Tag: nice things

Unforeseen nice things

On By Peter's ponderingIn animals, birds, cats, drugs, environment, food, nature, nice things, water, Weekly prompts32 Comments

Sue at Nan’s Farm and GC at themainaisle.com post a weekly prompt each Wednesday inviting us to participate in any way we choose.

The prompt this week is Unforeseen.

In my back garden (yard) I have several bird feeders which I keep regularly stocked with all sorts of seed, nuts, suet, fat balls, and dried mealworms. I have a feeding station, feeders in trees, feeders under arches, and ground feeders. Not forgetting, of course, four separate water feeders/baths. The birds really do feed well, and sometimes the odd squirrel will decide to wreck everything in sight to partake of the feast. My ground feeders also cater for hedgehogs, the odd feral cat, and even foxes.

The downside to having so many feeders is that I am constantly having to weed underneath them. Oh, I know that I could buy “No mess, no grow” seed but really it tends to be very poor quality and often very dusty and so is prone to getting damp and clogging up or going mouldy (and yes, we do put a u in mouldy in the UK, just like we do in favourite, neighbour, and many many more words) The birds do try to help out by fossicking under the feeders to hoover up any stray seed and fat. All this tends to do is to leave a very bare patch underneath.

Sometimes I miss seeing that something has started to sprout in the garden that I have not planted, and I end up with unforeseen growth. I once had some very healthy, and rampant, plants that had very distinct shaped leaves and which I could have sworn I’d seen on a drugs awareness course I had attended. They composted very well – honest!

This year the birds have left some unforeseen, but very welcome, sunflower plants. They’re not daft – they know that they will produce food for later on!

  • Unforeseen bounty

Because it is nice #1

On By Peter's ponderingIn art, beauty, classical music, Just because, Music, nice things34 Comments

I remember a long ago teacher warning all of her pupils never to use the word NICE because it wasn’t a proper word, It wasn’t nice!

The derivation is rather strange:

Middle English (in the sense ‘stupid’): from Old French, from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’, from nescire ‘not know’. Other early senses included ‘coy, reserved’, giving rise to ‘fastidious, scrupulous’: this led both to the sense ‘fine, subtle’ (regarded by some as the ‘correct’ sense), and to the main current senses.

However, I rather like the word, and I shall use it because I think it is NICE.

Geoff Le Pard posted a film review yesterday which mentioned that one of the main characters was an Oud player.

Now, it just so happens that I knew what an Oud was, but I wanted to know where the instrument originated from so I entered the long and dark tunnel known as Google, and then Wikipedia, and this is part of what I found:

The first known complete description of the ‛ūd and its construction is found in the epistle Risāla fī-l-Luḥūn wa-n-Nagham by 9th-century Philosopher of the Arabs Yaʻqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī.[9] Kindī’s description stands thus:

“[and the] length [of the ‛ūd] will be: thirty-six joint fingers – with good thick fingers – and the total will amount to three ashbār.[Notes 1] And its width: fifteen fingers. And its depth seven and a half fingers. And the measurement of the width of the bridge with the remainder behind: six fingers. Remains the length of the strings: thirty fingers and on these strings take place the division and the partition, because it is the sounding [or “the speaking”] length. This is why the width must be [of] fifteen fingers as it is the half of this length. Similarly for the depth, seven fingers and a half and this is the half of the width and the quarter of the length [of the strings]. And the neck must be one third of the length [of the speaking strings] and it is: ten fingers. Remains the vibrating body: twenty fingers. And that the back (soundbox) be well rounded and its “thinning” (kharţ) [must be done] towards the neck, as if it had been a round body drawn with a compass which was cut in two in order to extract two ‛ūds“.[10]

I just love that language. It is so much better than modern idioms, youth speak, or Essex garbage. That, in itself, is worthy of NICE.

But (and my favourite teacher would be horrified that I started a sentence with but) I then went on to discover this absolute gem of music, and this is REALLY NICE.

So, not only do we have a nice review of a nice film from the nice Geoff Le Pard but we also have some really nice descriptive language, followed by some very nice music.

I think this deserves a new occasional series of NICE things. I hope it gifts you a smile today.