Partial eclipse

Most people in the UK didn't seem to know this happened today.

Out of those were informed by astronomy-savvy types like me, at my place of work, approximately 50% at work were interested, the other 50% couldn't be bothered to even get up from their seat take a peek.

It's a shame really that so many should keep their heads down through life, carrying on with the grind, not bothering to stop, look around and consider some of the beauty and wonder that threads through our lives each day. I'm far more moved by nature in it's infinite complexity and wonder than reports of the latest celebrity sneeze exclusively in Heat magazine.

This picture was taken out of the window at work on my mid-morning break, holding some eclipse viewers up to the lens as a makeshift filter.

A good friend of mine living in Turkey should have hopefully have observed the eclipse along the line of totality as it passed through that region. I look forward to hearing her stories and seeing her pictures.

I was lucky enough to observe the 1999 Total Eclipse from a chartered ferry in the English Channel along with the rest of my family. It truly was a spellbinding event to witness; day turning to night, a wall of darkness bearing down from the southwest and the sun's ghostly corona finally illuminated in all it's glory.

To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, there are things in this universe played out on such a gargantuan scale, one can only consider them incomparable to magic.

Spring just sprung

What a difference a day makes.

Or what a difference a change in weather patterns and putting the clocks one hour forward makes.

A few days ago we were all shivering through overnight frosts and occasional snow flurries, this at the end of March still! Today there's a mild wind, the sun's out, the birds are in full song and the spring bloom has arrived en-masse. I even looked out the window to see two frisky pigeons going at in a flurry of feathers. Yikes.

It's amazing what the arrival of Spring, however delayed, does to people's moods also. Immediately you notice the change walking around any or our towns and cities, and I'm not just talking about the shedding of the layers either.

Buoyed by the change in atmosphere outside I spent most of the day tinkering with my car out on the drive. Now I'm not the most mechanically minded person in the world but you'd be surprised what you can do with a bit of patience and a Haynes manual.

Lighter evenings should mean you can go out for a walk after tea as well. Although if the local authorities have their way that isn't going to be the case. A major gas pipeline is being installed a few miles south of the village. Essentially trenches are being dug cross-country before they lay and seal a 2m circumference pipe sections. Apparently this footpath closure is going to be in force for six months. The local council has seen fit to close rights-of-way (paths and tracks) for almost a mile-and-a-half in either direction.

That's just plain daft.

We had another similar massive pipeline built near here a few years back and that didn't cause half the disruption this one seems to be. It took a matter of weeks. Not six bloody months!

Maybe it's all the ambulance-chasers the council is scared of.

"Have you been injured in a trip or fall recently?"

"Er, yeah, I wandered blindly into a 2m trench the other day because I didn't happen to see the machinery, mounds and gangs of workmen digging away as I approached."

As if.

Villagers aren't stupid (though, yes, we do still have our resident idiots). We see the works going on every day. We know what it entails, and we know where & when to steer well clear. But we also walk these paths daily, and that's part of the reason we love living here. Take that away and we might as well all sell our souls and decamp to the towns. To throw a mile-square cordon around the area is unbelievable; at a stroke that cuts off access to most rights-of-way south of the village. I can think of a dozen different places they could have put up a cordon and still kept their site sealed with a comfortable enough buffer zone.

Anyway, bugger the closure. Most walkers I've spoken to are just going to walk the paths until they make it physically impossible to do so.

Sign?

Sign, you say?

What sign?

I didn't see one.

Did you?

What we've learned

Trivia. Some interesting, some disturbing. Reprinted from the What we've learned column of today's Guardian newspaper.

• There is somewhere called London on every continent.
• Female prisoners in the US are routinely shackled during childbirth.
• Robert FX Sillerman owns about 600,000 pieces of Elvis memorabilia.
• Britons are the second most frequent visitors to Argentina after its Brazilian neighbours.
• Leonard Cohen once guest-starred on Miami Vice.
• Diet colas have overtaken their full-sugar cousins in UK sales.
• Dickens created 989 named characters.
• Scorpions can have as many as 12 eyes.
• Haggis sales are currently surging in England.
• China produces 90 billion chopsticks a year.

