You couldn't make it up …

8 June 2009 Keith 1 Comment

Quotes from today’s news which amused me …

Conservative leader David Cameron on Gordon Brown: He can’t seem to reshuffle his cabinet but they can’t seem to organise a coup.

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan: If Labour MPs put their terror of the electorate above any considerations of patriotism or democracy, they will do irreparable damage […] to representative democracy. This is your last chance, comrades.

Labour backbencher Jon Cruddas: Everyone’s walking away and taking their bat home with them.

And finally …

Former Home Secretary David Blunkett is recovering after being injured by a charging cow in Derbyshire.

Really you couldn’t make it up!

quotes, sexuality

Quotes: Relationships

6 June 2009 Keith

If you don’t concern yourself with your wife’s cat, you will lose something irretrievable between you.

[Haruki Murakami]

memes, personal, photography

Bucket List Meme

5 June 2009 Keith

Bucket List Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr meme is again simple: share 12 things you want to do before you die.

This isn’t necessarily the definitive set, but here goes with a selection …

1. Retire
2. Win the lottery
3. Fix my depression
4. Celebrate our pearl wedding anniversary
5. Have a swimming pool and swim nude every day
6. Be able to afford it (for any chosen value if “it”)
7. Have a naturist holiday
8. Have another 3 wishes
9. Get a knighthood (or peerage); not that there’s any chance of this.
10. Grow old disgracefully and in good health
11. Become skillful at dowsing
12. Become immortal

As always these photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

1. retired, 2. 2009: Another Year …., 3. If my hair looks good that’s all that matters……., 4. peach bridesmaids’ bouquet, 5. swim, 6. Maybe I can afford it one day!, 7. More for friends, 8. Three Wishes, 9. Gulf Coast Renaissance Faire, 10. By the Waters Edge…., 11. Pendulum1, 12. Immortality

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

memes, personal, photography

Amended DID Meme

28 May 2009 Keith

Amended DID Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

As most UK readers will know Desert Island Discs (DID) is a radio programme where a celebrity is asked to nominate the 8 records they would want if cast-a-way alone on a desert island. They are also allowed one book (they get the Bible and Shakespeare as well) and one luxury item (as long as it doesn’t aid them in escaping). It has been broadcast every week for well over 50 years!

This week’s Flickr meme follows the DID theme: chose 5 CD’s (to be loaded onto an iPod), 2 books, 4 luxury items and 1 food item of which you get an unlimited supply.

OK, so here are my choices:
1. CD: Monteverdi, 1610 Vespers
2. CD: Beatles, Let It Be
3. CD: Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
4. CD: Granados, Goyescas (Piano Music)
5. CD: JS Bach, Complete Organ Works
6. Book: Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time (yes, I’ll have all 12 volumes, thank you!)
7. Book: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
8. Luxury: Digital Camera with Assorted Lenses, battery charger, etc.
9. Luxury: PC with Internet Connection and Photoshop
10. Luxury: Prolifically Fruiting Avocado Tree
11. Luxury: Large Swiss Army Knife
12. Food: Nuts (assorted types)
Oh and I’ve mixed it up a bit as every one of the images is a collage.

This week’s Flickr meme could go one of two ways: either show us 12 of your favourites from other photographers or show us 12 favourite pictures you’ve taken! I have chosen to do the former; so here are 12 of my favourites from 12 other photographers — and not a pretty girl in sight (for once!). I might do 12 of my own favourites later in the week; or I might do 12 pretty girls from amongst my Flickr favourites.

1. Detail2 Poppea, 2. Art Project I, 3. Two lost souls, 4. The Crooked Coda: Toccare, 5. Orgelmuseum Malchow, 6. Sparkle With The Joy of Life, 7. Tales and Legends ~ Alice in Wonderland, 8. four amigos (hockney style), 9. Collage fragment3, 10. avocado, 11. Swiss army yo-yo, 12. Well Grab Your Drink And Clear A Space, I Think It’s Time To Torch This Place

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

current affairs, medical, science, words

Pandemic

24 May 2009 Keith

Following on from my post of yesterday, it seems that WHO really are bowing to political pressure and redefining pandemic to take account of virulence as well as geographical spread. As an academic, Vincent Racaniello, author of the Virology Blog, is typically scathing:

WHO redefining pandemic is absurd. Pandemic is an epidemiological definition that has nothing to do with virulence […] Although pandemic is most frequently associated with influenza virus, other infectious agents may cause worldwide epidemics […] WHO should leave textbook writing to others. To paraphrase Andre Lwoff, a pandemic is a pandemic. The word implies nothing about virulence – and has little to do with politics.

