Disqus - Latest Comments for garydenness

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: to bee -- or not to bee

Gary Denness — Thu, 25 May 2023 16:08:49 -0000

Queen Bee?? Jeez, Steve. You’re at least eight months behind the times…

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: the crucible of neighborliness

Gary Denness — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 12:39:18 -0000

Your failure to hold an impromptu ‘Buckets of Pool Water - 100 Pesos a Pail’ sale in your yard will have utterly destroyed local Mexicans faith in the American capitalist system…

I’m glad it all ended well.

😉

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: feliz cumpleaños mamá

Gary Denness — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:05:39 -0000

A belated happy birthday from me to her.

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: jupiter takes liberties with venus

Gary Denness — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:05:02 -0000

Your Space Odyssey was my Planet of the Apes. The acting was less wooden in mine, I guess. Maybe a bit more furry. Who doesn’t like a bit of extra terrestrial philosophy? Even if it turns out to be a little less extra terrestrial than initially thought…

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve

Gary Denness — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:47:35 -0000

My condolences Steve. Hope you and yours all get through the next few days with more laughs than tears. Best wishes.

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: little orphan annie eyes

Gary Denness — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 04:28:40 -0000

Are they plastic notes? Or paper notes? I’ve decided I prefer paper notes. Fivers and tenders here are solely plastic now. Twenties and fifties come in both the new plastic format and the outgoing paper notes. But the paper ones will cease to be good for use at the end of September.

This is a huge shame, as our plans for staying warm and alive this winter involved huddling around mounds of bank notes burning in empty bean tins. And paper burns so much better than plastic.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: To Covid or not, what is the answer?

Gary Denness — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:18:24 -0000

Odd. Some comments go thru. Some don’t.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: To Covid or not, what is the answer?

Gary Denness — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:18:03 -0000

Test.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: Our gardener's Texas odyssey and the self-defeating politics of U.S. immigration

Gary Denness — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:16:57 -0000

The origin of Brexit movement lies elsewhere, but Boris never passed up jumping on a bandwagon if he could squeeze some personal gain out of it. Even now, if you ask people for things they don’t like about the EU, they’ll bring up nonsense that Johnson peddled years ago when he was a journalist. Stuff like ‘Brussels Bans Bendy Bananas’. Which, of course, they didn’t.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: Honk if you prefer stick shift cars

Gary Denness — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 07:56:52 -0000

Manual gearboxes are far more common in Europe than North America, although most big German, British and Swedish cars will come with auto boxes. Indeed, when you’re next in Blighty, I dare you to pop into a Rolls dealership and ask how much for a manual box. Just for giggles. It’s the equivalent of dining at a Michelin starred French restaurant and insisting the chef cover everything with ketchup. You’ll be removed from the premises. And possibly thrown to the floor. Quite roughly.

Little cars? The opposite is true. I’m the odd one out - my little Mazda2 has an auto box. I use my car solely to get from A to B with the minimum of fuss and effort. And cost too, although auto boxes are, alas, less fuel efficient. My next car will be an electric model, and if self driving is a workable thing by then, then I’m all in.

Now, if you really want to go back in time in an automotive sense, you can still buy a Lotus 7 courtesy of Caterham. Either factory built or as a kit…

https://www.caterhamcars.co...

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: Our gardener's Texas odyssey and the self-defeating politics of U.S. immigration

Gary Denness — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 10:19:55 -0000

We have a similar problem here, for similar reasons. There’s a shortage of labour across Europe, but it was exacerbated in the UK by Brexit. The loss of skilled and unskilled labour has burned the UK economy.

Frankly, the only problem we really ever had with immigration and the EU, is that not enough Brits of a certain quality went the other way.

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve

Gary Denness — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:47:51 -0000

We had a weather thing here in Blighty. It got hot. Everything melted for a bit. Now we are back to worrying about the big freeze next winter. I’ve been practicing taking my jumper off. And then putting it back on. I’m prepared for all eventualities. Except rain. So that’s probably what’ll happen most. Rain.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: To Covid or not, what is the answer?

Gary Denness — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 08:33:31 -0000

You mean Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan would have been too much for that trip.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: To Covid or not, what is the answer?

Gary Denness — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 11:42:05 -0000

The Covid vaccinations were never sold by the government or health authorities as providing protection against infection. Certainly not in the UK. There was hope that it might reduce transmission, which indeed it did, quite well, at first. Less well as time and variants went on. But they do what they were designed to do extremely well - prevent serious illness in most folk.

By the end of March 2020, I’d figured out that Covid was with us forever, and that sooner or later we’d all catch it. I lived sensibly before my two shots. But after them, I stopped worrying. Why worry about something that cannot be avoided, and that you have a reasonable level of protection against? I’ve only worn masks when abroad since July 2021, when they were largely ditched here. But I managed to put one on without wetting my pants when required.

My risk levels are different than some of you guys. N95 masks turned out to offer decent protection against getting infected, so some people still wear them. But what is it with frothy mouthed antivaxxers/antimaskers and their fury at the sight of a person in a mask? Like you mentioned, the internet says a lot of things, and some people believe everything they want to believe.

