Killer ladybird bites blogger's hand
I had no idea another alien had landed and is threatening life as we know it. Only three years or so late with this one then. Click through on the picture to discover how I finally caught up in the flickr comments, thanks in particular to the flickr group Field Guide to Insects and Spiders. This latter already has, I now find, a discussion thread relating to the spread of this noxious pest.
This is Harmonia axyridis conspicua, a form of the harlequin ladybird. They are voracious and threaten our own 46 resident species with extinction. And they’re all over London in many different guises and are spreading fast!
If you’re at all interested in ladybirds and ecology then please keep a watch out and report any sightings to the Harlequin Ladybird Survey, preferably with a photograph for verification.
Apparently the advice is not to kill them if you find them since it’s very easy to misidentify British native ladybirds as harlequins and besides killing one or two would have very little impact on their population.
And yes, when hungry, harlequin ladybirds will bite humans in their search for something edible. The bastard really did bite me!
Killer ladybird bites blogger’s hand
I had no idea another alien had landed and is threatening life as we know it. Only three years or so late with this one then. Click through on the picture to discover how I finally caught up in the flickr comments, thanks in particular to the flickr group Field Guide to Insects and Spiders. This latter already has, I now find, a discussion thread relating to the spread of this noxious pest.
This is Harmonia axyridis conspicua, a form of the harlequin ladybird. They are voracious and threaten our own 46 resident species with extinction. And they’re all over London in many different guises and are spreading fast!
If you’re at all interested in ladybirds and ecology then please keep a watch out and report any sightings to the Harlequin Ladybird Survey, preferably with a photograph for verification.
Apparently the advice is not to kill them if you find them since it’s very easy to misidentify British native ladybirds as harlequins and besides killing one or two would have very little impact on their population.
And yes, when hungry, harlequin ladybirds will bite humans in their search for something edible. The bastard really did bite me!
Crystal Palace station
I passed through Crystal Palace Station last week on my way to Streatham Hill and was so struck by the building that I had to go back some days later to look at it properly. The picture above with its lines and curves, arches and stairs, reminds me somewhat of this picture by Escher.
The enormous cathedral-like structure with great arches and wide stairways was opened in 1854 to take what were obviously very large crowds to the relocated Crystal Palace. Its grandeur is now entirely out of scale to its importance in the railway system and it was empty and silent. It’s one of those spaces which invites whooping to test whether there is an echo. Yes, the echo is excellent.
There are two stairways (of which this is one) which are fenced off at the top and lead out, through small arches into a wide vacancy between the two remaining sets of tracks which is home to a potentially fine crop of hay. Apparently this used contain sidings and the whole area was covered between the red brick retaining walls by an elegant dual bow-spring arch iron roof. It must have looked spectacular.
One particularly endearing feature (if my presumption of purpose is correct) is the placing of a parallel handrail below those at adult height which I can only guess were designed for children to use. I can’t remember seeing such a thing anywhere else.
I went with Neha, who continues to bear my efforts to learn how to take pictures of people with great patience.
She writes poetry as well as modelling. However she wasn’t the most-photographed subject of the day. That honour has to go to Arun.
Two months old and he’s smiling, laughing, copying facial expressions like a pro (this is “oooooooh”) and generally behaving exactly as the perfect baby should. I realised that if I’m ever a grandmother I’m going to be a nightmare. I wrestled him from his mother‘s arms the moment I spotted her and only handed him back with great reluctance several hours later.
Optimism
This is, as you can see, addictive. Last one for today, I promise. And btw they are supposed to be funny, not a subtle statement about incipient suicide. I think I’m usually rather blatant when I feel crap.
Click through for a bit more info about who said it first (minus the starvation of course).
Update Oh frabjousity! there’s a de-motivator flickr group.
Life
Despair and demotivation
The seriously laugh-out-loud funny sight despair.com has, amongst its pages of satirical goodness, what it calls a “Parody Motivator Generator“. Choose a picture from amongst your favourite affirming images to upload, add your title and text, fiddle with the colours and total dissatisfaction can, and often does, ensue.
