Danskcolin: Sunday May 18th 2025 "Are this year's bugs starting to 'bug' you

Well, it's May 18th today, and time is marching on. The days are getting slightly warmer, and the insects are loving using the longer daylight hours to be extra annoying - have you noticed? My medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I certainly have!

Luckily science has the answer to bugs this year, with Raid's all-new "Containment Unit" - have you got yours yet? See page 94 of your Onion News for 'chapter and verse' !

We live on a crazy planet, however, and strangely, it's the opposite way round in Australia - it's "winter draws on" time down there, and the bugs are getting fewer, says our dear younger daughter Sarah in her regular Sunday whatsapp video call to us this morning, sitting there 9000 miles away from us, with her 11-year twin daughters, Lily and Jessica, in attendance. Nevertheless, the family went ahead and called in their local Yanchep pest control guys this week, just to hopefully "see the little buggers off" (no pun intended!!!!).

[That's enough so-called unintentional puns! - Ed]

(left) our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica, and (right)

with Sarah watches while Jessica showcases some of the clothes

the girls bought on a shopping trip to nearby Clarkson earlier today.

The bug problem, however, is, like, a billion times worse in Australia than here in the UK, because of the semi-tropical temperatures. And this week the pest control guys came in and solved the house's ant problem, got rid of the termites in the sandpit, and also the "snakes in the grass" (literally!!!!). What madness!!!!

And the twins are both "buzzing" today [don't say it! - Ed], because their primary school down there in Yanchep, 35 miles north of Perth, Western Australia, got a visit from the State's new Education Minister Lorna Clarke, appointed after the Australian Labour Party's recent successes in both the nationwide and state elections on May 3rd.

It was a nostalgic school visit for Lorna this week, her first since taking up office this month, because her dear old dad was the school gardener here for the first 30 years of the school's life, so Lorna was delighted to revisit all the work her dad did in the school garden, the little rabbit huts and the school aviary etc that her old dad built back in the day.

Awwww!!!!!

Lorna Clarke, WA's new Education Minister, visiting our

twin granddaughters' primary school this week, and

seeing the aviary built by her old dad when he was

school gardener back in the day - awwwwww!!!!!

Sarah says the centre-left Australian Labour Party was very much expected to win the elections here at the start of May. Voters were fearful of the centre-right Liberal Party's plans to cut spending on the Australian NHS, and it was also felt that the Liberals were too keen on expanding the country's nuclear power stations, so fair enough, Lois and I say! And in Australia, you have to vote - it's compulsory, and if you don't do it, you get a fine - what madness (again) !!!!

10:00 The call to Australia over, today proves to be a fairly quiet day for Lois and me, mostly weeding in the garden, but there's a bit of excitement in bed this afternoon, during statutory "nap time", when an email comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, all about the vexed issue of "semi-colons", and Lois and I, as self-confessed lifelong "grammar buffs" ourselves, we like nothing better than a good debate about punctuation marks, that's for sure!

In her article today, The Guardian newspaper's Melia Hill quotes Revolutionary French journalist Camille Desmoulins, famously recreated by novelist Hilary Mantel in her novel "A Place of Greater Safety", saying "I wonder why I ever bothered with sex - there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon".

Certainly our schools don't place enough emphasis on the correct use of semicolons, I think we can all agree on that much! And Lois recalls an article by writing guru George D. Gopen, of Duke University, North Carolina, who compared the poor state of the Anglosphere's semicolon training with the poor state of its sex-education classes - both being, lamentably, a case of "too little too late".

Gopen claimed that many teenagers are already experimenting with the use of semicolons at far too early an age, when they don't understand what they're doing, with sometimes, tragically, game-changing results.

I wonder...!!!!!

"Writing in English" guru George Gopen of Duke University, North Carolina,

with (right) his seminal work on what he calls "Reader Expectation Approach"

I can't say this better than Gopen himself, however, Well - he is an expert on 'writing in English', so be fair! And this was his chilling conclusion:

Sadly perhaps, however, Lois and I just don't have the energy for a full-scale debate on semicolons this afternoon - we're both a little bit tired, to be honest, after all today's mowing and weeding.

Tomorrow? Perhaps! So watch this space!

flashback to earlier today: Lois weeding an uncovering more secret paving stones,

and me mowing [not shown] and "bagging" Lois's weeds

[I can't believe you're making those awful 2018 Australian shorts "hang on" (literally) for yet another year, Colin! - Ed]

21:00 We go to bed on the BBC's boyishly enthusiastic travelogue-presenter Simon Reeves' new series on Scandinavia on the BBC2 channel.

Isn't Scandinavian etiquette a fascinating subject! Lois and I didn't know, for instance, that it's rude to ask a Sami reindeer-farmer how many reindeer he has.

Who knew that asking a Sami reindeer-farmer how many reindeer he has, is like asking somebody in the UK how much they earn, or how much they've got in their bank accounts? What madness!

[That's enough madness! - Ed]

And Lois and I didn't know, either, that when you mine for metals these days, you don't use a pick and shovel: that's old-fashioned. You do it these days sitting at a computer moving your mouse about on a mouse-pad, and pulling at your joystick.

Here "The Boy Simon" visits a high-tech Swedish 'mine' up in so-called Lapland, but all he can see is people sitting at desks, working their computers. It's similar to my own old UK civil service workplace back in the day, when I used to work for a living (!).

A couple of years ago, a discovery was made here that could be a game-changer for Europe, "Simon says" (so it must be true haha!). Also a game-changer for the future of 'green technology'. Under a forested area, iron ore has been discovered that contains also phosphorus and 'rare earth elements', as this diminutive Swedish "lady-miner" tells Simon:

As Simon comments, these elements are critical for next-generation tech. What coal was to the 19th century, and oil to the 20th, rare earth elements could be critical for the 21st.

"We have a billion tons of that ore in this mine", she says, "containing all the fundamentals, potentially, of Europe's future economy, a fact which only strengthens the importance of this region of Sweden.

And as Simon comments, "This is geopolitics right here!"