A walk.

 There's another bait article up in todays Mail about women watching pron and the so called harm, and I can't be bothered to respond.

Instead I went for a walk down by the river, instead. To tell the truth, its been about 4 months or so since I've been down there, It's a small stretch of the Thames from Firepower down towards Thamesmead, with options to walk past Crossness power station down towards Erith for the adventurous. 

There is quite a lot to watch along the way, if the tide is out you can see a variety of gulls such as Black Headed gulls, Herring Bull (aka Chip thief or Bully Gull) and the occasional Black backed gull. You may get some Mallards in the wooded bit as well as Shelduck and Teal. Today we saw some Mute Swans but I've also seen Cormorant, especially along by the Jetty at Erith.

There's quite a bit of cover even though a grass fire had ripped through a swathe of the river front, it still has quite a stand of Hawthorn and other small trees. There is some Sea Aster in flower as its getting on for autumn now, and we managed to disturb a Ring Neck Parakeet from the bush.

For once we managed to pick the right exit so we came out near the bus stop by the baths for the bus home.

brushfire damage.

 

Easter with the Barkley's

Happy Easter. As you can't quite tell we are down at my aunts place and have to slum it on an old laptop which is far from ideal.  Hope that you all have a nice day and have plenty of chocolate eggs and stuff as its the one day God throws down a Phoenix Down to revive his misbegotten son from the grave. 

I don't do religion so have spent it walking along the pier and looking at dogs.  Honestly there are hundreds of dogs here, including a few designer mongrels and the customary Labrador too.

Thanks to the Everton football scandal I've been reminded of an old cartoon show on TCC called the Barkleys. 
A sort of dog sitcom cartoon thing that was probably based on an old US sitcom (that they stole from us).  Wiki says all in the family which is Til Death Us Do Part and now I really want to see an animated Alf Garnett. To be honest I kinda rememeber the Theme tune in at odd times that Arnie Barkley is the head of the Barkley House.  But apart from that nothing much else, I guess the licence was cheap along with Groovie Goulies? and whatever else Sky put out on a weekday morning (they had an Anime version of the Little Prince / Le Petit Prince too).

First of the season.

Thanks to some glorious weather here today I've taken the advantage to visit the boot sale for my first visit of the season.  Thanks to our dear mayor Eatadick Khan we can take advantage getting two buses for the price of one, to lessen our costs. 

All in all we had a great day out, some great records bought all at one stall including some classic house and techno and a few bits and bobs including a new laundry bag.  Its a cracker of a day and we did see some stunning sights including a woman in a white dress and a thong underneath plus a really nice arse too, and a few other views in a similar vein.

Other birds included what I hoped were skylarks hopping about the scrub and on the verges some Orange Tip butterflies which I guess are quite early for the year.  Quite a productive season.


Also before I forget Sye Ten Atheist has been banned from Youtube due to vids and such you can read how and why here.  Its sad to see him go as Flinging a Faggot Off a Roof kept me going through the dark times and that and let me know that Tom Lehrer was still alive.

Butterflies at the Natural History Museum

Took a trip up town to see this spectacle of nature.  Every year the Natural History Museum in South Kensington puts on this show. Its in a polytunnel out in the grounds near the tube entrance, as you come in, you buy your ticket from the shed nearby and enter inward.  After the lab like plastic strips separating the outside from the inside you'll find yourself in a small tropical rainforest area complete with path and a few boards up with fun facts on the Lepidoptera.

There are plenty of things to see including a hatching area where if you are lucky you can see a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis or the table of rotting fruit which is favoured by some species.

Not pictured rotting Pineapples

 The fruit theme is explored further by the addition of orange and lemon bushes alongside some less recognizable flora. 

So what is there to see?
You get a few large species including Morpho, Owl Butterfly, some Swallowtails and an Atlas Moth bringing up the moth side of things. Some were quite tatty looking, especially the Eggfly with frayed wings and the like, possibly due to age and that. 

In the center was a shed with rows and rows of Chrysalises on poles.  I noticed a Monarch or another Danaeus species newly hatched as well as a Sulphur Yellow too.  They also had a guy in a shirt holding up an Atlas Moth which is truly huge. 

If you want to know the size check his hand in comparison.

