We’re all going to dieeeeeeeeprobably not
Twenty years ago, some dude wrote a paper about the volcano on La Palma in the Canaries. He thought the West face of the Cumbre Vieja volcano was unstable and, given another eruption, might shear off and fall into the sea.
You know, Cumbre Vieja. The one that’s erupting right now.
If the West face fell into the sea, he estimated it would generate a tsunami that would cross the Atlantic and reach the Eastern Seaboard seventy-five feet high.
Where the silly numbers in the illustration come from, I do not know. I found it here, but there’s no credit.
Only 23 feet for us, though it really doesn’t matter. We’re on the shores of the English Channel and slightly below sea level. A 23-foot wave hitting us might as well be 300 feet. We’d be goners.
There is precedent. They think Doggerland was sunk by a piece of Norway that slid into the sea 8,000 years ago.
Cheers!
September 22, 2021 — 7:11 pm
Comments: 20
Happy Equinox!
There is not really an equal amount of day and night, though. Because twilight. (The picture represents how wide a band twilight really is).
Kind of an interesting article. Apparently, there are two types of twilight. Civil twilight is when the sun is 6 degrees or less below the horizon and you can carry on doing normal daylight things. Nautical twilight is when the sea becomes difficult to make out, usually when the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon. At 18 degrees below the horizon, it am dark.
Also, it isn’t really dark six months of the year at the poles. Because twilight.
Oh, and people? Summer’s gone. Bend over!
September 21, 2021 — 8:13 pm
Comments: 17
Hmmm…
I was sitting at my desk today and I heard a clip-clop, clip-clop. Ran to the window, and I saw this ^^^
Not literally that. I whipped my cellphone out, but it didn’t wake up fast enough and the hearse clopped up the hill out of sight. I stole this picture from this funeral website.
I tried to find a picture from the actual funeral home, but I couldn’t because – are you ready for this? – there wasn’t a funeral scheduled in my town today.
Must be a private service. I’ll have to ask someone from church. I can’t possibly have seen a phantom hearse. I’m as psychic as a potato.
September 20, 2021 — 6:24 pm
Comments: 6
Huh.
This is Kane. The internet tells me he is “the most successful masked wrestler of all time.”
He’s also Glenn Jacobs, Mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.
Why does a county have a mayor? I don’t remember counties having mayors when I was in Tennessee. Cities have mayors, counties are just…counties. I may never know. Knoxcounty.org appears to be down. Or maybe it doesn’t like my foreign IP.
Also, he’s just told Biden to pound sand on a vaccine mandate.
I am not ashamed of any of this. I find it delightful. Woohoo Tennessee!
Good weekend, everyone.
September 17, 2021 — 6:54 pm
Comments: 15
Shoot.
I had to host a really bitchy Zoom meeting tonight and I didn’t get to hit the ‘mute all’ button even once. I’m bummed. I really wanted to exercise raw power and stuff.
Back on the subject of the harvest, I went to two fruiterers today (I love that word) trying to by some plums for Uncle B and was told there weren’t any anywhere. The season was scarcely two weeks long. So there’s another fruit failure for 2021.
The second purveyor of fruits was really exercised about it. He put it down to a lack of pruners last year and pickers this year. He may have a point.
Who knew you couldn’t run a society that pays line workers to stay home.
September 16, 2021 — 6:53 pm
Comments: 13
Well, my spreadsheet died and went to hell
It looked great on my computer. Then I uploaded it to Google Docs and it exploded. I picked bits of October out of April.
In the end, I had to simplify it down to a nub of its former self. It needs to be a collaborative document, so people can write themselves on to a calendar.
And now I think maybe Google Docs will only allow you to edit if you sign in from a Gmail. Annoyed.
Never mind. It’s the weekend! Enjoy yours.
September 10, 2021 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 3
Spreadsheets!
I don’t work Wednesdays. This morning over a leisurely coffee, I thought I’d download a free calendar from the internet to do some scheduling stuff.
But I didn’t like the look of any of the ones I found, so I decided to download a template and fuss with it.
But none of the templates were laid out exactly the way I wanted (I need the week to start Monday, for example), so I decided to build one from scratch.
I am not good at templates. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at stealing code. I found a calendar tutorial for Libre Office and I was humming along, comprehending stuff fine, until I got to the bit in the picture above.
If you can’t read it, it’s
By knowing the first day of the month we can get the day of the week. In my example it’s a Wednesday. The function that returns the day of week from a date is WEEKDAY. The formula is =WEEKDAY(DATE(G1,MATCH(A1,$Settings.A1:A12,0),1)). You should get a number from 1 to 7.
Yeah, no. Never mind. I pinched it and it worked.
People who understand spreadsheets can make them sing. I don’t think I’m ever going to be that person.
September 8, 2021 — 8:52 pm
Comments: 10
What do you see?
I see a weasel sucking his paw.
I said to Uncle B, “look – a weasel!” and for some reason he thought I was staring at the mortar between the stones. I think he thought I was tripping.
From the same church as Saturday’s fete.
September 2, 2021 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 19
Summer fade
We went to the third of three church fetes today (there were four, we missed one). It’s the last long weekend of the Summer and that’s probably it for the small local happenings. If we’re lucky, there will be a country show or two still.
It was PACKED. We go to this one every year, and there were at least twice as many there as usual. Maybe three times.
To be honest, it was a little too busy. I don’t like crowds at the best of times and this is hardly the best of times.
I saw one mask, Uncle B saw another and he saw a hand sanitizing station. That was it. Other than that, it was 100% the old normal and nobody cared. They’re going to have a hard time if they try another lockdown, I predict.
Do you recognize the illustration? Would you if I revealed the two airborne objects at the right should be green? They were recolored gray in this instance; I doubt the original had any meaning for the Brit who pinched it.
August 30, 2021 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 7
Bringing in the sheaves
The day they bale the hay always feels strange. I can’t really explain. It’s a cinch a little black and white photo won’t give any sense of it. The color version isn’t much better, either. I need Uncle B’s fancy new lens. Or a drone.
Or 70mm Technicolor!
The actual field is about three times the size of the color pic and the way the bales are dotted along it makes them seem meaningful. Like Stonehenge. The hay, it speaks to me!
They’re baled, not rolled up into those giant rolls, because this was a dwarf wheat crop. I don’t think the stalks are long enough to roll. You can see a few unharvested ears left in front. Didn’t even come to my knee.
Harvest service this Sunday. Here comes Fall!
August 26, 2021 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 14