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‘Scroll right and journey from horizon to horizon [..] through the zenith in the night sky over Beg-Meil, France… the panorama covers 210 degrees in 21 separate exposures, beginning on the beach with bright star Sirius rising in the southeast.’
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via Coudal: ‘In honor of the 300th birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the Department of Phanerogamic Botany at the Swedish Museum of Natural History has made 4000 of his herbarium specimens available online. ‘
Month: December 2007
There’s a berry-covered tree over the road from the house—some kind of cotoneaster?—and at the moment there’s an almost constant stream of redwings going back and forth from it.
The redwing is a smallish thrush with a marked white eyebrow stripe and a brick-red underwing. I’m always pleased to see them, not least because they’re one of the few true winter visitors we get here. I mainly see the same species in this bit of South London all year round. The only two species that regularly turn up in winter are redwings and siskins, and even the siskins are breeders in other parts of southern England. The redwings, though, have come from Iceland or Finland or somewhere.
In fact, quite a lot of the birds in the garden in winter have probably come from the Arctic, it’s just that they’re the same species that breed here, so it’s not obvious. Millions of blackbird, blue tits, starlings and other common species come here for the winter while our summer visitors are soaking up the sun in Africa. It feels pretty cold here to me at the moment, but I guess it’s all relative.
» the photos can be found in my Flickr stream where you can see them bigger if you want. I’m not sure I recommend it, though: my digiscoping set-up was struggling with the miserable winter light and they don’t bear close inspection.
Fela performing in 1971.
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Gotta be worth a squiz. Via kottke.org
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via Metafilter: ‘Interesting project by photographer Francois Brunelle. A collection of photographic portraits of North American and European look-alikes. Each photo features two look-alikes, who are not related, side by side.’
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I really worry sometimes that the forces of madness are winning; that we’ve entered the decline and fall, and the Dark Ages are just around the corner.
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weird Japanese squishy pig toy
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‘When I met the group on Monday morning, two weeks later, I proposed that we run a poetry stand, which would be like a country lemonade stand, except that people would be coming for poems. Whatever customers asked for, the students would write.’
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Origami with banknotes.
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‘Despite the inaccuracy of the title and the rather unsophisticated (yet charming) illustrations within, ‘Flora Sinensis’ is in fact one of the rarest and most important botanical works ever produced.’ Really gorgeous illustrations.