Fairweather photos

Headed into town last week - just ahead of a thunderstorm front - only to find that the southern half of the municipal parking lot at Maspernplatz was filled by the post-Easter fair, which I'd forgotten. But I managed to park in the northern half since fairgoers were running for their cars and leaving before the rain hit.

The approaching storm gave such a peculiar light that I've tried to capture in the fairground photos shown below. It was not that yellow/beige light you get in some storms when the light of the low sun creeps below the clouds, this was a sort of grayish murk that took the hues and saturation even from the otherwise garish colours of the fairground rides and stalls.

The noontime clouds were roiling a battleship-gray and the thunder clapped from less than 3 seconds distant; I could see the rainline approaching at a fast jog from about half a mile away. So I walked quickly through the fairground and took these snapshots :-

You can imagine how garish this whiplash ride would look under normal sunlight, now it looked almost bleached out. No-one was on the ride, you can see the dark clouds gathering in the bleak background sky.

The fairground was mostly deserted then, just a few parents whose kids were milking the last lap out of a kiddies roundabout.

This little guy's dad had paid for ten laps by his budding Lewis Hamilton:-(

I liked this very traditional pony-ride roundabout best. Nothing modern on it, and a traditional pneumatic pipe-organ sound too :-)

The owners of this plush-doll lottery had seen the rain coming and are dashing out to pull out the marquise and zip a transparent plastic wall around the front side to stop the plush animals getting soggy. I took the hint and ran off to the shelter of the pub I was visiting with a friend :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 29, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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The Bard's Baptism

This year we celebrate The Bard's 450th anniversary. The first written mention we have is his baptism on April 26th 1564. The custom at the time was to baptise children on their 3rd day, so we deduce he was probably born on April 23rd. He also died on an April 23rd, it is recorded. Some of the world's press wanted to celebrate the 450 years exactly to the day and so wrote it up on April 23rd. What they forgot was that GB was still on the Julian calendar then, which is May 3rd on our current Gregorian calendar :-(

His dad (John) was a glovemaker from Stratford-upon-Avon, his mom was called Mary. We know he attended a Latin-school around 1570 and married Anne Hathaway (26) in 1582. She bore him two daughters and a son.

In 1592 he is first mentioned as a dramatist in London. 1595 Midsummer Night's Dream shown, 1596 Romeo and Juliet, 1597 The Merchant of Venice. 1599 As you like it, 1600 Hamlet, 1603 Othello, 1606 MacBeth. Died 23/4/1616 (Julian calendar in GB until 1752). 1623 Jaggard and Blount print the First Folio, his collected works. There is a scan online at the University of NSW.

Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 works, totalling 884,429 words. Over 7,000 of these words he used only once and he introduced almost 3,000 new words into English, so his audience had to guess from the context what he meant, as have generations of schoolchildren since ;-)

He was also the first to anticipate this blog : "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 27-28) ;-)

Comments (5) :
John (UK) reminds us "...there are several conspiracy theories as to who REALLY wrote Shakespeare's works!" Indeed there are. My favourite would be Sir Francis Bacon, tutor at Gray's Inn court, whose home town (St.Albans) is mentioned 13 times in Shakespeare's works whereas Stratford-upon-Avon is never mentioned at all! And only a Looney would think it was the Earl of Oxford ;-)
John (UK) replied "But he DID write Psalm 46 ;-)" Really? I thought David wrote the psalms. I guess you are referring to the 1611 English translation in the King James' bible, done by 47 (=1+46 others) C of E scholars. For those who don't know John's reference : If you count in 46 words from the start of Psalm 46 you'll find the word Shake, and if you count back 46 words from the end of Psalm 46 you'll find the word Spear :-)
Pauline (UK) opined "I loved your last paragraph, true of so many blogs!"
Jenny (Ibiza) asks "What are some of the words he invented then?" Accessible, barefaced, critic, even-handed, eyeball, footfall, hunchbacked, laughable, moonbeam, pageantry, radiance, sanctimonius, three-legged; to name but a dozen that are still used today :-)
Ed (USA) responded to the previous comment "What words he made up are NOT still used?" That's a weird question; by definition you won't recognise any of them! But FWIW, here are eight : Boggler, carlot, foxship, kickie-wickie, near-legged, quatch, swoltery, wappened. Can any readers define these eight?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 26, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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UNESCO World Book Day 2014

