Final Day - Bumper Issue

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AS TODAY IS THE FINAL PUBLICATION

OF THE BLANKNEY JOURNAL WE HAVE

A BUMPER ISSUE OF NO LESS THAN (15)

POSTS. AS THERE ARE ONLY FIVE POSTS
TO A PAGE, DON'T FORGET TO GO BACK

A PAGE TO SEE MORE POSTS!

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CHEERS!

Looking Back - USSR Pledges To Leave Afghanistan

On this day in 1988, the Soviet Union signed an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
The pact, drawn up in negotiations between the United States, the USSR, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was signed in a United Nations ceremony in the Swiss capital, Geneva.
It ended nine years of occupation by the Soviet Union, who intervened in 1979 to prop up the struggling communist government.
The subsequent confrontation has drawn in the United States and Afghanistan's neighbours.
Delicate negotiations
Today's agreement provides for a gradual Russian withdrawal, phased over nine months.
But critics have pointed out that it still allows the Soviet Union and the United States to continue arming the two sides in the Afghan civil war.
Today's signing ceremony was itself fraught with complications and required some delicate negotiations to get all four parties around the table.
The Pakistan and Afghanistan groups have so far never met face to face.
One UN official commented, "Getting them to agree where to sit is almost as difficult as getting the agreement in the first place."
Elaborate schedule
In the end, an elaborate and precise 21-minute schedule was drawn up.
The UN Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, came in first, followed by the Afghan and Pakistani foreign ministers who entered the room simultaneously from separate doors.
They sat either side of Mr Perez de Cuellar.
There was then a similar arrangement for the US Secretary of State and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze.
Threat of anarchy
Resistance leaders are furious that they were excluded from the Geneva talks.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, chairman of the seven-party mujahideen alliance, attacked the accord as defective, unpracticable and ineffective.
He dismissed the entire UN-sponsored peace process as a waste of time, saying the agreement would ensure that what he called "an illegitimate puppet regime" would remain in place in Kabul. Critics believe Afghanistan will slip into anarchy after the Russians leave, as war continues between the Soviet-backed Communist government of President Sayid Mohammed Najibullah and the seven mujahideen rebel groups.
But UN mediator Diego Cordovez was confident the pact would hold, and rejected fears that a bloodbath would follow the departure of the Soviet army.
"Things will start changing now," he said. "There will be a fundamental change of attitude among all the people."

The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February 1989.
As predicted, a long period of civil war followed.
The mujahideen overthrew President Najibullah in 1992. Rival mujahideen factions then spent the next four years vying for control, until the Pashtun-dominated Taleban seized control of Kabul in 1996.
They instituted a hardline version of Islam, banning women from work and introducing punishments such as amputation and stoning.
Following the September 11 attacks in America in 2001, the Taleban refused to hand over the man believed to be responsible, Osama bin Laden.
Their stand meant Afghanistan became the first battleground in the so-called war against terror.
The US and Britain launched airstrikes against Afghanistan later that year, and the Taleban was driven from power within months.
An interim government under Hamid Karzai was sworn in in December 2001.
In presidential elections in 2004, he was elected president with 55% of the vote.
He leads a country whose economy and infrastructure are in ruins.
Many parts of the country are still controlled by regional warlords and their private militias, while attacks by Taleban remnants and militant groups continue.

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall Who's The Fairest Of Them All

(Click on image to enlarge)

Why Do We Say That?

BITTER END
Anchor cable was wrapped around posts called bitts. The last piece of cable was called the bitter end. If you let out the cable to the bitter end there was nothing else you could do, you had reached the end of your resources.

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND
In Matthew 15:14 Jesus criticised the Pharisees, the religious authorities of his day, 'they be blind leaders of the blind'.

ON YOUR BEAM ENDS
On a ship the beams are horizontal timbers that stretch across the ship and support the decks. If you are on your beam-ends your ship is leaning at a dangerous angle. In other words you are in a precarious situation.

BEE LINE
In the past people believed that bees flew in a straight line to their hive. So if you made a bee line for something you went straight for it.

TO BOOT
If you get something to boot it means you get it extra. However it has nothing to do with boots you wear on your feet. It is a corruption of the old word bot, which means profit or advantage.

COCK A HOOP
This phrase comes from a primitive tap called a spile and shive. A shive was a wooden tube at the bottom of a barrel and a spile was a wooden bung. You removed the shive to let liquid flow out and replaced it to stop the flow. The spile was sometimes called a cock. If people were extremely happy and wanted to celebrate they took out the cock and put it on the hoop on the top of the barrel to let the drink flow out freely. So it was cock a hoop. So cock a hoop came to mean ecstatic.

