AFK, so Hiatus.

There will now be a brief summer pause in blogging chez moi. But for your amusement, please consider the activities in the Houses of Parliament in Westminister as they negotiate the Brexit / deny reality.

And the reaction from Brussels :-

Meanwhile, from across the pond, Doug opined :-

Comments (1)
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote "Please tell me that is photoshopped!" No, it's not! But the bullfighter got off (sic!) lightly it seems with only light wounds; the bull's were fatal, as usual :-(

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 30, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

OUTch :-(

There are some very unhappy people this morning, and some happy ones. And now the press will go overboard reporting results, doing analyses, and generally trying to whip people into a frenzy, or at least show some interest. But the fat lady has sung. Maybe Susan Boyle?

So in a couple of years I have a decision to make. Because my UK passport expires in 2019; it's an EU UK passport which will become invalid when the Brexit finally happens. So, do I apply for a new non-EU UK passport with all the hassle about visas and residence permits for Germany? Or do I hope that Scotland goes independent and re-enters the EU within that timeframe? In which case I'd go for a Scottish passport. Or do I become a naturalised German, seeing as I've lived here for 40+ years already? Or just die first?

Choices, choices, but still a couple of years to decide :-)

Comments (3)
Carol (UK) notes sadly "Next up : the #Brecession :-(" Probably, yes :-(
John (UK) opines "Re #Brexit : We are living in the best of all possible worlds!" Yes. Sad, isn't it ;-)
Schorsch (D) quipped "Thankyou, Iceland soccer team, for implementing the Brexit as quickly as possible ;-)" Oh, that's evil! ;-)

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 24, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

Can you see the stars?

It is increasingly unlikely that you can, due to light-pollution :-(

A new report in "Science Advances" (doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600377) reports in this phenomenon, annoying not only to astronomers. A third of the world's population cannot even see the Milky Way (our own galaxy) from their own homes. In central Europe and the USA 99% of the inhabitants have some light-smog. If you want really dark skies here in Europe, you'd want to be in Scandanavia, the highlands of Scotland, or (nearest to me) parts of Meck-Pom in eastern Germany.

I happen to live in a valley, the hills to the north block out the light-smog of the city of Paderborn and my view south is reasonably dark; sufficient for an amateur's telescope anyway. Italy and South Korea have the worst light-smog. Canada, Australia and North Korea still have the darkest skies. Eastern USA, Holland, Singapore, Israel, Kuweit, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia? Fuggedaboudit!

Back in the 80s I was on a photosafari in South Africa and we trekked out onto the savanna one night (with armed guides) ostensibly to see lions etc at night. I spent most of the night looking up though, seeing the Milky Way in all its magnificent luminous glory, arching across the whole sky and lighting up the plains :-) Then when the MIR (russian space station) came over, I pointed up and cried out "Look out!". The rest of the group almost shat their pants, being unable to see where I was pointing ;-)

Ideally you should be able to see over 8,000 individual stars with the naked eye; friends in big cities tell me they can barely see five (that's 5, not 5000)!

What's the situation where you live, dear blogreaders?

Comments (4)
Carol (London, UK) notes sadly "No, I can't see the Milky Way from Notting Hill (London). Thanks for the great linked photos BTW." I suspected as much.
Doug (Trail, Canada) wrote "When clear I can see many hundreds from my backyard but there is some light pollution from the Teck-Cominco smelter. If I go a mile or two out of town then the sky really clears up and I can see many more." OK.
Karel (CZ) sent this timelapse video. :-)
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote " We can sometimes view spectacular night skies right in our neighborhood on the Big Island of Hawaii and have seen the International Space Station several times. Best viewing is from upslope Mauna Kea, of course. There is usually a dozent at the visitors' center who will point out features of the heavens to us with her laser pointer. Our greatest thrill was a daytime one, though, when we witnessed the transit of Venus. We were on the summit of Mauna Kea for that, along with professional and amateur astronomers from all over the world. And oh! Sorry about Brexit! " Brexit will be a BIG upheaval :-(

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 19, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

Weekend FAILs :-(

The local newspaper reports incidents about which one just has to laugh, mostly funny but sometimes sad too.

