Project Anchor?

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Rhyming slang for this guy?

Oh dear. Where to begin?

Well, firstly – obviously – this is nonsense.
And secondly, Mark Farnell is clearly a complete and utter Project Anchor.

7 seconds without gravity would be bad, so it’s a good job that it’s simply not going to happen. That’s because NASA might do all that space and science stuff, but critically (for the purposes of this post, at least) they don’t control gravity. And even if you gave them $89 billion – which would be pretty noticeable, given that their total annual budget is about $24 billion – they still couldn’t control gravity.

Also, just because there’s no gravity for 7.3 seconds, doesn’t mean that “everything not secured will rise”. That’s not how physics works (which NASA also doesn’t control). People, vehicles and animals will just remain right where they are – on the floor. Newton told us this way back in the 1600s. Mark Farnell has had 350 years to learn elementary school science, and has failed.

As seconds pass, objects will float 15-20 metres into the air.

Again, no. Absolutely not. But now Mark is putting a (metric) figure on it. And so we can calculate that these objects are somehow allegedly accelerating upwards, at about 2.5ms-2 – so gravity hasn’t just stopped: it’s reversed. But it’s also apparently only reversed to about a quarter of the actual speed of real gravity.
No-one is going to slam into any ceiling. A gentle bump at best, and only if they were already moving that way when the “gravitational anomaly” takes place.

Which they weren’t, and which it won’t.

In fact, given just how horrific the effects of this incident sound, 40-60 million casualties – or just 0.6% of the world’s population – seems like a incredibly small number, given that half the planet will be upside down at that time and will surely just… fall off. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

Look, this is clearly nonsense, but hey – let’s park it and come back to it on August 12th 2026. I can just warn you again to be really careful at whatever you’re up to at 14:33 UTC (15:33 BST, 16:33 CAT), and then we can all laugh at Mark (again) at 14:34 UTC (15:34 BST, 16:34 CAT).

Oh, and hey: you can only begin to guess what the rest of his timeline is like…

What a difference a week made…

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…168 little hours.

[with apologies to Dinah Washington]

March 8th 2026: Don’t send warships.

March 14th 2026: Send warships.

Flip flopping like a fish out of water. And hopefully expiring just as quickly.

I’m no big fan of Iran or their leadership, and no big fan of the UK PM either*, but I’m right with Starmer on his stance on this issue so far. Just as Iran has gradually isolated itself from its neighbours, so Trump is now doing exactly the same with the US’s allies. And I’m glad that so many leaders are showing him a diplomatic middle finger and choosing not to be a contributor in this unholy mess he’s made and continues to make.

The sad thing is that this is a global issue. No matter whether you choose to support the Israeli and US action in the Middle East or you choose to condemn it (or anywhere in between), we’re all affected by the decisions of this dementia-ridden bag of poorly painted skin.

And never in a good way.

.

* There are levels here, obviously.

Sunday

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I have spent much of the day editing photos.

Let’s just say that they are done and leave it there. As ever, some good stuff, some not so good, but then a handful of images that just stand out. Throw enough darts, you’ll get some bullseyes.

Several of them.

And so, with some light relief required, I lit the braai. Because that’s what we do down here.

Yeah. We’ve got some wood to get through.
Can’t wait.

Good chicken, great ribs, disappointing steak – no fault of mine – you can’t win all the time.

But a nice Shiraz and a great evening. Almost – almost – ready for the week ahead.

Almost.

A scheduled post to test my scheduled post settings

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You know that I’ve been doing this daily blogging thing for an awfully long time. But because sometimes I’m travelling or I’m out of range (because that’s something that can happen a lot in South Africa) or I’m just a bit knackered; and because WordPress has a nice reliable system to make sure that I can write in advance and then publish when I want, I schedule a post (or two) to go out and keep that daily record going.

I don’t think it’s cheating, for the simple reason that cheating involves breaking rules, and there are no rules when it comes to this sort of thing. Even if they were, I would make them, and I’d just include “You can schedule posts” as one of them.

So we’re all good.

Until I wrote a post yesterday, and:

WordPress just ignored my request to publish this post this morning. No apology, no warning, no explanation. And what’s more, when I rescheduled it to see if it was a one-off, it failed again.

Maybe it was just that post though, so I’m going to write another one (you’re reading it), schedule it for a few minutes into the future, and see what happens.

If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to work out why it hasn’t worked. And if it does work, I still won’t feel that I can trust WordPress 100%. But that’s anxiety for another day.

So… let’s see what’s going to happen, shall we?

UPDATE:

Oh dear.