After checking yourself for any stowaways in the mirror you can exit through the strips into the gift shop where you can buy all sorts of butterfly related tat and such. Reminds me a bit of the old butterfly house at Syon Park but that is now sadly closed.

Butterflies at the Natural History Museum.

It Costs. £6.50 to get in, Natural History Members get in free.

You can get there by Tube on these lines

Piccadilly. District and Circle exit at South Kensington and follow the signs down the tunnel as you go out.

(In fact this makes a great day out, there are a cluster of  museums in the area and a short walk will bring you to Hyde Park as well).

Raptors and Roundups.

Been a bit crazy this week, with a few trips out and some Vita news for all you rom botherers out there, 
oh and the Prime Minister allegedly sticking his knob in a dead pigs mouth as part of a university club initiation ceremony we have to grab our Lolz where we can get it.

Unexpected Find.!
First up some odd nature bits and pieces.  We took a trip down the Thames path at Woolwich today, the last time I did so I was sure I saw a Kingfisher in flight and didn't think anything would top this, or so I thought.  That is until halfway through my walk I saw this.

Peregrine Falcon.

Yeah that is a dead Peregrine Falcon, right there on the pathway leading down to Thamesmead, I didn't know that they were actually present in the area only that they are protected and rare in the UK. Looking on line there are reports of nests in Greenwich and Lewisham complete with chicks which is good to see. I initially thought it was a Sparrowhawk though my mind was screaming that this is a Peregrine.  It certainly made my trip out although really wished it had been alive rather than dead.

Vita Breakthrough.
Really enjoying this breakthrough on Wololo.net.  Seems some guys have been poking through some files dumped out via hacking into the Vita's Mail app.  Seems you can dump out files up to a certain size for analysing, you can only dump files lower than 2 Meg at the moment or go 7 Directories in but its a start and what has been found has been actually quite interesting. 

What has been found so far from this is:
* A whitelist of all games that run on Playstation TV.
* Switch PSN account.
* Read, write and delete from memory card (UX0)
* Cartridge dumping and back up installation.

As you can see its a major deal already, you can dump cards from the vita and put roms for back up whether this extends to PSN downloads is anyones guess so far but, like I said this is getting interesting.
Better explanation here, or if you wish to keep, fully up to date, follow Major_tom's twitter here.

The river of Poppies.

This is just a short lived thing up town out by the Tower of London, remembering all those that have fallen in battle in world conflicts.  Covering the moat area outside the Tower and various areas including spilling down the wall at one point its a poignant reflection on war and loss.  We were going to write about something else (an update on some old topics) but thought you would like this trip out instead.

First of all the Oyster card I had was plain out refused as it was blocked and didn't realise until I went in to Woolwich, luckily I was only going to use it for one trip before getting a travelcard for the rest of  my journey, which is a bastard but can't be helped. Next up we shared a train with a pop eyed spaniel like a full brown King Charles which was cute and set us up for the rest of the trip as it was full of dogs.  More spaniels down by the river, small schanuzers, big labs, dogs being carried, dogs on boats and a Fred Basset (incidentally I actually laughed at a Fred Basset strip this week, something to do with accidentally tossing the salad leading to much hilarity which is normally alien in his button down mundane world.)

I didn't think much of the river of poppies it was really crowded and there wasn't much space to take photos. A much better idea is taking a photo from a height such as from the park above the main areas, trust me it'll look better and you won't be crushed to death by 6 billion tourists.  The other reason I was down there is that we have a giant wooden hippo moored up at St Katharine's docks.  Its by a dutch artist and is very nice, its called Hipopo Thames and reminds me of the little guy from Liquid Kids or  a massive Kinder Happy Hippo.  Want to know how awesome he looks well check it out here.  Apparently the guy behind it has also made a giant rubber duck which I really must google.

Hyper Japan

Hyper Japan was on over the weekend if you didn't know, at Earls Court centre. For those not in the know this is a celebration of Japanese culture and otaku pursuits, think manga, anime, gaming and Japanese and you'd be right.  I decided to have a look after mum saw the address on an ad on the tube and wrote it down for us.  So this is my rather poor round up on the whole thing.

