Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or values of his employers.
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"The clergyman, in his 50s, told nurses he had been hanging curtains when he fell backwards on to his kitchen table.
He happened to be nude at the time of the mishap, said the vicar, who insisted he had not been playing a sex game.
The vicar had to undergo a delicate operation to extract the vegetable."
Four eggs in one day
The change in the weather these last few days has been unbelievable. Tuesday morning, I was cleaning out the chickens and it was warm enough in the sun to do without your coat, even at half seven. Then the arctic gales blew in and now your fingers feel like they’re about to snap off. The little puddles on the path through the nature reserve are freezing over; so is the water in the bird bath.
The chickens, bizarrely, seem to be thriving in the cold. They’re all malting, and Gerry in particular is shedding the feathers around her neck. Every morning when we open up the nesting box to check for eggs there are a few more of them tucked into the straw. She’s starting to look like a dowdy old woman with a scruffy, worn-out boa round her shoulders.
Despite that, egg production is actually up. They’re supposed to lay eggs on two out of every three days, but apart from one barren day a few weeks back we’ve had two eggs every single day since 11 September. One was enormous: 40% heavier, and much larger than the ones we usually get. It was one of Barbara’s – you can tell from the colour – so how she sat down the day that popped out I don’t know.
On Wednesday morning, the day after the weather turned cold and with little piles of snow still on the ground, we opened up the box to find four. Someone had laid two in a single night. How, I don’t know, but we’re not complaining.
It’s still cold now, and while that’s put the cat into semi-hibernation it doesn’t seem to have done the same to any of the other wildlife round about. The mice are still active in the garden, with something knocking off another one every night or so. I put a huge one in the bin this morning. Its stiff little tail was six inches long, and its body like a decent sausage roll. And last night we cycled into town, riding back along the river through the reserve at eleven, scattering startled rabbits in all directions as we went.
Then we got to the university bridge. We turned the corner and pulled on the brakes, coming to a stop beside an enormous fox, as tall as a Labrador and as slim as a greyhound. It stood there and looked at us as we did the same in return, its eyes caught in the amber glow of the streetlights and flashed by the green lamps on our bikes.
We stayed like that for a minute or two, nobody moving, until slowly he turned around and slipped into the bushes, still just a foot or two from our bikes, where he stayed until we cycled on.
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Great for giving backgrounds some depth in Photoshop and web pages. I was looking for something like this a few weeks back for a project I was working on. A bit late now, but here for next time.
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Use selection tools, layer effects and highlights to make it look like your image has a sprinkling of water.
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Can’t take beautiful smooth waterfall shots because you haven’t got a tripod? Do it in Photoshop instead.
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Surprisingly easy, effective way to put any scene on to water.
Before the awards: the empty stage, and the graphics being tweaked
Last night was our awards for this year. Today, the expo. They always coincide.
The Awards came back to central London – we took over the Ballroom at the Grosvenor House Hotel – from the Hurlingham Club where we’ve been for the last few years. The food was excellent, the comedy very funny (Stephen K Amos – I’d not seen him before, but the demo we picked him from was great) and the ambience pretty spot on. I didn’t get to bet until four this morning and even then there was still a good crowd in the bar, which inevitably meant there were some very tired faces at the expo today.
Perhaps the fact the expo was so small this year was a blessing in disguise. We were the only magazine with hospitality which meant we had an almost constant stream of visitors, giving us an excellent excuse to break up the trips around the show floor with plentiful teas and coffees with the other exhibitors back on our comfy chairs.
The most interesting conversation of the two events, though, wasn’t one I had with anyone at the expo, but with the woman who looked after the awards. I asked her what she did when she wasn’t being a trophy hander (or trophy girl as she put it). She said she was a singer, model and advert actor and gets a lot of work from DFS. Why? Because she’s short, and they like to use short people because it makes their sofas look big.
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“Elevator maker Otis will replace hundreds of lift buttons in France after authorities found radioactive materials imported from India at a supplier factory, a source at Otis said on Wednesday.”
Otis says there’s no risk to users.
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“While he was cleaning the fish tank in his house, he was holding a fish in his hand and went to the toilet for passing urine. When he was passing urine, the fish slipped from his hand and entered his urethra…”
So it just slipped in, did it? Hmmm… OK. How many people hold a fish in their hand while they go to the loo? And how did it get from there to… well, perhaps best not asked.
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Hitler apparently planned to lay broadband cables from Berlin to Nuremberg so he could broadcast propaganda shows to the masses. Why? Because if you relied entirely on radio you couldn’t control the pictures people saw in their mind. Goebbels crystallised the appeal of TV for the party, explaining that:
“The advantage of a visual image over the audible broadcast is the audible becomes a visual image with the help of an individual’s imagination, which can’t be kept under control. Regardless, each will always see his own.”
Now that we run three mornings a week, we’re both noticing the inevitable, inexorable onset of winter. A few weeks ago we could run down by the river and watch the sun come up. This morning we switched to running on the road, in under the amber glow of the street lights. It’s not nearly so pleasant, pretty or healthy to be running through those fumes.