Covid eventually caught up with Mrs P and I at the beginning of last month. Unpleasant and a little bit persistent. We coped.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: Tentative summer gardening forecast: Tomato downpours with frequent gazpachos

Gary Denness — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 06:03:16 -0000

I don’t have much to contribute to this topic. I usually kill everything I try to grow. Although I did manage to nurture a dozen or so marble sized tomatoes through the growing process and on to our plates as a lockdown project.

I am going to enjoy one of the side benefits to our recent heatwave though. Strawberries and cherries liked the extra sun and went through something of a growth explosion. So we have lots of cheap fruit to enjoy. A pound a punnet is back in fashion.,

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: A conflicted Fourth of July

Gary Denness — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 05:44:48 -0000

There’s not many better reasons to leave a country than because the destination is Mexico City.

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: sleeping with the fishes?

Gary Denness — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:02:59 -0000

Welcome back to the interweb Steve.

Were you unaware that the coronavirus has now spread to fish, causing them to leave the safety of the sea to walk ashore seeking masks and dewormer tablets?

I thought everyone knew this…

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: A conflicted Fourth of July

Gary Denness — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 12:13:50 -0000

Hopefully the US will emerge whole again. A good starting point would be for the American fascists to recognise what they are. It’s a problem that needs to be called out for what it is, confronted and resolved. Hopefully without violence.

Alas, the American fascists I’ve spoken to wouldn’t recognise their political brand of choice if you dressed them up in brown shirts and taught them to goose step. There’s a way to go, I suspect.

On the plus side, most of the countries east of the Suwalki Gap seem to have turned the corner in a positive way.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: The futile search for a solution to gun violence

Gary Denness — Mon, 30 May 2022 03:11:04 -0000

To an outsider, it seems bizarre that such a wealthy, educated nation can’t at the very least agree that there should be some conditions that need to be met before a person can own a gun. And that the gun probably doesn’t need to be a military style assault weapon.

But then we remember that this is a country that votes for the likes of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene in sufficient numbers to put them in office, and…well…yeah. The country is screwed.

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve

Gary Denness — Thu, 19 May 2022 03:53:12 -0000

I hear you on the topic of headphones, pun intended. I like to hear the world around me on my walks. My AirPod Pros are a revelation. One long click and active noise cancellation kicks in - great on a flight. Another click and I can hear everything in the outside world. I can listen to a podcast and it’s more like listening to a friend walking beside me.

I look forward to seeing your South African photos. A place I’d love to see. But I won’t make it this year. We have to go and see a Stan instead. Next month…

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve

Gary Denness — Sun, 15 May 2022 13:13:28 -0000

I would assume it converts your bitcoin to local currency and dispenses notes. Or coins. Or - going by recent crypto developments - a big raspberry.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: To mask or not to mask? But why? Does anyone know?

Gary Denness — Sun, 15 May 2022 13:10:25 -0000

I genuinely don’t know why the issue of masks is still as contentious as it is. There’s pretty good data on their use now. They are pretty effective in certain situations (poorly ventilated, indoors, short exposure) and much les effective in others. They’re not fun to wear though. I’m also glad to put them away.

Hope you’re enjoying your trip.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: Mother Nature cuts through the gloom of current events

Gary Denness — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 08:32:32 -0000

Funnily enough, my designated task at work today was to remove any lingering coronavirus related signage or plastics and bin them. The government has definitely decided the pandemic is over. That’s a sentence that can start a heated argument amongst some folk. But I’d say that the U.K. franchise of Covid pandemic is done.

We screwed a lot of stuff up here, but the one thing that we got right, as a nation, was the vaccination program. It was rolled out quickly and the uptake in the vulnerable groups was in excess of 97%. The countries that failed to do that will still have problems for a while yet.

As for the KKK in Patz…so he has. What a shame.

Re: Rancho Santa Clara: Mother Nature cuts through the gloom of current events

Gary Denness — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 03:56:25 -0000

The UK can offer some hope, regards covid. We’ve had a fourth dose given to the most vulnerable. But otherwise, restrictions haven’t been necessary since they were eased in the middle of last year. Yes, infection rates have soared, yes some companies have chosen to issue work at home orders. But mostly life has continued as normal. Yes, hospitals are packed, yes people are still dying. But the healthcare system hasn’t yet been overwhelmed and it seems unlikely that it will be.

Death rates? High. Three times higher than the worst flu season in a decade. But only a fraction what they were in April 2020/January 2021. Importantly, most deaths involving covid are no longer ‘from Covid’, unlike the earlier peaks when 90% of deaths had covid as the underlying cause.

The vaccines work. Which is good news. Unless you’re from HK or China, where huge numbers of vulnerable folk have still not been vaccinated.

I hope your folk in Kyiv are still ok. I remain disappointed that there are still people in the west who are pro-Putin on this issue. I guess its not a huge shock that the chap blogging for the Patzcuaro chapter of the KKK and his acolytes sided with fascism. But that otherwise intelligent folk, and people with broadcasting responsibilities continue pushing nonsense on behalf of fascism…well, like I say. Disappointing,

Gardening. I have nothing to say about that. My thumb remains black.

Re: mexpatriate — in the key of steve: spending my time not-so-well

Gary Denness — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 16:37:47 -0000

I do care. Give me my stolen hour back in October, then quit the madness.