RPDL of the week
recognise it? yes, it’s part of last weeks wall. Errwood Hall in the Goyt Valley
Go Do
Jónsi – Go Do from Jónsi on Vimeo.
RPDL of the week
yes i’ve decided to post a picture of a wall. Something to contemplate. Stare at it awhile and forget all your worries. Slowly start to become convinced you know where it is.
newslinks
A few more newslinks taken from the past couple of weeks of figuring out whats going on in the world.
Starting locally and taken from the Donaster Free Press, Mayor in vote of no confidence apart from the occasional more interesting than usual headline (Fury as mayor claims UK could learn from Taliban) it is sometime hard to see any difference in the council from the squabbling and infighting that’s been going on for years.
A slightly interesting piece from the BBC In Paris, the customer is not always right, too right they aren’t, though there’s probably some happy medium to be found. One of the major points of pharmacy is that a pharmacist and their staff are obliged to ensure the patient is only sold medication that is appropriate and suitable for them (hence the usual barrage of questions that accompany the most innocent seeming of purchaces). It is unfortunate that the press and consumer magazines seem to always be able to find the pharmacies that aren’t carrying out their professional duties that diligently. Then again, what sort of news story would ‘Pharmacies sell medicine correctly’ make? But this does mean that every now and again the pharmacist has to refuse to sell a medicine to someone because its not actually appropriate. It’s disappointing, to put it mildly, that a large number of the general public have fallen for the brainwashing that they must have everything that they want NOW, AND OF COURSE THEY’RE RIGHT etc etc. whether it’s their McDonalds Happy Meal or their 20 item prescription.
Let’s disappear from the surface of the planet for a moment and head out to space and what the Hubble Space Telescope is looking at for a nice picture to ease the tension and get all nice and relaxed and happy again.
And to finish off, a trio of slightly more unusual news stories taken from the daily telegraph. Hidden fire chokes last life from US ghost town, I’m sure theres a computer game series and film with part of that as the background, underground fires which are really the fires of hell/another dimension/something like that.
Scientists discover the burglar’s trainer of choice, I would have thought the burglar discovered it first, not the scientists.. and Swiss prostitutes trained to use defibrillators in brothels to prevent clients dying. Not only is clients having heart attacks ‘bad for business’ (possibly good for reputation?) but it also tends to reduce returning customers.
RPDL of the week
and so the recollections continue. This is where valentines day 2009 found me.
my kingdom for an open car park…
Bit of an epic for mid-holiday. The rain came down, the roads got worked on, the ice singularly refused to go away, the Lake District was closed, and so it was that lunch was eaten back at the villa at 4pm after 100 miles and two and a half hours of driving.
Apparently even a flat walk eluded us, the Derwent valley having turned to ice. Keswick even contained some fields that were iced over, sloping fields at that. The car parks that weren’t closed were either iced over or, once we got to Thirlmere, crammed with mountain rescue.
We managed to leave the car for a short period, finding the only spot in a car park half way along the shore of derwent water that wasn’t frozen. Eventually we got down to the shore and looked out over the frozen lake. Low cloud hung over the scene and rain splattered onto the ice making puddles but not doing anything to try and melt it. A couple of decent sized stones thrown high into the air failed to make an impression on the ice.
We left that spot in search of somewhere more promising that might not be frozen up leaving the ducks to their ice skating practice. This proved nigh on impossible and there seemed to be nowhere to stop that might just be a decent place to sit down and eat sandwiches. We ended up driving down the road that runs alongside Thirlmere, and with no obvious places to turn around given that the car parks were packed to bursting with mountain rescue teams – no idea what the emergency was, but as the fell top assessor had not made it to the summit of Helvellyn that day but turned around, then it’s probably reasonable to say anyone attempting to climb up high that day was asking for trouble. We continued along the road which slowly turned more and more snowy heading further into the heart of the lake district but not necessarily where we wanted to be with deteriorating weather and the roads starting to look nasty.
This is not proving a successful trip. Time to turn around and head back.
