Quiztime

Unfortunately. the result of the "Quiztime" referendum that appeared here on November 18th was inconclusive. Consequently, the production team here at Pudding Tower will simply carry on in their own merry way creating random quizzes for your amusement. For example, today's quiz happens to be all about Canada. As usual, answers will be given in the comments that succeed this blogpost.

⦿

1. Pictured here as a young man, who was this very famous Canadian songsmith?

2. In which Canadian city will you see this tall structure?

3. Approximately, how many lakes are there in Canada?

(a) over 25.000 (b) over 450,000   (c) over 2 million (d) over 1 billion

4. Shown here with his Yorkshire wife, who is this Canadian blogger? You can supply his name or the title of his blog. (Clue: his blog is listed in my sidebar)

5.  The largest and most northerly territory in Canada is called Nunavut but currently how many people live there according to the census of  April 2025?

(a) 4,150 (b) 41,500 (c) 415,000 (d) 1,415,000

6) Everybody knows that July 4th is American Independence Day but when is Canada Day? 

(a) July 1st (b) Also July 4th (c) July 7th (d) July 31st

7) Who is this famous Canadian writer?

(a) Alice Munro (b) L.M. Montgomery 

(c) Margaret Moore (d) Margaret Attwood

8. What is the name of the Major League Soccer team located in Vancouver?

(a) The Pioneers  (b) The Beavers

(c) The Whitecaps  (d) The Maple Leaf Warriors

9.  Who said,  "The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State"?

(a) Big Bird from "Sesame Street  (b) Animal from "The Muppets" 

(c) Bart Simpson  (d) Trump

10. Poutine is considered to be the Canadian national dish. It is mainly french fries but topped with what?

(a) crispy onions and Brie cheese (b) maple syrup and salmon roe (eggs)

(c) bacon lardons and French mayonnaise (d) cheese curds and brown gravy.

⦿

That's all folks! How did you do?

Lodger

 

For several days I had been noticing a small creature in our upstairs bathroom. Every time I had a shower it seemed to be sitting somewhere different. I thought it was just an unusual fly. In its resting position its wings are always extended left and right forming a "T" shape.

With its wings extended, the insect only measures  one centimetre across. I tried to take my own picture of our tiny lodger but my effort was not worthy of posting so I found a picture on the internet instead. It is an exact magnified version of how our little fellow looks.

It took me a while to find it via Google but in the end I was able to declare with confidence that it is a plume moth. Yes - a moth! Apparently, it unfurls its wings when flying but when stationary it rolls them up - as shown in the picture. Quite remarkable!

And here's another amazing fact about plume moths. There are over 1580 species of plume moth - all a little different from each other in terms of appearance and feeding habits. It is very likely that not all species of plume moth (Pterophoridae) have yet been discovered by entomologists. 

I guess that the same could be said of other small creatures on our planet. We do not know everything there is to know about them and probably never will. Some will certainly become extinct before we even discover them.

Did you know there are over 150,000 different known species of fly on this planet and over 160,000 different species of moth with many sub-species just like the plume moth. 

I hope that I see our plume moth when I am standing in the shower tomorrow morning but I further hope that he or she is not holding a tiny camera aimed in my direction! This temple is for members only.

Contrast

Yesterday, I met two women of a similar age. I have already mentioned Christine who welcomed me as I stepped into The Church of  St Mary the Virgin. Not only did she give me a free mug of coffee, she also told me a little about the history of the church. She had a positive outlook and I learnt about her love of singing - she even invited me to two forthcoming Christmas concerts in which her choir will be participating. In addition, I heard about her family.

Then there was Joyce - sitting at the Crystal Peaks tram stop with me for three trams that never came. Good heavens - that woman could talk but most of what came out of her mouth was negative, gloomy and accusatory. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying that she was a bad or despicable person but the way she looked at life was corrosive.

