@Hadacol

Herbert Henry Asquith

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Do you believe that home ownership is really something people should strive for, as a life achievement?

If this is a follow-up to what we said a few days ago, I'm sorry to disappoint but I haven't given the matter that much thought :)
I think it's definitely better for people to have property, not be beholden to a landlord or the council, and able to leave things for their children, and society benefits when people have this sense of responsibility. Unfortunately efforts to promote home ownership don't achieve their ends a lot of the time.
It's not like the sub-prime mortgages were a wild success, and that's what happens when it becomes a fetish. Also, Thatcher brought in the "right to buy", it sounded great. Remove people from dependency on the state, and no one has ever denied that big housing estates are grim, and encourage them to have a stake in society.
Unfortunately the properties often went not to the tenant but to shonky "investors", many of them from ultra-wealthy Gulf states ("allied" to the people who shamefully claimed that opponents of the latest war are terrorists!!!) and the poor didn't actually gain anything.from it. So I'm doubtful about whether it's something people should bust their asses for, and it should be encouraged by society, but only if it's been thought through properly.

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What do you most like to bake?

I don't actually enjoy baking, I do flapjacks or in autumn and winter the apple cake, only if I can't afford to buy something. I have pronounced views on the dessert question and if I can't buy one I must bake my own.
Which leads me to the religious experience I had earlier :)
Because of the bad weather I didn't go anywhere on the bus or train to do my photography, one silver lining to this is that I had a bit of money, so I was able to go to the farmers market and buy an especially good example of this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_toffee_pudding :)
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What's the last thing you bought and love?

I don't really buy much other than food, bills, and transport, since I need to catch the bus/train to do my photography adventures, which are the main recreation I have other than visiting my girlfriend. But one thing I do is baking, I have time (I only do 20 hours a week) but not money, so I buy the ingredients and bake it myself in the time I have rather than just pay for some bugger else's profit.
Whats the last thing you bought and love
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If you were tasked to choose among the population, one hundred people to be saved from extinction in an apocalypse, by what criteria would you choose?

No pressure there, then.
I'd choose by lot if I had to, there's no other way. You can't, for instance, choose the people with the highest iq. Because many highly intelligent people don't really DO anything, and often they do bad things, for instance a highly intelligent, skilled designer of nuclear warheads would get short shrift from me.
Then, you can't somehow objectively measure who is most useful, because while there is a place for lone genius you don't know where they'd be without their assistants and collaborators. Einstein for instance wouldn't be able to serve these 99 people very well if they were his only friends.
I am the shah of Persia so I'm meant to know these things but I'm afraid I don't :)
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Liked by: Kami Mehishi

Which Christmas movies or TV specials, if any, do you enjoy watching?

I don't watch all the tacky movies and sing the pop songs etc, I'm a killjoy like that and I'm a decorations-free zone. But I do like Christmas because I take on a second job and just before Christmas I finish that and take a holiday from my main job, and relax with unprecedented money and time. I don't go shopping or really DO much of anything, but as a good ex-Catholic there is one thing I do like (whatever you think of the religion and social sides, anyone who claims not to have enjoyed midnight mass as a child is a big fat liar)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_hs9-Sxf9j4Hadacol’s Video 133160642300 _hs9-Sxf9j4Hadacol’s Video 133160642300 _hs9-Sxf9j4

"A man's home is his castle." What does that mean to you?

I think that's definitely right... if it's his, if it's not public housing or owned by a landlord and the tenant has next to no rights, especially the ones where they deliberately keep people on shorthold tenancies. I think we do have a problem with "investors", many of them bureaucrats or businessmen from dodgy regimes, buying up property and pricing it out of the range of the average person. I'm not sure what can be done to help people find homes of their own, it has to be something that wouldn't have unintended consequences, but I'm sure Dave Cameron isn't helping matters.
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How well do you know your neighbours?

I've always lived here so I know most of my neighbours, I've known some of them all my life.
The family next door one side I like them, they are allied to me. I don't get on with the people across the road but I'm used to them, better the devil you know, and much better than the situation next door on the other side. It's owned by one of these shonky landlords who hires out on short-term tenancies, seemingly each new denizen being worse than the last.
And my parents didn't like the person who used to live there, but I thought he was ok, he replaced his grandparents who died and even if you don't want people like my old neighbour what you want even less is a revolving door.
So that's why understood the theoretical arguments that as bad as people like Saddam Hussein and Basher Assad are, going in all guns blazing to get rid of them creates a situation that's even worse, one demon cast out, seven demons entering in.
I don't like my neighbours apart from one family but I don't like anyone really :) So I keep the peace with them and we all vaguely drift through life and try to avoid getting bothered too much.

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So is where you are standing in that photo one of the hills made from the mud of the giant's boots in the folklore from that Wikipedia link?

shehitsback’s Profile PhotoAllison
Thanks for clicking, I'm always pleasantly surprised when someone does because I vaguely assume the world is ignoring me most of the time :)
I live about 40 miles from the Wrekin, so I think the people who told those legends had barely heard of my city, hardly anyone lived here before the industrial revolution. So I'd say I was sorry to disappoint you but maybe the reality is more interesting than the legend...
http://dry-valleys.tumblr.com/post/133666316279/even-if-it-is-freezing-cold-and-an-afternoon-on
Sneyd Hill is a slag heap, slag being a word for rubbish from coal mining, so it's entirely man-made and didn't exist as a natural hill in the old days.
There are a lot of slag heaps in this city because there were a load of mines before thatcher closed them all. So in that photoshoot the fifth and eighth pictures are slag heaps. My granddad was a miner and it's amazing to think I am standing on stuff he and his pels hewed out of the earth. :)

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Have you seen any beautiful churches lately?