Yesterday (23rd) was UNESCO World Book Day and bookshops around the country (and probably other countries too) are asking authors to help them sell more paper books by putting selfies of local authors in their shop windows. So here's what my contribution looked like this year:-

This was a 1989 attempt at writing a novel, it is terrible, don't read it, I should be ashamed! It flopped deservedly and is now out of print (thank FSM for little mercies). I took up blogging instead, it's easier to do and literary stannartz (sic!) are lower ;-) But I was surprised to find that old paperback in the New York Public Library; do they have NO discretion? ;-)

I also have a half dozen textbooks bearing my name; they're a bit better. See right sidebar.

At the other end of the quality scale, yesterday was also (probably) Shakespeare's birthday (450th anniversary). More about that on saturday.

Comments (7) :
Renke (D) wrote "[NYPL is a] strange example, as the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek owns your novel at least twice: Available in both Leipzig and Frankfurt :) And the authorship dataset is incorrect: Your books are not subset of your personal ID. Typical, lazy Germans... But this is a known problem of DNB's database and I asked them to merge the entries ;)" Thankyou. Publishers are required by law here to submit two copies (of every book published) to the DNB; other libraries can use their discretion (=money more sensibly) ;-)
Renke (D) gave me feedback on his DNB change request : " Haha, DNB's staff is really polite and seems to be aware of your embarrassment - they only personalised your non-fiction :) Currently the novel is the last remaining publication not linked to your author ID." That's a relief :-)
Jenny (Ibiza) opined "My, you have aged recently ;-)" Sadly yes, I turn 70 in June. On the bright side, I'll soon have forgotten about it :wry grin: :-(
Schorsch (D) grins evilly "For once, I agree with your opinion ;-)" Heh,heh. Nice one!
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote "Hi, Stu. I like the idea of displaying a book by a local author. And what could be more local than oneself! As to the Grand Canyon photos: that is the most popular viewing spot, easiest to access. It also happened to be the best kind of day for photos: overcast but bright. BTW: Did you have trouble getting comments through? Our service has sustained a very bad cyberattack and is still having problems." Indeed, your service is sporadic here lately. My comment to your blog went through OK though.
Jean (F) asks "And how many books have you read?" Assume 2 per week, so 100/year, so about 6000 ??? I haven't kept track.
Jean (F) replied "And your favourite is?" May I name two? They are : Gödel,Escher,Bach by Doug Hofstadter, and Süskind's Le Parfum :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 24, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Easter blossoms :-)

Many years ago, I was reading De Ratione Temporum by The Venerable Bede, a christian scholar who lived between 672-735 AD and learned from there that the name "Easter" originated with the name of the Great-Mother goddess of the Saxons. This goddess of fertility was known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, etc. which was derived from the ancient Saxon word for spring: "eastre." So simple.

While I stay at home this Easter looking after the dogs (who are doing well), my dear wife SWMBO is currently hiking the Grand Canyon in the USA. She recently mailed " ...the lack of water is strongly felt and it depresses me in its hostility. The reservoir behind the Hoover Dam has constantly lost water for the last 16 years; a few meters deeper water level and the Hoover Dam can no longer be used to generate electricity .... Bleak desert is not my "landscape of the soul" :-("

So to cheer her up, here are some of my photos of the Easter attractions in our garden for her and all my readers to enjoy :-

Every cloud has a silver lining though : when the Hoover Dam can no longer be used to generate electricity, it'll be the death of Las Vegas :-)

449

Comments (3) :
Jenny (Ibiza) opined "Your new camera DOES make better photos :-)" Indeed it does :-) But there is no camera in the world that would make me a photographer, I remain a snapshotter.
Gundi (D, currently USA) sent me this photo of SWMBO@Grand Canyon, for which many thanks. The shoes still look too clean, imho ;-)
Armin (CH) asks "Do you have a close-up of the apple blossom please?" Yes, here it is, just after the rain shower this morning :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 23, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Planet-hopping Savior

S choolboy theology had me asking The Religion^® (singular!) teacher whether Jesus also saved the "X" for some value of X in the set {Jews, Muslims, .... and Atheists, especially Atheists} ;-)

It seemed to me, I continued teasingly, that the Jews don't need to be saved, since they are God's chosen people, they claim. OTOH, The One True Church^® does have a mission to Save the Jews, presumably based on Matthew 15:24, which implies that ONLY Jews are saved by Him, no gentiles. So maybe The One True Church^® should just convert to Judaism?

