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Our attempt to understand backgammon at SF's 'Little Shamrock.' Tried out the 5D Mark II's video for the first time.
Seriously. Can someone please explain this to me? I found it in one of the shops on South Congress. I have absolutely no idea why you would want to buy a tchotchke of two naked men and two naked women in a shower, but maybe someone out there can educate me. Please, please educate me.
Our Guide,
The Talented and Knowledgable,
Sr. Feliciano Gonzalez
Hiker +
Nature Guide
TouristGuide +
Part Mountain Goat
= Nice Man.
www.geocities.com/boquete-tours
felicianogonzalez255@hotmail.com
I did this diagram last year for a small economic consulting firm. The purpose was to explain the importance of secured transactions in developing economies. There are some things I would change, but I'm pretty happy with it, and it's still generating buzz at the relevant financial institutions.
Taken on 18 August 2014 in South Africa near Springbok Kamieskroon (DSC_6338)
freewheely.com: Cycling Africa beyond mountains and deserts until Cape Town
everyday there are new residents made but this day i saw minus ! does this mean 76 deleted their accounts? the maker does not react on my question ,anyone else here who knows ?
Iris Gomez (FAO Colombia) explains in Wayùu what FAO came to do, then translates into Spanish.
Read more about FAO and Colombia.
Photo credit must be given: ©FAO/Justine Texier. Editorial use only. Copyright FAO
Charts similar to this are used to demonstrate relatedness according to Neo-Darwinistic Evolution. Lines are drawn based on observed similarities not only in physical features, but also in their assembly instructions. However, no explanation is offered to explain differences. The XR6 and XR8, for example, are in many ways identical, but changing a six cylinder motor into an eight cylinder motor gradually, step by step, is impossible.
Prior to the 1996 riposte by a Senator to the question of xenophobia as please explain a former Prime Minister had in 1992 labelled the Senate as unrepresentative swill. Never a chamber of greatness, just of review and opinions, they have improved since 1996. Still, their sub-optimal talent, except for some beacons of hope make it look as dull and uniform as the granite which clads two wings of the New Parliament House. This is it; up close.
I'm not really here to bag the Senate; that's too easy a target. Instead I'm here for a tour of parliamentary geology. That's right — geology. Under the encumbent mob you'd be excused for supposing I said theology. There are things older still than that antedeluvian mob, even if those things aren't as backward, unevolved and bland.
Where the New Parliament House stands there was once a perfectly good hill, and useful as hills go it was too. This was Capital Hill. On Capital Hill, as well as the foundation stone of the city of Canberra there were some altogether older stones, and some just a smidgen younger than the oldest ones. Australia had been a bit of mess in the Silurian Period. It was a bit of a construction site where something big had whacked into the side and pushed up some hills of its own. If you've ever piled something up you'll know gravity wants to pull it all down again; spoilsport that it is. Guess what? That's just what happened and so the State Circle Shale was formed. Then things got really serious and those new shales, along with the Black Mountain Sandstone on top of them, got tipped up as Australia's corset was tightened further. More weathering, erosion and pesky gravity later and another bunch of rocks, the Camp Hill Sandstone, were laid down over the lot. More uplift, tilting, erosion etcetera later and we had Camp Hill. Probably not as famous as the Hutton Unconformity at Inchbonny, but nevertheless, here in the middle of a city was an even more interesting and quite flashy example of deep time, orogenesis, blah, blah, blah…contained in an easily accessible unconformity.
Building New Parliament House required the excavation of roughly a million cubic metres of rock — the previously mentioned Capital Hill. With it went almost, but not quite all, of the unconformity between the Black Mountain Sandstone and Camp Hill Sandstone. Down below in the undercroft of this wastrel edifice, among all the dust and rubble, under the ventilation ducts, the buildings hydraulics and so on is a perfectly preserved chunk of that outstanding geology. This is why I am here. I cannot show you a photograph: phones, cameras etcetera are not allowed for security reasons. Honestly, it didn't work for Guy Fawkes, and blowing this lot up would be a waste of a good building, some classic geology and the explosives.
