March 2015 Chit Chat

Joanna - Now you're just being mean! Spring is arriving here, too and guess what we're getting instead of daffodils? That's right, SNOW! AGAIN! Then, if we're lucky, it will turn to rain and we'll have wonderful Spring SLUSH!! Nothing lovelier. Can't wait!

BTW this is typical March weather in NY. "In like a lion and out like a lamb" doesn't half describe it. More like "One day a lion, next day a lamb, every day a surprise."

Enjoy the sunshine and flowers for us!

Sorry Lizzy  .....sorry about your snow.

I'm a bit overcome by the lovely sights of Spring approaching 
as I haven't been able to get outside into the big wide world 
for ages due to health problems. But I'm getting there slowly.

Joanna wrote:Sorry Lizzy  .....sorry about your snow.

I'm a bit overcome by the lovely sights of Spring approaching 
as I haven't been able to get outside into the big wide world 
for ages due to health problems. But I'm getting there slowly.

Sorry to hear you're not feeling your best.  No one would ever know because you always have such a sunny disposition Joanna.  Whatever you are dealing with I hope you will be back to feeling good again sooner than later.  Tomorrow is officially the first day of Spring so HAPPY SPRING JOANNA!   

Joanna - Amen to everything Donnamarie said. I can't tell you how many times you've made me laugh and brightened my day. I hope you're well enough soon to get out and really enjoy the Spring weather and doing all the things you want to do.

Donnamarie wrote:

Joanna wrote:Happy news....Spring is arriving here in UK.
Birds are a'courting, green leaves are appearing 
on trees and bushes and a few sunny days.

Yea right. We're  supposed to get snow on Friday.

I'm the cloud on your sunny day Joanna.    

Just kidding.  I know spring is coming just not fast enough for me.

We're getting snow too.  Oh happy day.   But hope springs eternal ( no pun intended).  Off to buy some daffodils ( my fav).  Enjoy everyone. 

Thank you Donnamarie & Lizzy...and yes PP !!  Lol
 


Coming here every day has kept me sane, honestly.
What I'm dealing with is not life threatening, 
just a b*** y thing that's taking ages to get healed.

Very sunny and warm today here.....I'll send some over
the pond to you all.

Special New Moon, Yaa.

I know Katie and Nicky will want this moved to chit chat….but I implore you, don’t for the next  20 hours….
Today we have a new moon….a very special New Moon….This is your chance to write an Abundance Cheque/Check…Google Abundance Cheque to down load a blank Cheque….and a link as to how they work….They work on any New Moon….but this is a special one so mega powerful…. You have a 24 hour period to write it…so no pressure.

Everyone thinks this is for money….and it is…. also for so much more than that….ask for an abundance of health…..In my case, last time, I asked for an abundance of joy in my family…and got it!…This time I am asking for an abundance of joy all around me….My BFF is asking for an abundance of recognition in her job…..see you can ask for anything not just cash….Catch is you seriously have to believe you have it, and are immensely grateful for it. 
Many will not be taken or interested in this, but to the rest what do you have to lose?…..I’m off to hug a tree…X


Images of check/cheque and how to write them out are all over google….or you could just scribble on the back of an envelope….X

Well I've been writing chqs all day for my job!!! so let the good times roll!!!!!

Merged thread

What Would He Say wrote:I’m off to hug a tree…X

  funny.....

Can't I hug a panda instead?

He is smiling in his sleep .

Let's do Panda hugging  Asia here we come

The panda is beautiful but I'd be too scared to go too close as it is bigger and stronger than I am. I'll just admire it from a distance. I am a wuss.

Burn Before Reading will be on ITV at 10.45pm tonight in the UK. I'm planning to watch it as I really like it.

Enjoy Hebe....it's a cleverly funny film and I
love the scene in his bedroom !

I feel chipper today....just de-cluttered the 
conservatory and it looks much better !
 .......no dust on sofa either !

Does any want some freebie stuff ?  LOL

Does any want some freebie stuff ?  LOL

What do you have in mind????  If you have an extra male-single-gorgeous-rich and able to breathe without a respirator or oxygen mask.. I'll be on the next flight across the pond.

Oh no PP.....he's not in the freebie stuff pile.

So sorry x

ps/what's a conservatory ( by UK definition)?  This is what one looks like here  .  Rich people have them.  This poor schmuck doesn't!

Yep, quite a lot of us have them, Pigpen.........extension of living space that's not as expensive as an extension but creates a view into the garden. Moving house for more space is a lot more expensive here. Property in general is much more expensive than in the States - and a lot smaller

Bit tricky tho if you're in a flat........

maybe burn before reading is a knock off film and not really one with George in it.  maybe a look-alike.

Hey, it could happen.

Haa ha ha! Silly me, I don't know why I would write Burn Before Reading. It doesn't make any sense at all. I haven't even been drinking.

I always thought this was Brad Pitt's best film (I know it's not really) but it's my fav role for him. He absolutely cracks me up as Chad.

Joanna, you dark girl. You really like the bedroom scene when George kills Brad?!  The look on Brad's face right before George shoots him is priceless.

Hebe, if you haven't been drinking maybe you should start.  Sometimes it clears the mind. Hahaha!   Cheers and enjoy the movie.

Donnamarie wrote:I always thought this was Brad Pitt's best film (I know it's not really) but it's my fav role for him. He absolutely cracks me up as Chad.

And Chad's hair is funny   and the Dance Scene....

Yes Donnamarie.....I think his grin is priceless.

Anybody have a March Madness bracket they want to discuss? No? Mine still looks pretty good. The trick is to pick the first-round upsets, then go better than even on the closely-seeded matchups in the second round.

And let me just say that yeah, the weather has been sucky, but sports-wise, you can't beat this time of year. College basketball at its best and baseball spring training in full swing. Just when you get over the excitement of the Final Four and the NCAA Men's title game, here comes Opening Day in Major League Baseball.

Aaaahhh.

Nice bracket tip .

I usually start by deciding which #1 seed is going to be upset in the first two rounds. This is year was a little harder, because sometimes you don't know which Duke team is going to show up, but I went with Villanova, who just fell to #8 NC State, and that saves a region for me. :-)

Very interesting .

LornaDoone wrote:maybe burn before reading is a knock off film and not really one with George in it.  maybe a look-alike.

The made-for-TV pre-quel, maybe?

Really shocking News.

Plane Crash from Germanwings / Lufthansa in South france. 150 dead. Mostly Germans and Spanish People. And there were 16 German pupils on board. The class was in Spain for a language exchange. . all dead. So sad



|​​NYT Now
Germanwings Airbus Carrying 150 Crashes in French Alps

PARIS — A German jetliner on a routine flight to Düsseldorf from Barcelona, Spain, rapidly lost altitude for more than eight minutes and then crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday morning with 144 passengers and six crew members onboard, the airline said.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said that no one on the plane had survived the crash.
Search and rescue teams scrambled in the afternoon to get to the site, in a remote and rugged part of the Alpes de Haute-Provence region of southeastern France that President François Hollande said at a news conference would be very difficult to reach. The French Interior Ministry said that more than 400 police officers and rescue personnel had been dispatched to the area.
In the early evening, the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, reported that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, one of the plane’s two “black boxes,” had been found. The device records up to two hours of the pilots’ conversations as well as other sounds, including any alarms that may have sounded during the flight.

A French official with direct knowledge of the investigation said searchers were still looking for the other black box, the flight data recorder, which keeps track of roughly 1,300 different statistics about the aircraft’s operational performance.
The aircraft, an Airbus A320, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, took off at 10:01 a.m. The jet, Flight 9525, climbed normally to its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet but remained there for only a few minutes before beginning to descend at a high rate, the managing director of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann, told reporters.
When French air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft at about 10:53, it was flying at just 6,000 feet, Mr. Winkelmann said, and it crashed shortly afterward. Witnesses in the area of the crash site said that the terrain there rose to an elevation of more than 6,000 feet.
Wreckage was located by a French military helicopter near the town of Prads-Haute-Bléone, according to Éric Héraud, a spokesman in Paris for the aviation authority, the Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile.
Continue reading the main story
Aviation safety experts said that a steady descent of more than eight minutes, while highly unusual, may not be consistent with a sudden midair upset, such as an aerodynamic stall. In such cases, they said, they would expect a plane to fall from cruising altitude to the ground in half that time or less.
“While investigators still need to verify the data are correct, eight minutes is definitely longer, compared with the experience we have had in past cases,” said Olivier Ferrante, a former crash investigator for the French government who now advises the European Commission in Brussels. He cited the Air France flight that crashed over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, which fell to sea level from 38,000 feet in three and a half minutes.
 