Excuses

Blonde Jokes

Timex and Rolex.
A blonde named her two dogs Timex and Rolex. A friend asked why she named them that. "Well, duh," she replied, "because they're watchdogs, of course."

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Selling a Car

A blonde was trying to sell her old car but wasn't having any luck because the car had 250,000 miles on it. One day, she mentioned this to a friend. Her friend told her, "There is a way to make the car easier to sell, but it's not legal." "That doesn't matter," replied the blonde, "I've just gotta sell it." "Okay," said the friend. "Here is the address of a friend of mine. He owns a car repair shop. Tell him I sent you and he will turn the odometer in your car back to 50,000 miles. Then it should not be a problem to sell it." The following weekend, the blonde made the trip to the mechanic. About one month after that, her friend asked her, "Well, did you sell your car?" "No," replied the blonde, "why should I? It only has 50,000 miles on it!"

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Which is Further Away?

Two blondes were sitting on a bench on the Atlantic City boardwalk admiring a beautiful, bright full moon. One said to the other, "I wonder which is further away, Florida or the moon?" "Duh..." said the other, "Can you see Florida from here?"

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Mail Check

A man was in his front yard mowing grass when his pretty blonde neighbor came out of the house and went straight to the mailbox. She opened it then slammed it shut and stormed back into the house. A little later she came out of her house again, went to the mailbox, again opened it, and again slammed it shut. Angrily, back into the house she went. As the man was getting ready to edge the lawn, here she came out again, marched to the mail box, opened it and then slammed it shut harder than ever. Puzzled by her actions the man asked her, "Is something wrong?" To which she replied, "There certainly is! My stupid computer keeps saying, 'YOU'VE GOT MAIL'."

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Cheating Boyfriend

A blonde suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her, so she goes about and buys a gun. She goes to his apartment unexpectedly and when she opens the door, she finds him in the arms of a redhead. Well, the blonde is really angry. She opens her purse to take out the gun, and as she does so, she is overcome with grief. She takes the gun and puts it to her head. The boyfriend yells, "No, honey, don't do it." The blonde replies, "Shut up, you're next!"