Further down the hill the circular road, unimaginatively named State Circle, cuts through the just a bit younger than Black Mountain Sandstone's successor, State Circle Shale, on which the Camp Hill Sandstone sits and can still be seen by public gaze. I promise, one day I'll post an image of that delight so you don't feel wholly left out.
Now back to xenophobia. It's Greek in origin; the word, although perhaps the concept too. I don't know. Because scientists liked to sound all clever they called the black blob in this image a xenolith, a foreign rock. This one is in the frankly pretty uniform and drab Eugowra Granite cladding of the New Parliament House. It adds character. People still argue about how to make a granite. Nobody has even seen one born. It always happens deep underground where we aren't welcome. Unlike your spitty, spewy volcanoes, it seems granites don't really have the runs. The mavens of granite now suppose that rather than a liquid blob squirting up into what they might call the country rock, granites are emplaced more as a gravitationally and chemically unstable mush of crystals, liquids and gases. Where the xenoliths were supposed to be bits broken off from the intruded country rock, now they are known to be something completely different. That unstable mush is generated by the heating up of rocks deep within the Earth by all manner of Nature's witchery. The more susceptible to melting and dissolving bits separate out. But bits of the more stable, left behind until now stuff get entrained with the gravitationally unstable intrusive blob. One of the really clever things about granites is how their fluidity is enabled by a flux of fluids. These fluids are held in by the pressure of the overburden until the point where the pressure of the fluids exceed the Earth's ability to hold it in, like Australia's corset giving way. When that happens, the granite freezes, it's chemistry changes a bit and if those bits of entrained stuff aren't quite in chemical equilibrium they can get a halo around them that is a bit neither one thing or the other.
For a while geologists, or maybe they were "Earth scientists", went all PC and stopped calling them xenoliths. Instead they called them enclaves. Thankfully that silliness seems to have abated. There's enough problems with the occupants of this grey clad house hating foreigners without giving them any hint that there might be enclaves of the buggers too.
1920 Krazy Kat explaining why gender fluidity is a factor - sometimes He sometimes She - Comic Strip Newspaper News Paper Sunday Funnies daily comics funny humor satire character syndicate artist George Herriman cartoonist pen and ink illustration art 2019 worm Ignatz Mouse mice cat cats
Child Survival and Development which provides strategic support and technical assistance to improve policies, access to and uptake of services through the health system particularly the posyandu (integrated health post) network. It aims to improve water and sanitation for poor and vulnerable children and women; developing capacity in health human resources, particularly in remote poor areas; improving health information systems, monitoring and evaluation; documenting lessons learnt to improve governance, services and resource allocation.
Have I ever told you how much I despise estate agents? How I think that they are money-grubbing scum who make money by dubious lying and cheating?
I can't even make this mean anything by adding punctuation.
It seems that I can add "terrible use of English" and "Jumping on the environmental bandwaggon" to my reasons for hating them.
Taken with Minolta MD Macro-Rokkor 50mm f3.5 on Panasonic G1.
Sparks telling us some disheartening details about what his stay was like. This pictures gives some scale of how big the room is with the people in it, the next looks down the room. Apparently, most of the prisoners in the room were political prisoners. However, one of the interesting things Sparks told us is the prison system mixed common prisoners with political prisoners in the hopes the common criminals would make the political prisoners into common criminals and the political prisoners would forget about politics.
Pretty stupid.
The opposite happened - the political prisoners educated the common criminals - and the prison started punishing prisoners with solitary confinement and severly restricting the learning and education the prisoners had access too. I think Sparks said at one point Nelson Mandela was denied access to any form of reading or educational materials for four years during his 18 year stay on Robben Island.
Long before Election Day, Hurricane Sandy, the presidential debates, Libya, the 47 percent, the conventions or even the Iowa Caucuses, candidates and their strategists toiled away behind the scenes, mapping a path to victory. For some, the long hours and hard work paid off. For others, the efforts came up short. We’ll kick off our series by convening the lead strategists and managers from the Obama and Romney camps, in a freewheeling panel discussion about what went right, what went wrong, and what we learned in the process.
