I’m heading down south today, so here’s one I wrote yesterday:
You know me. I like lighthouses.
Here’s a different one, from Pilsum in Germany.
Built in 1891 in the very North Western corner of Germany, it sits on a dyke, and guarded the entrance to the Ems?hörn channel. But then they moved the channel and so it was no longer required. It’s been just sitting there looking garish since 1915.
Well done to the Germans for keeping it. More defunct lighthouses as landmarks, please.
When we bought this house, we inherited paid lots of money for the garden as well. The previous owner was an enthusiastic and very competent gardener, and thus the garden is amazing. When we moved in in February, it looked good, but this being our first spring, we are amazed to see the number of flowers everywhere.
I could take a photo of the flowers, but to get them all in would be difficult. So instead, I chose to use a bit of ICM to get the overall effect without having to concentrate on any of the detail.
Beagle-eyed horticulturists will surely recognise a couple of types of roses, at least one hydrangea and a plethora of Alstromeria spp.
Gorgeous.
This blog isn’t simply going to be a list of posts including photos I have taken of birds. I know there’s been a lot of that of late. But recently, there have been a lot of birds in my vicinity and it was either ignore them completely (which would have been very rude) or take their photos. I’m generally not a very rude person, and so I’ve been taking their photos, and in the absence of being able to do much else at the moment, I figure I may as well share them here.
This little guy might be big on your screen right now but he’s actually just 7cm long and weighs about 8g. That’s less than a R5 coin. On the plus side, he’s actually worth more than a R5 coin in dollar terms, and that’s because our economy is utterly buggered.
He’s a Swee Waxbill (Coccopygia melanotis), part of a small flock that have become regular visitors to our back garden; possibly to visit the plentiful selection of birdbaths and the regularly refilled bird table, but most likely just because of the sparkling company on offer.
Come back tomorrow for possibly fewer bird images with accompanying text.
Hail, thunder, lightning.
They said it was going to be exciting.
The view from our bedroom window suggests that they weren’t wrong.
(Also, see here.)
There’s little point in me writing an essay on any given subject while I’m away and unable to discuss my thoughts on that given subject. And so that’s why I rely mainly on short posts and quota photos*.
Like this one from September 2017.
This was an art installation called Waterlicht, in which a certain pass in the Peak District National Park in the UK was flooded with blue laser light to represent rising ocean levels and general panic. To be fair, if the sea gets there, we are going to be in a lot of trouble, given that it’s about 300m above (current) sea level.
The project hadn’t been well advertised or attended on its first two evenings. But this particular night was chaos, with 6km tailbacks and lots of walking along dark country roads with traffic everywhere. Was it worth it? Probably not.
But it was an experience.
You might think from my flippant attitude just beneath the image above that I’m some sort of climate change denier.
Not so. Obviously not. I recognise that things are changing, and not in a good way. And because it’s a gradual change, rather than one specific moment in time, it’s being overlooked by many people as far less of a problem than it actually is.
I do think that we would all be better served by less sensationalism around the subject, though. Good science is still just science. It isn’t compatible with sensationalism, and I do completely understand people’s scepticism when they have been fed ridiculous headlines of doom and gloom by celebrities and newspapers for years and years, only for those predicted timelines to be wholly unfounded.
Those individuals and publications sowed the seeds of doubt; they have made the bed upon which we now lie. And yet, science still gets the blame. Regaining the trust of the public on this subject is something that we will probably never be able to do.
* this one seems to have gone on a bit though.