Flight path data from Flightradar24; satellite image by Earthstar Geographics via Bing Maps.
MARCH 24, 2015
By The New York Times

The early images of wreckage, showing debris in small pieces, suggested the plane had probably struck the ground at very high speed, Mr. Ferrante said, but he cautioned that it was far too early to speculate why.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Valls, the prime minister, told the French National Assembly on Tuesday that no hypothesis about the cause of the crash could yet be excluded, and that a judicial investigation had been opened. He expressed his solidarity with the families of the victims and said that France would do everything possible to support them.
Frédéric Atger, a spokesman for Météo France, which monitors weather across the country, said that the conditions had been “particularly calm” in the area at the time of the crash.
“The visibility was good, and there were little clouds at low altitudes,” he said. “There were no convected clouds at the time of the crash, and the wind was light. There was no alarming weather. The flying conditions were usual.”
Conditions were expected to worsen later in the afternoon and evening, however, with temperatures below freezing overnight, complicating search efforts, the French Interior Ministry said in a statement.
Mr. Hollande said that many of the people on board were German, and that none were believed to be French. King Felipe VI of Spain, who had just arrived in Paris for a state visit when the crash was reported, said that Spanish and Turkish citizens had also been on the flight, and Reuters reported that there was one Belgian.

"We must feel grief, because this is a tragedy that happened on our soil,” Mr. Hollande said. “I want to make sure that there have been no other consequences as the accident happened in a very difficult area to access, and I do not know yet if there were houses nearby. We will know in the next few hours. In the meantime, we must show support.”
Bruno Lambert, a mountain guide who lives in Chanolles, a hamlet in the Prads-Haute-Bléone municipality, said the area of the crash was sparsely populated with steep mountain terrain.
“The mountains are very hard to access — there is no road access, neither in the summer nor the winter,” he said. “The people around here live in very isolated hamlets, and at this time of year, there is almost no one.”
A local official in the region, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said that an initial survey of the area by a helicopter showed that debris had been spread across a very craggy area. A local newspaper posted photos online that it said showed wreckage from the crash.
Sandrine Julien, an employee at the town hall in Seynes-les-Alpes, said that a command center had been set up in the town. Neither she nor her colleagues had seen or heard anything, she said, and as a result they had all been surprised when rescue operations started.
“There are four to five helicopters, and lots of police cars, firefighters and ambulances,” Ms. Julien said, adding that the crash site was at an elevation of more than 6,500 feet. “So the helicopters are doing most of the work at the moment.”

Officials in Haltern am See, a small city near Dortmund in northwestern Germany, said that 16 10th-grade students and two teachers from a local high school, the Joseph-Königs Gymnasium, were aboard the plane. They were returning from an annual exchange with students from the Institut Giola in Llinars del Vallès, near Barcelona, the school wrote on its home page.

“This is the darkest day in the history of our city,” said Bodo Klimpel, the mayor.
He said the school closed and sent students home when the news of the crash was confirmed. He said the school would reopen on Wednesday, but instead of holding regular classes, students and teachers would gather in the auditorium to begin working through their grief.
“You can imagine that tomorrow will also be a difficult day,” Mr. Klimpel told reporters.
Hans-Josef Böing, an administrator for the city, said in a telephone interview that many parents had gone to the Düsseldorf airport to meet their children, and that psychiatrists were there to assist them.
The type of aircraft that crashed, an Airbus A320 single-aisle jet, is a workhorse of many airline fleets, with more than 5,600 in service around the world. More than one billion passenger trips were flown on jets in the A320 series — which includes a smaller version, the A319, and a stretched model, the A321 — according to estimates by Ascend, a London-based aviation consultancy.
Photo


 
Emergency services workers and members of the French police gathered in Seyne, France, near the site where the Germanwings Airbus A320 crashed in the Alps. Credit Boris Horvat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The aircraft’s safety record has been very good, but not completely spotless. Since entering into service in 1988, A320 aircraft have been involved in 12 fatal accidents, according to Ascend.
“We are aware of the media reports and all efforts are now going towards assessing the situation,” Airbus said in a statement on Tuesday. “We will provide further information as soon as available.”
In Germany, Ms. Merkel expressed her deep sympathy for the families of the victims, saying that the crash was a “terrible shock” and that there would be a thorough investigation.
“I feel terribly sorry, because so many people died in this disaster,” she said. "Our thoughts and prayers are with these people,”
Ms. Merkel said she would fly to southern France on Wednesday to meet with the authorities there.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain said he had spoken with Ms. Merkel and with the Spanish king, who cut short his visit to Paris to return to Madrid. “We are all deeply moved and will do everything we can to help the families of the victims,” Mr. Rajoy said.
Germanwings, based in Cologne, was founded in 2002 and acquired by Lufthansa in 2009. It has since grown to become Lufthansa’s main operator for domestic and short-haul European flights from cities other than the main hubs of Munich and Frankfurt. It has a fleet of around 81 planes, of which about two-thirds are Airbus A320s and A319s.
French news reports said that the crash on Tuesday ranks as the third deadliest in the country’s history. In December 1981, a chartered Yugoslav DC-9 jetliner smashed into a mountain in Corsica minutes before it was due to land at Ajaccio Airport, killing all 180 people on board. In 1974, a Turkish Airlines DC-10 crashed outside Paris, killing more than 335 people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/world/europe/germanwings-crash.html

Such sad news Nicky.  Don't know what else to say.  Always devastating when planes crash.  Made even worse by the fact there were students on the plane returning from an exchange program.

