Monday, April 09, 2007

Square cornered Avebury stone

A stone at Avebury with a very sharp corner cut, which must be a piece of modern concrete put in to stop the stone from crumbling.

As I said on an earlier post, most of the Avebiry stones have had to be dug up and repositioned or even reassembled after centuries of deliberate and accidental damage.

THe photograph was cropped from one taken by TW from Why Dont You blog

Tags: , , , , , ,

Friday, April 06, 2007

My excuses for not updating

(Picture is out of date but not digitally messed with for once)

It's so easy to start a Blogger blog. It encourages you to approach blogging with a certain idleness that I'm happy to indulge myself with.

Blogger is brilliant the way you can just pick a theme and have a blog. You can alter the look of the blog with minimal skills as well. You don't even need a web host. You don't need a layout design or to choose a million Ajax widgets.

It's a happy amateur thing.

You are never going to be a target to be corrupted Like those people who blogged their drive across America, staying in WalMart carparks in their camper van . (Apparently, they found happy smiley WalMart employees everywhere.. Oh yes, by the way, guess who sponsored them)

The only downsides to having a blogger blog are that
  • you aren't likely to get into the blogristocracy easily, unles syou can remember to do all the Technorati tagging and join blogrolls and so on
  • Wordpress blogs have a million complex plug-ins and you can tweak them to death if you have the time and skills.
  • it's so easy to start that a lot of blogs have one post in 2004 and are never seen again
  • it's also so easy that a lot of blogs are about "I fed my cat and it scratched my sofa..." You know who you are...
Trying to avoid the latter - I know nobody is interested, it's hard enough to interest people you actually know in the minutiae of your life- I've not posted anything here for months.
Tags: , ,

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Web hits statistics

As soon as you hear the word statistics, your eyelids probably start to droop. This blog is Blogger-powered so I don't know if Firestats will work on it but I have been playing around with it on another Blog and I have to say I am entranced.

Once you start, you can get obssessed with where blog visitors come from, using which browser on which operating system and - most fascoinating of all- what desent them to your site.

Google hits are amazing. People have typed in phrases that you didn't even know appeared in your blog posts. They have been directed to an obscure post from a year ago that you forgot yourself.

There is a more measured discussion of how useful Firestats can be on Compuskills blog
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, February 16, 2007

Avebury ditch

Another photo from Avebury. This give more of an idea of what it's like to visit the site. The short concrete posts were put up as substitutes for the stones pulled down to make farm walls and buildings and/or to appease the anti-pagan mood of the late medieval church.The ditches are huge and circle a large area of the village. You can get an idea of the scale of these ditches from the few people here.
The ridges that you can see on the right side of this bit of ditch are called berms. They show the terracing that stops the sides from collapsing.
The picture comes from Whydontyou.org.uk

Tags: , , , , , ,

Idling


A few weeks of idling. The stone has shone on other territories and been even more horrifically opinionated than on here, but more coherent.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Rare breeds farm


Thanks to Megan's blog I know where the rare breeds farm in the post below was - Cholderton Wiltshire, which is quite close to Salisbury. This sheep (?) lives there.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

More stones in a occasional stones-picture series

Again, I will have to credit TW from Whydontyou.org.uk for yet another photograph of Stonehenge. He also has some good pictures, which are mainly of historic sites, on Flicka.
Some of the best sites aren't too photogenic, of course, but Stonehenge is a real star in any picture. You wouldn't hear Stonehenge saying "No, take it from my good side" for instance.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

An unusual hen

In fact, this hen is so unusual as to be a rare breed. The photo was taken - not by me - on a Rare Breeds Farm in Wiltshire.
This farm is paradise for toddlers. For any kids really.
There is a goat enclosure that brave kids can walk around among the goats, a rabbit building (with some enomous giant rabbits and dozens of other wierd kinds) a barn with one of those strange indoor adventure playgrounds made of scaffolding, tractor rides and huge numbers of odd animals.
I could go on but this isn't an advert because I don't even have the farm name handy.
Technorati tags:, . , , ,

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Stone from Avebury

The pages are overdue for stones. These are from Avebury in Wiltshire, a "World Heritage Site," which seems to be saying little when you consider that Liverpool riverside is also one. However, Avebury is quite amazing - a huge megalithic landscape, which includes Silbury Hill and Old Kennet long barrow.
The little concrete posts were put there in place of missing stones, when Avebury was rebuilt, less than 100 years ago. This reconstruction was necessary because the stones were demolished or buried in the medieval period. By that time, the Church had more or less won its struggle to dissuade the villagers from paganism. The stones then came to be associated with the Devil and fell victims to a religious fervour to stamp out his works, plus farmer's desire for easily obtainable building stones.
Most of the walls in Avebury village are built from the rubble that resulted from the pious destruction.
The present historic site was more or less recreated in the early 20th century by a Keiller marmalade heir, who supported the excavation of the site. The huge surrounding ditches were uncovered. Those stones that had been buried, rather than smashed or burnt, were reset in their locations. The plan was partly based on drawings made in the 17th century.

Technorati tags: , , , , , ,

Thanks , Marie


Marie Starr gave a kind comment to the Girls' toys and boys' toys rant below so I went to look at her own blogs.
Serendipitously, one of her blogs is called Serendipity3 which happens to be a word I have deformed into one of my email account names. She has some really good images if you navigate round her blogs and I like everything that I've heard of, in terms of books and music and films, in her profile. So thanks a lot Marie.
It is both welcome and really unusual for this blog to get comments that don't turn out to be adverts for obscure pharmaceutical products that you can buy online.
The "pink" and "blue" thing really exercised my rage to the point that I felt that I had to edit that blog to death so as not to sound like a lunatic. It probably still sounded like a lunatic, but a hobbled one.
However, reading through my own blogs, I realise that the concepts of "deadpan" or "sarcasm" don't translate well to the blogsphere. The typos are bad enough. (You'd imagine that the spellchecker had never been invented.) Combine the typos with deliberately silly images - such as the rendered ones below and the Christmas ones - some of which I had the sense to delete - and comments that feel wry at the time of writing but look dumb on the page..... So apologies to everyone else as well.

Technorati tags: , , , .

Friday, January 19, 2007

Big brother

Well, there has been a good outcome of sorts in the Celebrity Big Brother saga. Jade Goody has been kicked off, after a being the centre of a deeply unpleasant series of racially bullying comments directed towards Shilpa Shetty.
There are some good posts about it on Whydontyou.org blog and many other blogs.
Interestingly, it looks as if most bloggers have commented on this issue without watching the programme. I should think few rational people do. Well, who can blame them? I can claim some authority here, having watched in in someone else's house (I have cable so I am luckily never faced with TV choices so limited that the selection becomes Big Brother.) Endemol must be pretty pleased with themselves to have finally managed to find a Big Brother controversy that people with working grey matter could actually care about. Although it's a little distasteful that people's concerns, as expressed in Parliament and by the media, have focused on hiding the true ugliness of British racism rather than actually addressing it.
Technorati tags: ,,

Sunday, January 14, 2007

The strange insect

I am thinking about putting the insect on Sci-tech when they finish the redesign. Maybe someone will have an idea.