The Lemon Fool

The peat makes it very acidic. Common to most of Blighty's moorland areas. Tastes good: when I lived in Sheffield I used to walk out into the Peaks with a couple of big but empty waterbottles and fill them from the streams - learned the distinct tastes of many different streams that way (though perhaps excluding the really brown ones). And that despite Sheffield having the nicest tap water I've encountered anywhere.

Where Snorvey's pics look wrong to me is the lack of that Jock headline feature, the clouds of midges.

Snorvey wrote:So we all lived to tell another tale. Wyvis 1 Snorvey 0. But the hill will always be up for a rematch.

Or, to put it another way, Snorvey 1 Death 0.

But as you say, the bu**er's always up for a rematch

VRD

Snorvey wrote:
I did stop on the flatter bit to adjust my sack <ahem> and observed a rather large horsefly that had landed on my knee. As I had both hands occupied, I ignored it until I felt a sharp pain like someone had stuck a needle in my knee.

'Ooyah BASTARD' I exclaimed. I swear I saw it baring it's teeth at me as it chomped down for a second time on my white skin.

And that was the sum of all the insects feeding on me. Of course, if I hadn't taken the midge net it would have been completely different.

Two wheeled travel can be a bit of a challenge when the beasties get involved.
I live in Melbourne, Aus, had a really interesting commute one day when a huntsman spider wandered from under my saddle on to my thigh. Thankfully he was about the size of my hand so there wasn't much danger of him getting up the bike shorts; bit I did wobble a bit as I tried to convince him to let go.

-sd

Can't match the huntsman spider from this summer in blighty. But I had a "whoops" moment just last week when gardening, when I felt something I expected to be plant debris in my hair, and only after several attempts to brush it off found a bee in my hand.

Shenzhen: City of the Future

Aerial Tour of Shenzhen, China -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X0Q1d6Jwk

Information about the light show - https://www.asiaundiscovered.com/shenzhen-light-show/

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Quite impressive. Not bad for an "Emerging Market". But only fourth largest city in China. London's population 8M.

Pendrainllwyn

It was a beautiful afternoon, so I set off on my bicycle, heading down the old railway line to Kirkintilloch. I then switched to the Forth & Clyde Canal towpath, and headed eastwards through Twechar, Auchinstarry and finally to Craigmarloch. (remember to pronounce the "ch" correctly in the Scottish place names ). On my journey I saw many canal boats, but it was the name of this one that took my attention

OK - the connection is a bit geeky, but may be of interest. In 1834 John Scott Russell, on the Union Canal (which joins the Forth & Clyde Canal), noticed a wave which parted from the prow of a boat which had halted - and this wave travelled along the canal at about 8mph without apparently changing its shape, although diminishing its amplitude after several miles. This became known as a Soliton - and nowadays there is some interest in using Soliton shaped pulses for long distance high speed data transmission over Optical Fibres.

I travelled far to exotic foreign parts last week, and took this picture of an Onager in the desert



Well - actually it was in Chester Zoo, but that counts as a foreign land, and there were some pretty exotic displays of endangered animals.
For anyone who doesn't watch TV, this is the Zoo that appears on the Secret Life of the Zoo.
We (myself and spouse) were most impressed - and we managed to fit the visit in on a dry sunny day (Thursday) sandwiched between two pouring wet days which we spent travelling up and down the motorway.

I was off in Fife today, and visited St Monans on the Fife coast where I went on holiday with my parents about 65 years ago. The ship builders have gone, and now yachts outnumber the fishing boats at the harbour. But the Tower remains - only it now has become a pretend windmill.



In my youth, the Tower was an empty shell with no cap, and no windmill arms. Nobody seemed to know what it had been used for. Then along came some industrial archeologists, and excavated the remains of neighbouring coal-fired salt pans. Apparently the Tower was a windmill used to pump water from the sea into the salt pans.



These saltpans were constructed in the late 18th century, but only operated for around 40 years until changes in taxation combined with competition from English rock salt and cheap foreign imports rendered them uneconomic.

Snorvey wrote:So I lifted the kitchen blind this morning and......oh hello there....

Forget the soon to be ex Hawk, you said elsewhere you had no glasses so wouldn't have spotted it was about to be eaten by a Sim lookalike.

That made me chuckle

(From the press report) "Camouflaged soldiers – also wearing high-visibility vests – ensured they were secured correctly."

