Ian Short

If it looks like a frog you’re right-brained and if it looks like a giraffe you’re left-brained. What? It looks like a seagull to me. Never mind, here’s an intriguing story about a passenger’s outrageous behaviour on a plane with yet another entitled person refusing to move or demanding a seat swap. Shocking.
Anyway, which cup does fill up first, what colour is the dress, green or blue, and which way should toilet paper hang?
Now here are some absolutely genuine and not in the least AI pictures of intricate plants that look like animals, amazing animals that no one has ever seen on this earth before and the giants who once walked amongst us. Even more convincing are photos of couples in their 90s who have been married for 65 years, bless them, how do they manage to look like 45-year olds?
Oh, here are some more gripping stories about the actions of bad neighbours, careless or aggressive drivers, rude and dumb tourists, ratbags on the subway train and unreasonable in-laws. I love these last ones, especially if they involve weddings, funerals, Wills or conflicts between husbands and wives or bosses and workers, that tell of absolutely believable karmic justice and elaborate revenges.
Now I can join the other 4.3K commenters trying to explain why someone’s bizarre maths meme doesn’t add up before admiring some absolutely convincing pictures of incredibly complex, detailed and futuristic engineering miracles, not just of astonishing machines and devices, but also fantastic bridges, tunnels and giant buildings, often in China or Japan (where people are “living in the next century”) except for the giant looped skyscraper in New York’s Central Park.
After discovering that one weird trick to reduce belly fat, another to cut your electricity bill in half and what unusal foods can cleanse your blood or remove toxins, let’s spend spend some time arguing with Flat Earth advocates, moon landing deniers and brain chip implant believers before checking today’s stories about the early warning signs of loathsome diseases, silent killers and how to rid your body of parasites and toe fungus. My goodness, when the doctor checked this one, he called the police!
It almost as exciting as the stories of extensively tattooed and pierced people who can’t get a job or the furious debates about how much to tip. Let’s face it, if you can’t tip at least 30% then you can’t afford to eat out.
The morning has almost gone and at last I can get on with my work, but not before being amazed at the transformation before my very eyes of an elderly woman on America’s Got Talent into a gazelle to the astonishment of audience and judges and admiring the amazingly intricate and detailed larger-than-life carving of an owl, lion, woman, bear, ship, tree, flower or mermaid by a sad-looking young girl, teenage boy, disabled veteran, elderly aunt or someone’s grandfather who has never received the recognition they deserve. They are so talented, the whole world should know, can we get a like?

It is astonishing how such a physically solid and robust institution as an iron foundry could disappear so completely, leaving barely a trace 50 years later.

I worked at an iron foundry in Oldbury in the West Midlands’ Black Country in the late 1960s. It operated there for 64 years, helping hundreds of working families to put a roof over their heads, food on the table and clothes on their kids’ backs. It ceased operations in 1974.

Fast forward 50 years, where today I am corresponding with Professor Mark Duffield of Bristol University, an expert in industrial history and the changing workforce in the second half of the 20th century. He is interested in my eye-witness accounts, photos and recollections.

But there is a problem. We can’t find any trace of the old foundry. We can identify the site it used to occupy, but of the former physical structure there is no trace. Fifty years after it closed, a newish housing estate now occupies the southern half of the old site while several small warehouses, garages and workshops occupy the northern half. The massive sheds, furnaces, cranes and big machines that I remember are all gone. There is no visible evidence that this was once a thriving business in a significant local industry, a focus for the local community and an important factor in their lives.

I guess it’s very much a symptom of how history gets written and preserved – the deeds of ‘important’ people are recorded and remembered; the deeds and achievements of working class people are overlooked and forgotten.
As I write, Prof Duffield and an industrial archaeologist colleague are conducting a field trip to explore the site to see if they can find any physical evidence of the foundry that stood on it for over 60 years.
Archaeology? This is in my living memory!
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Photos from 1967-69: 1. The business end of the two cupolas (iron melting furnaces); 2. Big Joe tapping out the molten iron; 3. tapping out the slag; 4. casting with a two-handed shank; 5. bench moulder Sam at his workbench; 6. Sam casting his moulds with a pot ladle; 7. Munsih Ram casting his moulds; 8. high angle view of the floor moulding area, overhead ladle crane in the foreground; 9. casting a floor mould from a three and a half ton crane ladle.

