Cafe Einstein - LPTPW 17 - animal, vegetable, and/or a minerally type chemically thing, and maybe some other things as well, yes :)

...and I was righter than even I expected :)

But first there are some loose ends that need knotting.

*try to see what David is seeing* That would be the rest of the world, David... and Scotland. It's sort of how we looked at things in those days. So sorry. Or it could be Ireland itself. I can't say for sure because I don't know what your light apertures are fixating on. Or Europe. Or where someone spilled their rum. Or the Isle of wight as Chris said. But I won't labour the point. Gary did a lovely job of reiterating Ireland's Irishness... which I see you finally accepted... Thank you, Gary :)

We were much more into "see a lump... stick a flag into it" to worry too much about which way was up. That only became important when we tried to find where we'd put them.

No. I'm not. So neither should you be.

*make note of potentially VERY useful American quality* :)

I did consider asking you about your missing points, Mike... till I saw what you spawned with the ones that weren't missing... *slow blink at Chris, Richard and the one who started it all* Oh... and if you could time your most excellent ideas a little better next time, NOT LATE... I would appreciate it.

@Phil I am very sorry to hear of your tree's demise :( I suppose it served it right for having the audacity to grow near humans. Hope it all well went and that you're back crunching again though :)

@TL Hmm... with your RAC so low, this would be the perfect time to direct wildly inaccurate questions at you like... have you given up chewing shoes yet? :) *pause to smack hand very hard* I'm sorry :) it would just be nice to have you here...

@Nutrition corner: Hi Mikey! :) Hi Robl! :) Oh, and well done on the weight loss, David

@Chris My, that is a large broom you're sweeping with there :) Being of the female species, I cannot entirely agree with you on everything you've said, but as to looking like anything at any age, I think the backend of a bus is far preferable to say, the rear-end of a warthog - which is what I'm planning to look like in a decade. I hope you won't mind...? :)

Right. I think that's all the knots sorted :) More to the point... we are approaching my winning post number faster than my winning answer... so may I remind you all of our thread title:

You've done very well with the vegetable... and decidedly badly at everything else. Take for example the gentleman to the right of the frilly dude...

first seen here. He worked very hard at getting the Paris Faculty of Medicine to declare potatoes fit for human consumption (in 1772) but lost his job and the church-owned land he was growing them on as a result.

So he embarked on some potato stunts. YAY! One was to present potato flowers to Louis and Marie - who loved them so much, they gave him some land to grow them on :) So he did, and then fed the tubers to people like the father of modern chemistry and another father... a founding one of the United States - but it was the poor and famine-stricken he wanted to feed them to. And that's where the reverse psychology came in :) He had his potato fields heavily guarded during daylight hours - and sent the guards home at night... :) Nowadays, his name is associated with almost all potato dishes that originated in his home country. I could tell you it, but I'm not going to. It's not essential to the winning answer either, more of a guide to where my thought processes took me...

Y-e-e-e-s... the map I posted that showed Europe was kind of in the traditional orientation of right way up, and the one I posted of Ireland was more right-side down than anything else... making the blob in the pink triangle a right way up Ireland, and the one in the green rhombus, a right way up Iceland... which if it HAD been included in the right-side down map of Ireland, would have appeared left-side up.

Did that help? :)