Like the young girl, just got her driving licence, who, trying for a shortcut, illegally turned left into the no-entry end of a one way street and a hit a car coming the other way. It was a police car ;-)

Or the housebreaking thief, trying to escape from the police, who jumped into the canal and submerged himself but was nabbed when he came up for air ;-)

Or the supermarket shoplifter who stuffed his rücksack full and made a run for it - straight into the glass sliding door which didn't open quickly enough - knocking himself out in the process. Still unconcious when the cops arrived.

Or the mom who saw her kid fishing in the canal and asked what he was fishing for. He replied that he wasn't fishing, he was just testing her dress wristwatch to see if it was waterproof ;-)

Or yours truly who had popped over to Rainer's place on my motorcycle for sunday breakfast only to be caught in another thunderstorm on the way home as I emerged from the forest :-(

Comments (5)
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote " Hi! What dull news. Ours is so much more interesting! Just the other day the cops killed a knife waving guy and his dog, using many many bullets to stop them. Can't you come up with something more exciting????" Trigger-happy cops are so usual in the USA, I'm surprised your newspaper even reported that story :-( But here we also had a french light-airplane engine failure causing a spectacular emergency landing on the autobahn just 35 miles NW of me on monday: He was trying to make it to Oelde airfield near to the autobahn but couldn't glide far enough. See here for photo. Noone hurt, but wing damage where a lorry hit him :-(
John (UK) asks "How far is that airfield from the autobahn?" About a kilometer. Given that the MS883 plane has a glide angle of about 10:1, he would have needed another 300 feet of altitude.
Barbara (UK) quips "We had a thunderstorm too for the Queen's birthday, so I got wet too :-(" Long to rain over us, eh ;-)
Cop Car (USA) asks " How was the weather on the Queen's actual birthday (April 21)?" Google says "... chilly winds and icy showers today as wintry weather dampens spirits in the capital". Which is why they always move the celebrations to June, hoping for better weather. Nothing to do with keeping it well apart from the Führer's birthday (April 20) ;-)
Peter (UK), having read of my thunderstorm event, sent me this video of a microburst event at a tow-plane site. Wow, scary!

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 14, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

Stop'n'go staircase :-)

Several years ago, I blogged about a very narrow street, in Horb I think it was. But Wikipedia tells me the world's narrowest street is in Reutlingen. At its narrowest it is just 31 cms (12.2 inches) wide! Personally, I'd call that a passageway; a street is for vehicular traffic surely? And you couldn't even ride a bicycle through there, let alone my motorcycle!

The "Spreuerhofstraße" in Reutlingen, shown on the left, is so narrow that fat people can't walk through it even sideways ;-)

But today I want to tell you about a "tidal-flow passageway" I found in Prague(CZ). Prague is the capital city of the Czeck Republic. The city is on 3 levels. At the top you have the castle and the cathedral (also worth a visit), illuminated a golden colour at night. And far down below, you have the Moldau river. The medieval buildings of the old (upper) town were built about 2 feet apart to stop any fires spreading from one building to another. These gaps were pedestrian passageways. Now there's just one left.

This particularly interesting one leads from the street called U luzického semináre down towards the river Moldau. It zick-zacks around like an alpine road and you cannot see one end from the other. This led to tourists puffing and panting on the way up encountering others on the way down; the passage is so narrow they couldn't pass one another :-(

The city administrators came up with an ingenious solution to this problem. The crooked staircase now has pedestrian traffic-lights at each end, timed to allow the "puffers and panters" on the way up to get there before the others can start down :-) Just don't stop on the stairs to admire the river view :-)

It was worth taking these stairs because they lead to the terrace of the Certovka restaurant, which was well worth the visit; both the food and the view were spectacular :-) Follow that link and look at exterior-photo number 6, it shows you the passageway/staircase as seen from the restaurant terrace at night. For obvious reasons we'd parked our motorcycles at the top.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 13, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

I'm semi-gross!

Now it's official, I'm semi-gross! No thanks to yet another birthday this morning, I am now semi-gross ;-) Several readers may think I'm gross already, but actually I'm only half as old as they think. Getting weaker, yes, but mostly in good health, that's the main thing.

Celebrating with friends because SWMBO is off on a polar expedition, counting the polar bears on Spitzbergen. If she gets good photos, I'll be showing you some when she gets back home. In the mean-time, I'm the dogsitter, as she will be when I'm off riding the Wild Atlantic Way soon.