Go to their gallery of delightful demotivational products for some disinspiration. I particularly enjoy despair, dysfunction and loneliness. And don’t forget to check out who the manufacturers suggest each poster is particularly suited to. Most impressive in this regard is consulting with its clever alternating urls for the first link (must find out how that’s done). And whatever you do don’t click that second link. No, don’t. Really.
My poster is another version of the phrase used in their adversity poster. The original Nietzschean nonsense has always annoyed me.
Torso
Or should it be trunk? when actually it’s a root. Oh well, you get the general idea.
Most of the Suffok pictures are now up, I think, and can be seen in a slideshow.
The most viewed, apart from the pipefish, is one of the secondborn’s lower extremities which seems to be very popular among the community which finds such body parts particularly exciting. Some of whom have accounts seemingly without their own pictures but lots and lots of other people’s saved for future reference. I’m not really sure how I feel about this.
If only Maizy was a bloodhound
The firstborn has a mobile. It is sleekly curved, slightly rubberised to the touch, a pleasing matt black. It is called a pebl. That’s pronounced “pebble”. Firstborn flips it open with a neat flick of a single hand which is considered extremely cool by his peers. According to the manufacturer:
With chic simplicity, the subtly stylish Motorola PEBL adds a calming convenience to your everyday travels.
Really? Calming? We are currently on our travels, camping on the top of a cliff overlooking this beach (also a gratuitous Maizy picture but I can’t resist).
You will note that it is shingly. Stoney. It is, in fact, entirely covered in pebbles. They are its most obvious feature. Can you guess what’s next?
Yes. Firstborn managed to lose his pebl on the beach.
We narrowed down the area of potential loss to a quarter mile or so between a notice about crumbling cliffs and a lump of concrete which had crumbled down to the beach. Firstborn was extremely grumpy about being forced to go to the beach and the last time he had seen his phone was apparently when he made a call to moan about how miserable his life was and this call was by the yellow sign.
Part of the outward and visible signs of extreme grumpiness are the headphones indicating that the grumpee is listening to music at an extremely high volume. It is, I conclude, an electronically-aided version of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “la la la la la”, but I have decided not to mention this to the grumpee in question.
It would be an exaggeration to say that we subjected the place to a finger-tip search but we certainly spent more than an hour scanning the area, first side to side in strips parallel to the sea then, when that revealed nothing, in strips up and down between sea and cliff. At intervals I rang the phone hoping that we would hear it over the crash of the waves until its owner remembered that it was set on vibrate.
The organisation of the beach was fascinating. At the base of the cliff tiny pebbles which gave way to succeeding banks of shingle organised by size of stone. The most difficult to scan were those banks where the pebbles were the same size as the phone. What we really needed was a bloodhound, suggested secondborn, because Maizy was no help at all and when told to “seek” ran up the side of the cliff like a mountain goat and disappeared over the top.
The sun lowered in the sky. The shadows cast by the cliff were deep and dark. The chill was enough to make us, t-shirted as we were, shiver. Secondborn sat on the stones and screamed about how miserable his life was.
When the shadows reached the sea I called off the search. Secondborn and I set off along the beach, Maizy trotting at our heels. Firstborn appeared to be labouring under a powerful and private emotion and we let him mourn alone.
When we were halfway across the stretch of beach between the yellow sign and the steps up to the campsite, the stretch of beach we had not searched, there was the phone, clearly visible, lying on top of the small stones in an entirely un-pebble-like manner.
Another search which concluded successfully was that of the identity of secondborn’s monster of the deep.
Click through to the picture on flickr to discover the amazing resource that is the ID Please group. Many thanks to Dem for suggesting it.
Hail and wifi
Good grief. There’s wifi in the campsite. It rained a lot. Torrentially. Then it hailed. Then, at dusk, it stopped and some people went fishing.
The van has such excellent ventilation.
Is it any wonder my feet get so cold when driving?
Thank goodness for Adnams beer.
frizzyLogic 