This Friday’s Other Creature is this:
Found it here. Thank you Clarissa for telling me about this.
It’s all in connection with Australian Ball Tampering.
My favourite factual discovery re this rumpus: Cricket Australia has a Head of Integrity. Reminds me of this guy.
For two reasons. First, England came second to bottom, which is not the usual arrangement at all. It is now being said that they were tired, from playing too much rugby for their clubs and before that for the British Lions.
But the other reason this was a strange end to the Six Nations was the weather. The last weekend of the Six Nations is supposed to be a day where all we rugby couch potatoes celebrate that Winter is well and truly over, that Spring is here, and that we can finally rise up out of our couches and venture out properly into the first serious sunshine of the new year, for hours at a time.
Instead, along with England doing really badly in the rugby, it was like this:
Click on that to get the bigger picture. That’s GodDaughter2 weekending out in the countryside, in Hampshire or some such county out there. That photo was taken by her, on the same day that England got beaten by Ireland at Twickenham, where it also snowed. Which was all part of why England did so badly, I think. For Ireland, the worse the weather is the better they like it.
According to the short-term weather forecasters, who are the only weather forecasters I take seriously, this second cold snap will soon be done, and then Spring can finally get started.
I’m trying to wrench my sleep patterns back into something like sanity, and this now leaves me very tired. Which is the plan working, but it makes blogging rather difficult. So, today, one photo, and that’s your lot:
Plus, although I’m tired, here is a detail, that emphasises the flamingo aspect:
The relevant bit of the website.
On March 21st, Roz Watkins, author of The Devil’s Dice, will be signing copies of that book at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, an event which I will attend. This afternoon, finding myself in that part of London on account of needing a new battery for my ancient Casio watch, I dropped in on Waterstones to see what, if anything, they were doing with the book.
They had just one copy on show, in a New Crime Hardbacks display:
Can you spot it? Memo to self: If I ever design a book cover, make the title on the front either in dark lettering with a light background, or with light lettering on a dark background. The Devil’s Dice, with its light orange title on a light coloured sky, is second from the right, bottom row (on account of Watkins beginning with W). Another memo to self: When I become a published author, have a surname starting with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet, rather than almost at the end.
Anyway, here’s a close-up of it, just so you know it was really there:
I needed another copy of the book, because I gave the advance copy Roz sent me to someone else. But I was reluctant to buy the only copy of The Devil’s Dice that they had on show, thus depriving Waterstonians of any further sight of it. I asked at the desk if they had a paperback. Oh no, they said, not for at least six months. I asked if they had any more copies on order. Yes, said the lady, sounding rather impressed when her computer told her, we have eighty copies coming, ordered this morning.
I have no idea what that means. Maybe those copies are just for the book signing, and maybe many will be sent back after that. But maybe this is good, and reflects how well the original launch in Derby went, assuming that this did go well. Anyway, with eighty more copies on their way to Waterstones, I bought that one copy that they had today.
See also, The Devil’s Dice with dog, in Waterstones Brighton. Again, right down by the floor with the other Ws.
As a Blackadder fan, I have long known about the use of pigeons during World War 1, to send messages. Pigeons like the one in this photo:
Twitter caption:
War Pigeons were very effectively deployed in the First World War. For instance, they carried messages, like the one being attached to a pigeon by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front, which can be seen in this picture.
Quite so. But what made me decide to post the above photo here was this exchange, in the comments.
“Liagson”:
Wayne Meyer:
They used WEP. Wartime Encryption for Pigeons. It was a very early wireless standard.
Blog and learn. Not only did I just discover that pigeon messages were – of course, they’d have to have been – encrypted. I also learned that you can link directly to individual Twitter comments.
And what better way could there to learn about the activities of birds than via Twitter?
In other face recognition news, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Big Prawn is having its face blurred out of photos on Google Maps.
The problem Google faced was that recognisable people with recognisable faces were showing up on Google Maps, owing to the accident of where they happened to be when the Google Maps photos happened to be taken. So, they introduced a face recognition programme with a difference. Every time a face was recognised to be a face, that face was blurred into unrecognisability in the final Google Maps photos.
