Tag: ladybird

Everything I Know I Learned From Old Ladybird books

We recently inherited a stack of Ladybird books and have wasted many happy hours inside the uncomplicated mind of the 1960s educationalist. Here’s what we’ve learned:

  1. Computers do not have brains and they cannot really think for themselves
  2. A stockbroker in the City is probably more interested in financial news, and has time to read long articles about it. A train driver may be more interested in sport, and prefer short, lively articles
  3. Anglo-Saxons built castles out of wood. So did Africans
  4. The videophone is really a combined telephone and television which enables the person speaking to actually see the person he or she is speaking to
  5. All new babies look very much alike. Nurses make sure that the babies do not get mixed
  6. It may one day be possible to have plenty of fresh water and grow an abundance of food in the deserts by using the heat from nuclear reactors
  7. England has never had a better ruler than Agricola
  8. Some musical shows, particularly ‘pop’ shows are mimed. The artistes do not actually make any sound at all
  9. Some newspapers employ a women’s editor
  10. As with most hobbies, there is a vast amount of equipment it is possible to use in stamp collecting

If this fount of knowledge were on every child’s bookshelf we’d have no need of Wikipedia :)

Blogging on the beach

… just because I can, and because it’s five years to the day since my first mobile clog [t9 sic] post. Equipment used: 1 Nokia 30something, running series 40, Opera Mini, 1 ladybird print beach tent (does not provide protection against rain), sand in shoes.

Update 12/9/2006: We’ve been back for two weeks now and I probably still have sand in my shoes. The ladybird print tent is still taking up space on our bedroom floor because we can’t wrestle it back into its little sleeve to put away for next year. But this is a serious point (I knew I’d get there in the end): My mobile is virtually unusable for text browsing in broad daylight. And it’s not helped by the fact that Opera Mini highlights text links in white text on a blue background, even though the main navigation on my WordPress dashboard is made up of – yup, you guessed – white text on a very subtly different shade of blue background. Now everything’s bright, nothing’s clear.