Farewell for Pete

and Dinah - again

I've been rather slack on the Friday Theme organising this contract. From memory I managed to forget to come in theme for all the Friday Theme days I tried to organise.

So I'll do my best to go out with a blast.

We farewell Pete and Dinah (yours truely) on Apil 20th with waffles and a fabulous chance to express yourselves in denim.

Pete reasons that everyone owns some denim. If you don't own a pair of jeans, now is the time to get to the Levi shop and buy some.

Because I'd rather wear a flowery shirt (and maybe my jeans will be too tight to fit waffles in) I thought that I'd expand the theme to  Easy Rider.
That's the Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda Easy Rider not the sadly sunk Stewart Island ship.

Turns out that Hopper and Fonda didn't wear Levis as much as leather and tassels. Which, coincidently, is much more my kind of theme dress-up.

Here are some inspirational pictures.

 Peter Fonda looks a bit Adam Ant in this one.

 And a bit fey in this one

 Love that shirt!

And that moustache.

If anyone has a tassly jacket please wear it. 

 

I'm not too sure what these folk have to do with Easy rider but my google image search found this. 

It has given me ideas.

 



You are welcome to wear "low riders" but please nothing like these.

Mark Twain

November 30th (today) is the birthdate of Mark Twain. He was born in 1835.

That's a good enough reason for me to declare that all things Twain-y as this weeks'

Friday Theme.

Here's a simple description of the great man from the Otago Witness March 1899

I'm not entirely certain how we can represent Mark Twain in a Friday Theme way.

That moustache is magnificent. But then so are these





























That second one seems to be a very hairy fellow


As you will all know...
Mark Twain (or Samual Clemens) wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
If you google images for these two books you will encounter some of the more nauseatingly saccharine images I have been presented with in a long time.


However braces and dungerees do seem to feature.

Apples

According to that most marvelous of reference sites, Wikipedia, November 18th is the day William Tell shot an apple off his son's head.







So...



Friday's theme
will be William Tell and Apples.




The rest is up to you.



Of course Rosinni's overture might inspire,







or Spike Jones' version




Then there is that other apple...

Slán go fóill Shiobhan

or Pink Bag theme day.


Can be bags

Or outfits












Not forgetting that men can wear pink,
and carry bags.







Even if the bag isn't pink it can be
the perfect match for your pink suit and hat.

Will BING replace GOOGLE?

Not yet, is my reply. Who knows if it will in future.

I've done a little bit of exploring while sitting on the Help Desk and thought this was a good topic to kick the blog back into gear. Have a play with it yourselves and see what you think.
BING - http://www.bing.com/

I've added images to this but they don't come out very clearly. Take a test yourselves and see what you think of BING. Add some comments of what you've found.

First complaint.

It's too busy. The search screen has wallpaper. Today on IE is a seaside scene and on Firefox a night city scene.

I haven't tested BING on my home (very slow connection) computer yet but I suspect that with a busy picture like that BING is going to be a much slower page to load than Google.

Second complaint:

I have a few favourite searches I use to test new search engines. BING doesn't do well on either of them.

I searched for the name of my Hampden property, Kurinui. We have a very old web site which quite a number of people link to (to our embarrassment) and our property gets mentioned on a number of other web sites. There is a school in NZ called Kuranui which some people spell incorrectly.

Bing finds 73 results today, our web site not included. Google finds 572 and our web site comes in tops.

Then I tried an obscure ancestor: "Walter Mowbray Johnston". He appears on a number of genealogy web sites and a couple of Google Books (is it unfair to expect BING to find a Google Book result?)

BING found no results. Google 9.















Google has a wild card function I find very useful. Instead of searching for "walter mowbray johnston" I can search for "walter * johnston". Google replaces the * with any word or character, so I get results of "Walter Lee Johnston" or "Walter H. Johnston". Using the * in a phrase in BING gave me results of "Walter Johnston", no middle name or character.

The help section and advanced sections of BING don't mention wildcards. So I'm guessing they don't have this feature, yet.

BING has one cool feature in Firefox. Hover over the picture in the main search screen and see what pops up.

BLING

The last and hopefully most spectacular theme of my residency at The Billy Bob is:

Here's a little bit of inspiration.

Thanksgiving

In the USA Thanksgiving falls on the 4th Thursday in November.

Because we are ahead (in time) of the rest of the world (except Fiji I think) while we are having a TGIF, Americans will be tucking into

Or maybe

According to wikipedia Thanksgiving started in America in 1565 with the Spaniards who gave thanks to God when they first arrived at what is now St Augustine, Florida.

In 1619 the first 'official' Thanksgiving was held at Berkely Plantation in Virginia.

Painting of "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" By Jennie A. Brownscombe.

In 1621 the Pilgrims who had colonised Plymouth were taught how to catch eel and grow corn by Squanto, a Patuxet Native American who resided with the Wampanoag tribe. The Pilgrims set apart a day to celebrate at Plymouth immediately after their first harvest.