'fraid not, I've been either at work and I've taken a few photos when I could avoid rain but apart from Saint Chad's in birmingham, and even that was three weeks ago, no buildings of any kind :(
But hopefully I will go on this long distance walk one day:
http://twosaintsway.org.uk/
Then I will be reunited with some old places and meet some new places I've never seen!
1

Would you ever pick up a hitchhiker?

I don't drive, anon, but I'm sorry to say I probably wouldn't. I remember one time I was walking round here:
http://dry-valleys.tumblr.com/post/132020061679/cotton-dell-and-cotton-where-tragically-saint
And when I got to the bus stop, in hope of going on the bus very soon, only then was I told that the bus "service" had been curtailed and I'd have to either wait several hours or trudge four miles into the town, Cheadle.
So I'd started to do this and some kind soul gave me a lift! And I was so thankful I lit a candle for him in one of my favourite places, Saint Giles in Cheadle.
Yes, the world needs more people like that, but sorry to say I'm not one of them :(
Would you ever pick up a hitchhiker
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Liked by: C. Michael Warming

What is one joke or riddle that always makes you laugh?

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
Eventually, of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realised that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own galaxy---now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across---which happened to be Earth---where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.
'It's just life,' they say.

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What Wikipedia article have you recently read?

Funny you should say that, anon!
I want to go here again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Chad%27s_Cathedral,_Birmingham
My girlfriend/friend with benefits lives in that city, I hope I can talk her into going here when I visit h tomorrow, it depends whether she's interested as she has less natural interest than me.
Once they were doing a service when we went there, I wanted to go and randomly join in even tho I'm an agnostic but she didn't and maybe I will talk he into coming when it's empty anyway.
That architect is a hero of mine and thankfully I live near his masterpiece and it's in beautiful walking country :)
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Do you write with your right or your left hand? In the shower, do you wash your right or left arm first? Which shoe do you put on first? Are you more comfortable laying on your left or right side? If your nose itches, which hand are you more likely to scratch with?

shehitsback’s Profile PhotoAllison
Completely righty for all those things, I'm quite boringly conventional in that sense :)
Except sleeping, I think I do that on the back!

What are you doing for Remembrance Day?

In an hour I'm going to the service at the cenotaph and Stoke Minster, our civic church and a building that last saw my face last August at a commemoration of the outbreak of war in August 1914. It's raining but I don't suppose that's half as bad as being some poor sod shivering in a trench or a wife wondering whether her husband will be on the list of dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZqN1glz4JYHadacol’s Video 132602653180 cZqN1glz4JYHadacol’s Video 132602653180 cZqN1glz4JY

How do you like your eggs?

When they're mixed with other ingredients in a cake, like this one I made last weekend, an apple cake.
How do you like your eggs

Will you continue taking landscape photographs in the winter?

Yes, when I'm not working and it's not raining I'm pretty much always in business :)
Winter trees aren't as good as autumn trees but the contrast is good, and because I've recovered from my hypothyroidism I'll be more able to appreciate the sunrises and sunsets like this one, last December.
Will you continue taking landscape photographs in the winter
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Who is a non-politician you wish would run for office?

In the real world, I don't think someone who has never been a politician would be any good at high office. Donald Trump, for instance, makes a virtue of his ignorance and lack of interest in details, but ruling is a hard and unglamorous task that it's easy to do badly, and I don't think the world needs another Silvio Berlusconi, thanks.
I understand the argument that we need people with hinterlands outside politics, though I think professional politicians are slightly unfairly traduced. We need in particular more working-class people, I'm critical of attempts to get diversity of race and gender if they don't mention class, a load of upper-middle-class technocrats won't bring "balance". So we need a more intelligent effort to get a range of views and backgrounds, and while we need a varied range of people, it's ESSENTIAL that anyone who wants high office should have a humbler political job first. If you're a 40 year olf businessman, you should be prepared to take a pay cut and be a "humble" MP for a few years before being a minister, etc.
But that's to talk about the real world, which is shit and boring and has no place on the internet. Therefore I propose we install Rob Halford and he'll implement a policy of freewheel burning :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g29seKqECJQHadacol’s Video 132472401404 g29seKqECJQHadacol’s Video 132472401404 g29seKqECJQ

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Hadacol’s Video 132472401404 g29seKqECJQHadacol’s Video 132472401404 g29seKqECJQ

What would you do if an elephant were charging at you?

Pick it up by its tusks and hurl it backwards whilst howling with rage, then it will fall onto the Danes and my other foes :)
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How adept are you at recognizing your anons?

I have one regular anon but I know who she is!
If you are who I think you are, I like you and I'm sorry I don't always respond but sometimes I can't think of anything, I prefer asking questions to answering them because it's hard to come up with something to say some of the time (QED).
Anons are aye welcome to ask questions, in the unlikely event of them wanting to :)
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Liked by: Stella Miracula

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