RPDL of the week
It was a year ago this week that I was to be found nervously/excitedly heading out of the country down to the bottom of the world for a voyage down the Antarctic Penninsula. The antarctic has to be one of the most wonderful places in the world. After 30 hours of travelling we arrived at our departure point. Ushuaia, at the southern most tip of South America.
Snippets from the news
I was going to wade into the ‘should pharmacies sell homeopathic products’ debate but decided instead that I would post some of the news stories from the week I thought it fit to link to. Comments and thoughts welcome.
can the power of thought stop you ageing? – from the BBC news site. Interesting thought, also an excuse to watch cartoons and get the lego out.
plan to slash council tax by 3% is ‘nonsensical’ – from the Doncaster Free Press website. Yes it may well be slightly unwise to cut council tax while there’s not much money flowing about in the system. Putting less money in to the system and seemingly not planning to raise it by proper funding elsewhere will surely just make problems worse and end up with people losing their jobs at a time when there are not many jobs about to be had. I do like the quote from Councillor Brown though:
I’m not sure where he’s getting his £24.44 ice-cream from but he’s either being ripped off or maybe he likes his ice-cream with gold bits in.
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article – from the daily telegraph. I’m not entirely sure i’m convinced about man made climate change. Even so, whether it’s down to us or not we should be doing our best, without various panels and politicians and scare stories playing the guilt card, to look after our planet. There are too few places on earth where we’ve not gone in and caused chaos as a species. It’s just a shame that the people who have taken it upon themselves to fix the world can’t seem to present honest data and leave it alone rather than trying to embellish it with suspect or just wrong work. This taken from the BBC news website makes you wonder whether it’s down to the cold winter we’ve had (which admittedly has been nice to have for a change) or whether its because over the past few months stories have been breaking that seem to show that the stuff we’re being told about climate change is flawed science, wrong or lies. They seem to be doing themselves no favours.
Again from the Daily Telegraph
- from the Daily Telegraph
spectacular. There are more pictures if you click on the link.
and to round the cull of random stuff from the week, and because it’s a year ago since I headed off down to the bottom of the world:
Shackleton’s whisky recovered from South Pole ice – from BBC news
I can still wade in to the homeopathic debate if needs be, I have enough views and opinions on it to form a decent rant.
life on mars
poor Spirit. no one ever thinks of the technologies feelings. There should be a campaign.
from xkcd.com
Latrigg Fail
I promised a bit more detail on some of my lake district adventures recently, so here is part 1, a slightly poor attempt to walk up a hill.
Latrigg fell – wednesday 13th jan
Beaten by the weather on this one. Even a small hill can have a turn around vibe to it, so I did, not even hitting the 300m meter contour line. The app I was playing with on my phone making it pretend it was a gps tracking system and devouring the batteries said I got to 324m, but I’m figuring otherwise.
It was a cloudy day with the higher fells alongside hiding their tops from view. Snow was threatening and under the snow on the lower parts were hidden sheets of ice. Starting off from Keswick and there were a few people wandering along the track (mostly in the other direction), which under other circumstances would provide a leisurely, undemanding stroll. Higher up was fine, and once I left the well-trodden path between the cheats car park half way up the hill and Keswick the covering turned to an inch or so of snow, with only two sets of footprints in it. This started me thinking I’ll get to the top of the zigzag path on the map and see what it’s like.
By the top of the zigzag, the ground started to open out and the wind began to blow calmly across the hill, taking with it some of the snow and slowly starting to erase my boot prints. The path itself was also starting to disappear, the snow trying to hide it and blend it in with the slope of the hill. Maybe I could have gone on, according to the map there was only another 70 meters of ascent and not too much further to walk, but it didn’t seem the wise thing to do. So I stood and took in what there was of the view, most of it being hidden by distant mist, and snows and cloud. I took a picture of the only thing around that leant some colour to the monotone scene, a gorse bush, snow drifted around it, and headed off back down the track.
Further down the track to Keswick there is another viewpoint, where the trees have been cut down so they do not obscure the vista. I guess the stumps also provide a convenient seat to admire the view. Bassenthwaite lake was visible in the distance, and beyond the houses of Keswick, Derwent Water could be seen, completely frozen over. I think that officially makes it cold.