The local council was wrong about everything, the government was wrong about everything and so were the young, along with her neighbours, the police and the homeless. I tried to butt in with my more positive view of the world and the people who are in it but Joyce simply did not want to know.

You find that with some strangers don't you? Well, I do anyway. You listen to their life stories and their philosophies and they want to know nothing about you - no questions, no curiosity. For half an hour, I was in Joyceworld and Puddingworld had been plunged into  nothingness.

Joyce pulled out her smartphone and showed me pictures of her family. She brightened and even smiled with love and pride before berating maternity services with regard to her baby granddaughter and the crises she had suffered before getting out of hospital. Then there was her grown up granddaughter who joined the police service in Manchester and now brings back to her nan deliciously grim tales about the criminal activity she encounters.

In Joyceworld, those police stories seemed to simply confirm that the world has already gone to hell in a handcart.

I prefer the Christines of this world whose kindness and positivity  surrounded her like an aura. She also showed interest in me - a complete stranger - asking me several friendly questions. In contrast, and I used to find this in teaching, persistent grumblers like Joyce can infect you, bringing you down. 

We should probably all try to be more Christine and less Joyce.

St Mary the Virgin in Beighton

Adventure

This morning Madame Pudding had the bright idea of heading out to the far south east of the city to visit the Crystal Peaks shopping centre. She was keen to use her senior travel card on the city's "Supertram" system. We would travel by bus into the city centre   then near Fitzalan Square we would catch a blue line tram all the way to Crystal Peaks. Neither of us had been there in years.

Hastily, I hatched a supplementary plan which would see me spurning the retail delights of  the shopping centre in order to walk in a big circle - out to Rother Valley Country Park, round the lakes and then back again to Beighton and onward to Crystal Peaks - some six miles in total.

Soon after setting off on the walk I found myself in the Church of St Mary the Virgin. Inside, a small number of senior parishoners happened to be decorating the church ready for Christmas. They were most welcoming and a silver-haired lady called Christine asked if I would like a hot drink. It seemed to me to be a very Christian thing to do so I asked for a coffee and she even brought it to me as I was photographing the statuette of Mary that stands in a stone apse and happened to be caught delightfully in sunshine.

Then off I plodded, climbing two railway footbridges and a stone bridge over The River Rother. The path led me on to Rother Valley Country Park which sits on the site of what was once a large opencast coal mine. Its dirty, industrial past is almost impossible to detect these days. The years have softened it and thoughtful authorities have planted and developed the 750 acre leisure area wisely.

Onward I plodded feeling slightly giddy - probably because I do not eat much in the morning these days - just a banana and a handful of grapes today. The sun continued to shine. Three men were feeding wildfowl at the water's edge  and a few other people were out walking like me. A couple of joggers dashed by and a daft lad on a motorbike who knew for sure that motorcycles are banned in the park.

On the way home there was an unexpected and unheralded  hold-up with the trams so after waiting for forty minutes, I caught the number 120 bus back into the city centre.  All in all it had been another grand day out with good exercise and not what I was anticipating when I was woken up this morning by a scam telephone call that instantly made my blood boil: "YOU JUST  WOKE ME UP!"Then I placed  a hex on the call centre responsible.

89

It's my old friend Bert's 89th birthday today. I went off to see him yesterday lunchtime.

For the past few months he has been living in his ex-wife's little terraced house in a different part of the city - about four miles away. It's a two-bedroomed house and their youngest son - Philip - usually sleeps in one of those bedrooms. Bizarrely, Bert and Pat sleep in the double bedroom - top to tail. They separated thirty years ago.

All three of them were glad to see me. I brought Bert a birthday card I had made myself. It included the top picture I took of him a few years ago - before he broke his hip and before dementia began to creep into his brain like a white rot fungus. I also gave him two cans of Bacardi and Coca Cola which was often his tipple of choice after a hearty pub session in "The Banner Cross Hotel". In addition, I gave Pat a bunch of flowers I had just picked up from a nearby supermarket.