How about Muslims? Luke 6:40 says "A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained (katertismenos) will be like his teacher." The Greek word katertismenos is translated as "fully trained" but it was rendered into Hebrew as Mushlam which is equivalent to the Arabic word Muslim. So, if you want to be saved (=like your teacher(=Jesus)), you should become Muslim? Most confusing for The One True Church^® ;-)

How about Atheists? Here’s what Pope Francis recently said about atheists: "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists." Sort of like Pascal's Wager without the need to recant at the last moment.

But now we are discovering extraterrestial inhabitable planets, most recently Kepler 186f, a "cousin" of the Earth, which raises the thorny theological problem about saving the Aliens. Now the news of the Easter resurrection/redemption, being information, can only travel at the speed of light. So civilisations further away than 1981 light years (1981=2014-33) cannot know they are saved by Jesus. And thus someone came up with the idea of a Planet-hopping Savior being reborn and crucified on planets far beyond our ken. Over and over again. Just how pissed off must He be with the need to do that!

Of course, He would be in THEIR image there and wouldn't necessarily be called Jesus on all of those planets, after all, thanks to an excellent short story by Arthur C. Clarke we know that God has nine billion names :-)
Clarke being a Brit, a billion is 10¹². Clarke also states that the nine billion names each have nine letters, so we can deduce there are 27½ letters in the alphabet He used. Maybe there were 28 letters (English has 26 plus a hyphen and a blank used in some names, Latin 22, German 30) and some rules were used to exclude some combinations. So somewhere the Redeemer is called maybe Cthulhu, or Satan or Sarah-Palin (no, that's 10 letters ;-). The Jews have various names for Him, one even with 42 letters already! And if there are planets without written languages, you would need to play the voices back on a Tetris-Grammaphone? ;-)

Be that as it may --- and it may --- various terrestrial artists have tried to depict the Planet-hopping Savior, here are just three of their efforts.

The One True Church^® probably regards all these images - particularly the one on the right - as a sacrilege. Apropos Sacrilege and other Dan Brown books, the Vatican has issued an official statement reminding Dan Brown readers that "his books are largely fictional and full of historically unverifiable information." Can't they see the irony of the pot calling the kettle black? ;-)

PS: You might also like to read another Arthur C. Clarke short story: The Star. Every time there is a supernova, The Savior^® has planet-hopped again :-(

Comments (10) :
Anon (USA) complains "Your going to Hell for that!" For pointing out a logical consequence of your religious beliefs? OTOH, you're (sic!) going to hell for omitting the apostrophe ;-)
Dave (GBM) wrote "Convert to Judaism? How? Afaik you have to be born of a Jewish mother! Bit difficult for the OTC lads to achieve retrospectively!" Didn't think of that; consider it artistic licence :-)
Jenny (Ibiza) wrote "Nice one, I laughed a lot :-) But explain how you deduced the number of letters in the alphabet. And why is it important that it's an UK billion?" Let there be N letters in the chosen(sic!) alphabet. So there are N single-letter combinations, N² two-letter combinations and so on. With nine letters (as Clarke stated) there are N⁹ nine-letter combinations, which are the 9 billion names. The ninth root of 9 billion is near-as-dammit 27½ for the value of N. Had it been an American billion (10⁹) then N would have been 12.76 (about 13), so the chosen alphabet would have been Hawaiian ;-)
Jenny (Ibiza) replied "Understood. Thanks. Now what's with the Tetris-Gramophone(sic!)?" It was an attempted pun on Tetragrammaton, the name of the four letters YHWH which Jews do not enunciate when reading from the Torah (they say Adonai instead). I confused Tetragrammaton with Metatron, the voice of God. My bad :-(
Barbara (UK) wrote "I don't usually read SF, so thankyou for introducing me to Clarke's short stories, they are quite good ideas!" His other great idea was the geostationary satellite :-)
Cop Car (USA) wrote "I liked it, and while reading it wondered how long it would take you to get around to posting an image similar to the last one in your article. Well done! Well done, too, in pointing out the difference between Arthur C's "billion" and mine. I'm sure that the thought did not occur to me - all those years ago when I read the story." Thankyou.
Peter (UK, currently T&T) pointed out that "VladPutin has nine letters ;-)" Just waiting for him to retake Alaska and go live in Palin's house ;-)
Xtreme English (USA) wrote "Oh, for cripe's sake, stuart. Alien crucifixions? I thought we were done with religion this week. My favorite day in the church calendar has always been Easter Monday. No long dragged-out liturgy, no festivities involving eggs and bunnies, no presents, no folderol. Just a nice spring Monday." Indeed. And I'll be showing you some of our Easter blossoms in my next post.
Xtreme English (USA) also wrote in a second mail " ... to hell for missing an apostrophe? Yes! for misuse of an apostrophe, too. (as in its/it's)." Shiver the bo's'n's fo'c's'le's timbers! ;-)
Klaus (Alaska) points me to an Atheist protest in the USA here.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 21, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Easter Sacrifice

