If you've not heard the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Here's a Youtube flick for introduction and for those who want to hear a little more, a recent Music Feature on Radio 4. Enjoy!

A video has been circulating around again. It came out a year or so ago - long enough, in other words, to have spawned at least one parody.

A tourist couple set their camera up on a rock at Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park to take a memorable holiday shot. Unfortunately, they had the scene stolen by a local Ground Squirrel who "popped up" just as the timer clicked over and took the shot.

The resulting photo has become one of those viral events. Everyone is making their own version of it. You can now make your own photo HERE

Were the natural range of the Columbian Ground Squirrel, at the end of the last Ice Age, to have extended to Scotland, for example, the recent General Synod might have looked like this

If you take the link (above) to the Crasher Squirrel Make Your Own Photo page you'll see where hundreds of people have turned their ordinary photographs into something remarkable and funny. The family depicted below has clearly decided that they've had enough of the "dull" and the "ordinary" so they decided that the addition of a random rodent would add something of interest.

Pause for Thought

Hunger: It was one of the first things we ever felt and one of the first things going on ‘within us’ that anybody else ever recognized.

A dis-ease inside.
An emptiness within us.
An ache

At some point our mothers must have said ‘I don’t know why he’s crying. He’s just after eating'.

Hungry people aren’t always the thin ones. You know that, don’t you?

Some of us are hungry even after we’ve eaten our fill. The hunger outstrips the meal in front of us.

Its not always a meal we’re hungry for, either.

We’re hungry for revenge or for company or in need of an avenue for our anger. We’re hungry to be told we’re the best or maybe we’d even give our right arm to be told that we were merely sufficient.

The hunger often outstrips the physical need. We try too hard, we’re told. We’ve become very hard work. There’s going to be trouble ahead. We’re starting to leave carnage in our wake because we’re suffering so from this insatiable hunger - from this thing gnawing within us. There’s a marriage to think about and children who depend on us. We’re up for a promotion at work and folks in the office are wondering whether we’re maybe a little too desperate and driven.

We might have known. Come to think of it, we did know - we’ve always known.

We wish we had a dime each time we’d slapped ourselves on the forehead and wondered why we’d said what we said – why we’d lost the rag - the way we did - in a public place.

We need to step back and review what we already know - ask what sort of hole it is we find in the centre of our being – while there’s time - what sort of emptiness – and what it is which drives us for good or ill.

And there is time. Our misfortunes don’t all happen to us by accident.

There are lessons to be learned and a more creative and ultimately a more ‘nourishing’ response to be discovered.


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The audio is HERE for a limited time.
Pause for Thought begins at 1:12.54 on the audio bar