Boobs

WW2 Peoples War - My Aunty Mary's Wartime Memoirs

THE SECOND WORLD WAR
By Mary Lawrence
I was 17 when the Second World War started and lived at Peckham Rye with my parents — I was also engaged to be married to Fred, my fiancé. It didn’t come entirely as a shock when Neville Chamberlain (the then Prime Minister) announced on the wireless (there was no TV then) that we were at war with Germany. There had been unrest between us and Germany for the past year and Chamberlain had come home from a meeting with Hitler waving a piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it, saying it would be ‘peace in our time’.
I had the same feelings and emotions as everybody: I liked going out, enjoying myself — going to the pictures, going dancing, having a crafty fag, talking about boys, falling in love - all the things you do at that age. But from that Sunday, my life was going to change drastically. Fred (as I shall refer to him from now on) and I had made arrangements to visit my sister on that Sunday morning. Fred had an old 1929 Austin Seven, so after Chamberlain’s speech, we set off. About half way there — half an hour after war had been declared — we heard the awful wail of the air-raid warning siren. We were stunned and frightened, imagining all sorts of things. People were running about, not knowing what to do. Policemen were blowing whistles and telling us to get to the nearest air-raid shelter or take cover.
Being young and foolish, we decided to carry on. We arrived at my sister’s place to find her and her husband with gas-masks on and gloves handy in case poisonous gas was dropped. We didn’t have our gas-masks with us — everybody was issued with one and you were supposed to take them everywhere with you. Babies went into a sort of box, which could be carried around, to keep them protected. After about an hour, the ‘all clear’ sounded, nothing had happened — it was a false alarm. Little did we know, that siren going was to become a very familiar sound.
After that, began a period which was called ‘the phoney war’, at least as far as we were concerned. On August 11th 1940, Fred and I were married. The vicar who married us was a very nice young man, putting meaning into the service, and he gave us a talk about ‘give and take’ in marriage and not letting the sun go down on a row or argument without making up. Some time later, he was in the scouts hut with two other men when it received a direct hit in a bombing raid and all three of them were killed.
A week after our wedding day, the daylight bombing raids began, with the target being Croydon Airport. After a while, the Germans had lost so many planes that they switched to night-time bombing. One day, I’ll never forget — it was a Saturday morning — my mum and I were in our back garden and we heard the sound of a plane and knew it was a Jerry. There was no air-raid warning — this plane had got in under the barrage balloons. It was so low and as it swooped over our heads, we saw the pilot in his leather helmet and goggles and a black cross on the side of the plane. He seemed to be looking straight at us; he went on to Lewisham, where he dropped a bomb on Woolworth’s, killing about 200 people — most of them women and children. It was devastating — I never knew how he managed to get to London without being detected.
The barrage balloons were a grey, fat, sausage shape with fins and they were secured to the ground by a cable, which men turned to bring them lower or make them higher. A lot were up all the time, but in an air-raid a lot more would go up; the purpose of them was to keep the Jerry planes up high so they couldn’t pick out their targets so easily and they also kept them in range of our anti-aircraft guns.
When the bombing began in earnest, everyone had the option of having an air-raid shelter: an Anderson for outdoors or a Morrison for indoors. The Anderson was the safest and my dad made a very safe shelter at the bottom of our garden. It was nearly all underground, with a load of earth on top and a huge blackberry bush covering it all. We had a mattress down there, some spare food and drink and some candles. It was to become my sleeping place for a long time — and also my baby’s, when he arrived. He never went to bed in his cot upstairs, I’d put him straight down in the shelter when it was his bedtime — even if the siren hadn’t gone, as I knew it would later. It saved waking him up and rushing to the shelter when the warning did go. At the front of our house was a railway line and during the war, there was a mobile gun on it during an air raid, firing at the planes. The noise was horrendous: as well as the sound of the bombs screaming down and the explosions, there was this huge gun letting rip.
In the Blitz, indeed during the whole war, we had a blackout — no lights must be showing anywhere; people had to hang black curtains up at their windows. Even if only a chink of light was showing, an air-raid warden would be knocking at the door telling you a light was showing. Cars could not have any lights, no torches could be used — total blackness, so that the Jerries wouldn’t know where they were.
At night, I would often go out of the air-raid shelter for a breath of air and the Jerries would drop flares to try and see where they were. The area would be lit by a bright glow as the flare floated down — it was quite eerie.
My sister had a close shave one night: the house next door had a direct hit — she had stayed indoors that night, wanting to sleep in a proper bed for a change. A big walnut wardrobe in her bedroom crashed down on her baby’s cot, trapping him. In a way, it saved him from falling debris; the wardens got the baby out and he was unharmed, except for being covered in dust — as she was also. Her house was uninhabitable for a time, so she went to the country for the rest of the war.
At one period of the Blitz, the sirens went at 6 o’clock every evening and the all-clear at 6 o’clock very morning. This went on for weeks and weeks without a break. Most people slept underground every night: the bombs dropped incessantly, but Hitler couldn’t get us down. Coventry was bombed, for the factories making tanks etc, Plymouth, Swansea and Southampton because of the docks, to name but a few places. They all took a terrible battering, killing hundreds and destroying most of the cities, but the civilians carried on. A special bond sprang up between us Londoners — everybody tried to help each other, people were friendly to strangers, they looked out for each other, it’s a shame it didn’t stay like that after the war ended.
After a bad night of bombing, the streets would be littered with shrapnel, which came from the shells our soldiers were firing at the planes. I collected many pieces — some quite large. Once, I picked a bit of dog mess, mistaking it for shrapnel — I soon dropped it, as you can imagine!
The City of London was set alight by incendiary bombs one night. It was the biggest fire I have ever seen, the sky was a brilliant red, the docks getting it very badly. Although the incendiary bombs weren’t as explosive as the ordinary bombs, the damage they did by fire was immense.
During the very bad night-time bombing, we slept under a shop my father-in-law had at Victoria. He had made a room under the pavement — it was a store-room really. We slept there for months. Once, we were going to Streatham, where my father-in-law lived, for a bath and to wash our hair, when we were caught in an air-raid and had to take shelter on Clapham common. It was crowded with people — all singing — and we joined in. Close by was an anti-aircraft gun, firing away at the Jerries overhead. We were trying to drown out the noise that was going on outside.
As the crow flies, Peckham isn’t far from Kent, over which the Jerries used to come on their way to bomb London and it was very usual to see a dog-fight going on between our Spitfires and their fighters, wheeling about and firing their guns at each other — the Spitfires had 8 machine guns. There were losses on both sides, but the Spitfires saved London from a lot worse bombing — as Mr Churchill said: “never was so much owed, by so many, to so few “.
The bombing had to be seen to be believed. Fred was on a course at Walthamstow, he used to cycle back and forth, from there to Peckham. His route took him through the Elephant and Castle district and he did this for a while. He got home as usual one evening and that night there was a very bad air-raid. The next morning he went on his usual journey to Walthamstow, but when he got to the Elephant and Castle, he just couldn’t recognise a thing — it had been completely flattened. It was chaos — hose-pipes everywhere, firemen putting out fires, people being dug out of bombed buildings. He didn’t know which way to go — that gives you some idea of what London looked like in the Blitz.
My own experience of being blown down a shelter by a bomb, causing me to lose my first baby was harrowing enough, but not compared to what a lot of Londoners had to suffer — death of their loved ones and some were maimed for life.
Because the Germans lost so many planes, instead of bombing us, they began their onslaught with ‘doodle-bugs’. These were unmanned jets — a flying bomb; the distance they covered was governed by the amount of fuel they held. We had no warning of these unheard of things, so we were unable to take shelter. They were long, with flames coming out of the back, when the engine stopped, they dropped like a stone, doing untold damage and causing lots more loss of life. How much more could us civilians cope with?
This went on for months, meanwhile the Germans were inventing something even more evil — the V-2 rocket — to try and bring England to its knees. I stood the bombs and the doodle-bugs, but these latest unmanned missiles really got me down. They were long, like telegraph-poles and were launched in Belgium or Holland, they went straight up in the air, out of range of our fighter planes, into the upper atmosphere, so we had no warning they were coming. They dropped straight down and the first we knew was when they exploded. They did more damage than any bombs or doodle-bugs, as people couldn’t take shelter; thousands were killed in their beds; they came day or night, killing 200 to 300 people at a time. My nerves went to pieces at that time: worrying for my baby, my family, about being buried under piles of debris. Luckily, these terrifying things didn’t go on for long, as the launching sites got over-run by the British army and the war was nearing its end.
So, after nearly 5 years of bombing we could begin to think of living a normal life again. As I said, I was 17 when it started and 23 when it ended, so I lost six years of my youth. Like millions of others, I was lucky to come out alive — with my baby. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, but to live through the Blitz is something I won’t forget till my dying day.


