Strangely Perfect

Amazing and Weird When the pictures were taken, it was nearly pitch dark outside! The shots are in 2 columns below, taken at about 1 this morning.  Those on the left are “autoenhanced” using Irfanview as part of the batch resize operation before uploading to the web.  Those on the right are resized without any [...]

Google StreetView is in Antarctica Although you can see how they’ve done it using the cameras and flags in the snow, it’s still really cute that they’ve given the appearance that the (in)famous Google Streetview Car has been that way. The Google Streetview Car is the one with the funny thing on its roof, NOT [...]

Following on from yesterday’s snow – it’s still here (plus icicles) but with the addition of a heron, studiously examining the fish pond….

And yes, brr, it’s cold, but not as bad as back home in Northumberland.  No way.

Yup!  It’s true. Apparently, the only way that PWW et al can now made any headway is by asking inane questions on the very websites that are trying to close them down!!! Comment Spam from Kevin Hoeffer This is the content of a comment added to an old post I made on this website about [...]

Introduction So it’s time to move… It’s time to get down with it… It’s time to testify.. …and I want to know… ARE YOU READY TO TESTIFY? Brothers and sisters… I give you.. A testimonial… The MC5! With a vague resemblance to my personal life and status, and a bit like “technology mirroring life”, this [...]

In the above video, shot with a mobile phone and first reported at the beginning of April this year, some blokes, watched by a load of other blokes, whip a young woman for breaking some law. At that time, the Taliban blokes (for it is them) had just come to an agreement with the Pakistan [...]

Highlighting the Differences in Public Health provision, the Attitudes to Death and Responsibilities of the State and the Individual to Public Welfare. The title is the biggest bit – trust me. Introduction This takes us from today’s news from America and the Duffy’s Cut project to a tiny hamlet in Northumberland, England, called Throckrington. Duffy’s [...]

In this stark summary from a meeting of 2.5k scientists from across the globe, we find that not only is anthropomorphic climate change real, not only is it getting worse, but also, within the error margins for the ‘hockey stick‘ predictions of only a few years back, recent measurements put the actual effects at the [...]

Not being a frequent foreign traveller, my recent stop in Eisenstadt, Austria, at a 5 star hotel open my eyes a bit.  A peculiar quirk, for me, was the toilet, with a shelf, in the room’s en-suite bathroom.  I’ve since found that it’s called a “shelf toilet”, a German invention to ease the inspection of [...]

There is a saying of the Buddhist monk Nichiren Daishonin, that Winter Always Turns to Spring Those who believe in the Lotus Sutra are as if in winter, but winter always turns to spring. Never, from ancient times on, has anyone heard or seen of winter turning back to autumn. Nor have we ever heard [...]

I’ve just been reading this fascinating book, Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism by a non-Buddhist, Richard Seager, who gives a really good, well-balanced investigation into Buddhism, the Soka Gakkai (SGI) and it’s meteoric rise in popularity under the inspirational personas of Makiguchi, Toda and Ikeda. Well you’d [...]

Chinese Censorship: As part of the BBCs “take” on the international views on the new, 44th President of the United States, their China correspondent Michael Bristow has reported that his inauguration speech was censored in China. Apparently, the English version on the Xinghua News site is okay, but the Chinese version for the locals has [...]

Clearly, there is something wrong with the motor and finance industries of the world (a.k.a America for this article, because when America sneezes, the world catches a cold). We are all acutely aware how their problems affect us. We believe that we live in healthy democracies where we vote for the people and systems that [...]