Photo cropped from one taken by my good biker friend Frank on 26/5/2016.

Comments (7)
Andreas (D) congratulated, as did Barbara (UK),John (UK) and Bob (D).
Lady & Evelyn (D) sent a sliding 2-view card with great bulldog photos (they know our dogs). Several old-fogey bikers joined me for a fast 100-mile ride through the Sauerland hills this afternoon, avoiding the thunderstorms.
Cop Car (USA) wrote " Without SWMBO there, do you have a license to have a wild time for your birthday? Hope you are celebrating sanely, and well!"
Ron (UK), with whom I attended City University, London, 50+ years ago, sent this link, saying I am now entitled to wear the hoodie ;-)

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 8, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

Mama, laud him!

Concientious objector (=draft objector) Cassius Clay, who renamed himself Muhammad Ali, died on friday after a long fight against Parkinson's disease, which had had him on the ropes for many a year. (The photo shows him on the ropes, having been knocked down by Henry Cooper, a UK boxer.) The USA jailed him for refusing to fight in Vietnam, something they did not do to draft dodgers Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Romney, Trump et al :-(

He made a comeback in his boxing career after having his title removed for draft objection :-)

My cleverer readers may have noted that "Mama, laud him!" is an anagram of "Muhammad Ali". RIP.

Comments (1)
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote " Lacking an "organ of veneration" I can't join in eulogies for Ali. So many others worked against the war. And a hell of a lot of good it did. All that happened was that Nixon eliminated the draft."

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 4, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---

Rain stopped play :-(

Over the long Corpus Christi weekend our motorcycle club took a trip (planned far ahead) to the Eifel hills, staying in Ahrweiler. Unfortunately the weather was not totally cooperative :-(

Germany has been suffering under Elvira, the mother of all deluges of biblical proportions, and we got caught in one of the downpours on friday afternoon. As much rain in an hour as we normally get in a whole month! :-(

I have never gotten so soaked in over a half century of motorcycling. We were about 40 miles from our hotel when the storm broke. So we donned our rain gear and pressed on (perhaps we should have sought shelter for 4 hours then proceeded; my bad decision). I took the high roads back though, because roads through steep & narrow valleys were getting washed out. Poor old Dieter got really soaked through, because he had stored his rain gear in Frank's saddlebags, not having any himself. Then he had also chosen to ride in a different group from Frank. How thoughtless is that?

We just had to cope with several inches of water on the roads (yes, the photo below shows a road, not a river!), hoping to see where the road leads!

But other locations were hit worse : in the narrower valleys some roads were washed away (and so closed to traffic). The torrents tore up the asphalt, trees and even knocked houses down. Cars were washed away. As the rain subsided, valley roads were left blocked by rubble up to 20 feet high. No way through!

Luckily, it was dry in Ahrweiler and our hotel had drying facilities, so our clothes were dried out overnight. Needless to say, on the saturday and for the way home on sunday, those with smartphones consulted the rain-radar web-pages on the weather-sites in some detail. So yes, we did manage to get home in the dry by navigating a path between two rain fronts parallel to our route :-) Nobody has caught a cold afaik, so that's OK then :-)

Climate change is real, folks :-(

Comments (3)
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote " Stu:Wow. I'm glad you survived the deluge. Not so much fun on a motorcycle, I am sure. Yes, as you say, climate change is real, and it's hitting hard." The lightning density was low on our route, otherwise we would have sought shelter; after all, a car is a Faraday Cage, but a motorcycle is not. And the golfball-sized hail really hurt :-(
Ed (USA) asks "Anybody hurt?" Not of our 20 (just hail-bruising). But Germany-wide, 4 dead, 42 seriously injured, 520 rescued/evacuated . Property damage at least in the tens of millions of Euros. Meanwhile 22,000 dead from cancer from smoking each year, just to relativize things.
David (NY,NY) wrote "....just to relativize things?? In Chicago alone : 6 dead, 63 wounded in Memorial Weekend shootings :-( " That's the USA's own homemade weapons problem. You just don't have the political will to fix the problem (aka NRA). Here, 4 more died in the deluges yesterday. Death toll now at nine, 4 missing, over 100 injured and over 2000 evacuated. It's still raining cats and dogs :-(

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on June 1, 2016 permalink Comments Email

---