According to the Guardian, thieves stole a French winegrower’s entire harvest – 30 tonnes of grapes over 2 hectares.  A few thoughts: How do winegrowers survive if their entire harvest, a whole year’s work, is only worth £13,000? How much do grape-harvesting machines cost? Presumably this bloke has one for his own harvest and it […]
Entries from September 30th, 2010
A cheeky little vintage crime
September 30th, 2010 · Comments Off on A cheeky little vintage crime · Life
Confusing headline
September 29th, 2010 · Comments Off on Confusing headline · Life
The BBC News website had a link to a story with the headline Research widens height gene hunt. It took a while for my poor old brain to drag any sense out of it. Subconsciously I was isolating ‘gene hunt’ as the character from Life on Mars and being left with something widening height. The […]
Tags: WTF
Manu Chao in London
September 29th, 2010 · Comments Off on Manu Chao in London · Music
The mighty Manu Chao is coming to london next month to play at the Coronet on October 23rd – tickets went on sale today. Only £15 a ticket and its all for charity (Colombiage and some local Brixton organisations) Very frustrating. I would love to go up and see him again, but there is a […]
Number-crunching the leadership ballot
September 29th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Politics
I was pleased to see the data behind the leadership ballot released, and also a little surprised. But mostly pleased. The data is available as a Google Doc here and you can download it all to your own computer to pull it about in Excel. ((or Open Office of course))
Tags: Elections·Labour Party·Statistics
The inevitable Mark Hammond announcement
September 29th, 2010 · 7 Comments · Politics
According to the County Times the county council has announced that the chief executive is ‘formally leaving the post’. It goes on to say that the council say Mr. Hammond is leaving on ‘amicable terms’.  Everything about this is a bit vague - necessarily, since the council leader forbade any of the councillors from talking […]
Beaten to it again
September 28th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Politics
Last week I was about to write something about the ConDom government’s announcement about council tax revaluation, and then lost the urge when Danivon beat me to it and said at least half of what I wanted to say, but I might as well have a little belated rant. When I read about this, the […]
Tags: Local Government·Taxation
Tilt -Shift goodness
September 27th, 2010 · Comments Off on Tilt -Shift goodness · Technology
Using Photoshop to immitate the effects of a tilt-shift lens is one of those novelties that has been over-used to the extent that it soon jumped the shark – though I have to confess that I still love it even though it has moved into the realms of cliche. What is surprising is that nobody […]
It pays to advertise
September 25th, 2010 · 10 Comments · Politics
One of the kids brought this home today. Apparently they are tied to bus stops all over Broadfield. Can’t be an ill-advised election campaign poster because he is not up for election for a few years so one has to assume he has been out making friends again. I guess you have to be pretty […]
Tags: Broadfield·WILT
Pretty colours
September 25th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Life
A quick quiz: who knows what this picture is?
Tags: Europe
Montana woman fights bear with courgette
September 24th, 2010 · Comments Off on Montana woman fights bear with courgette · Life
A very eye-catching headline from the BBC News website - Montana woman fights bear with courgette.  It is almost impossible to not click on it to read the story, which is worth doing because it includes this: The woman, whom police have not named, grabbed the closest object – a courgette from her garden – […]
