In case you didn’t realise, Cats bond with their people too. I’m already convinced. When GD2’s family’s cat Oscar got home after going awol, he slept for about a solid day. This says to me that he was stressed out when away from home, but not when home with his humans.
As Michael Jennings, this blog’s technical curator (to whom continuing thanks), would say, this was in Straya.
Aerodynamic contrails occur when a plane lowers the air pressure as it flies, in turn lowering the air temperature and causing condensation to form on the wings. This condensation then trails behind as the plane continues forward.
In certain humid conditions, the drop in temperature and pressure is such that the droplets of condensation will freeze at varying sizes.
When the sunlight shines through these different sized droplets, it will refract at different wavelengths, hence the variety of colours that can be seen.
So far, Surrey have been doing well against Hants, who are now 120 for 8. At lunch, Hants were 60 for 5. And I love that those five wickets were taken by Clarke, Clark, Clarke, Clarke and Clark. That’s Rikki Clarke with the e and Jordan Clark without the e. Rikki Clarke has since got another, and has 5 for 21.
This is the game I’m talking about. Wickets are tumbling all over the country, so 120 for 8 may not (that sound you hear is of bets being hedged) end up being such a bad score. Yeah, now it’s 135 for 8. Morkel, now bowling, has 0 for 37. This year, Morkel is not the force he was last year. Even so, this makes a nice change from all this.
Surrey just brought Clark back on, and he now has three wickets. Jordan Clark. Hants 135 for 9. They were 26 for 4 at one early point. Not unrelated, I surmise, to the fact that they are starting county matches at 10.30am rather than 11am, now that it’s not summer any more.
TWO DAYS LATER: Well that was a hell of a lot less like it that it had started out seeming to be. Far from taking my mind off the England test team (currently 226 for 7 in their first innings in the final test), Surrey copied it. In the first test this summer, as I recall, England got eight early wickets, but nevertheless contrived to lose by a lot. Surrey have just done exactly the same, losing this game by a whopping 272, having started out by having had Hants 90 for 8.
I am a true cricket fan. I am unable to ignore cricket merely because it is going badly for the teams I support. Real fans don’t just enjoy. They suffer. It’s the rule.
I am Old, but I have made enough friends among the Young for me to be able to twist Young arms and mostly get them to do all this for me. The other day a Young Person agreed to get a copy of this CD for me. (I only buy CD’s on line from Amazon, and this CD is not on Amazon.) If I had tried to buy this CD, I would probably have spent longer failing to accomplish this than I will take listening successfully to the CD.
One of the things I like about living in London is that if I want to buy tickets for something, I can go there beforehand, and buy them, the twentieth century way.
Increasingly, I find that trying to visit any “visitor attraction” is starting to resemble trying to get on an airplane. And as McIntyre explains, booking beforehand on your computer is just as bad.
A good bit, concerning those never-read “terms and conditions”:
I’m slightly worried that in five years time iTunes are going to show up at my door and say: “We own this house now.”
And don’t get me started on passwords. Just watch him speaking (for me) about passwords.
I don’t know why there are big black bits above and below Michael McIntyre. If anyone can suggest a way to get rid of these that I am capable of doing, I would be most grateful.
… and is now having the time of its life, or so the tweet from #DanClarkSport says.
No, say commenters. The bird thinks the golf ball is an egg and is trying to break it and get a meal. The bouncing of the ball is a bug, and a rather alarming bug, not a feature.
This bit of video, courtesy The Independent, impresses me greatly. It’s a new design for a bike, but a bike which doesn’t use a chain:
The bike instead uses a shaft-drive system to transmit power from the pedals to the wheel. … Manufacturers claim it makes power transfer more efficient.
I’m guessing that, if that’s true, this is made possible by new materials, and in particular by plastic that is both very light and very strong.
I particularly like how they include a multi-speed gear, just by having a cog-wheel that shifts along the shaft.
It will be interesting to see if this really is an improvement which catches on, or is merely an internet-friendly idea that turns out, for various simple or complicated reasons, not to be any use.
Says the first (cynical) commenter: it’s not new, and …:
This is the first time I’ve tried embedding a bit of video in this blog. Let’s see how this works:
Seems to have worked. Another major improvement of this blog over the old one, especially important for me at moments like this, is that when I press “Save draft” and them “Preview”, I get a preview of exactly how things will end up looking. The old blog, for some idiot reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t do this. Not exactly. Well, maybe it could have, but I couldn’t make it.
I found this news report, about how drones are replacing sheepdogs on the farms of New Zealand, here. This is definitely the most interesting “other creatures” thing I learned about during the last seven days. I first got a clue about this story when semi-watching a BBC4 TV documentary about the wildlife of New Zealand. They must have digressed into not-so-wild life.
According to the above video, drones haven’t yet learned how to function when it’s raining. So sheepdogs, for the time being, are still useful when it’s wet. But work is surely progressing on that, and the days of sheepdogs as workers on farms are surely numbered. These things can take a long time, so it will be a big number. But, a number.
LATER: I just realised it’s Thursday today, rather than Friday, which is the day I usually focus especially on cats, dogs, etc. Well, no matter. I’m probably the only one who noticed, so I’m not even going to apologise.
