Another Facebook photo album, of a two hour, three kilometre walk earlier today. As with previous photo albums of mine, it's public, and you don't need a Facebook account to view it.

Mere months after we actually traipsed around the Hill, I've finally put up a Facebook photo album of the afternoon. As usual, it's a public album, so a Facebook account isn't needed to see it -- use this link to marvel at the instructive captions, mordant wit, and other textual exertions in which one has to indulge when one is stuck indoors on a ( Read more... )

The first part of this photograph album covered Days 1-2 of our four-day group tour through West Australia's spring wildflower country in the last full week of September 2015; this second part covers Days 3-4. If you have not already scrutinised the first part, I urge you to do so before proceeding further!

In the last full week of September 2015, headgardener and I went on a four-day group tour through West Australia's spring wildflower country, accompanied by a former professional botanist to identify and describe the flowers seen. I took an average of 120-140 photographs per day -- not all of them of wildflowers, but far too many to include in a single ( Read more... )

....is one headline this morning, reporting the removal from renewable energy producers of their exemption from the climate change levy in yesterday's budget. Amongst other things, it means that UK energy policy is now completely out-of-step with the government's proclaimed desire to secure agreement in Paris later this year on measures to ( Read more... )

I used to be a great supporter of the European idea, aka the European project -- "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe", to be arrived at through social, political, diplomatic, economic and other means. In the 1980s, European Nuclear Disarmament's manifesto for a "nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal” -- for a Europe "beyond the ( Read more... )

Again. And not unexpectedly, given that its policies were so similar to those of the coalition government and that its leader seemed to spend his first four years hoping for something to turn up rather than doing anything to make it so. But amid all the pontificating on the reasons for its defeat, one thing is for sure: rushing into another ( Read more... )

There is a suggestion that the Conservatives' election campaign may be beginning to backfire on them, because people are being turned off by its near-relentless negativism. (Michael Fallon's personal attack on Ed Miliband over what he might do about the UK's military assets is the latest case in point.) Whether or not that is so, the decision to ( Read more... )

I've been commenting on the Sad Puppies Hugo shenanigans on various people's threads on Facebook, and often in response to the syllogistic, counter-factual, paranoid drivel put up by those trying to justify the slate, claim that the Hugo Awards are dominated by a clique, that women/people of colour/gays/atheists/et bloody al are an illegitimate ( Read more... )

Seen at the allotment this afternoon -- some of it clearly so new that it might have been laid within the last twenty-four hours.


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