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The best toy ever?
April 18th, 2007 | 
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Whilst I was over in Belfast last month James and John separately discovered the treasure trove of toys in the roofspace and, boy is it a treasure trove, as they’ve been living in that house since I was three.
They both liked the Scalextric car racing set which I was amazed to find still operational after over 30 years. All that it needed was a bit of sanding on the tracks to get rid of a little bit of rust. James was really keen on it so we’ll have to see about getting some new brushes for the cars.
James loved the little moon rovers too which also, quite amazingly, worked perfectly with new batteries. It seems a little odd to have toys with the big D size batteries rather than the much more common AA size that you get these days. On ‘tother hand, I’m not so sure that the present day toys will still be in working order 30 years on.
But, the toy that they both liked best was this little motorbike. No batteries required and the back wheel has broken off but it was always their choice to go to sleep with.
The toy choices of children are strange, aren’t they?
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Strawberry, honey, truffles, you name it, they’ve got a festival for it!
With start of April starts the onslaught of the festivals for just about every fruit, vegetable or drink you could name.The one problem with them is that you’ve really no idea in advance whether or not a given festival will be a popular one or just a few stalls trying to sell some obscure vegetable.
One of the best we’ve been to lately was the strawberry festival at Bellesta which is a village quite close to us but one we’d not been to before. They were lucky enough to hold the festival on a particularly sunny day following some of the last of the Winter rain. Combine that with the Vide Grenier (car boot sale or flea market) and the village was seriously struggling under the weight of traffic and people looking for parking spots on the day.
In fact, there were only two small stalls selling strawberries but the other stalls gave a very good representation of the local produce ranging from excellent honey as you can see, through the spicy sausages that you find everywhere here, and olives. Strangely, the wine makers didn’t have a big presence but then there are numerous wine festivals from now through to harvest time.
The majority of the festivals are only publicised locally so it’s potluck as to whether or not you’ll see the sign for one as you travel along the road. Larger villages are generally a better bet than small ones but really you can get a wonderful experience from even the tiniest village which is, of course, as happens in what we’d call church fetes.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Trips and holidays: New England
It’s been a while since I’ve been on one of the grand-scale holidays that I used to go on quite regularly but the point is coming up when it’ll be time for another one so I’ve started looking round the places that I went to in the past.
Anyway, as part of the pre-trip plans, I’ve started tidying up and updating the outline guides that I used to run up for the big trips and they’ll be starting to appear on the trips section of this site in due course.
The first one is for New England which I spent about four weeks going round way back in mid-September 1996. That’s quite an unusual area for America in that it has quite a bit of history behind it and is quite compact too. So compact in fact that we ended up spending almost three weeks within 150 miles of Boston.
The unexpected highlight of the trip for me was Concord Massachusetts which is where the War of Independence started or, as we would refer to it, the rebellion. Whilst in the rest of America us brits feel very much at home, this is the place where our history books diverged. So, whilst they would say something like “American patriots killed two of the occupying British forces” we would say, using present day terms, “American terrorists murdered two British soldiers”. It’s a very peculiar place to be if you’re British as you feel very much as though you are intruding and shouldn’t be there.
As I say, it’s very historic and filled with a wide assortment of living history museums. You can experience life in the early 1700s in Plimouth Plantation, the 1800s in Old Sturbridge Village and into the 1900s in the mansions of Newport Rhode Island. It’s so compact that you could quite easily base yourself in Boston and see most of the sights as day trips.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.A wrist slapping from Technorati
As you know, I was one of the first to repost the 2kbloggers list last Thursday and in common with Bob and Chino had my blog suspended from Technoratis listings temporarily (Angela by chance didn’t make the list clickable). It would have been rather more than a temporary suspension but for the words of wisdom from Bob.
Now, Technorati have gotten around to replying to us as to the reason for the suspension in a comment on Bob’s site. Seems that were a substantial number of the 2kbloggers to have similarly reposted the list, their whole ranking system would have become worthless. Their reasoning is that their system is intended to give high rankings to blogs which get a lot of relevant links.
Emm, guys€¦ if that’s the case, how come you allow the growth of blog reviews’ as a side-line to the likes of John Chow? For that matter, how come you allow the growth of blog review blogs at all? After all, the link that I have on this blog to bloggyaward is hardly a relevant outbound link to me, is it? (Although the words of wisdom from Mr Bloggy will be getting acted on in due course).
This isn’t to knock John Chow who, after all, is only out to make a buck online as are most of us. I’m just asking, how come it’s OK for him to run a long series of blog review’ competitions for his blog and thereby gather up hundreds if not thousands of inbound links, yet it’s not OK for those on the 2kblogger list to do the same?
To my mind, it highlights a severe weakness in the Technorati system. If they want the system to rank blogs on the basis of relevant links then those are the only links that they should count. They’re probably going to turn around and say that it’s impossible to distinguish a relevant link from an irrelevant one but that’s not the case. At a simplistic level, it would be relatively easy for them to only count links from site A to site B where A had more than one link to B. That in itself would exclude any irrelevant cross-linking that might happen from a spread of the 2kblogger list and the like.
After all, how long is it going to be before some awkward sod like myself decides to set up several thousand one page blogs all pointing to their main blog? For that matter, what will happen when (and it will be “when”, not “if”) someone runs up, say, 25,000 one page blogs and thereby ends up in the top 10 on Technorati?
All this, of course, aside from the freedom of speech angle. Actually, knowing bloggers, I’d be quite worried about that particular angle being taken up if I were in Technorati at the moment. There’s a LOT of support for freedom of expression out there in blog-land.
Ironically though, that 2kblogger post has actually attracted a growing number of relevant posts to my blog. So, yes, almost 1800 people now have a link from me that’s not too relevant but I correspondingly have links back which are relevant. In fact, I’ve found that looking at irrelevant’ blogs often turns up relevant links for me, hence all the click-throughs from me to those that look at my site.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The master of blog marketing
Whilst I’m feeling quite chuffed at moving from a 200k ranking on Technorati down to 100k in a couple of days John Chow is the true master of such things and presently sitting at number 154. Even better, his blog is there to help you make money online, in this particular instance by (hopefully) driving traffic to Foreign Perspectives. All that’s required is to link to his blog.
His blog is just filled with ways of making money online so all being well, once I’ve worked through them all, I’ll be able to give up the day job.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