I can't get no sleep

Six days in a row at work; I'm whacked out and sick of the sight of those walls. I appreciate this is a breeze compared to what I'll go through shift-wise in the Police, but six days straight of the general retail public is more than enough right now thank you very much. Strangely though I'm wide-awake still convincing me that my genes are, and always will be, part-Owl.

Thankfully I have a day off tomorrow, though it's going mostly to be mostly spent visiting garages due to some indiscriminate vandalism of my car on Friday night. No idea why; seemingly the wrong place at the wrong time. Why not the flashy Volvo a few space up, eh guys? Shame really as it spoiled what was otherwise a really good night out. Curry followed up by a Guinness. Globalisation has its benefits.

Boy am I looking forward to getting hold of some of these wankers and shoving them in cells though. I could almost understand someone breaking a side window to steal, but just vandalising because you can and you're pissed up. Yeah, very big and clever. Roll on June.

Anyway I'm off to read myself to sleep. Currently ploughing through John Twelve Hawks' The Traveller. It's a good fun thriller, does exactly what it says on the tin, but is unlikely to change the face of literature any time soon. I wanted something lighter after reading plenty of non-fiction of late.

Right, I best turn this thing off. Warm covers, pages and the stillness of the midnight hour awaits.

The Falling Man

I know I probably put one-too-many melancholic entries online, but the world's is a stark, beautiful but intermittently terrifying place that some things you see/hear/experience just lodge in your mind and remain there for a long time to come.

And this just happens to be where I store some of those thoughts.

I watched a extremely moving documentary this evening entitled 9/11: The Falling Man. Different from most post 9/11 documentaries this focused on the effective censorship of images of those who jumped from the Twin Towers. One particular image has come to crystallise the horror of that day, and that is the photo has been dubbed The Falling Man. It's an image that's been effectively whitewashed from the history of that clear blue day in September.

But why?

In the days after it appeared, readers across America complained to the newspapers that printed this image that they felt deeply uncomfortable upon viewing it. If you remember the atmosphere days and weeks after the attacks, America was a wounded nation. Many couldn't bear to see the despair of the few; America needed the survivors and the heroes to heal, stand firm and rebuild in the face of terror. The Falling Man was quickly airbrushed from the history of the day. That's why when you see a retrospective feature on 9/11 now you'll generally see the towers, the debris, the survivors and the rescue workers... But not the jumpers.

One of the reporters researching the story of the jumpers had asked a city official months afterwards:

"How many jumped from the towers that day?"

"None."

"None?!"

"Some were blown out, some fell..."

Many journalists hold the Falling Man as an era-defining photo - the Eddie Adams shot of it's moment. Many say it should have won a Pulitzer. I wouldn't feel comfortable reproducing it here, this isn't the place, but simply do a Google image search for 'The Falling Man' and you see that image reproduced all over the world. You'll doubtless remember it, and realise that you haven't really seen it for over four-and-a-half years.

Read the article which partly inspired the programme if you can.

Ultimately the documentary came to a touching conclusion; the reporters who had investigated the identity of The Falling Man couldn't be entirely sure who he was, and they themselves agreed that it was probably best that the anonymity remained.

The Falling Man has become 9/11's Unknown Soldier.

Italian Politics

Just loved this cartoon from 'The Guardian' the other day. (It's worth clicking the image here to see the bigger version just for Pope Benedict's wonderfully mad expression!)

Cold snap

Spring?

Not yet it ain't.

The second vicious cold front in as many weeks is blanketing a fair part of the UK in snow. Of course it having been winter 'n all this is catching us by surprise (as it does every year seemingly) - cue headlines of Icy Apocalypse, Britain grinds to a halt etc all because a snowflake fell somewhere near Fleet Street.

People; we're on the same latitude as Siberia and Northern Canada - get used to it.

