Craig Sawyers

A very happy and belated - hope you had a blast!

And a very happy very belated!

And in two of my absolute favourite pieces - the finale Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, and Im Abendrot from Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, both of which bring me to tears.

RIP Jessye Norman, one of the finest classical sopranos there have been. In full glory as Sieglinde in die Walkure https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49887748

Galileo would have been absolutely gob smacked by the imagery from planetary probes, when all he saw was a blurry image. Enough to see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, but no detail at all.

Sand dunes with ice melting near the North pole of Mars

Have a spectacular day!

For creepy. Playgrounds from hell. And whoever thought that this was a good idea for kids?

Really? I never would have guessed that. Well, I kind of see Snoopy, but the rest is a strange and wonderful mystery.

I have no idea what those weird images are from. But I'm torn - I don't know whether I want to watch it, or not.

Happy birthday, tall thing!

Ivor Tieffenbrun's (Linn) maxim was always "If it sounds better, that is because it is better". On the one hand it could be taken as just a company slogan, like Quad's "The closest approach to the original sound". But on the other, it is quite a deep statement to the effect that measurement is not enough in determining subjective quality.

Oh bugger. Far, far too early.

You heard it here first. Solid gold toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace. Apparently an artwork. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-49700620

This is so true. Boris has generated curved space that is sucking the UK into a black hole. But he is now stuffed. He cannot go for a no-deal (now illegal) and France has said "no extension beyond 31st October". And the Scottish court has ruled the Boris's suspension of Parliament for five weeks is illegal https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/11/scottish-judges-rule-boris-johnsons-prorogation-unlawful . All in all a pretty bad week in Boris-land. And I'm massively enjoying watching the bastard twist in the wind.

It does! I'll have to post an image of one of mine. Wife: "Oh - you've done latte art! Hey wait a minute..."

I used to enjoy running in a lightning storm - I really like the deluge of rain after the hot and humid that led up to it. But one day, about a mile of so from home, there was a simultaneous flash and BANG. Followed by a strong smell of acrid and ozone. Must've struck not many yards away. Scared me really bad. That cured me entirely of running in a lightning storm

My latte art looks more like a penis and testicles than anything else. I would make a lousy barista!

Thanks for the heads up guys. I'll keep an eye out for any weed intrusion and kill the bastards as soon as they raise their ugly little shoots.

Well these guys went down 6 inches, started with dense nylon planting film, 4 inches of hardcore (about 20 tons), and 2 inches of fine crushed grit (10 tons). All compacted at each stage. So nothing is coming up through that lot. Things might get out at the edges, but if anything sprouts there I'm just going to hit it with kick ass weedkiller. The planting film is there sure to stop weeds (and ants) getting through, but also to stop the hardcore from sinking into the ground underneath. The thing that astonished me is that everything they dug out, and all the hardcore etc was brought through in an endless relay of wheelbarrows. They worked their asses off from start to finish. When they arrived in the trucks, it was only a minute or two before they were at it full tilt. Lunch was ten minutes and then pow back to it full bore.

Not quite yesterday, but last week. What passed for grass in our garden was 50% weeds and infested with ant hills that defied all attempts, chemical, biological and thermal, to kill off. So after three weeks of preparation (painting 35 metres of fence twice, painting walls white, all after digging out 15 metres of Virginia Creeper and ivy) a team of five guys came for four days to fit artificial grass. Cheap it was not, but the effect is so much better that the mess it replaced.

Oh dear. The very real perils of land speed records. RIP Jessi.