Shore roads and Youview boxes

 Here is a weird one, got a comment on Secret Of the Caves about if I've uploaded the Shore Road Mystery and while it's most certainly up there I have no recollection of what it was called and what it was under.

It's the one where the boys buy a flashy car and wait for it to be stolen from the Shore Road. You can see bits of it mouldering in the garage in Caves as it turns out to be a lemon.

 Anyway, original here and remake here.

On a side note, been messing with a Youview box I've found at work and decided to look over it on PC. 

It is, of course a Linux format drive, not ExFat but something along those lines, so you'll diskinternals Linux viewer to look at it on PC and fork out actual money to recover anything from it.

Or, you could just grab Rufus and an ISO of something like Linux Mint or ubuntu and burn yourself a live booting Linux pendrive to cut out the middleman.

There's a bunch of partitions and everything is in TS mpeg streams which is nice but not really viewable sadly. Worse it seems that they were a Big Bang Theory fan so with that insult I formatted the bastard and got myself a 500gb drive to upgrade a found PS3.

Down the tubes.

 Here is a brief update to the upside down tube map post I did a year or two ago. You can read it here if you're desperate.

There is a guy who talks about tube stations on Youtube, its quite informative and there is a video about why there's hardly any tube down south.

Turns out that we have really bad soil and a proliferation of train lines that take over most of south London in a way that they don't up north.

The soil bit is interesting, as a kid I can remember it being quite a lot of sand and oyster shell material in a bank at what would become my current workplace. You can see what it was like in the wiki link posted and how its not really suitable for tunneling and such. Though the DLR at Woolwich seems to manage OK, I guess modern methods help.

Cave secrets

 Here is a few new files for you and a review of sorts. 

The secret of the caves is the thirteenth book in the Hardy boys series, at least in the UK. It has both an original text and a revised version that has about half the old text in it with a new story tacked on. Its not an entirely original story like Flickering Torch which I'm reading now, nor is it an extended edit like The Hooded Hawk Mystery, its somewhere halfway in between.

The revised story goes something like this. 

Chet Morton has a new hobby as a metal detectorist, after finding Joe's old toy Fire Engine in the front yard, he wants to go to Honeycomb caves because of some treasure about buried treasure. A girl called Mary Todd shows up and asks them to find her professor brother, Todham, as he has vanished, presumed kidnapped.

She stays with the Mortons and they head down the coast to check out the caves and find a suspicious French diner cum antique shop is the focus of much of the trouble and that there is a strange old man living down on the sea shore in a cave who could be crazy. There is also a technology angle as a telescope up on the coast is the subject of sabotage by a foreign power.

All in all its not a bad story, just typical for most of the revised output.

The original story on the other hand is much more interesting...

The basic outlines are the same except it has ties in with The Shore Road mystery, as the earliest books were considered as part of a series, with the boys growing up and graduating from high school. This time it's one of the car thieves that has escaped from jail.

The boys rescue an old lady called Evangeline Todd who asks them to look for her brother, Todham. Which leads them down to Honeycomb caves, and a strange old man called Captain Royal. Its a much more interesting story and quite modern as it deals with mental health issues and amnesiacs. I won't spoil it too much, but I found it to be quite the better story for this. Chet, as per the usual original text doesn't get any hobbies which, having read a few stories, seem to be entirely for the remakes.

Also on a final note, no one could really spell coconut back then. Its listed as cocoanut, in the text and such and have seen various variations in this from older stories and posters and the like.

You can read the remake and originals here, and here.

Kew Japan Month

 So this is a thing, Kew has its own Momijigari trail along with a Japan festival for the whole of October, so if you want to explore the garden and have an interest in Japanese culture then this will probably do it. 

A warning though, book online, its a good £2 cheaper and they do not take cash at the main gates, card only sadly. Also I only got to see some of the permanent things there, including the gravel garden and Chokushi mon gate, as there was a massive queue to get in to the main event in the temperate house.

On the other hand though, those events are strictly optional and included in your entry fee. In fact over half term 16 - 31st Oct there's a Gruffalo event as well, which is worth mentioning for families.

What did  I actually see then?

Mostly quite a bit of the lower garden, including the Palm House, Princess of Wales Glasshouse and the Chokushi Gate and Yoshino Cherry pathway. Mental note, come back in spring time to see if they are in full bloom for sakura season.

Palm house is the main tropical house, holding palms and cycads but also many tropical trees such as Tamarind and a Banana in flower when I was there. Holds the oldest pot plant a massive cycad; the last of its kind.

Princess of Wales Greenhouse is not named after Princess Di but Princess Augusta although it was opened by her in 1987 and she has a memorial Maple in the garden which I also saw. making this the only Momiji of the trip.

They have a reasonable selection of cacti as it's my prime interest might actually be there for mesemb season. Caught a few conos in flower along with one of two Lithops. There were a few Opuntia in flower also. Mostly though a few odd species were in flower including a Plectranthus, an Elephant's foot yam and a Stoeberia, which can get to about 8ft making it the worlds biggest mesemb species.

Outside I saw a Jay as well as the usual crows and Magpie common to London. The chestnuts were in fruit and I saw the Gingko as well. Topped it off with a walk around the gate before going home.

Banana Flower

Dioscorea Elephantipes Flower

Stoeberia Frutescens bloom.

Paulownia Crests on the Chokushi gate.

Unknown Hoya in the Orchid section

Flickering torches

 A weird one this. This looks to be one of those three way splits that they did from time to time, a la Melted Coins.

I can't remember the original Flickering Torch Mystery though reading the blurb on the back of my original copy it has something to do with silkworms. If you hadn't guessed we got a revised edition of the original text here in the UK.

Currently 3 chapters in so far and its not good. The boys are starting a folk rock band complete with electric guitars and Tony Prito on Drums and Phil Cohen on Organ. There is some subplot about a radioactive plane engine and the boys losing time on their watches. But so far its all about the folk.

I can't really remember them playing guitars before, a few bits about them listening to the radio and news bulletins whilst driving and for some reason going to a play back in the Hidden Harbour mystery as part of the plot. Nothing screams out that they are into playing any sort of instruments.

 The upshot is this knowing nothing of the original story except that its a Les Macfarlane story, means I get to dig it out of the cupboard and read through the condensed version after I read this.

Finally I saw this on Instaspam, Yeah I'm mainly there for the shitposters and such, but it's an overlap and seeing as I've just come off editing up the original *cabin island and such thought it would make a good point to end it here.

*except its American numbering and its Phantom Freighter instead.