don't throw sticks

There was an item on our local news tonight (see link)about advice from a vet not to throw sticks for dogs in case they catch them in the air and the stick sticks in their throats. Cassie would like to speak to him about gratuitous advice and dog rights. Try throwing this one.

a roll in the hay

no matter, it's that time of year again, time for a roll in the hay and a roll on the hogweed if you can get it.

two variable longhorn beetles. The female is much larger than the male. The larvae live in tree stumps and dead wood.

the last of the summer wine 2

Hemp agrimony, the third of the tall hedgerow plants with large flat or daisy like flowers to appear after meadowsweet and valerian, and before orpine. The forest of long white styles is characteristic of this plant which is much favoured by butterflies as summer goes on. Named eupatorium after Mithradates VI Eupator, King of Pontus in 120BC.

pink hogwash

a spotted longhorn beetle on some pink hogweed (it is usually a greyish white). Hogweed seems to attract a wide range of unsavoury types including horse and other biting flies. The better class of umbellifer attract butterflies and bees. Why?

the last of the summer wine

this tattered and exhausted butterfly is the end result of days of flying about in the sun, avoiding birds, rain, and high winds. I am not even sure what type of butterfly it is. One of the brown family (meadow or hedge).


Looks like I feel these days, and how Spot looks at his best, ragged.

AC Grayling

some of the thoughts of AC Grayling, philosopher and mordant wit.

A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.

The democracy of blogging and tweeting is absolutely terrific in one way. It is also the most effective producer of rubbish and insult and falsehood we have yet invented.

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.

I spent the first 13 years of my life in Zambia. In Africa you can't walk in the countryside and think. You might be eaten by a lion. You have to read instead.

My mother was a straight-up-and-down racist of a very marked kind. She used to laugh at the shopping lists the cook would try to copy out. It would never have occurred to her to teach him to read.

I would imagine Jesus was a kind of Jewish reformer. If you were looking for an equivalent to the figure you dimly perceive through the gospels it would probably be a Richard Dawkins.

I'm a vegetarian, but I wear leather shoes. Some people say that's a contradiction; I say I'm doing my best.

I used to be a terrible hypochondriac when I was young and a great reader of medical dictionaries. One day I realised that I was not actually frightened of terminal illness but of not getting done the things I wanted to get done.

I recently retraced on foot a famous journey that William Hazlitt made from Shropshire to Somerset to visit Wordsworth and Coleridge. I spent two weeks slogging through nettle beds before I realised the bastard had taken the coach.

When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?

I'm passionately in favour of legalising heroin and cocaine. But I despise people who depend on these things. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.

I don't believe in killing animals, but I think President Obama did a justifiable thing in swatting a fly. Flies spread disease.

I have enough faith in statistics to know there must be conscious life on other planets.

Initials can be useful to hide behind. I once heard Jonathan Ross on the radio asking Kirsty Young who she had coming up on Desert Island Discs. When she mentioned "AC Grayling" Ross replied: "Oh, I know her."

Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.

I'm not sure it is possible to think too much. You don't refresh your mind by partying in Ibiza.

Life is all about relationships. By all means sit cross-legged on top of a mountain occasionally. But don't do it for very long.

Every professor of philosophy needs a nine-year-old daughter. Mine has a habit of saying, "Daddy, that is a very silly idea." She is always right.

from

Liberty in the Age of Terror, by AC Grayling, is published by Bloomsbury, 12.99

 

thanks to BRIAN CHAMPNESS, raconteur, author and authority on Bose