Category Archives: photography

Yeuch of the Day

Noreen was off early(ish) today on a work outing. On her way she phoned me to say she had found an embryo lying on our front garden path and had moved it into the shrubbery nearby so no-one trod on it. (Handily we keep a trowel by the front door for burying the cats’ prey.)

Of course being interested in natural history I had to go and look. And yes, there was a roughly 4 inch long fresh foetus, complete with placenta still attached. Nice! And of course I just had to photograph it.

But what is it? Well it isn’t human as it clearly has a tail. Phew! It is too big for domestic cat – it is bigger than a new-born kitten. Being London this immediately says it is going to be either fox or dog. I would guess it’s too late in the year for fox, and maybe a little large.

Hmm. Interesting, if slightly yeuchy – but not as yeuchy as I’d expected.

If anyone really wants to see the photo you can find it here. I bet you all say “yeeuuuwwww”, but still go and look anyway!

Zen Mischief Website Updated

At long last, and after three days solid effort, I’ve completely updated my Zen Mischief website.  And not before time either!  I started the revision over 2 years ago and got as far as completing the design before I was rudely interrupted by work.  Only now have I made the time to complete the job.  Although at the moment the content – essentially a static backup to this weblog – is largely the same, all the text has been revised (some pages more than others), all the links checked, dead links removed and many new ones added, and all the images have been overhauled.  I have ideas for new pages and I hope they will be along over the coming weeks – there’s a lot that gets an airing on this weblog but isn’t covered on the website, an omission I hope to rectify.

Milestones Passed in the Dark

Last night I had a realisation, the way one does, that I must have written quite a few blog posts.  But how many?  Having awoken at stupid o’clock this morning I figured I’d use the time to try to work it out.  Could I even do it?  This weblog has been through at least three different incarnations and the old blogs are no longer online.

Wait!  I have backups.  Do I still have the old files?  No, not on my current PC: well I did trash a lot of old data when I migrated to this machine recently.  So let’s search the archive disks … and …  Lo! we do have the old files, saved in an archive of my PC three before last.  (How sad is that?!)  So I was able to do a count …

“I don’t believe it!”  If I go back to when I started blogging in January 2004 I reckon I’ve written 879 Zen Mischief weblog posts (this will be number 880).  And we can add to this another 134 for the Anthony Powell Society.  That’s a total of 1013 in 6½ years, or three a week.  Not prolific by many blogger’s standards, but prolific enough for me, especially when you add in almost 2000 photos (and that’s just the edited ones!) posted on Flickr since February 2006.

While not everything I write is wholly original (whose writing is?) I’ve covered everything from beer, by way of diversions into naturism, science and Bagpuss, to zen.  Hmmm … not bad!

Queen's Beasts at Kew


Queen’s Beasts at Kew, originally uploaded by kcm76.

You’ll probably want to look at this in a larger size.

We went to Kew Gardens last week, with an American friend who was staying and had a free afternoon to do something different. While there I fulfilled by wish to photograph the ten Queen’s Beasts in front of the Palm House. The beasts represent the genealogy of Queen Elizabeth II. They are (from L to R):
• White Greyhound of Richmond
• Yale of Beaufort
• Red Dragon of Wales
• White Horse of Hanover
• Lion of England
• White Lion of Mortimer
• Unicorn of Scotland
• Griffin of Edward III
• Black Bull of Clarence
• Falcon of the Plantagenet

These aren’t great photos, so I’ll probably redo them next I go to Kew.

And there’s a bit more about the Queen’s Beasts on Wikipedia.