Acknowledgements:
Alan Constable
Peoples War

Jealousy Is A Terrible Thing

Cheeky!

Housing Complaints

Will you please send a man to look at my water? It is a funny colour and not fit to drink.

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I wish to complain that my father hurt his ankle very badly when he put his foot in the hole in his back passage.

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Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two small children and would like a third so please send someone round to do something about it.

The Journal Family

Left to Right: Son David, Your's Truly, Grandson Alexander,

Wife Angela and Daughter Karen

The Final News Headlines

Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy.

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Death causes loneliness, feeling of isolation.

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Plane too close to ground, crash probe told.

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Plot to kill officer had vicious side.

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Arson suspect held in Massachusetts fire.

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Blind woman gets new kidney from dad she hasn't seen in years.

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Low wages said to be key to poverty.

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Squad helps dog bite victim.

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Something went wrong in jet crash, expert says.

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Dealers will hear car talk at noon.

Well Now You Know

You can't say the Journal wasn't educational!

Homer Simpson Wisdom

Go ahead play the blues if it makes you happy.

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I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.

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With $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like ..... love!

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All right, let's not panic. I'll make the money by selling one of my livers. I can get by with one.

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Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.

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When I held that gun in my hand, I felt a surge of power - like God must feel when he's holding a gun.

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We're going to get a new TV. Twenty-one inch screen, realistic flesh tones, and a little cart so we can wheel it into the dining room on holidays!

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First you don't want me to get the pony, then you want me to take it back. Make up your mind.

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I'm normally not a praying man, but if your up there, please save me, Superman!

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Marge I swear, I never thought that you would find out.

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Oh, they have internet on computers now.

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Books are useless. I only ever read one book, "To Kill A Mockingbird" - and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the color of his skin , but what good does THAT do me?

Final Racing Tip

KEEP YOUR MONEY IN YOUR POCKET!

If you can't do that, you may like a flutter on today's final best bet selection. During 2009 we advised 14 bets which resulted in a Loss of 3.65 points. Today we need at least a 4/1 winner to move us into profit.

For our final racing tip we are going to today's Cheltenham meeting and the Stanjames.com Handicap Hurdle (3.20), run over 2m.4f.110y. The horse in question is Good Old Thyme a six-year-old gelding trained by Dr R D P Newland and ridden by claiming apprentice G Hawkins. The horse won over today's distance at Catterick last month and on that run looks well handicapped here. He then went to the Cheltenham Festival a week later, finishing 14 of 28 in the Grade 3 Coral Cup, running well until blundering four fences from home. He ran again at Haydock eleven days ago, finishing a respectable fourth, just over 7 lengths behind Majaales, over a trip too short and on very heavy ground. With today's ground and trip more to his liking we expect him to run a big race off a weight of 11-2 and the jockeys 5lb allowance will be an added bonus.

Wednesday 14 April 2010

Cheltenham 3.20

GOOD OLD THYME

Good luck with the above selection!