We're used to seeing timelapse videos of the Milky Way rotating in the night sky, but this video delivers a fantastic slant on that by being filmed from an equatorial mount which maintains a static Milky Way and rotates the camera to compensate for the rotation of the Earth -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJ9FnQXmJI

It's useful to sometimes be reminded that it's us that's spinning around!

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Itsallaguess wrote:We're used to seeing timelapse videos of the Milky Way rotating in the night sky, but this video delivers a fantastic slant on that by being filmed from an equatorial mount which maintains a static Milky Way and rotates the camera to compensate for the rotation of the Earth -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJ9FnQXmJI

It's useful to sometimes be reminded that it's us that's spinning around!

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Don't be silly. If the earth tilted like that, we'd all be rolling downhill and water would spill out of lakes (and beer would spill out of my glass)

--kiloran

If you get a move on you can catch live coverage of maintenance on the outside of the International Space Station.

International Space Station

Clitheroekid wrote:(From the press report) "Camouflaged soldiers – also wearing high-visibility vests – ensured they were secured correctly."

It's beyond a joke. I used to design military equipment. We had spent several years and a huge amount of (taxpayers') money designing a piece of equipment to be as small a radar signature as possible. As soon as it entered service, their elf'n'safety officer insisted a safety railing be added around the outside. Which completely ruined the radar stealth.

gryffron wrote:

Clitheroekid wrote:(From the press report) "Camouflaged soldiers – also wearing high-visibility vests – ensured they were secured correctly."

It's beyond a joke. I used to design military equipment. We had spent several years and a huge amount of (taxpayers') money designing a piece of equipment to be as small a radar signature as possible. As soon as it entered service, their elf'n'safety officer insisted a safety railing be added around the outside. Which completely ruined the radar stealth.

Both of these make for a bit of a giggle, but come actual conflict one assumes they would bin the vests and the safety rail....

If only for "elf 'n' safety" considerations!

Here's one for Snorvey - which he missed attending today!



The weather was fine, so we set off for Millport, and once again, totally by accident, we arrived on a Scooter Rally Day.
For our southern friends who have no idea where Millport is, I should perhaps supply a description.
In the Firth of Clyde there are three islands which are large enough to have towns and ferry connections. The smallest one is Cumbrae, with Millport its only town. The next largest is Bute, with Rothesay its chief town, then Arran is the largest with Brodick its largest town.
The picture below was taken today from the high ground in the centre of Cumbrae , looking over the southern end of Bute to the mountains of Arran.



Cumbrae is an attractive little island - about 10 miles round its coast road - so it makes for a pleasant walk. There are several cycle hire shops in Millport, and consequently lots of cyclists. It was a warm, lazy, hazy day - and we watched a grey seal floating on his back with his nose in the air, and occasional lifting of his head to watch the cyclists go by. We also watched



A humphy-backit heron
Nearly as big as me
Stands at the waterside
Fishin for his tea.

(by J K Annand)

It was a very enjoyable day (in spite of the Scooters )

Which reminds me... If you catch the ferry to Cumbrae there is a Catalina seaplane sunk close by on the Cumbrae side. You sometimes see foot passengers getting on the ferry at Largs in full SCUBA gear as it's a shore dive from the other side. The aircraft crashed during training in 1943. These days all that is left is bits of twisted metal that is now home to various critters.

VRD

vrdiver wrote:Which reminds me... If you catch the ferry to Cumbrae there is a Catalina seaplane sunk close by on the Cumbrae side. You sometimes see foot passengers getting on the ferry at Largs in full SCUBA gear as it's a shore dive from the other side. The aircraft crashed during training in 1943. These days all that is left is bits of twisted metal that is now home to various critters.
VRD

Yes - that was one visited by my son in his diving days, (before he became a family man)

I was fishing on the loch today - during the non-Scottish bank holiday. The picture I had hoped to show you was of the Osprey. He arrived about 10:30am , flew round the loch, focussed on one spot, dived, splashed, and struggled back up into the air carrying a large trout. Meanwhile I had dropped my rod, and was struggling with the camera app on the phone, but by the time I had pressed the appropriate button, he had completed his low pass overhead, complete with the trout carried like a torpedo, and with a shrug of his feathers he was gone. So he took a few minutes to catch a big trout, and I took seven hours to catch zero trout.
However the perch were accommodating, as usual, and as a consolation, I thought I would take a photograph of one of the perch that I landed - they are beautiful little fish. But it refused to lie still, and gave me a most reproachful look for my attempted imposition, before I slipped it back into the water.
So apologies - no photo today.