Herewith another photograph taken from my kitchen window, showing the first signs of winter. In the distance, a lake of white mist submerges the countryside; nearer to hand an iron grey frost has settled over the land. According to the pub pundits, the glossy red berries hanging heavily on every roadside bush foretell a bleak winter; according to the weather forecast, we may have the first snow this week.
And according to the diary, British Summer Time is still with us until October 31st.
I'm reading a beautiful book by a chap called Mark Knowler. It is called Classic Brooke Bond Picture Card Collections, and reproduces twelve complete Brooke Bond picture card albums with every card in place. For me, it opened up a magic doorway to 1956, when I was nine years old and frantically trying to collect the Out Into Space seriesbefore they stopped issuing the cards (one in every packet of tea). I never did get them all, but I had the half-filled album for years, with the cards messily glued in with rubber solution. Now, this book gives me a chance to see them all again. They are just as beautiful as I remembered them. And how interesting to see Mars depicted with 'canals', features that were seen, and mapped, by hundreds of widely separated astronomers - even though they never existed at all! There's a message there for the climate change boys.
Sandwell MP Tom Watson has been questioning Arts Council England Chief Executive Alan Davey over the horrendous costs incurred during the constructon of the hideous 'arts centre' The Public (above). The building, erected in one of the poorest boroughs in England, went £49,000,000 over its already unjustifiable budget. The Wolverhampton Express & Star has printed the interview in full here, but for those too lazy to read it, here are a few highlights:
There's nothing like having the facts at your fingertips.
A little while ago I blogged about 'No Pressure' the disastrous video put out by 10:10. However, this isn't the first green ad to show a remarkable lack of judgement.Take the one above, showing hundreds of planes crashing into the Two Towers. The message was that the 9/11 atrocity was bad, but nothing compared to what nature can do (they refer specifically to the Boxing Day Tsunami). Needless to say there was an outcry from those who had suffered family losses in both disasters; WWF responded by saying that they knew nothing about the ad, a fib which swiftly exploded in their faces when the documents in which they had signed off the ad were produced. Tasteless - but wasn't the ad also pointless?
Then there's our next clip. which shows a hapless office worker being bullied and shunned for the sin of buying a 4x4. This one, too, was pulled from release almost immediately.
More recently, a grumpy juvenile hoody was recruited to threaten the punters:
Finally, an advert from 2006, which a little girl being hung as the block of ice beneath her melts.
Apart from being tacky, all these ads have one strange thing in common. They all stay a million light years away from discussing 'the science' on which their advocacy is supposedly based - because, I suspect, if they made such pseudoscientific claims within the context of an advertisement, they would immediately find themselves in court.
Here's another snapshot from my kitchen window, intended to show What A Difference a Day Makes.
After a bright day yesterday, today finds the neighbourhood cloaked in fog.
The conference was held in Brum this year, so I thought it might be fun to hop over there and study the milling throng. Besides, somebody might have been giving away freebies. Below are a few of the photographs I took.
Why is that girl dressed as a cow? Because she is supporting a Friends of the Earth campaign called "Cheese for the Grater Good". She was also giving away tiny chunks of 'rainforest-free' cheese. As it turned out, one of those chunks of cheese (plus explanatory leaflet) was the only freebie I got - until the last moment, when somebody handed me a pack of the Top Trumps cards pictured below - created by their political pundit Adam Boulton. They are already selling on eBay for £2.00 a time.
Getting a little tired of my usual tipple of cider, I tried something new. That's it above: Jeremiah Weed's Sweet Tea Liquor, an American drink marketed exclusively by Wetherspoon's. You get a jigger of the liquor topped up with lemonade and ice. How does it taste? Well, like sweet tea, but as it is actually a tea flavoured vodka, it packs a punch which might well flatten the unwary. Notice the peculiar, but quaint, glass; the ads say it is 'served in the traditional jam jar'. A tradition, I suspect, which was invented by Wetherspoons.
And here's today's spelling mistake, courtesy of The Independent:
Eco-fascism has come of age! Here's a preview of how climate skeptics will be dealt with when Der Tag finally arrives. The video - created by the rabidly climatist 10:10 campaign - has aroused such disgust across the web that the greenies have had to take it down from their site and from YouTube. Unfortunately for them, as fast as they take it down, concerned citizens stick it up again. Not unlike Whac-A-Mole.
Interestingly, not a murmur of this has yet reached the MSM (main stream media) unless you count the splendid James Delingpole's blog in the Telegraph. Will the story be featured in the Sundays?
At any rate the crazies from 10:10 won't have lost money on the project. It was paid for out of taxpayers' cash, mainly through DEFRA.
Why the exclamation mark? Because my birthday falls at the end of this month. For the young, birthdays are milestones; as you grow older, they become unpleasantly reminiscent of tombstones. This year, God help me, I shall be 63.
And, while I'm at the keyboard, here's today's spelling mistake, courtesy of Amazon.co.uk:
