I don’t do them thar memes but if Scott McCloud can do this one then I be feeling I bain’t got much choice. Arr; me hearties; etc.



Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don't change your clothes. Don't fix your hair. Just take a picture.
Post that picture with no editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

As if my hair could be fixed.

Meanwhile:

I could survive for 54 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Jeremy points out that a real velociraptor is (was) the size of a large chicken and you could probably kick it to death (assuming you are wearing a pair of stout shoes) and then eat it.

To smile or not to smile by Chandi

I had vaguely planned to try again to go to London to be a tourist and got as far as getting to the bus stop a couple of hours late (difficulty dragging myself out of bed) when I had a warning twinge of motion sickness that put me off the idea of being in a hot stuffy coach for ninety minutes on a lovely sunny day. Went home and caught up with things like laundry that had been skipped last weekend because I was in London. Our garden was lovely, so much so that I ended up photographing the lawn rather than mowing it.

Watched a bit of Nasa TV, live streaming footage of astronauts attaching the Kibo module to the International Space Shed, astronauts working or bobbing about inside the various modules of the station, and astronauts being interviewed by local TV stations, one after another. They had the entire combined crew all lined up together—the Kibo module finally provides the station with a room large enough to do this. It is large enough to get ‘lost’ in—meaning you can end up drifting in the middle of the room unable to reach any of the walls.

Watched Doctor Who ‘Forest of the Dead’ which was brilliant! Jeremy arrived home from spending Saturday being soaked in Bristol, and we watched ‘Forest of the Dead’ again. It was still brilliant!

Today I lost a certain amount of time from following a link to an online graphic novel Rosewll, Texas. This is an alternate-history story where Texas never joins the USA. Set in 1947, it starts when ‘Lieutenant Gene Roddenberry, a young Texas Air Militia pilot, shoots down an unidentified flying disk near Roswell, western-most city in the Federated States of Texas. Agents from the United States, the California Republic, the Franco-Mexican Empire, and the Third-and-a-Half Reich all want to learn the flying disk's secrets.’ A fun romp, if you can overlook a certain amount of chauvinism.

Once things had cooled down a but, Jeremy and I made a start on digging a pond to give the frogs we keep disturbing somewhere nice to live. So far we have a hole, and some carpet and liner that will have to deploy tomorrow. The new cat in the neighbourhood continues to amuse us with her antics.

Camera On Mars Orbiter Snaps Phoenix During Landing • One of those images that is more impressive once you know what it is: a photo of Mars Phoenix descending with its parachute deployed, as seen from the Mars Orbiter (which is been photographing the surface of Mars for years now).

A third giant red storm has flared up on Jupiter, joining the Great Red Spot and the recently developed Red Spot Junior. (Via Reddit)

New Jawbone Bluetooth headsets · “We regard them as personal accessories or even jewelery, and, as such, believe they need to be a complete departure from the gadgetry of the mobile and headset industry.”

‘While we've been using our primitive, apelike arms like a bunch of jerks, the squids of the world have been clutching their prey with their superior tentacles and laughing at us. Until now!’ (Via jwz)

jinty’s been bothering me to contribute to the Portmeirion fotonovella, but what with one thing and another i have not got around to doing much. On the other hand, when cleanskies whipped out the iBook at my birthday fondue to perpetrate evol_wasps I felt emboldended to knock together the above.

I realize I have broken the rules by using Mostra Three rather than Impact but, well, (a) variety is the spice of life, and (b) having actually purchased Mostra with money, I would like to have a chance to use it from time to time.

We did some gardening today—we installed a compost bin and put some of our mouldering pile of grass in to it, and we bought some telescopic loppers (for only £4.95) and lopped some branches off the leylandii. Then Jeremy have the bramble a good lopping to reveal the ivy-encrusted remains of the rhubarb that we don’t want. I suggested we try lifting it, imagining it has having one of those shallow underground manifestations that can be levered up with a fork. It turns out that rhubarb’s underground part is a surprisingly deep and broad mass of bright orange woody stuff. Luckily for us this can be sliced pretty effectively with a spade. By the time we had both taken turns on the digging, we had a wheel-barrow full of it.

We don’t know for sure, but we assume that the root chunks would probably grow in to a new rhubarb plant if planted and suitably fussed over. We have already given away some likely looking portions to tinyjo, one of the few people we know who claims to like rhubarb. Anyone else local who fancies trying their luck with their own hunk of orange wood is welcome to come around and take their prize away some time before we work out how to dispose of it.

I have discovered that there are two reasons (at least) to not sit your bag on the kichen counter while packing or unpacking it:

1. If something regularly sits on the floor or on the ground, it should not go on the table. You would not put your shoes on the work surface, right?
2. If the shoulder straps of the bag catch the handle of your coffeepot, the latter may be flung to the floor, shattering in to a thousand shards of glass and leaving you without a working coffee maker.

It did not take us long to decide that it would be easier to replace the machine as a whole with a slimmer, more shiny Italian coffee-maker, rather than try to source a spare part for a machine that has been discontinued by the shop we bought it from. The new machine also comes with a vacuum flask pot, which (a) will keep the coffee warmer without usibng a heated hotplate, and (b) might not break as much when dropped.

I can guess what you’re thinking: what, more gardening pictures? Doesn’t Damian do anything apart from hanging around his cherry tree waiting for the blossom to appear?

I don’t have any pictures of our gardening efforts, so here’s one from Jeremy.