Nobody likes the darker mornings, and fewer still welcome the gloomy evenings, which mean that night has already fallen by the time you leave work. No wonder the drive to abandon GMT once and for all is gathering support from the likes of RoSPA, Age Concern and the CBI, which reckons that standardising on European time would be good for business.
Yet this weekend we’ll be rolling back the clocks once more, and while it may give us another couple of weeks of sunrise running it also means we’ll all spend more time living under artificial light later on in the day.
That might have made sense once, but not any more. Stuart Hampson explains why in today’s Times Online:
When Britain was an agricultural nation, people got up at first light, spent the daylight hours working outdoors and relied on candles and firelight after sunset. For many today, a typical day runs from 7am to 11pm, so the middle of that day isn’t noon but 3pm. There is a total mismatch between daylight and waking hours.
“Daylight saving time”, introduced in 1916, shifts our clocks forward an hour for seven months of the year. This was still geared to agricultural priorities, allowing farmers to work later on the harvest in daylight. It simply fails to recognise how we now live.
But Hampson’s most compelling argument for synchronising our clocks with the rest of Europe has less to do with the fact that GMT is an outdated construct, and more that lighter evenings mean we’ll use less energy lighting our homes, streets and office.
That, surely, is good enough reason to do away with one winter tradition we could all do without.
Every day brings more unfavourable press for the Republicans, which can only be a good thing for the Democrat campaign. Much of it seems to focus on VP candidate Sarah Palin. Why? Perhaps because the chances of her assuming the Oval Office swivel chair before the end of a Republican administration’s first term aren’t altogether unlikely.
Today, having moved on from Troopergate, the networks are majoring on her spending habits, pointing out that the electoral campaign has splurged more than $150,000 on clothes for her, her husband and their kids since it added her name to the ballot. In the words of Politico:
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.
The excellent Huffington Post, which has become a most-read sources for this campaign, puts this expenditure into context:
During a week in which the Republican ticket is trying to highlight its connection to the working class — and, by extension, promoting its newest campaign tool, Joe the Plumber — it was revealed that Palin’s fashion budget for several weeks was more than four times the median salary of an American plumber ($37,514). To put it another way: Palin received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. A Democrat put it in even blunter terms: her clothes were the cost of health care for 15 or so people.
The revelation comes on the same day that CNN is reporting how much the Palin family claimed back to fly not just the Alaskan governor but also her husband and children around the country:
Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.
The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.
A campaign spokesperson assured reporters that the clothes will be donated to charity once the race is over, whoever wins.
If it goes the Republicans’ way, the new administration will have 77 days in which to ready itself for office. Think Progress reports an exchange between Palin and some third-grade students. What does a Vice President do? They asked. Her answer: ‘[T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.’
Except they’re not. The Senate website explains that:
During the twentieth century, the role of the vice president has evolved into more of an executive branch position. Now, the vice president is usually seen as an integral part of a president’s administration and presides over the Senate only on ceremonial occasions or when a tie-breaking vote may be needed.
Is this why The News Quiz was so delighted when McCain named Sarah Palin his running mate?
But perhaps the most worrying story for the campaign, and perhaps the US as a whole, is an apparent endorsement of the McCain campaign from al-Qaeda sympathisers. Says the Telegraph.
In an endorsement that will not be welcomed by Mr McCain’s flagging campaign, the group said that if al-Qaeda wants to exhaust the US militarily and economically, the “impetuous” Republican presidential candidate is the better choice.
Probably not what he wanted to hear.
Technorati Tags:
mccain, john+mccain, palin, sarah+palin, us+election, election
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“Marks & Spencer is selling mince pies that go past their best before date in November. And the store has bags of Christmas sweets that should be consumed two weeks before the big day.”
Starting Christmas three months before the day itself is a pet peeve of mine. The doubly-irritating thing about this story is the fact that the box is clearly stamped ‘Classics for Christmas’. Buy them now ‘for Christmas’, though, and they’ll be off before you open them.
McCain is running on public funds in his campaign for the White House, yet Reuters reports his team soliciting contributions from Russia’s ambassador to the UN.
In the letter, McCain urged Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, to contribute anywhere from $35 (20 pounds) to $5,000 (2,912 pounds) to help ensure McCain’s victory over Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama, currently ahead in voter preference polls.
“If I have the honour of continuing to serve you, I make you this promise: We will always put America — her strength, her ideals, her future — before every other consideration,” McCain assured Churkin.
Oops! McCain asks Russian envoy for money | Oddly Enough | Reuters
Self-sufficiency- Reviving the rhubarb
- This year’s crabapple harvest
- The nasty death of a naughty chicken
- Struggling to keep the potatoes under control
- Eating the first lettuce of 2011
- We’ve transplanted our tomatoes
- The artichokes are rising… and so are the errant potatoes
- Curing the pecking hens
- Our rhubarb has made it through the winter
- Time to clean the greenhouse windows