Firetop

I spent much of the past weekend staying with friends in Cardiff. A trip had been on the agenda for some time, so it was time to pull off the M4 at junction 29 instead of going straight past Cardiff to some other area of Wales. Got up early on Saturday (well early for me is anything before 11am as I’m usually hung over). I nearly fainted because it wasn’t raining outside (all my other Wales trips have featured A LOT of rain). Had a lovely traditional English breakfast at an Italian cafe around the corner and then headed off through the park for a tour of Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
(more…)

It can get awfully hot in Somalia up to forty-five degrees Celsius at the peak of their summertime. For the Giraffes that live there it must get a bit uncomfortable, but luckily, thanks to millions of years of evolution, Giraffes can go for several days without water. Somebody please tell me why then in England, when it gets to a measly thirty-six degrees, we have zookeepers feeding ice-lollies to Giraffes to help them stay cool. Call me crazy but I’ve never seen David Attenborough interrupted on a nature documentary by a Mr Whippy van playing the tune of ‘Boys and Girls come out to play’ pulling up to feed a gaggle of meer cats anxiously awaiting their Soleros…

(more…)

Google carried out a PageRank update during the latter part of this week, revising scores for what is judged to be popular or unpopular web content. No change for nature.com which remains at 9/10 although many of the other pages on that website have gone back to eight from zero (thanks to some revisions on outbound linking). Interestingly this blog seems to have gone from a PageRank two (calculated in April when there was no content here at all) to a PageRank zero. Presumably this means that Google thinks this blog is of less use than when there was just an htaccess log-in box preventing the Googlebot from indexing anything… Google’s algorithm as mysterious as ever! What I have found whilst looking into this issue is the NEW WordTranslator function built into the latest version of the Google Toolbar.

(more…)

Popped up to Duxford’s Imperial War Museum (Cambridgeshire) on Saturday for the ‘Flying Legends’ air display. Admission prices have skyrocketed since I was a lad - it cost £150 for my carload of people to get in. The last time I went (in the mid 1990s) it was about £30 per car to drive in and watch the air display… a decade later it’s £30 PER PERSON with additional costs for ‘walking past the planes on the air strip’ or getting on board for a ‘look around’. Now call me Victor Meldrew but with people collecting to ‘get Concorde flying again’, shouting “Got any spare change?” I thought they’d have to be pretty lucky to find anybody at the show with that luxury.

(more…)