Howard Carter, the man who excavated Tutankhamun’s tomb, died on this day in 1939.

The last surviving member of Carter’s team died in 1995. He had been a 19 year old labourer at the excavation and died in Ireland aged 92.

The local paper kicked off the story with the headline, “The Curse Still Rings True!”

Originally published on the Phil Rickman Appreciation Society Facebook page.

The pagan festival of Imbolc starts tonight at sunset in the Northern Hemisphere and runs until sunset tomorrow.

Tonight’s the night in Crown of Lights* that Robin and Betty plan to hold a sabbat, a ceremony marking the midpoint between the dark of winter and the light of spring. Robin likes to call it Imbolc, but Betty prefers to call it Candlemas.

Imbolc, half way between the northern winter solstice and Spring equinox, is the time to welcome the first signs of spring and honour the goddess Brigid. It’s a festival of renewal, fire, and fertility. Candlemas is tomorrow, 2 Feb. It commemorates the presentation of Jesus at the Temple of Jerusalem, referring to him as the light of the people of Israel.

Both emphasise the significance of light and the ceremonies of both feature candles and Crowns of Light. It is possible that the early Christian missionaries, under instructions to adapt and incorporate features of the old religion rather than destroy and replace them, borrowed the symbols of Imbolc to tell their own spiritual stories.
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*Crown of Lights is a novel by Phil Rickman in the Merrily Watkins series.

Were you an Internode customer who transferred your email account to The Messaging Company?

Be careful of a dodgy email starting “Hi,” but without your name, purporting to be from The Messaging Company asking you to complete a survey or click a link to “recover lost emails”.

Do not trust it.

Facebook is becoming more unusable by the day.

A recent trend that has become very annoying is where a post shows an elaborate, intricate, obviously AI-generated, sculpture, statue, painting, portrait, carving or suchlike, even a magnificent cake or a horse made of bread, with an unlikely-looking creator standing next to it and a caption saying something like “Do you think I can get any likes for this?” or in the third person, “He/she did all this work, why is nobody talking about it?” The post then has hundreds of comments, mostly along the lines of “Oh, wow! What amazing talent!”, “God has blessed you with such skill” and “The whole world should see her work, let’s all share it far and wide”.

It’s all nonsense, of course, and most are scams. Some are trying to provoke as many responses as possible in order to generate input to help train AI language models. Others are share- and like-farming scams, just like the posts with pictures that play on the emotions of kind and thoughtful people, for example pictures that depict an abused dog or a disabled child and ask you to ‘like’ or ‘share’ the post to wish the subject of the picture well.

When such a page has received thousands of ‘likes’ or shares, the page will be sold to marketers or ads placed on the page to display to the thousands of users who, by liking, sharing or commenting have inadvertently signed up as fans.

Isn’t it nice of Patrick to go to all that trouble (see below) to recover all that money for me from around the world? I’d been wondering lately where it had got to. Oh, and I’ve obscured Mr Anderson’s contact details because I don’t want anyone else getting in first and snaffling the loot.

Hello, this Patrick Anderson from the USA department of treasury Washington DC, this is to let you know that a ton of money up to 20 million dollars has been recovered across Africa, Europe and America to your name. I’m pleased to inform you that this funds will be released to you through bank wire transfer, cashiers check, cash delivery as soon as we hear from you.
Congratulations to you as i await your response,contact
…………..@…….com or 202-xxx-xxx
Thank you.
Patrick Anderson

I never knew I had my own Security Team!

My word, these folk are good, going to the trouble of emailing me from my own website domain to tell me that there is something wrong with my email account, with a nice, big juicy link tempting me to click it (all links deactivated in the exact copy below).

Or maybe I’m emailing myself to warn myself of a problem with my own email that I’m using to send and receive the warning.

Dear ianshort.com,

Your account will be disconnected from sending or receiving mails from other users.Because you failed to resolve errors on your mail.

You need to resolve the errors or your account will be disconnect
Follow the instruction below to resolve now.

CLICK HERE TO RESOLVE ISSUE NOW

Regards,
ianshort.com Security Team
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