canny granny

Developers win again

A huge Chinese Developer has finally won and defeated little home owner, pensioner Wu Pin.

For more than 3 years this home has been stuck in the middle of a construction site in a pit in Chongqing city.

The developers want to turn the area into a $40m ‘Broadway’ square, including apartments and a shopping mall, and there’s no room for an ordinary house in there. They sued Mrs. Wu and pleaded for the court to issue an order to bulldoze the house. Finally the judge at Chongqing Jiulongpo district court decided that Mrs Wu must leave her villa, and it’s now been demolished. I would have put up a longer fight but who can ever win against those bloody developers?

Such a neat little cottage too, a bit like mine really, but with a better view. Mind you, it’s a lot easier for me to get to my local shop for a bottle of milk.

Beautiful Cleo

I still say that Cleopatra was beautiful. I know there’s been disparaging remarks made about her nose before, but this coin reveals that she had a pointed chin, thin lips and sharp, aqualine nose. Somewhat like myself in fact.

Better than Marc Antony anyway, with his bulging eyes, thick neck and nasty-looking hook nose.

This tiny coin shows the head of Marc Antony, while Cleopatra is on the reverse. The image on the coin is far from being that of Elizabeth Taylor, but old Marc bears a strong resemblance to Richard Burton.

Roman writers merely said that Cleopatra was intelligent, sharp-witted, possessed of good humour and that she was charismatic. Her voice was known as seductive, and she had a wonderful laugh. Isn’t that beautiful enough?

Pensioner turns vicious

I see that Rosemarie Hamilton-Meikle, a normally placid pensioner of 80 good years, attacked 3 wild boars in Dartmoor, sending fear into the hearts of the savage beasts. The brutes had the ill-luck to come across her dachsund as he scuttered around under a bush.

” I heard a terrible screaming noise and I thought my Bosun had got into a fight with some other dog”, says Rosemarie, “then I saw my little dog lying down on the ground with three wild boar in front of him. I thought he was dead.”

Justifiably angry, she launched an attack with the dog-lead, frightening off two of them, but a large male boar stood his ground. Undeterred, the fighting pensioner swung the dog-lead again. “The dog-lead has a heavy metal clip so I swung it and caught him on the nose. Then I picked up Bosun and walked away. Fortunately the boar did not follow.”.

Too bloody right! Fortunate indeed the boar didn’t follow. Those things can weigh 440 lb : 200 kg, and can grow to 6 feet : 1.8 m long.

It almost puts Rosemarie into the Darwin AwardsThe dachshound was unhurt.

Suspicious smiling

I know what to do about the poor soldiers in the impenetrable forests of giant marijuana. No one has told their superiors that marijuana combats Alzheimers disease. The effects are only beneficial for older people, or so I’m told, and that explains the preponderance of smiling old ladies you see around such dense forests.

THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana, has been used for some time to help reduce agitation and increase weight in people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. And now researchers have shown that cannabis can help older subjects perform better on a spatial memory task.

I wonder where these tests have been carried out? And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the ladies at my Lawn Bowls Club have been subjects in this research. A couple of them are always smiling. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?