Happy birthday to batworker Heather last week.
Flying Mouse
Category: cartoon
Bake-Off
Happy birthday to Zach.
Barcode Safari
Happy birthday to Florence.
Barcode 5018 4453 isn’t as fierce as depicted; it’s from the top of a jar of Marmite.
Wookiees
Great Star Wars party at the weekend. Happy birthday today to Ruby. Or, as they’d say in Wookieespeak . . .
The Secret Life of Pebbles
What pebbles do on their day off. Happy birthday to George (yesterday).
Secrets of the ‘Inkwell’ Underground
A busy week for birthdays including, for Arden, some Secrets of the Underground beneath a Victorian villa. The map is 70% accurate: the Victorians did a lot of groundwork when they built their villas.
Less accurate: Paul Simon didn’t, unfortunately, include the exciting new ballad Dave in his surprise set at the Newport Folk Festival. My nephews James (happy birthday today), Richard and Tom gave its world premiere last month, at Dave and my sister Lin’s golden wedding celebrations.
It opens with Dave on his trusty NSU Quickly moped phut-phutting to the rescue with nothing to sustain him on his journey except a raw onion, hence the chorus, ‘Bite! Bite!’.
Performing alongside the Ingham brothers, my great-nephew Dylan, who also celebrated a birthday during this last week.
George Gissing’s Childhood
Happy birthday to Sue (a few days ago) who, as a member of our local wild flower group, follows in the footsteps of Thomas Gissing, pharmacist of Westgate, Wakefield, father of novelist George.
Celebration
Celebrating a golden wedding, Lin (my sister) and Dave’s, with their sons Richard, James and Tom plus grandson Dylan supplying the music.
I already knew that my sister during her time at Cambridge had had two close encounters with Prince Charles, himself a student at there at the time: one when she nearly ran in to him on her bike and another when she was next in the queue to him in the bread shop and she bought the muffin that had been next to the one that His Royal Highness bought.
But according to a Golden Wedding ballad performed by the boys there was more to it than that. In their version it’s Charles that runs into Lin to get her attention and Dave – a student in Liverpool – has to leap on his scooter and drive to Cambridge for a dramatic face-off with the Prince on the college croquet lawn.
My brother Bill and I were the grooms at the wedding. Family friend Muriel was convinced that I’d get my hair cut.
More celebrations: happy birthday to Zoe on the Isle of Man.
Osla’s Camp
Ossett is a Viking place name, which might mean ‘Osla’s seat’ or ‘ridge camp’.
I’m transferring my 1998 booklet Around Old Ossett from the Microsoft Publisher version on my now defunct PC to Adobe InDesign on my iMac and taking the opportunity to spruce up my cartoons of local place names in Adobe Illustrator.
In my original booklets I wanted the blackest of blacks possible so I went for bit map format where each pixel is either black or white – never grey but this gives a slightly pixelated image. In Illustrator I can use the ‘Image Trace’ function set to ‘Black and White Logo’ to get a smoother effect.
R2-D2 and C-3PO
R2-D2 and C-3PO: how they are related.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to a Star Wars fan who shares her name with NASA’s plucky little (weighing in at just 200 kg at the launch) solar Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.
