As I sit down to write about Christmas, as I do at this time every year, it occurs to me that my Christmas as a celebration is gradually changing.
As a child, it was about the Nativity scene, about singing carols, the delicious aromas in the kitchen where Mum was cooking turkey and mince pies. [more…]
A mascot is a person or thing that is supposed to bring good luck, especially one linked to a particular organisation or event. Some of our clues for mascot include ‘Lucky emblem’, ‘Lucky symbol’ and ‘Team pet’.
The word mascot is derived from the French term mascotte meaning ‘good luck piece’, which ultimately came from [more…]
Eau de water!
Eau de is French for ‘water of’. I’m sure you have heard of, or even sprayed, eau de toilette or eau de parfum. In English the idea of ‘toilet water’ sends school children into sniggers, but toilette is the process of washing oneself, dressing and taking care of one’s appearance, so splashing [more…]
5-cent Cinema
The term NICKELODEON was first used to mean a theatre where a motion picture could be seen for five cents, or a nickel. The –odeon is thought to come from the keyboard instrument, the melodeon, which also was used as a name for a music hall. Odeon was also the name of a [more…]
Hi DeniseSuit just arrived, looks great. My 91 year old neighbour thought I was about to go into space. I can just imagine those cold nights in the caravan in my suit.Many thanksCheersJudyPictured: Judy Schouten, winner of a Lazypatch Duvet Suit in Variety Prize Puzzles
Portrait of Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott (source: Wikipedia)
New York’s Round Table
“Three things shall I have till I die,
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”
So wrote Dorothy Parker, one of a group of writers who in 1919 began to meet for lunch in a New York [more…]
Fish with bite!
Their powerful jaws, frenzied feeding action and ability to quickly reduce their prey to a bare skeleton, have made these voracious fish popular cartoon and movie metaphors for foul play, greed and evil.
In the James Bond classic, You Only Live Twice, there is a gruesome scene where the evil Blofeld tosses a [more…]
Crossword lover Dorothy Lyall recently asked me how I compile crosswords.
I start off with the black and white pattern of squares which we call a grid. This grid has to be carefully designed so that there are no two-letter words, not many very short or very long words (ie a reasonable number of words [more…]
Blowing in the wind
The world’s winds have wonderfully evocative names. The khamsin blows in Egypt for fifty dry, dusty days from late April. The chinook, named after a Native American tribe, blows a warm, dry wind through the Rocky Mountains. The mistral, meaning master wind, blows strong and cold through Southern France and the [more…]