And this also got done to the Big Prawn.
The Big Prawn is a giant sculpture, presumably an advert for a place where you can eat regular sized prawns. No, not according to Wikipedia. It’s just a big prawn.
In Australia, it would seem that Big Thing means something different to what I mean by this phrase.
A cow also got its face blurred over.
Confining Cats and Other Creatures postings to Friday is becoming difficult. These days, as on this day, I often don’t bother.
A commenter on the piece I did yesterday at Samizdata, about Twitter and about Facebook, says of Twitter (the one I now greatly prefer), that it is …:
… like entering a beehive. Opinionated fools screaming at each other. …
I know what this commenter means. Personally, I like a bit of opinionated screaming, in among the other stuff I follow. But I already think I know enough about how Twitter works to believe that if Twitter is a beehive and if you don’t like that, then you should be following different people. And that’s pretty easy to make happen.
My Twitter is partly beehive, but partly it is other kinder, gentler things. So, for instance, one of the people I follow pointed me to this, I think, excellent photo, of an owl:
I don’t know if you think that’s as good as I think it is, but you would surely agree that this photo is not an opinionated fool screaming at another opinionated fool. I have added the lady who took this photo, The Afternoon Birder, to my following list.
I have lost track of who it was of my followees that I should be thanking for linking to that. Twitter is difficult like that. I rather think that it has a habit of muddling up the order in which postings (tweets) appear, in such a way that scrolling back to find a particular one gets difficult.
No, I’ve not bought yet another camera. I refer to the new Panasonic Lumix FZ150 that I bought myself, as a late Christmas present, in January 2012. When I look back through my photo-archives it becomes clearer and clearer that this was the moment when my photos really started looking pretty.
On February 1st 2012, I posted nine of the photos I had taken on January 30th, of my fellow digital photographers. Here are nine more photos of photoers, that I took on that same expedition:
In these photos, we observe some dedicated photographers, with their SLRs, some hobbyists with what are still only cheap cameras, and, inexorably on the rise, smartphones.
One more for luck, an example of a genre I grow ever more fond of, the perhaps rather (in this case very) blurry bird, in flight:
I cropped the original, to hide the photoer’s face.
Yes, I picked nine good ones to show you, back in February 2012. Now I can easily show nine more just as good, and then another that I only now noticed.
That was the change that new camera brought with it. Before it, I took the occasional good photo, and many bad ones. When the FZ150 arrived, I took quite a lot of good photos, and as many bad ones as ever.
You wait nearly thirteen years at BMdotcom for a giant penis photo, and then, out of the blue, two come along. That one, in the post before last yesterday, and this one:
Crikey, blimey, etc.. Or as we Brits also used to say: Well I’m blowed.
Fox News, so also “other creatures”.
You Had One Job calls this an “unfortunate helicopter shot”. But I bet the photoer could hardly believe his extreme good fortune.
I like it when cars are old enough to have round headlights, and I especially like it when they have not just two round headlights, but four round headlights:
Photoed by me in Wilton Road, on my way to Victoria Station, earlier this month. My camera does artificially lit darkness rather well, I think. In reality, things were not nearly so clear, or not to me.
I know, I know. Friday is the day here for cats and other creatures, not for antique cars. But, this car looks American, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that it too is some kind of animal, like a Cougar or a Mustang or some such thing. Anyone?
Some day soon, you’ll be able to feed a photo like this into Google and say: What kind of car is this? Perhaps that day is already here.
But hey, how about this?!? I’m definitely getting better at this internet searching malarkey. On the bonnet of this car it says “R/T”. So, I typed “r/t car” into Google, and straight away got to this:
R/T is the performance marker used on Dodge automobiles since the 1960s (much like Chevrolet Super Sport). R/T stands for Road/Track (no “and”). R/T models come with R/T badging, upgraded suspension, tires, brakes, and more powerful engines.
So, which Dodge would this one be? (Scrolls down through all the pictures on offer.) It would be, unless my eyes deceive me, the 1971 Dodge Charger Super Bee. A charger and a “super” bee. So, two kinds of incompatible other creature. There you go. What did I just tell you?