personal, pleasures

Reasons to be Grateful: 31

Experiment, week 31. A late report this week as I’ve been under the weather for the last few days; hopefully now on the up! Anyway here’s last week’s selection of five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful this week.

  1. Waitrose Cox’s Apple Vintage Cider. Yummy! Memories of childhood: this is what cider should taste like.

  2. Pigeon Bones. See Pieces of Pigeon.
  3. Microwave Combi Oven. We decided last week to retire our old microwave oven. I use old advisedly: we bought it soon after we moved into the house, so it is over 30 years old! We replaced it with a Combi Microwave/Oven/Grill which promises to be very useful and save using the “big oven” a lot of the time.
  4. Sunshine. Don’t faint! We had sunshine two days running last week.
  5. Cherries. Noreen bought some wonderful large, dark red cherries (from M&S, I think). They didn’t last long.
amusements, history, links, medical, science

Links What You May Have Missed

A pretty mixed bag of the curious and interesting which you may have missed in this instalment. Let’s start with the historical …

Archaeologists reckon they’ve located the exact site, and part of the structure of, the Curtain theatre in London’s Shoreditch area, which was used by Shakespeare prior to The Globe.

Meanwhile on the south coast some other archaeologists have discovered wall paintings of a dozen or so medieval ships in a Winchelsea cellar. That has to be worth a visit!

Elsewhere historians are puzzling over the possibility that the ancients were also visited by UFOs and flying saucers.

From ancient history to natural history … You always wanted to know about turtle sex, didn’t you? Well here’s a disquisition on the terrifying sex organs of male turtles. We’re promised girlie turtle anatomy to follow.

While on the subject of sex (well you just knew there’d be more, didn’t you!) back in 2006 an American Roman Catholic nun and theologian wrote a sensible book about sex and relationships. But now the Vatican has decided it doesn’t like the content and has banned it. What price Galileo?

Now, what will the medics come up with next? Oh, I know, fungi. After investigating the bacteria and viruses which reside in our guts they’ve now started to investigate similarly located fungi.

Scientists have also been investigating whether whether human farts are germ-laden, or merely malodorous. Turns out they are germ-laden, but only if you’re naked.

So now for something a little more appealing. Emily is getting married. (Well people will do it, y’know!) But what’s this? The latest wedding accessory appears to be … a birdcage! Her only question is “why?“!!

And finally while on the subject of nubiles, didn’t you always want to know what was inside Kylie’s knickers? Well now you can thanks to a surprisingly interesting collection of X-ray images of of everyday objects as art.

Toodle pip!

ramblings

Voluminous Expletiveness

So there I was writing a long post about the (still proposed) third runway at Heathrow Airport and the also proposed HS2 rail link from London to Birmingham and beyond.

It had taken a long time. It was almost finished. I was tidying up the wording.

At that point my browser decides to corrupt it and save the corruption.

So my text is no more. It cannot be recovered. It is a dead parrot.

Somewhere on my hard drive it is laid to rest in it’s lead coffin. Slowly decaying to electronic dust.

And I don’t have the will to spend over an hour and do it all again. With quotes. From scratch.

[Exit, weeping, pursued by a long string of expletives.]

natural history, photography, pleasures, science

Pieces of Pigeon

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If you’re overly squeamish, or don’t like bits of things, then you might be advised to look away now.

A few weeks ago we discovered a decaying pigeon carcass hidden in a nook in the garden. When examined it was little but a collection of decaying feathers and bones; it had clearly been lying in it’s last resting place for some months. We managed, without too much mess, to salvage the breastbone and the skull.

Pigeon Sternum & Skull
Click on any of the images for larger views on Flickr

Having soaked them overnight in mild detergent (aka. shampoo) and given them a careful scrub with an old toothbrush they were allowed to dry thoroughly. Then I bleached and disinfected them twice, again overnight, in hydrogen peroxide, allowing them to dry thoroughly in between. They have then been sitting drying thoroughly again in the bathroom for a week or more.

(Whether this is anything like an approved method for preparing such specimens, I have no idea. I more or less made it up as I went along, and it seems to have worked. Being a chemist helps!)

Pigeon Sternum & Skull

These are the resulting photographs. The structures are amazing. Some of the delicate structure of the brain case can be discerned. So can the wonderfully intricate fine structure which is actually within the bone of the sternum (birds have very light bones filled with air-sacs which is I think what we’re seeing). The sternum especially is beautiful to handle: it weighs absolutely nothing, literally no more than a feather, and it feels like the most gorgeous and delicate waxed paper, something which isn’t so obvious with the skull.

Pigeon Skull

Just for the record …
The skull is 56mm from back to the tip of the bill, 20mm high, 20mm wide.
The sternum is 72mm long, 48mm high, 50mm wide.

Pigeon Sternum from Above

Next time you’re destroying a roast chicken (or even your cat’s next mouse) stop for a few minutes and look at the amazing structures before throwing the carcass in the bin. If you really want to see what the bones are like, boil them down in clean water (you can use the water for stock! — no maybe not the mouse!), clean them, then bleach them (domestic beach or hydrogen peroxide is fine; but not acid) and wash well in clean water; leave them to dry thoroughly. Finally be amazed.

This is why I love science and natural history.

personal, photography, pleasures

Reasons to be Grateful: 30

Experiment, week 30. Another week, another selection in my continuing experiment in documenting five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful this week.

But the whoe week has been very Meh, at best — grey, wet, windy, not very warm and generally crap. In fact it’s been so Meh one wonders how to find 5 good things to highlight!

  1. The Experiment Continues. Yes, that is worth mentioning because we are now halfway through the 60 weeks I set out for this experiment to last. Overall over the last year I do seem to be less depressed — I keep a very qualitative track of my mood (just on a scale of +3 to -3) and I’m definitely having more good days than I was. How much this experiment is the cause, or the hypnotherapy, or something else, I have no idea. I’m just glad things are better than they were; it’ll be good if we can keep the upward trend.
  2. Waking up with a Pussy. Several mornings this week I’ve awoken with Harry the Cat sleeping by my head. And there’s nothing like a warm furry pussy first thing in the morning. Maybe this should count as two ticks?
  3. Smoked Chicken. I’m sure I’ve said this one before, but Waitrose do smoked chicken breasts, and they aren’t any more expensive that ordinary cold roast chicken. They usually have quite long “use by” dates so we often have a couple in the fridge as a stand-by so we can throw together a quick, and very yummy salad if ever we decide we don’t want to cook. Especially good with an olive oil and lemon dressing.

    Peonies & Sunflowers
    Click the image for larger version

  4. Sunshine. There’s been so little sunshine this week that the few odd spells of sun and blue sky we’ve had have been so very welcome.
  5. Peonies & Sunflowers (photo above, which sorry I also used yesterday!). We bought these from Waitrose on Friday. They’re magnificent! They’re in a handmade pottery jug by Dave Brown of Merriott, Somerset (which we bought from the man himself some 30-ish years ago). Don’t they look very “Dutch flower painting”!
ramblings

Being Grown-up

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So according to the Daily Telegraph today the Skipton Building Society has come up with a list of the top 50 indicators that one is grown-up.

Here’s the list:

  1. Having a mortgage
  2. Mum and dad no longer make your financial decisions
  3. Paying into a pension
  4. Conducting a weekly food shop
  5. Written a Will
  6. Having children
  7. Budgeting every month
  8. Being able to cook an evening meal from scratch
  9. Getting married

  10. Having life insurance
  11. Recycling
  12. Having a savings account
  13. Knowing what terms like ‘ISA’ and ‘tracker’ mean
  14. Watching the news
  15. Owning a lawn mower
  16. Doing your own washing
  17. Taking trips to the local tip
  18. Planting flowers
  19. Being able to bleed a radiator
  20. Having a joint bank account
  21. Having a view on politics
  22. Keeping track of interest rates
  23. Finding a messy house annoying
  24. Being able to change a light bulb
  25. Owning a vacuum cleaner
  26. Holding dinner parties
  27. Listening to Radio 2
  28. Enjoying gardening
  29. Spending weekend just ‘pottering’
  30. Mum starts asking you for advice
  31. Carrying spare shopping bags just in case
  32. Like going round garden centres
  33. Wearing coats on a night out
  34. Going to bed before 11pm
  35. Making sure mum and dad are phoned at least once a week
  36. Classing work as a career rather than a job
  37. Repairing torn clothing rather than throwing it away
  38. You iron
  39. You wash up immediately after eating
  40. Enjoy cooking
  41. Buying a Sunday paper
  42. Always going out with a sensible pair of shoes
  43. You like receiving gift vouchers
  44. Work keeps you awake at night
  45. Filing post
  46. Having a ‘best’ crockery set
  47. Being able to change a car tyre
  48. Being sensible enough to remove make up off before bedtime
  49. Being able to follow a receipt
  50. Owning ‘best towels’ as well as ‘everyday towels’

Well that’s a big fail for me then! I scored just 33 out of 50.

So if we start at a base of zero at age 18, and we assume you score 6 months for every “yes”, you would be fully grown up at age 43. Sounds about right?

On that basis I’m about 35. Which is at least more grown-up than the 25-ish my brain thinks I am.

Hmmm … I wonder if I’ll ever get to 43? No, can’t do that, maybe I’ll have to settle for 42.

photography

Buggered Britain 10

Another in my occasional series documenting some of the underbelly of Britain. Britain which we wouldn’t like visitors to see and which we wish wasn’t there. The trash, abused, decaying, destitute and otherwise buggered parts of our environment. Those parts which symbolise the current economic malaise; parts which, were the country flourishing, wouldn’t be there, would be better cared for, or made less inconvenient.

Buggered Britain 10
Click the image for larger view

This is the road junction near our house. They are replacing the old gas mains. The works were due to start on 2 April (they did) and last 8 weeks. They are still there digging holes today (8 June), that’s already 10 weeks and there is probably at least 2 weeks work still to do. Oh and where are the workmen? At no time have I seen more than two men in attendance.

thoughts

The Mind of a Fruit-Loop

Yesterday I came across an interestingly odd — even loopy — article on Scientific American Blogs about the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.

Apparently McKenna came up with the 21 December 2012 apocalypse long before anyone have delved into the intricacies of the Mayan calendar. The article is a report of an interview with him in 1999 not long before his death, and supposedly tries to uncover whether McKenna was serious in proposing the December 2012 apocalypse or whether he was just being outrageous for the fun of it.

Well you won’t find an answer to that but reading the article, which contains more than a few grains of truth, will give you an insight into the mind of a genuine fruit-loop. Or was he loopy? Maybe he was just a far-sighted shaman.

Anyway I’ll leave you to read the article but here are a few other quotes from McKenna. At first sight many seem crazy, but look deeper and they contains some surprisingly perception nuggets of wisdom and deep thought.

We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.

Culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviours are acceptable.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it’s there it doesn’t require your belief — and if it’s not there why should you believe in it?

And last, but not least …

Pay Attention.
And keep breathing.