Brexit comes but once a year (you wish)

...And when it comes it brings good cheer,
And when it goes it leaves us here,
And what shall we do for the rest of the year?

As I see it from my vantage point on the other side of the pond, you MAY* have Brexit but then again you MAY* not.

Keep us posted. We're on needles and pins.


*The Right Honourable THERESA MAY (you may have heard of her) with an unidentified friend:

(September 4, 2016 photo from www.kremlin.ru used in accordance with CC-BY-4.0)

Pin the tail on the troglodytes

The three gentlemen I showed you in yesterday's post are (or, more accurately, were):

* Washington Irving (1783 - 1859), American writer, author of Rip van Winkle.

* Thomas J. Watson, Sr. (1874 - 1956), founder and chief executive officer of International Business Machines (IBM).

* Warren G. Harding (1865 - 1923), twenty-ninth president of the United States (from 1921 until 1923), considered by many to have been one of the worst U.S. presidents.

I invite you to enjoy Noel Coward singing "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" (2:24), which I have included here in commemoration of the glories of yesteryear, troglodytes everywhere (you know who you are), and the fact that yesterday millions of Englishmen went out in the midday sun and voted to take their country out of the European Union.

Rip van Winkle returns

Two weeks without posting is a lifetime in the world of blogging. Social media being "where it's at" today, I may just be considered a troglodyte.

trog-lo-dyte [trog-luh-dahyt] noun. 1. A prehistoric cave dweller. 2. A person of degraded, primitive, or brutal character. 3. A person living in seclusion. 4. A person unacquainted with affairs of the world. 5. An animal living underground. (American dictionary)

troglodyte /trɒɡləˌdaɪt/ noun. 1. A cave dweller, esp one of the prehistoric peoples thought to have lived in caves. 2. (informal) a person who lives alone and appears eccentric. (British dictionary)

I, of course, neither live alone (Mrs. RWP is here with me) nor appear eccentric. And even though eccentricity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, I am not eccentric, I am not eccentric, I am not eccentric.

Anything I say three times is true.

Be that as it may, forty-seven years ago today, on June 23rd, 1969, the United States government forced IBM to "unbundle" its software from its hardware and market the products separately. A day that will live in infamy the annals of computing industry history, at least among IBM troglodytes like myself.

Today, June 23rd, 2016, another sort of "unbundling" may be in the making. The inhabitants of the British Isles (U.K. to you) are deciding whether to remain in the European Union or to leave, in a national referendum dubbed "BREXIT".

Only time will tell.

Fortunately, Rip van Winkle has plenty of that.

I will now crawl back into my hole, but not before showing you some troglodytes.

Without cheating, can you identify them?