Meanwhile global warming continues to merrily screw things about. Whilst most of the north is knee-deep in the white stuff, the south east is facing the prospect of a hosepipe ban as two successively dry winters (yes you heard that right) have left reservoir levels at all-time lows. As previously stated, my sympathy hardly overfloweth, but it does seem to be further proof that we're all going to environmental hell in a unsustainable handbasket.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't

People, or rather the media (again), seem forget that fifty-two people were murdered last summer.

For two weeks last summer, here in the UK, we were living in unprecedented times. The first suicide bombings in Europe (in modern times) claimed 52 lives, less than two weeks later a second set of bombings failed by sheer chance and luck to kill many more. The day after the failed attacks Police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man living in the UK, as he boarded a tube train in the Capital. Surveillance mistakenly identified him as a suicide bomber at the time.

Within 24 hours the police came clean and admitted that they had shot the wrong man. They made a public apology, and a private apology to the family of the bereaved. A full investigation, once the threat level in the capital had receded somewhat, then ensued.

Yet still some sections of the society and the media refuse to draw a line under this tragedy. This is understandable from the relatives' point of view, but some forget what extraordinary times we were living in last summer. Within a week London hosted Live8, won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games before seeing these dreams ripped apart on that fateful morning. For days after numbers were down on public transport in the capital, people were nervous up and down the country for good reason. Yes the government had put us at an increased risk of terrorism because of the Iraq war, yet some commentators almost shrugged after the bombings and remarked "Well, it was going to happen sometime..."

In Jean Charles had turned out to be a bomber and Police had not taken him out, what then? No doubt there would have been just as much furore that the Police had 'failed' us once again. A terrible mistake was made, but under unique and highly charged circumstances. This is Britain for Christsakes, Police do not go discharging firearms at every passer-by and do not arm themselves as a matter of course.

The fallout from the Jean Charles shooting is now overshadowing the events from 7/7. Media and some sections of society are suffering from a real lack of perspective. We've lived through extraordinary times, mistakes have been made, apologies have been made; we need to learn now and move forward.

Remember the tragedy of Jean Charles, but remember also the 52 other lives that were taken days before. Were it not for that atrocity then Jean Charles as would no doubt have been alive today.

He's not a martyr.

They're all victims of extraordinary times.

All creatures great and small

This was the sight that greeted me this morning.

That there is Chunk, and he's solar-powered cat.

More wildlife on the TV this evening though. Ahem.

It's not often you hear David Attenborough quoted in interviews as saying that something will really blow your mind, but he said just that in relation to Planet Earth, the new blockbusting BBC natural history series that started on BBC1 this evening. Now Attenborough has seen more extraordinary sights and creatures throughout this planet of ours than many of us will ever get to see in our lifetimes combined, so when he's quoted like that you really sit up and take notice. After viewing the first episode, how can one disagree? It's a series like this that actually manages to justify the (outrageous) concept of a licence fee (not that the rest of the Sunday night line-up particularly strengthens the case). Planet Earth should be required viewing for any world leader taking office, from Peru to Palestine, reminding us all that however busy we are tearing our societies apart; we share this planet.

Other than that it's been another fairly lazy Sunday. The picture pretty much sets the theme. Downloading, Car Washing, Walks and free trans-continental phonecalls (all hail MSN messenger).

The art of Ebay

Ebay is becoming disturbingly addictive.

Okay, I'm a few years behind the buzz, but whatever.

Already managed to shift a few old unloved CD's to better homes and reinvest the money back into new music.

Have begun to learn the fine art of 'snipering' on there too. That is to say, don't bid straight away - you only help push the price up in the long run. Sit back, put it in your 'watch' list, be patient and keep an eye on it. Then do what I've had done to me countless times - piss someone off royally by outbidding in the last few seconds.

It is amazing what you can find on there though.

CD's
Houses
Russian MIG Fighters
False teeth

Try searching for the strangest things on there if you ever have a quiet moment. You'll be surprised!

If Google is the new Library of Alexandria, Ebay is the sprawling global flea market round the corner.