The cutting off of an Englishman's ear by Spanish Coastguards in Havana.

Refusal to grow a beard.

Theft of an oaken bucket.

A disputed referee's decision in an international soccer match.

A spilled glass of wine.

A wife running away from her husband.

A cricket match.

A stray dog.

An eloping couple.

Some of the more interesting twinnings.

Hull - Freetown, Sierra Leone

Middlesborough - Masvingo, Zimbabwe and Middlesboro, USA

Whitby - Anchorage, Alaska: Cooktown, Australia [Captain Cook came from Whitby]: Stanley, Falkland Islands: Whitby, Canada

Leeds - Durban, South Africa

Doncaster, Wilmington, North Carolina USA

Sheffield - Anshan, China: Esteli, Nicaragua

I've decided to adopt a footpath. I should be receiving the paperwork in the post tomorrow. All I
need to do is mark on the map which available one I want, and register it. I'm required to walk along its entire length at least four times a year and report if it's blocked, flooded or overgrown...that's all.

Since I regularly go walking with my brother in the west of the borough I'm going to adopt one out there; it's near to where I used to live, and my brother still lives in the area.

I've also applied to become a volunteer area warden but will have to wait for a few weeks until there are enough new volunteers for the council to run an induction course.

Outside a Hong Kong tailor's shop - 'Ladies may have a fit upstairs.'

In an advertisement by a Hong Kong dentist - 'Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists.'

In a Paris hotel lift - 'Please leave your values at the front desk.'

Outside a Paris dress shop - 'Dresses for street walking.'

In a Rome laundry - 'Ladies leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.'

In a Tokyo bar - 'Special cocktail for the ladies with nuts.'

In a Japanese hotel - 'You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.'

In an Acapulco hotel - 'The manager has personally passed all the water served here.'

On the door of a Moscow hotel room - 'If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it.'

In a Bangkok dry-cleaner's - 'Drop your trousers here for best results.'

American and Russian space flights have always included chocolate onboard.

Chocolate is highly toxic to dogs and parrots.

Cocoa butter makes a sensuous massage cream.

Allergies to chocolate are very uncommon - it certainly doesn't cause acne.

The melting point of chocolate is the same temperature as normal human body temperature; 37 degrees Centigrade.

Dear School: Please excuse John from being absent on Jan 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and also 33.

Chris will not be in school because he has an acre in his side.

My son is under the doctor's care and should not take fizical ed. Please execute him.

My daughter was absent yesterday because she was tired. She spent this weekend with the marines.

Please excuse Ray Friday from school. He has very loose vowels.

The River Don flows through Doncaster (hence the name) and is seventy miles long; rising in the Pennines west of Penistone and flowing eastwards to join the Ouse at Goole.

Prior to the draining of the Isle of Axholme in the seventeenth century the Don used to flow into the Trent near to where it joins the Ouse to form the Humber - the county boundary between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire still follows the original course.

There are also rivers named Don in Aberdeen, Toronto (Canada) and in Russia.

93% of all greeting cards are bought by women.

A person uses on average 57 sheets of toilet paper each day.

An office desk has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet.

Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

'Cow' is a Japanese brand of shaving foam.

According to 'A Glossary of Yorkshire Medical Terms.' - published by Doncaster West PCT

Barnsley (or Rotherham) are at home - [the teams play in red strips...so do Doncaster Rovers though.]

I've got a friend/visitor

I had a show

I was on my Honda

My husband is dead and will not bring me.

I am unable to walk as my dog has died.

I am under the doctor and cannot breathe.

I can't walk to the bus stop and my wife is bent.

I can't breathe and haven't done so for years.

I have arthritis of the spine and can hardly walk into doors.

I cannot walk up a hill unless it is down, and the hill to your surgery is up.

My mother is 96 and must have a car as she has got long fingernails.

That's the latitude and longitude of Doncaster, where I live.

Here are two facts that I found out years ago:

1...Parts of Alaska are further south than Doncaster.
2...Parts of China are further north than Doncaster.

Of course, I'm not too far from the Greenwich (or Prime) Meridian and have stood astride it in two different places; Louth and Cleethorpes - both in Lincolnshire.

Unfortunately, I haven't visited Greenwich yet.

Well, not particularly; according to these figures.

In their 2002 report, Reporters Without Borders places the U.K. in joint 21st. place on the Press Freedom Index - ranked behind such countries as Costa Rica, Hong Kong and Ecuador.

By 2004, the U.K.'s rank had fallen to joint 28th; now also trailing behind Trinidad & Tobago, Bosnia & Herzogovina, and Jamaica.

A year later, and things had slightly improved. The U.K. was ranked in 24th place.

Certainly something to think about.

For most of the last few days it's been raining; not particularly heavy, just a constant drizzle for hours on end; even when it's not actually raining it's still damp, miserable and cold. It's good weather for snails and slugs though; I recently put some slug pellets around my aster seedlings and they seem to be effective.

I installed 'StatCounter' on my blog a few days ago and generally I'd say it's a good service; it certainly provides detailed statistics. However, it's not very good at geography; when it lists the locations of my visitors it thinks that Gateshead is in Wales and that Malaysia is in the United States. (They do have similar flags though.)

It was my 44th. birthday last week.

Here are some interesting science-related facts about the number 44, according to Wikipedia.

In mathematics, it's a tribonacci number, a happy number (yes, this is a genuine term - I've looked it up) and an octahedral number.

In chemistry, it's the atomic number of ruthenium.

In astronomy, Messier Object M44 is known as the Beehive Cluster.

1...In the U.S. one in three snake bite victims is drunk. One in five is tattooed.

2...According to U.S. FDA standards, a cup of orange juice is allowed to contain ten fruit fly eggs, but only two maggots.

3...All species of beetles are edible.

4...It is illegal not to smile in Pocatello, Idaho.

5...Seaweed is to thicken icecream.

6...India has a Bill of Rights for cows.

Palm = 3 inches
Hand = 4 inches (still used for measuring the height of horses)
Shaftment = 6 inches, 6 and a half inches until twelfth century
Span = 9 inches
Natural Foot = 9.8 ins (approx.): Anglo-Saxon
Roman Foot = 11.6 ins (approx.)
Military Pace = 30ins.
Megalithic Yard = 2.72 ft., proposed by some archaelogists
Ell = 3ft p ins, measurement of cloth. Double length of forearm.
Geometric Pace = 5ft, more recent version of Roman Pace
Rod, Pole or Perch = 5.5 yards: Anglo-Saxon
Surveyor's Chain = 22 Yards = 100 Links: length of cricket pitch.
Engineer's Chain = 100 ft, less common
Bolt = 40 yards = 32 ells. Measurement of cloth.
Roman Mile = 4860 ft approx.
Scottish Mile = 5952 ft (English Mile = 5280 ft.)
Irish Mile 6720 ft.

The local newspaper is reporting that our bins are only going to be emptied once a fortnight - Doncaster Council will be trialling the 'new service' in certain parts of the borough, starting in June.

How on Earth is this meant to be an improvement? One stupid councillor is saying that it will save space at the local tip...the problem is that there'll still be just as much rubbish needing disposing of, it's just that it'll be rotting in your bin for two weeks and attracting flies and vermin.

I'm able to store my wheelie bin in the old outdoor toilet at the bottom of the garden; not everyone's so fortunate though.

I'm glad there are a lot of cats in the neighbourhood to keep the rats under control!

I don't often visit my own blog; I've only been doing so recently to check that my stats counter is working.

I've noticed that all of my Google Ads concern alcoholism. Why on Earth does Google think these are relevant to the subject matter and content of my blog?

I don't understand.

I've been having a lot of fun with the stats counter I've added to my blog...it's a very detailed service. Not only does it show me the number of pageviews and unique visitors, but also the locations of my visitors and the length of time they stay. There's also a lot of other stuff; far too detailed and technical for me to understand though.

One trend I've already noticed though is that the number of pageviews registered by this new stats counter seems to be lagging behind the figure provided by blog.co.uk - maybe it's due to the restrictive settings I selected.

...to Wulfweard and his blogsite visitors. I've just managed to install a visible stats counter by following the instructions...it seems to be working.

I live in Doncaster town centre and my local authority is Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (D.M.B.C.) A quick check on the internet shows that the initials D.M.B.C. also stand for...

Durban Mountain Bike Club
Durham Memorial Baptist Church
Don Mills Baptist Church
Dallas Military Ball Corporation
Data-Matrix Bar Code
Digital Media Broadcasting Corporation
D'Morte Burial Chambers
Directors' Meetings and Board Committees
Daily Mail Book Club

Albert Dock, Liverpool

Limestone Pavements, Yorkshire Dales

The highest and most remote parts of the Lake District

Spurn Point, East Riding

Hadrian's Wall

Bamburgh Castle

Lindisfarne

Chester

Would I be disappointed with any of these locations?

This was a question asked on BBC Radio Five Live International Messageboard. Here are some of the responses.

'Andorra - I once got a spectacularly large parking fine there.'

'Switzerland - their economy is Nazi gold.'

'Luxembourg and Switzerland - too damned clean!'

'Vatican City - far and away the most corrupt; a very long history of intrigue and mass murder.'

'Albania and Serbia - crime-ridden.'

'Luxembourg - most boring.'

'Wales - the people are insular. They detest anyone not Welsh. They produce nothing. It rains all the time.'