Paying my £15 on the door to get in and its a little overwhelming as its the whole ground floor dedicated to everything.  Big stand out stalls are Namco Bandai with a bank of PS3's dedicated to showcasing Tales of Xillia 2 and some One Piece game.  Tales turned out to be OK with the demo having you explore the basement of some bastard hydroponic centre for an imprisoned goddess or something, to be honest who judges an RPG on 10 minutes of play.  Across the way Nintendo had some stalls out promoting Wii U and Tomodachi Life and Yoshi's Woolly World and actually had a go on a new Harvest Moon spin off which I believe was called Hometown Story* (didn't think much of that).

Apart from games there were about a billion more stalls ranging from weapons (no really actual Katana) to a celebration of Sake.  They had a small area for people flogging dojinshi, homely Tumblrettes with self published books and manga of varying quality, from dull western (Manglo I call it, think rubbish like Totally Spies that try too hard to look Japanese but never capture the spirit) to the real deal in all its myriad styles.

There were a load of cosplayers too, and for every bloke in shorts with hairy legs and Sailor Moon with a nose ring (no really), there were several who looked boss.  Everyone deserved a medal as it was murderously hot out, especially the furry guy.
My favourite bits were a small arcade section with a Donkey Kong, PacMan and Ikaruga.  I never got a chance to play Ikaruga as there was some old dude content to freeplay his way to the end, never switching colours, and just continuing over and over when he died (which was often).  I've probably forgotten plenty of stuff (I came home with a Disgaea Artbook and a wobbly weedle cat) more including a table flogging Godzilla toys and Hentai Manga which was awesome.

I decided to make my way down to the end of street and look around Brompton Street Cemetery, which is marvellously overgrown, and was full of bathing crows and Gothic grave architecture, this must look stunning when the weather is cold and grey.
I decided to take the train home and popped out at Woolwich to see some people wanting Biafra to be a proper state, it sounded like they were banging a saucepan and yelling about jesus which sounds about right for Woolwich.

Goldeneye and SFII on portable hell yeah.

Pac n Pal.

It was O.K. I suppose.

A excerpt from the absolutely barking wall of manga.

Carue from One Piece according to Google.

From Brompton Road Cemetery, not the newscaster.

*edit it turned out to be Fantasy Life instead, possibly another that will warrant an extended play. Also a Gamecentral reader posted his version of a trip there too, he got to play a lot more Nintendo stuff then me.

Deptford / Lewisham Junk Tour.

Lucky you, you get two posts today, one is this round up / Junk tour thing and the other is fall out from my holiday (foreign TV if you're interested).

But first Flat top watch. The Mail has put up a piece about the evil Cyber Gnats or Cybernats, the poor wee disenfranchised souls who vote yes for Scots independence.  For the record, I'm not Scottish and therefore have no vote, but I can sum up my feelings with this, If you think you're big enough to go it alone then do so as I simply do not care about you.

Apparently one of these trolls is flat topped ex Amiga Power reviewer Stuart Campbell. Now I've read Stu's work for ages now and it has to be said he does great polemic albeit from a left wing perspective, and used to put up with Wings over Scotland before ditching it sometime back, due to lack of interest.  I was also warned through BX forum that he also now sports a ridiculous comedy Lefty beard (like Dale Winton) to go with his flat top.  Anyway the piece is actually pretty spot on and while I still respect him for gaming stuff (especially the best of guides in Retrogamer) I've grown tired of his stuff on politics.

Anyway a junk tour to Deptford and Lewisham is it.  We decided to take a tour down past the DLR station and through the park there which I've never done before.  Its passed the Stephen Lawrence Center which a blue plaque by the Nubian Jak Programme  which sounds like they should be putting out old school inspired acid house on Clone Records or its imprints. The park itself is nice with a properly arranged garden and play area but mainly a shaded cycle path along the Quaggy River down into Lewisham.

Lewisham itself has always been a "melting pot" which means its stuffed full of foreigners, Lefties and the fervent Christians.  It has a few nice charity shops, such as the Red Cross, Marie Curie and the Hate (Heart) Foundation.  I've got a few nice things there and today is no exception, including a Dorling Kindersley Animal Encyclopaedia and a very interesting book called A Dodo at Oxford.  Supposedly a students diary about how he kept a Dodo in his lodgings in 17th Century Oxford, it was found donated in a box of books at charity shop.  Its probably not real but the little things like the side notes on life then and various stuff make it excellent to dip into and out of and impossible to put down.