Nowadays, many people celebrate the Easter holidays using heathen fertility symbolism such as Easter eggs and chocolate Easter bunnies. And so they can relate to the biting humour of this cartoon:

But Easter should be seen as a set of religious rites, so is this biting cartoon really about the symbolic cannibalism of a Catholic mass?

Or is it subtly pointing to the One True Church^® turning a deaf ear to the many public complaints about the OTC priests buggering the choirboys?

One "joke", so many interpretations.

YMMV ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 18, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Lumix DMC-TZ61

My old digicam, a 2005 Finepix E900 with 9 megapixels, 4x zoom, gave up the ghost last week after 9 years of duty. So I decided to invest in a new upmarket pocket size digicam with all the bells and whistles, particularly a 30x superzoom, panoramas, GPS and HDR and hope it lasts 9 years too. I chose the new Lumix DMC-TZ61 as shown below.

My first test was to take a wide-angle flashless shot using only indoor lighting. Here's a cropped and 8x scaled-down rendition thereof.

To show you the resolution of the original 18 megapixel photo, here is the Aztek carving on the wall which I've ringed in red in the snapshot above.

Next, being lazy, I wanted to see if I could zoom in on the bookshelf and read the title of the books. Turned out about 8x zoom suffices :-

My next test was of maximal telezoom. Up on the hill behind my house is a farmer's shed, about 800 yards away. I've ringed it in red in the photo below, taken at a 24mm focal length (35mm equivalent).

Then I zoomed out the full 30x optical zoom to 720 mm focal length (35mm equivalent). Pretty good for a handheld shot, eh? You can see the individual cords of firewood on the left of the photo even. At 800 yards!

To show you the limits of a handheld shot at 30x zoom, here is the detail of the Santa Claus/ Red Dwarf figure on the shed's central post. Not acceptable, I should have used a tripod and the self-release delay set to 2 seconds (10 secs are usual for tripod selfies).

My next test was to see the amount of noise produced when the camera raises its sensitivity to 1600 ASA and to check for color abberations at the max 30x zoom. So I took this handheld! photo of the full moon that evening. Chromatic abberation, blue at the top, yellow at the bottom :-(

Sunday morning, I tested the limits of the panorama feature. You stand there and turn slowly while the camera takes lots of overlapping photos. I turned through 270° while the camera took about 30 photos, then it stitched them together automatically. To make it more difficult, I'd gone up onto the hilltop where the wind moves the rape plants around a lot whilst I was turning the 270°. This makes it harder for the stitching SW to identify overlaps since the (similar!) rape plants have moved around. At wide-angle settings the result was satisfactory. This reproduction is 9 times smaller than my original, which was of much better quality.

Next test was of the macro facility, taking a closeup from about 4 inches.

Next test was of the HDR (High-Dynamic-Range imaging) feature. The camera takes three photos in rapid succession autonomously, one at normal exposure, one under-exposed and one over-exposed. It superimposes the results (so works best on non-moving targets), and is so able to fill in the details in the shadows and the bright spots. Personally I find the resulting image looks overly bright, I guess I'll become accustomed to HDR though.

