Strangely Perfect

One Small Step for Man, one Giant Leap For Mankind When Armstrong said those words (except I missed out the ‘a’), it looked like men & women would be walking tall on all sorts of astronomical bodies in a continuation of the Apollo programme.  As we no know, things didn’t quite work out like that [...]

Using my Panasonic Lumix TZ7 and it’s fantastic zoom and image stabilisation, and at low-ish light levels (dusk), I took the following pictures last night of the thinnest, slimmest, almost invisible moon that I’ve ever seen.  Just after the sun set, the bats were flying and the moon was ever-so-close to the sun.  On 12x [...]

Okay.  Big title, and, I must admit, written after I spotted a link FROM Google Maps to this website in the logs!  It’s pointing to a post from last year. The good bit is that someone has had the bright idea to make a map, mainly UK based, geographically highlighting incidents of draconian stupidity, crassness [...]

WordPress Upgrade Error I had messages from one of my managed sites that it went invisible and chucked out weird messages….  Well  that’s certainly up to the normal standard of feedback I get as a tech person! However, I too when doing this website got an annoying message on the recently introduced WordPress auto-update feature [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

Crikey! I Never Realised! Maybe certain days have relevance above their station and mere numerical nomenclature?  Who knows.  So read on.  See what happened today! 622 AD  – The Hijra of Muhammad Muhammad runs away from Mecca to escape persecution.  From this point forward, huge swathes of the globe took up Islam, Islamic empires spread [...]

Welcome to the World of Outdoor Ceiling Fans This morning I trapped some pingback comment spam.  “Nothing unusual in that for a WordPress junkie” you’ll be thinking.  And you’re right! What is unusual is the irony of the targeted post and the  subject matter of the pinging website! The comment targeted this post:  http://str…combatting-wordpress-trackback-comment-spam, and [...]

Two news items today confirm the inadequacy of any security system made by man.  After all, once a secret is out, it’s no longer secret. We have the simple human error of losing something combined with the natural inquisitiveness of human beings.  Both these absolute facts of life should drive a big hole through any [...]

Moon Craters with Panasonic Lumix TZ5 These pictures were taken this evening, by myself ,after finding my body clock not in time with the clocks going forward last night!  I chose a nice blue camera from the range. The two full-size clips show: the Earthshine quite clearly lighting up the mare on the Moon (the [...]

Books by Clark Ashton Smith It’s important to realise the impact that this funny, eclectic, multi-talented, poor, skinny man has had on the world.  The whole genre of science fiction and fantasy and whole industries that hang off the backs of people like Tolkien, are also standing on the shoulders of people like H.P. Lovecraft. [...]

Many moons ago, before Crawling Chaos first played, I heard a tune on the late night John Peel Show called “Wading Through a Ventilator” by “The Soft Boys“.  You can get it on the compilation at left. At only 3:20  it has the unique quality of extending time so it feels like about half an [...]

Many moons ago, before Crawling Chaos, I had an interest in astronomy.  In those days, only professionals took photos of stars and it was hard, as you needed plates and plate holders stuck on the back of your telescope, and a dark room to develop pictures.  Telescope needed to be motor driven to track the [...]

Many moons ago I read the short story with the above title. Although not one of Pohl’s best works, it has nevertheless left an obviously lasting impression on me. Written in the mid-fifties, it’s a future tale of consumerism gone mad. In the tale, it’s illegal not to consume as much as possible.  The hero [...]

You should not have the slightest fear in your heart. It is lack of courage that prevents one from attaining Buddhahood, although one may have professed faith in the Lotus Sutra many times since innumerable kalpas ago. There is definitely something extraordinary in the ebb and flow of the tide, the rising and setting of [...]