I was intrigued by the ability of this tiny plant to capture and retain droplets of water on its leaves. From a marshland walk this morning.
Daily Archives: December 30, 2011
The road in winter
Ever since we first saw them, F & I have been fascinated by David Hockney’s series of paintings of roads in his native Yorkshire, and so we’re always on the lookout for “Hockney Roads”. Driving to Norfolk in the rain yesterday we suddenly came on this view of the road to Ringstead (my favourite village), stopped the car, and I took this shot through the windscreen. The light was amazing, and it only lasted for a few seconds, but this captures it. Shot with a 90mm f2 Summicron.
Larger size here.
A novel use for duct tape?
From Reuters.
(Reuters) – Two Arizona parents were arrested by sheriff’s deputies after apparently posting pictures on Facebook that showed their children, an infant and a toddler, bound with duct tape, authorities said on Thursday.
Coconino County deputies arrested Frankie Almuina, 20, and Kayla Almuina, 19, on suspicion of two counts of child abuse on Wednesday at their northern Arizona home after being alerted to the photos by an anonymous tip.
The children, a 2-year-old toddler and a 10-month-old infant, were seen online bound with duct tape on their wrists and ankles with their mouths taped shut, Commander Rex Gilliland told Reuters. One of the children was shown hanging upside down on an exercise machine.
The parents told investigators that the photos, posted on the mother’s Facebook account, were a joke and that the children were not harmed, Gilliland said.
If this hadn’t been filed by Reuters, I’d have thought it was a hoax.
Tolkien: the unlikely revolutionary
I’ve never seen the point of Hobbits et al, so hadn’t really thought about J.R. Tolkien until (a) I was asked to buy a copy of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings for someone as a Christmas present and (b) I came on this piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. What captivated me were its opening paragraphs.
At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”
It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written, thereby inventing one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses, and establishing the foundation of the modern fantasy industry.