As a fully paid-up pedant (and erstwhile academic) I entirely agree.

photography, pleasures

H Asleep – Join the Dots

23 May 2009 Keith

H Asleep – Join the Dots, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Harry the cat asleep on my study chair; he was so dead to the world he didn’t even twitch a whisker while I leant across for my camera and took photographs until I moved the chair slightly; even then all he did was open half an eye! The cropping was a bit of an experiment.

history, pleasures

A Practical Use for Cats

23 May 2009 Keith 1 Comment

Another snippet which interested me (as an ailurophile) this week is from the May 2009 issue of Subterranea*:

A Practical Use for Cats

An unsubstantiated item of Derbyshire folklore claims the application of a cat to useful purposes, in connection with the development of lead mining at Bole Hill, near Wirksworth. Here shafts had been sunk, and lead ore raised, to considerable depths, until the water-table was reached necessitating expensive pumping if mining was to follow the ore deeper.

From 1772 a drainage tunnel (the Meerbrook sough) was driven under the hill from the valley of the river Derwent, intended to connect with a shaft then of the order of 200 metres deep. The tunnel was not in one straight line, as it made diversions from time to time to follow veins of galena as they were encountered. After 26 years or so, when the tunnel was getting close to the shaft, the question arose how to effect the meeting of the two with least wasted labour.

The solution, local legend has it, was provided by a cat, taken along the very wet tunnel into the heart of the hill. Boring was commenced at the bottom of the shaft at a predetermined time. The cat in the tunnel turned to look in the direction of the sound, thus indicating the exact alignment needed for the final length of the drainage tunnel. This was repeated several metres further along the same tunnel, allowing the determination of the shaft’s location by triangulation.

* Subterranea is the magazine of Subterranea Britannica, the “society devoted to the study of man-made and man-used underground structures and the archaeology of the Cold War”.

current affairs, medical, quotes, science

Pandemic or Not?

23 May 2009 Keith

Revere over at Effect Measure, has been writing a lot recently about the so-calle “Swine Flu” outbreak; not suprising as the editors are public health practitioners. A post the other day caught my eye; it explored when is a pandemic not a pandemic. Basically Revere explores the position with the current Influenza A/H1N1 outbreak and touches on some of the posturing going on by governments, WHO etc. to avoid declaring this a pandemic.

Yes, all very well; this is what we would surely expect of politicians. What struck me though was this wonderful paragraph:

The argument boils down to this. We shouldn’t call a pandemic a pandemic, because people might misunderstand that this means it’s a pandemic. And then they would do things like panic, like UK officials are doing now when the prospect is broached we are having a pandemic. And since even the considerable wiggle room of the current definition of a pandemic is insufficient to avoid calling this one a pandemic, please provide us with some more wiggle room by adding severity to the mix, so we can then argue about whether the pandemic is severe enough to be a pandemic.

The original post isn’t technical and it isn’t long but it does highlight the way in which governments etc. use as much (and more) wriggle room as is available in their own interests. Politics was ever thus!

memes, personal, photography

Favourites Meme the Second – for Relaxation

21 May 2009 Keith

Favourites Meme the Second, originally uploaded by kcm76.

I am so drained this evening after a non-stop, battering day at work that I just cannot get to do anything! Sorry to those who are waiting for emails or literary society work from me; it just cannot be did this evening. I can’t even concentrate on writing a decent weblog post! So I decided to do a second version of this week’s Flickr meme, only this time containing some of my favourites from amongst my own photos. Looking at my Flickr Photostream it contains an awful lot of crap, but amongst it the odd gem. These aren’t necessarily my best shots (anyway who is to say what is best, you or me? — your best is my rubbish) but are the first dozen I picked that I like. So have an evening off and enjoy! Now I shall go and read.

Oh and just for the record these shots span some 20+ years. #9 is the earliest; taken I think in the mid to late 80s (and obviously on film); #10 is the most recent taken just a 3-4 of weeks ago.

1. Apothecary’s Rose
2. Tabby Tiger
3. Red Shoveller Duck
4. Iris 3
5. Double Departure from Alexisbad (3)
6. Warbrook House (Rear)
7. French Lavender 2
8. Deep Pink Cyclamen
9. Floss Cat
10. Camellia
11. Armco Sundown
12. Early Morning December 2