HOW BLOGS COME ABOUT

I’m asked, though admittedly not that often, where I get my ideas for this weekly blog. Truthfully, there is no easy answer. Sometimes it comes to me during the week when I read something I want to know more about myself. Other times from what explains it the most: that when anyone reads it, they say to themselves, “I didn’t know that!”

One item that caught my eye was a newspaper headline: NORWAY HAS A BRIEF REQUEST FOR MILITARY CONSCRIPTS. Here’s a bit of what it told us. “Conscripts in Norway have been ordered to return their underwear, bras and socks at the end of their military service so that the next set of recruits can use them.”

Another was a song that brings me back to my youth. Here’s a few lines:

“Be prepared, that’s a boy scout’s marching song, be prepared

as through life you march along. Don’t solicit for your sister

that’s not nice, unless you get a good percentage of her price…”

An earlier blog was about how I find myself in two worlds. It’s working to bring ‘life’ to fictional characters and switching to my real life when I finish writing for the day.

Author’s comment: In a 2021 blog I wrote about how Halloween was the second most grossing commercial offer with Christmas topping the list. Yet another was about how many ‘old’ typewriters once given away or thrown in the trash now sell for hundreds if not thousands of dollars. An original Green Olivetti Valentine typewriter? Over $18,000.

SHEP-HERD Part 2

To bring you up to speed, here’s what was in (my) Part One of writer Sally Couthard writing in the Globe and Mail

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It involved the residents of Marsden, England, where sheep deserted the nearby countryside to move into town and munch on lawns of fresh green grass.

Despite a cattle grid, a deep hole in the ground topped by a series of iron bars to keep them away.

As for the two sheep we had beside us when I was young, they worked on digging a hole under the fence and crawling out from under it.

How did these other sheep slip into town unnoticed and get away with it? Villagers set up a reconnaissance brigade to figure it out. Here's what they discovered.

The sheep would lay down on their sides or backs and roll over and over across the bars’ and stand up on the other side. Undoubtedly proud of themselves.

Author’s comment: Ingenious? You bet. Scientists who study sheep discovered they have this ‘cognitive ability’ to work things out.

They became instant celebrities, far from being passive, meek and dumb. Let's look at them in a better light from now on.