We also found something I thought had died out long ago, Rola Cola.  Due to being thirsty we found that they had this on a two for one deal with D&Gs grape soda which is nice.  From what I can gather its made down at Purley and tastes absolutely lovely, sort of flat ish but nice.  They have a remarkably uninformative site here if you are so interested, bit if you do see any for sale then I suggest you snap it up.

Hall Place

Don't know if I've ever given a report from here, but today I was down at Hall Place in Bexleyheath taking in the wildlife and enjoying the sun.  Its a really nice place out at Bexley as the link above shows they have a butterfly exhibition on and a hands on display by Jambs owls and their parliament of owls. (incidentally I would love to be governed by parliament of owls they could solve major problems and keep rodent infestations down at the same time).

First of all they have a small greenhouse with a limited display of tropical species including a banana plant a large Plumeria and an impressive bottle brush (Callistemon) situated round a large pool.  The owls and butterfly exhibits are further down in more shaded and tropical glasshouses. I didn't go into to see them but did rake around the plant areas outside they had some Jatropha and small Hoyas for sale at quite expensive prices.

The main outside area revolves around a small river and the grounds are home to a lot of geese and ducks. I was lucky enough to see some greylags having a fight though unlucky enough not to catch them on camera as I wanted film and the pentax I use is fiddly for film. Windows doesn't like reading its memory card for some reason as it'll corrupt shots as will this isn't present in Linux Mint.

Anyway you want some pictures a few maybe old shots from previous visits. Here you go.

Orange plants for sale

Bottlebrush bush

Greylags 

Jambs Owls

Even though this is an old shot its still not changed to Aloe Arborescens

Holiday Highlights.

This is a quick update giving a quick thumbs up / thumbs down guide to our recent holiday. We detailed Botanicactus in our last post though it'll get on here simply for having an eyed hawkmoth.

OK Here goes.

Good.
Various calas around our resort.  Its catalan or possibly Spanish for bay, Platja/ playa being beach in both, they were rather nice little beaches with the smaller bay having a massive pine tree for shade and good amount of sea life for snorkelling. 

General wildlife. 
Our balcony had house martins nesting in the beams, so you could see the young poke their heads out of the nest and the adults barrel in and feed them or if you got too close abort at the last second and fly away.  They would wheel around and do all sorts of insane acrobatics.  They reminded me of little spitfires crossed with jets and their aeronautic abilities were incredible.  Sadly due to some bullshit by the hotel, we had  to change rooms on the wednesday so we never saw the little guy fledge.

So were's me grub then?

Other stuff we saw was a scorpion in our shower, not sure if its poisonous or what but most are and a wall gecko, though this was only in the last week or so.

Plantwise. There was plenty of cacti for us and tubs full of little Aloes including some of the Littoralis types and what looked like Melalucea in flower / seed.  Incidentally this was the first time I've ever seen red flowered platyopuntia, your archetypal flat pad prickly pear.  There was plenty of the original yellow flowered versions as well.

So red and spiny.

Finally we saw a sea hare but was not sure if it was alive or dead.

Cover acts.
They had a load of cover acts with varying degrees of badness.  We have a Rod Stewart that looked like Keith Chegwin, a Whitney Houston that looked like a gorilla in a dress and a duo that covered everything from Creedence to Sam and Dave (sic) as well as Usher.  Best of all was walking along the street and coming across a bar covering Love and Happiness by Ron Hardy (though they played the Al Green original  rather than the proper house beat we know and love)

Downsides.

Our hotel was nice and we got an upgrade to an suite room, however on the Monday before we went home we had a letter posted on our door saying we had to move and come to reception.  We did and they gave us some cock about a leak from our room.  There was no leak and we saw them later putting in a minibar, they did give us two new rooms and a packed lunch but it was the principle of the thing rather then being cocking deceitful about it.

Even worse was to come. We missed our flight home due to them Thomson being bellends about the coach home.  A coach pulled up and they didn't call out and when we did query the name they said no.  Of course this was our coach and they pulled off.  We had to get a cab to the airport and fuck about getting new flights as Thomson were of course no use.  We can do you tomorrow, cough.  So we took our trade to Easyjet who took our cash and got us flights home a mere two hours later.

Yeah we are putting in a complaint for them dicking us around.

