Phursday Photos at the Paralympics

I can hardly believe I got up at 5am to go and watch sport once, never mind twice, but it seems I must have done, because there is photographic evidence.

Having said that, before last weekend if you had asked me what the minimum requirement for competetive cycling was, I'd have said two legs - either natural or prosthetic.

Turns out I was wrong. Didn't get any photos of the German team sprint - too busy watching as 3 guys with 10 limbs between them broke the Paralympic record - but they were a definite highlight of the day.

Even so, no apologies for the obvious team bias in the photo selection...

Phursday Photos at the Olympics

I'm not normally the sort of person to be interested in sport of any flavour, but the Olympics dropping on your doorstep is kind of a once in a lifetime occasion, so we kinda had to go...

Unfortunately the organisers'  plan to allocate tickets to people who didn't actually want them means the closest I could get was to camp out at the side of the road for the cycling road race... but at least I got a good snap of Team GB's cyclists to show for it, as well as getting to soak up some of the Olympic atmosphere...

 

        

  

 

Phursday Photos: obvious subject....

Well, a blog which pretends to be vaguely related to science fiction is hardly going to let the end of an era slip by unnoticed is it? I've never actually seen a space shuttle in person, so this week I'll hand the camera over to NASA...

Phursday photo

A little something to bend the mind of any passing petrol-heads. Go on, you know it doesn't look right!

Long Walk 2011

It is a tradition over at the Daily Audio Bible to take July 7th off, go somewhere beautiful, and spend the day with God. My intention had been to do a slight variation on the theme, and go for a long drive, take the Mini off into the countryside for the day. (The reason for this stems from Wild at Heart, something John Eldredge says about men getting closest to God when they feel most 'alive'; for him it's all manner of outdoorsy stuff, for me, it's a back-lane Mini blast.)

Unfortunately things were not as easy as all that: first there was a hospital appointment on July 7th (for my daughter) which would have taken half the day out. Still, no matter; July 8th was booked off work and the Long Drive was on. Except the aforementioned daughter was taken ill this morning. Not only that, but the rain did not look conducive to a back-lane Mini blast.

Still, as it turned out I was not required to make the trip to see the doctor, and was able to slip off for a somewhat shorter than planned walk, getting myself lost in the rolling hills of, um, Staffordshire.

I had no real idea what I was doing; I mean, the theory was simple enough - go somewhere quiet and listen to God. Easier said than done, obviously. But did I come away with anything? Well, maybe, although I'm not sure what it means, if anything.

I found myself surrounded by ferns, and as I looked at the repeatedly dividing pattern of the leaves, it occured to me that the closer you look at a fern leaf, the more detail you go into, the more accurately you can measure its outline, and the longer its outline will be.

Sass that hoopy frond

Taken to its extreme, you end up with the fractal theory argument that Britain's coastline is infinite. Plainly nonsense in practical terms, but an interesting point, that the closer you look, the more anything - a fern, a country, a person - approaches infinity. At some level, the Infinite is present right at the heart of everything.

Phursday Photo

Phursday Photos: Dunstanburgh Castle

For no other reason than that it's been something of an iconic view since my childhood, and every time I go back I find myself taking more pictures of the castle and the scenery around it. So, while I get on with thinking up some sci-fi related stuff to post, here are some of them.

CSFF Blog Tour: The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead

It is an important and popular fact that my first novel was a sort of comic fantasy playing on the idea of ley lines (or isoparadoxes, lines of equal weirdness) as a means of travelling to perpendicular dimensions. It was, of course, unmitigated rubbish, and failed utterly to pave the way for someone with more talent to tackle the subject in a more serious manner.

And so it is that over the last month I have been reading The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead. I have to say it was nice that for this blog tour, the publisher involved managed to send a review copy of the book out to our poky little island. Apparently before they sent them to some US reviewers, which was nice change! And given that big chunks of the story take place in England, I hope you’ll appreciate the view of someone who has an Oyster card and grew up in the Gateway to the Cotswolds, although admittedly not in the 17th Century. I haven’t been to Black Mixen either, although I have been to Dragon Hill, which is in the Cotswolds and does have an artificially flat top, although rather than being a ley portal it’s where St George killed the dragon. Dragon blood is the most effective weedkiller known to man, and not so much as a blade of grass has grown on the hill for 17 centuries.

But I digress. I think the point, such as it was, was that things like leylines and prehistoric monuments and English mythology have long fascinated me, and, well, when you mix these things up with a little time and inter-dimensional travel, you’re going to have a book that I’ll at least take a look at in Waterstones.

So while I do that, here are some nice illustrations of ley lines and portals:

Phursday Photos: Wheels

Phursday Photos: Mini varieties

If I had time I would have found 57 varieties of Mini (I'm sure there are many more than that around!) but here's a smaller selection of the different shapes and sizes (OK, not much variety in sizes!) to have appeared over the last 50 years...