The Official Nonsense Thread

[Caspin]

Oh. I was hoping you were going to laugh at me for believing an April Fools' news story. I'm sad that the demolition story is actually real. It's a really crass idea for entertainment and nothing to do with sport. They say that the theme is supposed to be the city's "regeneration" but all the demolition says, surely, is "destruction". People living nearby whose houses will need to be evacuated during the demolition extravaganza will be given tickets to see the show at Celtic Park. Are they going to let all the asylum seekers go to that party too? Or have they been deported already. Surely they could come up with an alternative spectacle for the opening ceremony. Jeez.

Angela Lansbury was great and got a huge cheer when she came on stage. It's hard to believe she's approaching 90 years of age! She must have some serious stamina to still be treading the boards. It's true about her only being remembered for a few things - as soon as you see her you really just think "Jessica Fletcher"! The other members of the cast were really good too and the play was very well done with a lot of laughs and, topically it would seem, a set that fell apart at the end, destroyed the ghost wives in poltergeist mode. Two mobile phones rang during the performance but I managed to control my rage and indignation. It was a good night out and nice to be in a theatre in which the ceiling falls down on stage as part of the play, rather than the ceiling falling in on the audience.

Today I had a day off (bliss!) and went off to the British Museum to look at the Viking exhibition. I sometimes want to smack the curators of these big exhibitions - they always shove a load of interesting but really small artefacts right at the beginning, so people all stop by the entrance and nobody can move through or see a damn thing. Also why can't they put the descriptions above and below the artefacts - the stuff written up on the walls was fine because you can look up and read that over other people's heads, then wait your turn to get close enough to actually look at the thing you've read about. Anyway, I should moan less - it was still very enjoyable and I'm lucky to be able to go to see all these things.

They had on display the longest viking long ship ever discovered (and it was really huge), or at least the 20% of the wooden planks that could be recovered, put into a metal frame to represent the whole ship. They are such strange boats - so shallow - it's difficult to imagine them covering such vast distances in such vessels.

There were pictures of a longhouse that they've reconstructed in Borg (Norway) that is now on my wishlist of places to visit. It looked like something straight out of Skyrim with its fire in the middle of the room with loads of pots hanging over it, containing horker stew for sure.

They had a lot of swords as well and grave goods and hoards of coins and other bits and bobs that have been dug up all over the place. Funny to think how much must still be out there - buried for safe-keeping and then the owner dies and all that nice silver and gold is forgotten. Maybe we should dig random holes in likely locations (Scotland, Lancashire, Yorkshire!) and we might find a fortune! I always thought that those gold/silver torcs they wore around their necks were just decorative jewellery and a display of status, but today I learned that in fact it was just like carrying all your wealth with you (since they were travelling a lot I guess you'd need a handy way to carry your cash other than a big sack of coins). So they would wear these heavy rings of precious metal round their necks, then if they needed to pay someone they would untwist a bit and snip it off and hand it over as payment. They had one truly massive gold neck ring (2 kg of gold) that looked as though it would surely just be decorative, as it was entirely impractical to wear such a thing, but there was clearly a link twisted out where the owner had started to snip bits off to use as currency. You learn something new every day, or some days anyhow.

Think I'll shut up and go buy my sim a bakery now.