While I was at the supermoto races (see previous posting) I also made a short HD movie (1080p). I particularly liked being able to zoom in and out whilst filming, so the action on the far side of the track is captured as well as that on the near side.

The GPS annotates each photo with where I was standing, so I could upload the photos to Google maps etc and they would be placed automatically in their correct places. I haven't tried this feature yet. Nor have I yet tried pre-setting the aperture and/or shutter-speed. The camera also has a dozen "creative" picture effects which I'll avoid like the plague for the gimmick that it is :-( Nor have I yet downloaded the (free) SW for manipulating RAW images. Nor have I tested what the GPS annotates if I were filming a movie from a moving vehicle. These and other tests will be done over the Easter Weekend as well as testing the WiFi and Near Field connectivity. I found it mildly annoying that the camera price did not include a storage chip. But I use a 32GB chip I already had. USB power supply was included though.

Summary: Yes I am satisfied I got value for my money (€400) :-)

Comments (2) :
Doug (Canada) has a suggestion for correcting the HDR over-brightness "Get GIMP (it's free) http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ import the photo and adjust to what you want." I already have Irfanview, Doug.
Schorsch (D) maintains that "Intelligent cameras sometimes aren't. Yours?" True. Telezoom maxxed out and focussed on the moon, it still flashed, probably because it was dark :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 16, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Supermoto Sunday

Y esterday was the (sunny) start of the Supermoto racing season, so I went to see the international races at Harsewinkel, about an hour's ride away. Here are some of my photos; I was experimenting with a new superzoom camera, about which more in a later post. Let's kick off with a shot taken at the pre-start, riders' briefing.

Then they start off for a track-inspection lap, a row at a time, at 5 second intervals. 450cc single cylinder engines wheelie them loudly off the grid.

Some 300 yards away (thank you 30x telezoom) they are in the sandy part of the track and get seriously airborne over the first jump. Those spectators are over 400 yards away from me! Good facial detail despite handheld camera shot. The originals are more detailed than this compressed, shrunken, cropped photo.

Back on the asphalt part of the track, a group drifts into a corner about 100 yards away from me. Zoom about 10x, good resolution.

Later in the race, another group passes the same corner.

This final shot is rather blurry, I found it hard to pan properly when the riders were close in front of me. Should have preset a shorter shutter time.
Both wheels drifting and accelerating hard for the finish line :-)

Comments (1) :
Jenny (Ibiza) asks "How long are the race heats?" 15 minutes plus 3 laps.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 11, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Speed trap day :-(

Germany had a publicly announced "Speed Trap" marathon day recently. In our state(NRW) alone, the police measured the speed of 778,000 vehicles, regardless of whether they were speeding or not. Of these merely 21,600 (=2.7%) were going too fast. Mostly minimally so (<20 kmh over). Corollary : in over 97% of the cases, police were unable to judge for themselves whether it was worth the effort of doing a machine check on the speeds. They did because they could, like the NSA :-(

Of these 21,600 a mere 1% (219) were going so fast (>30 kmh over the limit) they forfeited their licences, 5 of them on the spot. 22 of the 21,600 pulled over (1 per mil) were done for DUI (drunk or drugs). 2 wanted guys!

So, for these 2.7% and any foreigners visiting Germany, these are what the various speedtraps look like. Keep your eyes open...

Left : This is the most common static type. Triggered by an induction loop in the road. Mounted up on a pole, there may or may not be a camera in the gray box. The cameras are moved around at random on a regular basis.
Centre : Inner city mobile device. Mounted low between parked cars.
Right : Five light beams cross the road at 90°. Mobile. No radar.

Left : Roadside radar, usually in built-up areas or in roadworks. Mobile.
Centre : Static. This one can cover multiple lanes and or take front/side/rear photos and so can catch motorcycles (which in Germany do not have front numberplates, only rearside ones).
Right : Civil vehicle parked at the side of the road. Radar flasher mounted in the trunk/boot. Mobile, several different sites per day.

Left : Static. On speed-limited motorway (Autobahn) sections. One pair per lane. This type generates the highest income for the local authorities :-(
Centre : To be found amongst roadworks, usually on the Autobahn. Sneakily disguised as a roadworks warning sign! The inner city variant is usually disguised as a garbage bin :-(
Right : Saw this one in Switzerland, it's just a bulge in the crash-planking down the centre of the Autobahn. Very hard to see in time. The Swiss have a general speed limit on their Autobahns :-(

Also hard to see, because they can laser you at several hundred meters range, is the tripod-mounted laser-pistol shown below. No photo, one cop reads off the speed and the other jumps out and flags you down.

