Geraldine's musings

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/D4gMbjkhm6s/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=224970

sidhlairiel, posting in little_details:

Hi everyone :)

At the moment I am revising an old story and I have some action that takes place in a hospital in Prague in 2002. The protagonist finds her critically injured companion in the area of the Strahov monastery and rushes him to the nearest hospital. What I'm trying (and failing) to work out is which would be the best hospital for her to take him to. I've been using google maps to try and pinpoint where all the hospitals are but, obviously, the information for most of them is in Czech and I can't understand a lot of it.

Some of the places that are flagged up when using google maps appear to be either private health clinics or university departments related to medicine. I'm really just looking for a typical hospital building which has sufficient grounds to accommodate a car chase out of the parking lot and which is on the west bank of the Vltava river, as near to the Strahov monastery as possible. If anyone who understands Czech or is simply knowledgeable about Prague could give me some help choosing a hospital I would really appreciate it. I don't mind using a bit of creative license to describe the interior of the building, but I'd really like to have a real world facility to refer to.

Many thanks!

paukenfrau, posting in little_details:
Hi all,

Can anyone tell me what the popular terms were for marijuana, heroin, and cocaine in Britain and/or the rest of English-speaking Europe circa 1996/1997? My character is a rock star from a wealthy family, so he would have been using what was considered the 'good stuff' of the era (i.e., powdered cocaine versus crack, high-quality heroin versus low).

Wiki, Google, and my f-list yielded several websites with international terms for different drugs, but nothing that was year-specific or class-specific. Thanks in advance for any help!

3_purple_stars, posting in little_details:

SO, I've looked in the  tags and my google fu is failing me. Even the Wikipedia page on Rocerfeller is very scarce on how the great depression affected the wealthy, especially Manhattan high society. The Rockerfellers, the Firestones.. What did they have to sacrifice? Were there less people invited to Fiorello LaGuardia's dinner parties?

There is quite alot about the hoovervilles and the soup lines, but where can I find out what happened to the creme de la creme?


Thanks in advance!!

ineffablewombat, posting in little_details:
This has come up twice now in fantasy settings I've been working on. O.o

So if you have very little in the way of natural resources, but one of the resources you DO have in relative abundance is feathers (pigeon and occasionally chicken feathers in the one setting, a much wider variety of birds in the other), what might you do with them? Any way to spin them and turn them into cloth? Or maybe use them whole in some way for warmth? These people don't have room to grow flax or hemp or cotton and certainly don't have room to graze sheep or goats. One setting does have domesticated rabbits and the other has occasional skins from animals hunted in the Extremely Dangerous Place, so I've got backup clothing sources, but if they CAN do anything with the feathers they have, they WILL.

If it matters, both settings have rather ubiquitous but very limited magic.



googling "feather spinning" and "feather cloth" did not find me any useful results, and I haven't seen anything about feathers as a fibre source on handspinning-related websites. If nobody has a clue I may just go buy or collect some feathers and dig out my drop spindle and see if I can make it work somehow. Heck, I might do that anyway.

ramtops:
Today's tweets are ( behind the cut )

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/hcpv8f7juJ4/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=225028

fruvous, posting in splodefromcute:


I LOL'd so hard when I frst saw this.

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/5tfXfLo94uQ/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=225038

heleninwales:

Next destination: Isengard

Miles travelled today: 10
Miles travelled so far: 389 (1309 from Bag End)
Percentage complete: 100%


Point reached on journey: We have reached the lawn of Parth Galen below Amon Hen. “Rauros was calling with a great voice.” We have made camp...

---

Where I really went...

I hadn't planned to reach Rauros Falls today. The weather forecast was not good, but I wanted to reach my destination before the end of 2009. Realising around 11 am that it wasn't actually raining, I ventured out. My plan was to do a quick cycle ride to add enough miles to put me in easy reach of the finish of this leg, which could be accomplished tomorrow.

Except when I reached the point where I intended to turn round and cycle back, the weather wasn't all that bad (still no rain!) and instead I headed up the Gwynant valley, past Kings Youth Hostel and came back via Cader Road. No photos, I'm afraid, but everywhere was grey and drear.

I did think a couple of times that the idea of doing the circular trip wasn't terribly bright. I had forgotten that though it wasn't all that cold down by the estuary, a few hundred feet higher, it was trying to snow, but it wasn't cold enough to freeze and the roads were clear of ice, so I persevered and eventually was rewarded with the long swoop down the hill into town. I did push the bike up most of the hills, but the extra couple of miles meant that the effort was worth it and a total of 10 miles for the day put me at Rauros Falls. :)

I think I'll have a rest day tomorrow, then it's onwards to Isengard with Merry and Pippin.

heleninwales:

Yesterday was absolutely gorgeous, though chilly. I have lots of things I should be getting on with, including writing a radio play for the next assignment for the OU advanced creative writing course, but I couldn't waste a day like this, especially as I have to reach Rauros falls before the 31 December (my self-imposed deadline).

As it was so nice, I decided to walk to the seaside. Not all the way, it's true; that would take much too long. Instead I drove to Arthog, parked the car in the car park by the Mawddach trail and walked from there across the bridge to Barmouth. It turned out to be a free crossing too because there was no one taking money in the little hut on the Barmouth side.

Because it's wide, I've put the large panorama looking up the estuary behind the cut so as not to mess up your friends' page. ( Photo behind here... )

And here is a cheerful diesel train that passed me as I was heading towards the bridge. It has just come from Barmouth, next stop, Morfa Mawddach.

cakewrecks:

http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/12/spelling-airs.html

We all know that nearly all cake decorators misspell "congratulations" every day.

(Um, John? I don't think...)

This is obviously because they're either drunk or completely incompetent.

(Okay now, we're totally gonna get in trouble for that...)

Now you might be saying, "I thought all drunk and completely incompetent people were politicians?"

(Well, that's true.)

But you would be wrong!

(I would?)

Which brings us back to cake.

(Oh, good.)


See? Comgratation. Interestingly enough, there are close to 3,000 accepted spellings of "congradulationed" in the decorators' dictionary.

Occasionally, though, they do spell it goodly:

Like so. Of course, sometimes after successfully spelling a word the thrill goes to the baker's head. Thusly we get "Ternifer" - a hybrid creation of "Terrific" and the name of the person who ordered the cake, perhaps?

Here again the decorator got the "hard" word right:

Sure, the number's a bit, well, wrong...but hey, numbers are hard!


Wisites: n. [wi-SET-eez] Small, fuzzy mammals indigenous to Uganda prized for their venom, which is said to cure gout and certain types of restless leg syndrome.

See? No misspellings here!

Well, y'all have a grrr-reat day now. Oh, and decorators? Bottoms up!

Jessica E., Christy C., Dana S., & Jessica, watch out; I hear those wisites spit.


- Related Wreckage: The "Year" of the "Grad"

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/COq7AcN0ERQ/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=225044

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/ePERwjElqd0/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=224958

aladasian, posting in splodefromcute:

SMILE!!! 8*D~

beachpsalms, posting in unclutter_2009:

Might as well restart a couple of days early.

out: 
2 gingerbread houses
1 slightly broken nutcracker
all the christmas cardboard packaging

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/diotDQrxkt0/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=222973

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/lLcr-QDkl5c/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=222823

ramtops:
Today's tweets are ( behind the cut )

icanhaschzbrgr:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICanHasCheezburger/~3/RoaTGVKVix4/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/?p=224185