Days out.

Had a few nights out, including a talk and our annual Xmas dinner.

The talk was by Paul Hoxey, and covered new avenues down the Mantaro river Peru. Largely due to new roads opening up the area, and largely because of mining reasons that this can be explored now.

He reckons he's found a few new species, including a short flowered Cleistocactus and a few species of Corryocactus he can't place. Also a Lymanbensonia with red flowers which looks boss.

My other day out was our Xmas meal at a pub down in Petts Wood. A lovely old building, that sadly was quite cold and such. We were in a back room that had high ceilings which didn't help, the upside of this was the food was nice and unlike work I don't have to pretend not to drink to fit in. Which is nice.

Footprints Review

 So Footprints Under The Window. 

Is one of those stories that got a modern as well as a classic edition, and for once, both stories run along the same lines. Sort of.

Revised edition.

The story revolves around refugees taken from a fictional island nation off of French Guiana, ending up in Bayport and targeting a local  tech start up called Micro-Eye, to nick the plans of an advanced satellite camera. Or such.

I always imagined that French Guiana was one of those countries that had been renamed along the lines of Belize, but, no it's still French Guiana. The island chain off the coast, The Huellas (way ass aka footprints islands) are a sort of micro Cuba, a dictatorship run by Juan Posada that the boys visit over the course of their investigation.   

There is involvement from a local tycoon called Orrin North, who predictably turns out to be the main culprit. Along with Posadas right hand man Bedoya, they end up getting trapped in a rusted hulk of a ship before being sprung out by their father.

Notes.

There are a few common points about this, refugees from a foreign nation, a Laundry company being involved and Orrin North as the main criminal. It still stands up as a story, even if there is some high tech nonsense tacked on for the modern era.

Part of the plot involves a keyhole limpet used as a dead drop for messages, not found in this part of the coast. It also gives a range of where the Hardy's actually live. Wikipedia says its found from New Jersey to Brazil and looking on a few maps its sort of cuts across Chesapeake bay with Maryland as its limit. Which means Bayport can be found around New Jersey or at the most New York State. Looking at a map there are a ton of small islands on the East Coast in that vicinity so that area makes sense.

Original Edition.

The original edition revolves around the disappearance of a former pillar of the Chinese community and someone doping the fuck out of Aunt Gertrude as she travels via a steamer back to Bayport. Also the launderette that the Hardys used being a front for smuggling Chinese nationals into Bayport with cooperation from Orrin North.

A word of warning, this is an old book and if you aren't comfortable with every fresh off the boat Chinese basically being a whopping stereotype, then this is not for you, hell even an unwoke bastard like me finds it hard going trying to work out what they're saying half of the time.

There are two stereotypes here for you, an evil Fu Manchu type that runs the laundry now (Called Louie Fong) and various hapless immigrants who seem to have trouble with their L's and R's (is that even a thing in Chinese,).

Although if you want a modern thing, they dress up some poor dude they rescue as a girl to smuggle back to their home as a safe house. So convincing is it that Callie and Iola get jealous and Chet Morton tries to hit on her / him. 

Notes.

There are no vacation trips out of the country in the old Hardy Boys books. Nor are any of Fentons staff like Jack Wayne or Sam Radley encountered either. I wonder if they are products of the revised edits.

This seems to be the last of the books where the boys use their bikes, the roadster they drive round in is a heavily restored car bought during the Shore Road mystery.

The big fight at the docks, amongst the Chinese reminds me of something, maybe an old news story, but still seems modern. I can imagine them running a boot sale stall now, peddling bent DVDs instead of a laundry service.

Anyway when complete you can download both books here and here.

Ilford trip and cactus news

 This is just a few lines to basically say, I've decided to cross over back to the other side of the river again. I haven't been down that way in ages, and every time I go there there seems to be less charity shops and more nutters out.

The way  I go is via Gants Hill tube. You can exit and walk through the park to end up on Ilford high street. Occasionally you'll see a rat in the park, but mostly its all about the ducks and geese and of course the squirrels.

This time they seemed to have their squirrel spawner set up to 11 as there was an absolute load of them scurrying around. Setting still for a moment gets you at least three come up to see if you have any food for them and kinda felt bad not having any monkey nuts for them to hand out. By my counting I must have seen 30 or so of them just walking through. After that Ilford wasn't all that.

This sort of thing.

New species to be split from Antimima.

I'm part of a Facebook group dedicated to the more popular Mesembryanthemaceae  such as Lithops and Conophytum. These get most of the photos, but sometimes we have posted things from the stranger, more shrubbier mesembs.

Antimima was part of Ruschia a supergroup of shrubby pink flowering bushes native to South Africa, they basically made up a group in the group of more mat-forming, or dome shaped colonies. A guy posts a photo of a white flowered plant in flower and says its from MSG (Mesemb Study Group) seed, does anyone know what it is:

The reply is from Peter Van Wyk.

It is Antimima pilosula. I had the species DNA sequenced in 2020 by Dr Klak. The strange morphology does not fit with Antimima and so did the DNA also showed, it falls in a clade with 5 other species from three other genera in the eastern Richtersveld and Boesmanland and will be placed rightfully into a new genus in the future.

If I get any update on what the outcome of this research or what this new taxon will be called, I will of course update this post. 

Scorpion stings

 Finally finished editing the last of the original Canon titles, this of course being the Sting of the Scorpion. Which in the UK is one of those books held back for "contractual reasons" actually a dispute between publisher Collins and an older publisher, who also had the Hardy's licence.

It doesn't really matter, mind, as this is one of the good ones, whereas Witchmaster's Key was a massive clusterfuck, this wasn't. A good story, with some previous nods to the series, just like the original stories, and the whole gang assembled to help fight, the crooks.

The story centers around two things mini airships and  a wildlife park which is the target of the Scorpio gang. There is also a general scorpion related theme to it, too, with a scorpion hidden in a tree trunk at one point and a harmless whip scorpion sent to Aunt Gertrude, under the guise of a new cooking product.

Quite a few elephants added in this as well with a grumpy tusker and and exploding elephant too (though spoiler alert this was a mini airship with an explosive charge.)

I won't ruin it further, even the exploding 'phant isn't that central to the plot, as, like the scorpion in the tree before mentioned, its in chapter 1.

You can read the original story here. 

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.