Tag: YouTube

Nature

Moths and meteorites

With National Moth Night and the Perseids, it should have been a good weekend for night-time stuff.

I didn’t have a lot of luck on either front. Really of course you need a moth trap to count moths effectively. I had a go at treacling—spreading a mix of treacle, brown sugar and rum on tree trunks to attract the moths—but nothing came. In the end my total count was three species; Jersey Tiger, seen earlier in the day, a Marbled Beauty attracted to the porch light, and a Double-striped Pug which came into my bedroom. Still, Jersey Tiger was one of the target species for NMN this year, so that’s good.

One thing becomes apparent walking around the garden at night; lots and lots of slugs.

And here’s some hot slug-on-slug action.

I didn’t try very hard with the meteorites, I must admit. And didn’t see any. But little white flashes of light appearing in the sky because the orbit of our planet is rolling through the dust trail of a long-gone comet seems like a good enough reason to post this:

Tags astronomy, insects, invertebrates, moths, National Moth Night, slugs, YouTube

Culture Nature

Digiscoping woodpeckers

I was having a go at photographing the juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker that comes to the birdfeeder, but it’s kind of tricky. My success rate when digiscoping is never that high at the best of times; and as you can see, it’s not temperamentally inclined to stay still:

Still, the motion blur can be a fun effect:

And it makes it all the more gratifying when one of the pictures comes out just right.

Tags birds, digiscoping, photography, woodpeckers, YouTube

Culture

Train songs

Post author By Harry
Post date 12 June 2007
No Comments on Train songs

Larry has posted a whole compilation of train-themed soul music over at Funky16Corners, which seemed like as good a reason as any to post this video:

Trains are a big presence in American music, of course: blues, jazz, rock and roll all have their great train songs. I don’t think they’ve ever had quite the same associations in Europe, perhaps because our countries are just physically too small. There’s never been a great British road movie, either.

Still, there’s a different kind of romance to European train travel; the idea of buying a ticket in Paris and waking up the next morning in Vienna, or Milan, or Barcelona. Between school and university I went travelling around Europe by train with friends. That was before the Channel Tunnel, so it was a long first day: London-Dover, then the ferry, then a train to Paris, then walking across Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon to get a train heading south. But the next morning, I took one look out of the window and could see we were in Italy; the buildings, the whole look of the landscape, had changed.

Going by easyJet just isn’t the same.

Tags Elizabeth Cotten, Kraftwerk, music, trains, YouTube

Culture

War—hunh—Good God, y’all

We’ll soon know whether the ‘Ugly Rumours‘ version of War has made it into the UK charts. I’d be more sympathetic to the project if it wasn’t so closely linked with the all-conquering ego of greasy, self-serving media strumpet George Galloway. Anyway, here’s Edwin Starr:

EDIT: the new version went in at #21, which isn’t bad going, but not really high enough to make a big political point.

FURTHER EDIT: I decided not to clutter up the place by putting this in its own post. There’s no particular connection except it’s music on YouTube. This is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who I just learned about today via this post over at Soul Sides.