Day: August 19, 2008

Thought it was about time I adopted a pet for my blog.

There were no cows available at the Virtual Pet Shop unfortunately – anyhow, Angus would get jealous, wouldn’t he @mrmackenzie?

So, in honour of my friend, The Countess of Devon, here’s my new pet who will henceforth live in my sidebar.

Feel free to feed my sheep with hay or lettuce – just offer it to her and click for her to eat. Apologies that she’s a noisy eater.

One of my Google Reader / Feedly subscriptions is to a site called Noticias Locas which offers ‘Noticias curiosas, insólitas, raras …. pero rigurosamente ciertas‘, a bit like a site that catalogues ‘And finally…’ news items in Spanish.

I thought I’d share with you one that tickled me!

You can search here by title – find such gems as the Japanese biscuit with a special ingredient, the unfortunate Austrian girl with the tractor driving boyfriend, or Rory the horse who thinks it’s a dog.

A warning – you couldn’t use the site directly for pupils due to some dodgy adverts at the bottom, and some of the stories are of an ‘adult’ nature e.g this one about an interesting side effect of beer. However, if you pick your article and take a screen shot, or print it out, I think you could use some of the stories for gist reading – certainly in a secondary context, but also as an example of using all the clues you can to decipher meaning without understanding every word.

And, for amusement value, it can be quite amusing :oD