canny granny

Virgin Mary on eBay

She’s turned up again. The BVM just can’t help herself from manifesting to awestruck mortals the world over.

Not content with recreating her appearance in melted chocolate, potatoes and rancid fat, she has given the world a new face on a “pool stick”.

I’m not sure what a pool stick is, but this one has a starting price of $20,999,999.00 on eBay. (In fact I’m not even sure what the object in that photo is.)

If any reasonably endowed person can actually see the BVM on the whatever-it-is then it’s odds on that someone may just be mug enough to make a bid.

She may be popping up with dreary regularity, but searching for a cowled female shape on mundane objects certainly makes a change from all the alien abductions we saw a few months back.

Virgin Mary and child on a Pool Stick

Summer is i- cumen in. Lhude sing blowfly

Summer is i-cumen in –/ Lhude sing, blowfly!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, blowfly!

Today I heard the first blow-fly of Summer.

While people in other climes use swallows to signify the warmer season, here we know the date by the humblie blowie. Ugly though this creature is, it signifies all of the delights that bound in with Summer.

Members of this unattractive family are known as bluebottles, clusterflies, greenbottles, and (in Britain and Australia) as blue-arsed flies. The name blow-fly comes from an older English term for meat that had eggs laid on it, which was said to be fly blown. (maggotty)

If you really need to know, the eggs are yellowish or white, and when laid, look like rice balls. The female blow-fly typically lays around 2,000 eggs during the course of her life. Watch out for little rice balls in your lamb sandwich.

Apparently the natural life history of the blowflies remains a largely untapped body of research. I hope it stays that way.