It was snug and warm in the little house but quite spartan too with few pictures or adornments - just some framed family photos. And it was quite untidy and grubby with stuff piled up here and there. This was not a home to accommodate visitors or incidentally show off one's worldly wealth or tastes in decor. In the corner, a forty two inch television screen resided like an idol to be worshipped. Fortunately, the volume had been turned right down.

I wish I could have videoed or tape recorded the visit. It would have made a great basis for an existential TV drama.

At one point, I was trying to participate in three different but simultaneous conversations that seemed to have no connection with each other. Pat was talking about how much she despises Donald Trump and her vaginal bleed. Bert was talking about climate change as some Antarctic imagery had appeared on the silent TV screen. Philip was talking about yellow label bargains he had picked up in supermarkets and a band called The Cardiacs that I had never heard of.

Perhaps I had unwittingly entered a miniature asylum. Maybe I would get sucked into it and never leave but after ninety minutes and with some tactical difficulty I managed to extricate myself.

At one point, as Pat was making me a cup of coffee in the kitchen, I said to Bert, "How old are you tomorrow?"

"Eighty. Seventy something. Ninety - what's it?... November 24th 1936. Pat! Pat! How old am I tomorrow?"

"You're eighty nine Bert! Eighty nine!"

Africa

Africa? War, giraffes, corruption, gorillas, AIDS, lions, malaria, crocodiles, poverty, The Great Pyramid of Giza,  infant mortality, Mount Kilimanjaro, mass kidnapping of schoolchildren, The Victoria Falls ... but who would automatically think of the joy of dancing, happily moving your body to the music, lost in that music and laughing for that too is Africa...Here we go...

Rajneeshpuram

 

Three weeks ago, I wanted to watch something on our television set - something that would hold my attention and would entertain or inform me. Given the number of options out there in the ether, you might think that such an itch would be very easy to scratch but not so. There's so much rubbish piled up on accessible channels - stuff that I would never want to see.

Flicking through Netflix, I found a documentary series that I thought might be just the ticket - all about a commune that evolved in the state of Oregon during the nineteen eighties. The series is titled "Wild Wild Country" and it focuses upon a cult that was centred around an Indian fellow who had become a kind of mystic -  a guru if you will. His name was   Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho. That's him in the header picture.

Back in 1981, he and his immediate followers purchased a  valley in north central Oregon. It had previously been the site of The Big Muddy Ranch It was about twenty miles south east of the town of Antelope and pretty remote.

Citizens of Rajneeshpuram greeting their spiritual leader  in 1983

Rajneesh's followers became known as Rajneeshees. They came from all over the world but mostly they were Americans. Some of them were pretty wealthy, influential people. Together they turned the valley into a small city known as Rajneeshpuram. It had lots of good accommodation, a large meeting hall and even its own airstrip. They built a reservoir and a sewage reclamation plant. There was a police station, a fire department, cafes and restaurants and a health facility. It is estimated that at its height over 7,000 people lived there including a large number of down-and-out homeless people from various American cities.

Downtown Rajneeshpuram in its heyday

Although I watched all six episodes of the documentary, by the end I remained very unclear about what if anything Rajneesh had been preaching. What was his message and why did he attract so many devotees? I mean he looked like a guru with his customary smile and his long white beard and his mystical robes but what was he actually saying?

Anyway, by 1988 it had all fallen apart  for mixed reasons. Local citizens were distrustful, politicians and lawmakers were quite hostile and within the cult itself cracks began to appear with various accusations and wrong turns. The dream was over as the authorities began to circle like hawks.

Today the former site of Rajneeshpuram is occupied by a Christian youth organisation called Young Life . It's like a giant summer camp and retreat - operating within the remit of The Washington Family Ranch. I checked out their website and could find no reference at all to  Rajneeshpuram. It's almost like it was never there - a kind of fiction - which I suppose it was.

Washington Family Ranch