…..
Please…..no applause!…..LOL!
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OK, I’ll be silently impressed! 🙂
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LOL LOL LOL……Love it! Walmart customer service! And the mom and pop cookie store that Walmart just built around and never noticed.
Everybody hates Walmart! 🙂
Sam Walton and his original dime store in Bentonville: (Now the Walmart Corporation Visitor Center)
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Ha ha ha ha ha … they have a visitor centre???????? LOL
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LOL LOL……..Yep Tris, it isn’t every small town in the Arkansas Ozarks that’s the international headquarters of a world wide retail business empire. They even built a big airport to accommodate business travel into and out of Walmart Headquarters. 🙂
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Indeed, Danny… even if it is a horrific organisation.
I remember they were features in “The Worst Person in the World” at one point over some incident with an employee who had been injured.
The British stores drew up new contracts for staff taking away a load of rights. Anyone who refused to sign was sacked.
It was at that point that I decided I didn’t much want to buy stuff from them any more.
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I don’t blame you!
Wiki: Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, with US$548.743 billion, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2020. It is also the largest private employer in the world with 2.2 million employees and stores in 25 countries.
I think Walmart has about 1.4 million employees in the United States, and NOT ONE of those employees belongs to a union. They’ve managed to keep the unions out totally in the US. Not sure about the international operations.
Amazon may be even worse if possible. They are catching heat from a recent New York Times expose:
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The British ones can be in a union… I’m not sure it did them any good.
https://www.gmb.org.uk/asda-contract-6-flyer
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Hardly ‘taking back’, Danny, just reasserting the status of the event as THE Open Championship as opposed to others that need qualificaton by way of geography. The Scottish Open usually takes place in the week before THE Open, often played in Scotland as well, as you note, so that could account for your confusion.
But don’t worry, golf is confusing for many people. I was once asked by someone who should have known better why the Masters has such a long history in a former Communist country (Georgia!) where golf would surely have been considered a bourgeois pastime.
The Open is the oldest golf tournament in the world, first played in 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club on the west coast of Scotland. Later the venue rotated between a select group of coastal links golf courses in the UK, as it does now, under the auspices of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the game’s governing body (apart from the US Golf Association which is responsible for your part of the world). The R&A is not a club in the sense of being a course, although based in St Andrews which does not carry the ‘royal’ tag, being a municipal course despite its status as golf’s ultimate destination.
The name derives from being ‘open’ to all, professional and amateur alike, although the first event was restricted to pros and only a year later became truly ‘open’. In fact the ‘open’ part did not feature at all originally, being simply ‘The Championship’.
The first US Open was not played until 1895, a whole 35 years after THE Open. It took place at Newport Country Club in Rhode Island and was contested by 10 professionals and a single amateur. The winner was Horace Rawlins, a 21-year-old Englishman who had arrived in the US earlier that year to become pro at the host club. His winnings? $150 cash out of a prize fund of $335, along with a $50 gold medal.
I’d be interested to know what became of that medial and if it’s still to be seen, but my Googling skills cannot produce an answer. I’d love to think that such a great piece of golfing history has not been lost.
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John…….
I think the media and internet chatter some time back about “The British Open” henceforth being referred to by the name “The Open,” was just an American media thing. It’s a big event on American TV, and for years the American TV networks had called it “The British Open,” following informal usage by golfers and others in America. But for some years now, it’s been “The Open” on TV and other American media.
The confusing business of the two places named “Georgia” prompted me to do some Googling. I was pretty sure that the American State of Georgia was named after one of the British King Georges; and sure enough, the southern state is named after George II, who granted the colonial charter in 1732. The Brits got involved with the Russian Georgia naming too. Russian Georgia is named after the patron saint of England, and back in the middle ages, the English started calling Russian “Gruzia” by the English name “Georgia.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/08/why-are-georgia-and-georgia-both-named-georgia.html
Interesting history about Horace Rawlins! (As you reported, his cash prize of $150 for winning the 1895 US Open, reflected a $200 prize, with $50 deducted to pay for the medal he received. Poor guy had to pay for his own gold medal! 🙂 I found a couple of articles (which might open for you below,) and located that long lost gold medal, with a picture of him wearing it. The medal was found by his grandson in 1974 in a bank box in England. It’s now owned by the USGA, and is in the USGA museum in New Jersey. In case the articles won’t open in Europe, here is the relevant information:
Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Decades later, Rawlins’ descendents knew nothing of his Open victory. And when a sportswriter phoned Springhaven in the 1970s to ask about him, the response was “Horace who?”
That began to change in 1974, when his grandson opened a long-neglected safe-deposit box. There he found photographs, golf memorabilia, and, most intriguing, a beribboned gold medal.
Unsure of its origins, he contacted a local collector.
“[He] came by to see the medal . . . told me it was perhaps the first official award ever made to a professional in the United States,” Michael Rawlins told the Inquirer in 1995.
Eventually, the family presented the historic award to the USGA, where it’s now displayed in that organization’s Far Hills, N.J., museum.”
Rawlins barely escaped gunfire before the 1903 US Open:
“On June 25, 1903, the night before the first round of golf’s U.S. Open, the young man who had won that tournament eight years earlier lay sprawled in a gutter, trying to escape incongruous gunfire.”
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/columnists/frank_fitzpatrick/Golf-The-first-US-Open-winners-brush-with-death-Franks-Place.html
https://www.golfcompendium.com/2020/09/golfer-horace-rawlins-first-us-open.html
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Thank you, John.
A history of THE Open.
Interesting that in that first US open nearly all the players were Scottish or English, with one Canadian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1895_U.S._Open_(golf)
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Helsinki’s lovely; I spent 99/00 there as I wanted away from Blair’s propaganda.
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I think we should all go now… but I guess they probably wouldn’t let us.
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You’re correct; we’re on their list of no-gos. Incidentally, I think that the red ship’s the icebreaker; it keeps the channels clear in winter. I remember seeing the 3-master that’s moored in front of it.
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I’ve always fancied a trip in an icebreaker…
I suspected we would be banned from Finland. Like we probably are most places.
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Lovely. What sorta wee monkey is no2? Cute as anything but weird as well. Munguin Tower’s gardens are looking lovely. I case anyone is wondering my contribution was the Scots born Amur tiger from Kingussie, part of a letter of two girls and one boy.
I don’t need to mention that the orangs were adorable but it seems like I just did!
This individual’s tweets are really impressive 🙂
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Sake typos! In case and a litter!
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I think it’s a pygmy marmoset.
You’re right. What great tweets.
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Gaborone is one of the driest capitals in Africa.
A visit to next door Zimbabwe instead:
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Wow… that house of the cliff… and then the photographer on the cliff…. eeek
Beautiful though.
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and he did it in bare feet.
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When it is hot you need to relax.
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Get a tan?
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I’m a bit worried about Ed.
He hasn’t appeared all week.
Has anyone heard from him?
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I’ve just emailed Ed Freeman to see if he’s Ok.
He always checks in on a Sunday for a bit of life reaffirming.
I’ll let you know if I hear anything.
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