And then there are the "polite-reminder" types of speed-trap, like this MPH one on the Isle of Man, which just tell you how fast you are going and leave it up to you to brake if appropriate. Of course, red-blooded bikers on the Isle of Man see them as a challenge, and have a mate standing there to take a photo of the board as they rocket past at ~270 kph:-)

And some of us would like to believe our bike's SatNavs always worked correctly ;-) Max. 394 km/h = 245 mph btw :-)

Comments (1) :
Jenny (Ibiza) wrote "You seem to be in 2 minds on speed limits?" Indeed. But I hold the 50 kmh general limit in built up areas for sensible. Some of the 30 kmh ones there are superfluous, I would limit the 30 kmh innercity limits to schools and kindergartens. Many of the non-urban limits are superfluous, not to say ridiculous, leftovers from some roadworks project or whatever? Limits on sections of the autobahn are IMHO unnecessary, except for roadworks restrictions. Cash cows, because many drivers deem them superfluous. Sometimes the local authorities just slap on a speed-limit instead of repairing the road! And we have FAR too many roadsigns here, some things should be left to common sense, damned nanny state :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 11, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Letterman's successor ;-)

After 20+ years, David Letterman has announced he will be retiring from his TV show next year. So the question of "Letterman's successor" arises. The media are suggesting various candidates already, but I thought I'd see what results I get when I anagram "Letterman's successor". There are no two-word anagrams, but lots of 3-word ones. Here are some of them ;-)

• Casts Recluse Monster
• Starlets' Semen Occurs
• Censures Closet Smarts
• Monster Rectal Cusses
• Smart Electors' Census
• Censure Actress Molts
• Arrests Occult Menses

Maybe I should stop here before it gets too indecent ;-)

Comments (2) :
John (UK) points out that " 'Feral treatment' comes 'after Letterman' " So it does. Nice one :-)
Ed (USA) tells us "They signed up Stephen Colbert" Well, that 'Belches Portent' ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 7, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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The name is BND, JMS BND ;-)

The German spy agency is called the Bundesnachrichtendienst (=Federal Intelligence Service), its acronym is BND, hence the abbreviated Ian Fleming quote in the title ;-)

The BND used to be based in Pullach (S. of Munich) and have resisted moving to Berlin as long as possible. Now the new buildings in Berlin are almost ready for the move, some six years late. The next public road is on the far left in this photo, trees have been planted as an optical barrier. The internal access road is still full of building materials as you see.

Plans for the buildings were stolen early on, it was reported. I expect that there were various dubious sub-contractors onsite too, e.g. soft-handed "construction workers" with short haircuts and Maryland accents, electricians from the Cheltenham area, and diverse GRUsome people ;-)

No laptops, cameras, tablets or mobile phones will be allowed on the site. But imagine the security problem of validating that the new site is bug-free! Miles of wiring to be pinged, fibre-optics etc. I expect all the rooms are Faraday-cages and the windows to have a copper film for shielding, not just keeping sunlight out; TEMPEST-proofing by design hopefully.

The various buildings are all connected below ground too. The nearest subway station is Schwarzkopffstrasse, within easy tunnelling distance during the long building phase ;-) Coincidentally, the BND is just 350 meters line-of-sight from the HQ of the Pirate Party in Berlin ;-)

Comments (1) :
Anon (D) asks "So how big is it?" 9 stories high, 260,000 square meters, room for 5,000 people, afaik. 1000 obstructionists are staying in Pullach.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 4, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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Bulldog Kosmo turned 7 today :-)

Our English Bulldog Kosmo turned 7 years old today, so SWMBO made him a SUPER breakfast which I've photographed here. Seven frankfurters, beef and oatmeal hack and an egg yolk for Kosmo's 7th birthday breakfast. Photo taken 5 seconds before we unleashed him :-)

This second photo taken ten seconds later :-)

And after barely 30 seconds ;-)

He is spending the rest of this morning comatose, sleeping it off :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 2, 2014 permalink Comments Email

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