Good afternoon, Reg and the HMSOldies staff, You wait all year for correspondence from me and then two turn up almost at once.
Over the last week or so a few things have caught my eye. The first one was about accents, British accents. It was an article I read in the BBC about what they called “accent bias”. I don’t know where they get their idea about gentlemen from the north-west city of Liverpool as being thieves, scallywags and criminals!! I am going to write a stern letter to the BBC about this unfair characterization of people from this fair city. This is what the article said: “Of the 10 accents studied, Glaswegians were perceived as most likely to stand up for someone who was being harassed, people with Scouse accents were seen as most likely to commit crimes and people with Standard Southern British English accents were viewed as most likely to report a relative to the police for a minor offence.”
This next one was in the local Florida news. I remember writing about this a few years ago. Well it has happened again. This year the cold weather has been getting farther south, even into the Sunshine State. There were warnings in a few newspapers to beware of falling iguanas. Green iguanas, introduced to Florida decades ago from Central and South America, are not adapted to temperatures below 45 F and generally begin to get sluggish or lethargic once the temperature drops below 50 F. Once the temperature drops below the mid-40s, iguanas go into a dormant or cold-stunned state and sometimes fall out of trees where they go to sleep. They appear to be dead, but they are not. They remain breathing with critical body functions still operating. Generally, iguanas can grow up to 15–20 pounds of weight and 50–72 inches in length. I wouldn’t want one of them falling on my head!!
Not only did it get cold in Florida but it also snowed. This is a phenomenon that a lot of people have never seen in their lives. My 56-year-old step-son, who lives in the north-west part of the state, told me he had never seen snow in Florida. He sent me a few photographs of his back garden with a snowman. State records were broken with 10 inches of snow falling. This is the highest snowfall total since 1954. As many as 10,000 customers lost power at one point.
P.S. In the article about Linotype machines, et al. I placed the word Monotype in quotation marks. I remembered this from donkeys years ago where the company specifically asked for this to be done. You may want to leave them or delete them; I leave that up to you.
Best wishes, Jack
Well said, Jack! We oiks from Sarf Lunnon certainly knew about snow, but we stuck to our shrimps and winkles, leaving all that Iguana stuff to the posh lot in Walthamstow! Keep at it. Reg.