I was watching cable news early this morning as I usually do and they broke this story within an hour of it happening and covered it the whole morning here.

This is a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to all the families, friends and classmates of those on he plane. My thoughts also go to the emergency services who are doing such difficult jobs.

Yes the emergency Service is great. You can't reach this part by car only by Foot as it is high up at the mountain. It is already dark there. Will be  a long night for them.

There were two Babys on board.

I don't know if it's just me but i find we have lot of "air plane" accidents in the last few years.....

It's going to be a very hard job to reach the area where the plane crashed.
Our 6 o'clock news said one black box had been found.
Helicopters going in I expect.
They have a terrible job to do. I do admire them.

[this post and the following three moved from another thread for being off topic]

Oh my Lizzy....another expression I've never heard
before !
What does your last sentence mean "she drank the 
kool-aid at the wedding" ?

Well JOANNA drinking the kool-aid means to accept a philosophy, argument or belief blindly without question.  LizzyNY will have to explain what she means as it pertains to Amal.

Jo- Sorry about that. The expression originated when the cult leader, Rev. Jim Jones, told his followers to commit suicide. Because they believed everything he said they did so by drinking poisoned kool-aid. So, since then "drinking the kool-aid" has meant being totally convinced about something.

In Amal's case, I think she has come to believe she is a fashion icon and must keep up the image - aided and abetted by people like Anna Wintour and the designers who want to dress her, and maybe even George and his publicity people.

Latest News about the German plane crash Today.

The latest news coming from the prosecutor 
in a press conference is that the co Pilot set the 
auto Pilot to descend rapidly into the mountain.

The pilot was out of the cockpit, presumably for
for a toilet break, but the co Pilot wouldn't let him
back into the cockpit.
The cockpit doors are obviously locked from the 
inside and have been following 9/11.

This is extremely shocking news and is based on what was heard from the recovered black box.

Thanks Lizzy for the Kool-Aid response.
I well remember the mass suicides of course.
I'm Not criticising you Lizzy.....but it seems a bit
disrespective to use a praise like that IMO.

Do folk also have slang language usage 
based on 9/11 ?

Yeah really sad news.If one Person wants to kill yourself why killing 149 others. The parents of the co Pilot flew to France like the other Family members of the victims. And when they arrived in France they have been told that they son is not a victim he is a suspect. What a shock for them. The Police isolated them from the other Family members when they visit the place where the accident happened.....

I've moved the 'kool aid' posts to this thread because they've got absolutely nothing to do with George Clooney being in New York and are clearly going to be contentious.

And to answer the question, no it's not disrespectful. It's simply an expression that's come to mean people who are willing to blindly follow a thing/person without question.

Katie, thanks for clearing things up for posters outside the US who could misunderstand how that expression is used. I'm sure it was considered offensive when it first surfaced, but that was a long time ago. Most people don't even remember the event that led to it. Now it's just something people say to illustrate a point.

Joanna - I guess we in the US can seem a little insensitive at times, but our hearts are in the right place. Sorry if I upset you. And to answer your question, no we don't have a slang expression for the events of 9/11. Much too recent and universal. Give it another generation or two and I'm sure someone will come up with something obnoxious. It's the nature of the beast.

Lizzy....sorry if I upset you. I feel very
emotional sometimes due to the pills Im taking.
Don't want to cause a rift. Honest.  

Haven't been giving the site due attention lately... but have noticed not much from melbert.  Is she okay??

  Joanna - You absolutely didn't upset me - honest. I know sometimes expressions/intentions don't travel well across the pond and I wasn't sure I hadn't offended YOU, which was never my intention. I'm sure if we ever did have a problem we could work it out. 

Hope you're feeling better and able to get out a bit. That always brings my spirits up and makes me feel better.

Lizzy....as Our Man said to what's his name...
O'Donnell..."Are we good" answer "Yes, we're good"
followed by a hug...

Yes thank you....I've been out recently and 
it does lift the spirit, then I get tired afterwards. LOL

Joanna - Baby steps, Sweetie, baby steps! You'll get there!

I'm here every day.  Just don't feel the need to enter into some of the banter that would set me off.  So, I'll stay silent on the topics that rile me.