Someone made a comment about six months ago that they hadn’t seen much of the hens recently.
After about ten or twelve years of hen keeping, nowadays we have only two of them. They seem quite happy. Champagne, a Buff Orpington, mostly stays inside. Cloudy is a faverolle, a very friendly breed of hen with feathery feet. She lays quite small eggs.
Our best rooster was Leopold, who was a Welsummer until he was killed by a dozy chou-chou dog that jumped the fence illegally. Leopold was a hell of a rooster; very intellegent, he died defending the six hens and Jussi, his assistant, from this enormous and very dim dog-thing.
All hens the world over have the same action: they scratch the earth twice with one foot, take two steps backwards and watch for bugs or worms to appear.
How do they know to do this?
A Bad Guide 
“Chookies” we called them, “chooks” if we were feeling terse, “chookie-hens” if feeling verbose.
Stupid chou-chou! Good for Leopold! Though sad, very sad. A hurray for his memory!
I love those feathery feet…
“All hens the world over have the same action: they scratch the earth twice with one foot, take two steps backwards and watch for bugs or worms to appear.”
I have at times done this myself, not until now knowing why.
Chou-chou: blue tongue. Here there are blue hens. So, really they are ash gray:
http://www.lagallinaazul.es/Documentos.html
Not “cobbles” but “setts” where I grew up. Cobbles had a rounded top surface, setts a flat.
!Muy bonitas esas gallinas!
I have seen many movies in which artists are shown working in a hen-like way – not in search of worms, of course, but of reassurance. They apply two or three daubs of paint to the canvas, take two or three steps back, and look expectantly at the result.
That’s it, that’s the movement.
Jesús, we had one like that, I can’t remember the breed name at the moment. They used a picture of it in an advertisement. Very pretty.
>Marie-lucie, A. J. P Crown
« Sí, bonitas ». Besides I’ve read:
Eggs: 60 g. (minimum). And an average of 200 per year; they work more than a Spanish teacher! (LOL)
Cobbles had a rounded top surface, setts a flat.
Oddly, a definition at Wordnik says setts are rounded.
So much the worse for wordnik , then.
For some reason, I’m seeing everything on a slant.
How do you do that with your names?
Eek!
I think Ø forgot to close an italic tag. Perhaps you can send a goat in to fix it?
Gosh, I’ve messed up tags before, but never with such dire consequences. Did I really do this?
Is it better now?
No.
As a bug this is better fixed by hens.
Maybe AJP needs to bring in some Italian experts to fix the Italic bug.
(Let’s try to close a dozen italic tags. Parfois le nombre fait la force.)
If you delete empty’s first comment on June 16, 12:26 pm, that might fix the problem. If it doesn’t, I would delete chronologically each subsequent comment by him until the problem is corrected. The reason for that is that in his subsequent comments empty was trying to fix the bracket-matching error. To do this, he probably added more improper bracket-matches, in the hope that they would cancel out the first one.
That’s the way a systematic mind fixes mistakes – by compensating them with other mistakes.
Thank you Grumbly Stu. There was one too many in Ø’s first post and when I removed those three the others disappeared.
How does an unsystematic mind fix mistakes?
(Don’t get me mind — I’m not claiming not to have an unsystematic mind — just curious about this theory of Stu’s.)
There are at least two kinds of problem-solving situation. In one, all the pieces are in front of you, and you can move them around in a deliberate and goal-directed fashion.
In another problem-solving situation, you are operating in the dark. You can’t see the pieces, but only the results of putting them together in one way or another. Empty posted a comment which was displayed in a way he hadn’t intended. The effect seemed to be due to a bracket-matching error, but he didn’t have access to his original input. He then, I suppose, did something I might have done: assume that C, the number of close-brackets, was one less than O, the number of open-brackets, and try to compensate for that by posting a new comment with one close-bracket and no open-brackets. This in itself would be a wrongly formatted input, i.e.l a mistake, but the desired overall effect would be to cancel the first mistake.
I don’t know whether empty actually thought that, but somehow it sounded like it. My approach was not to compensate the first mistake, but to eliminate it. This seemed to me to be the best approach, because O – P = 0 does not guarantee a correctly formatted output. To get that, the brackets have to appear in alternating order, starting with an open bracket.
I said “systematic mind” merely to see how empty would react. The answer to “how does an unsystematic mind fix mistakes ?” is: “it doesn’t. By definition, such a mind cannot fix anything, but can only make stabs in the dark.”
The formula should be “O – C = 0”
Is this the way you have to think at work, Grum?
Yeah, you’re thinking blind when you deal with thousands of artefacts (Java classes etc.) and their interactions that you can see only partially. To sense potential problems coming – depending on how you implement something – and to diagnose actual problems, it is convenient to be suspicious, paranoid and inventive to the point of madness. Now you understand my personality.
merely to see how empty would react
And I reacted by making another mistake: typing “don’t get me mind” when I meant “don’t get me wrong”.
Probably some kind of Freudian slip caused by Glumbly’s paranoid personality.
Grumbly.
“Glumbly” shows promise. Maybe I should slip on a fresh name more often, like you do when on the road at Hat.
You slip on plenty of fresh names already, in fact I think you’ve got more names than I do.