I came across this whilst visiting another language-based website. It's an interesting concept; removing all English vocabulary of a non-Germanic origin and replacing it with native words or constructions.

Here are a few examples:

penultimate - forelast
atom - uncleft
particle - mote
irascible - cranksome
epilogue - aftertale
recrimination - backblaming
developmental - becomesome
conjunction - bindword
mortuary - deadhouse
mythology - fablelore
perjure - falseswear
element - firststuff
democracy - folkdom
council - folkmoot
prologue - foretale
preposition - forething
native - homeborn
tribune - hustinger
introduce - inbring
monarch - kinghead
jurisprudence - lawcraft
parliament - lawmoot
court - lawstead
poem - lay
environment - lifescape
biography - lifewrit
prison - mendstead
inclination - mindbent
imagination - mindsight
noun - nameword
juror - oathman

This is actually a lot of fun, thinking up suggestions for new words - I'll have to see if there are any online forums for submitting ideas.

Although English is classified as a Western Germanic language, most of our words are derived from Latin or Greek; but all of our most commonly used words are derived from Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse (a North Germanic language.) Thus, in everday speech, it's been calculated that about eighty percent of words used have native Germanic roots; but when the speech or writing is on a technical or scientific subject this proportion would be significantly lower.

I saw this poster on the window of one of the newsagents in town. I stopped and wrote down the wording.

Launch of a

new product range

from a major

tobacco manufacturer.

By law we are unable

to advertise this new range.

Please ask instore for details.

It probably isn't true, but many people will believe it and be enticed into the shop - after all, Britain is one of the most oppressive and over-legislated countries in the free world...so it might just be true.

Seven Wonders of the Modern World...according to Hillman Wonders.

1...Great Pyramid of Giza
2...Great Wall of China
3...Taj Mahal
4...Serengeti Migration
5...Galapagos Islands
6...Grand Canyon
7...Machu Picchu

Seven Wonders of the Modern World...according to American Society of Civil Engineers.

1...Channel Tunnel
2...CN Tower
3...Empire State Building
4...Golden Gate Bridge
5...Itaipu Dam
6...Netherlands' Tidal Defences
7...Panama Canal

Seven Wonders of the Natural World...according to CNN

1...Grand Canyon
2...Great Barrier Reef
3...Natural Harbour of Rio do Janeiro
4...Mount Everest
5...Northern Lights
6...Paricutin Volcano
7...Victoria Falls

After a number of injections my jaw got number.

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse any more refuse.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

To help with his planting the farmer taught his sow to sow.

Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

One of my favourite TV series of all time. As far as I'm aware it's never been repeated here in Britain - I'd certainly be an avid viewer again if it were.

Some of the quotes:

'Fellas, don't drink that coffee! You'd never guess...there was a fish in the percolator.'

'I feel like I know her but sometimes my arms bend back...'

'The only thing Columbus discovered was that he was lost.'

'Shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames.'

'Got some advice for you: let a smile be your umbrella.'

Why does it always rain when a TV journalist is reporting live about a drought in England?

Why is my belly button fluff always blue, irrespective of the colour of the shirt I'm wearing?

Why, when it's busy in town, are there always a lot more people walking towards me than walking away?

- I haven't visited any of them though.

Satanic Hamster Dance
The Official Watching Paint Dry Webcam
Squirrel Fishing
How to Build an H-Bomb
A Woman's Guide on How to Pee Standing
A Complete List of Plans To Take Over The World
Furniture Porn
Stick Figure Death Theatre
Backyard Artillery
Hats of Meat
Penis Amulets.

Peanut Butter Parfait
Maui Wowie
Chocolate Road to Ruin
Peach Green Tea
Mother Lode Butter Brickle
Perils of Praline
Road to Glory
Lost in the Fifties
Earl Grey Tea Ice Cream
Ginger, The Professor, and Mary Ann
What a pear!
Pickle me.

According to AskMen.com

1...The World Islands; Dubai
2...Banaue Rice Terraces; Phillipines
3...The Rock of Gibraltar
4...Franz Josef Glacier; New Zealand
5...Carlsbad Cavern; New Mexico, U.S.A.
6...Stone Forest; Kunming, China
7...BI5; the world's largest iceberg, Antarctica
8...Magnetic Hill; New Brunswick, Canada
9...Silbury Hill; Wiltshire, England
10..Fairy Chimneys; Cappadocia, Turkey

Of course, I've not visited any of them; because of my interest in Geography I have heard of eight of them though - the two I haven't are the rice terraces in the Phillipines and the Chinese stone forest.

I heard from my brother yesterday that our mum has been diagnosed with intestinal ulcers - pretty much what we were all expecting. there's no need for any treatment at the moment; she'll just have to be careful with what she eats.

It sounds as though the medical p