El Mejor sito de Musica Libre Electronica

Oh and in unrelated news we'll be putting up a music blog soon its called RobotNuncaVisto and heres the header for it. We listen to a lot of music so we'll share the joy of this with any good stuff heard.  If its made.

Nuthatch and friends.

We took a trip out to Oxleas Woods today, seeing as its A. a nice day and B. our camera is fully charged so good for a photo opportunity.

Its a nice place, ideal for dog walkers (plenty of dogs there) and bird watching.  We saw a few things that were quite nice including a Robin, a few crows and a lot of Ring Necked Parakeets.  They seemed to have proliferated over the years and now can be found all over south London and not just in the suburbs either, they can be seen down by the railway in work and in most parks nowadays.  What you really want to know is about the nuthatches.

 It was on the way back to the car we saw it, while looking at a parakeet in a tree we noticed a small bird hacking at the trunk of a tree, but didn't recognise it as any of our local woodpeckers. Small and blue, we suddenly twigged that it was a Nuthatch.  It was a nice round up to our day and though we didn't get a shot of it, it was pretty cool to see.

Oh and if you are interested in a nice Kanji dictionary (and don't have JDICT as one of your search box options) then this isn't a bad alternative and also has some US centric info on Nuthatches.

Holiday TV round up.

Part 2 of our holiday special see's us not only reminisce about some great holiday TV but something from work.

We normally don't talk about work, not that its forbidden or nowt but simply because its routine and boring, there's only so much you people could take before your eyes glaze over.  However last friday we cleared out the grass bank at Galena.  Its the mother of all slopes at the back of our tea room and largely a dangerous place.
Doing so we managed to find about 6 Slow Worms hidden underneath various bags and stones,  ranging from small coppery coloured youngsters to a large brown adult male, it was heartening to see them there.  Previously we used to collect them from the self same site when we were kids, and kept one for 3 days until it escaped into the garden. 

OK back to holiday tv,  My parents had the room with the TV so if you wanted to see anything you needed to get a hold of the remote and go surfing.  Sadly English channels bottomed out around Channel 17 with half either fuzz or the ominous no signal.  The rest were German TV and were nothing to write home about, sorry Germans.  English was BBC Northern Ireland (previously Ulster), an Intermittent ITV though thats a blessing seeing the shit they put out, and various guest channels, (German Eurosport and Sky News) with rolling coverage of  Raoul Moat "heroically" blasting his wife, her lover, and a blameless Police Officer before doing the world a big favour and shooting his own steroid addled brains out with a shotgun.  As you can see I have little time for the cunt.

No if you wanted different you had to tune into Spanish TV.  A mix of TV news and Telenovela Spain never disappoints, mainly because they're the only people to have decent kids TV in the mornings.  Oh and Doraemon in Catalan.  Its divided up into TVE, Cinco and Siete as main stations, and is based on a mix of dubbed imports (an impressive Stargate Atlantis comes to mind and a patchy Simpsons with Marge and Lisa being spot on but Apu sounding not unlike Mr Burns), home grown Loose Women type shows and crappy lottery game style shows. 

Worse was the TV shopping shows, this includes a Gold for Euro advert, seeing as that pox has reached Europe too.   Psychics, including the old, the fat and someone who worryingly looked like Jo Brand.  All with a mix of contact ads underneath, so if you don't want your palm read you could always ring up for a fat mature (shudders).

Best of all is Aprende Ingles a station dedicated to teaching the Spanish, English.  Run by Richard Vaughan a Texan, who is the spitting image of dead comedian Bill Hicks if he'd lived to his 50's.

Richard Vaughan

Bill, sorry Richard is the host for most of the shows and is largely there to promote English use amongst the Spanish.  However for kids there's Davey the Dog.  Davey is of course no ordinary dog, being host Marcus Giovanni in a dogsuit.  Yugioh! fans may remember Joey in a similar suit, well this dude does it for real, not only that but he sings Old Mac Donald and various songs.  Its utterly funny but for all the wrong reasons, a proper Meme in motion that would only require a dedicated 4Channer to turn into an internet phenomenon.

Last but not least there is an unknown show that
seems to involve either something from Dig dug or  Black and White Minstrels.  Videoclip of course later.

Bill Hicks Uncanny huh.