Photo credit: Jamie Manley
I was taking some pictures for a photography lesson. This is the data: f29 - ISO 400 - 1/15 sec.
How did I get these results? Amazing, huh?
The Pioneer Martian Flag, with explanations of the symbols. Check out the world of Sub Martis at: www.submartis.com. Welcome to Mars!
Prof Mack Dumba explaining to the Chair Clare Short how the staff are fighting an uphill battle against an endemic corruption and deep rooted bad governance practices that have plagued the development of the country for decades.
The visitors were told how the team goes from company to company to collect payments figures to the state that they will then match with revenue figures declared by government agencies. Based on this, they figure out whether companies have paid their dues and whether these revenues went to the state coffers, instead of in government official's pockets.
Explaining the research process during Spatial Group Model Building (SGMB) workshop one for the pig value chain project in Myeik, Myanmar (photo credit: Lincoln University/ Jared Berends)
I'm dancing next to none other than the European techno king. he stops only for camera poses and bathroom breaks- this guy was pure entertainment- we had a great time at our first techno party.
A classic pose for the Conger family... George telling us stuff while we all sit and listen attentively.
When I was younger, I’d watch films caricaturing small, isolated communities and crack jokes comparing them to Kidderminster, my hometown, often not realising that I was hitting a nerve with some locals. Looking back, I realise that I was only half-joking, the people whose nerve was hit had certain ‘ways’, and that it’s only been as I’ve aged - now 43 - that I’ve seen just how right half of me was. Yesterday I watched almost the whole of the 1999 comedy series ‘League of Gentlemen’ (www.imdb.com/title/tt0184135/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3) and saw, even more than I did 14 years ago, how so many media representations of such places as Royston Vasey get close to referencing the underlying workings of some small towns, like Kidderminster.
This morning I had a chat with a woman who works at one of the town’s banks, someone who I used to chat with occasionally when I regularly hung out at Weavers Wharf for a few years (a difficult, though instructive experience, all told), the commercial centre of the town, and a hotspot for many of its issues. The talk got round to me explaining how I’d eventually been banned last year from Caffe Nero after years of it being on the cards (see: www.flickr.com/photos/jaseanton/7780454048/in/photostream). Her response was something I’ve heard all too many times. From Birmingham, she explained how she’d worked in many places but had never even remotely come across people like those in Kidderminster: ‘There’s nowt as strange as folk and there’s definitely nowt as strange as Kidderminster folk’, she said. And she wasn’t joking, even though we laughed (compare ‘Filthy Clint’: www.flickr.com/photos/jaseanton/7844150560/in/photostream).
I explained to her that, since I don’t have to work with the public, I no longer interact much with most of the locals in town because of this. ‘You try to explain it to people outside of the town and they just don’t get it,’ I said. She agreed. It is something you have to experience first-hand to really understand it and then there’s always the danger that you become assimilated into the local ‘ways’ before you understand how the local mindset really works. Locals, meanwhile, can’t usually see it as it tends to be a natural way of life for them, so there seems no way to really address it, highly resistant as it is to adequate exposure or any attempts at disagreement, reform or even assistance.
Nowadays, knowing that it’s pretty pointless to try anything, I just keep in my zone and leave them to it. Or at least I try. Starbucks, the new coffee shop in Weavers Wharf, is already gradually losing its original independence from the local culture, as was only to be expected, though I had tried to warn the staff that it’d creep up on them without them seeing it, so intense is its existence in that little stretch of town. The danger of me now even popping there for a quick coffee, though, is that, before you know it, you have a relationship with that culture, no matter what you do, and even that can become problematic. At the moment, though, I’m keeping my distance from it and benefiting hugely from that distance.
But therein lies one of the problems. I know the local culture inside out. I know how to protect myself against becoming influenced by it, after being at times at the sharp edge of it since way back in 1996. But, still, despite all that, it only takes seconds to fall into a sequence of events before you, too, are just as local as most of the locals and recovery is a tortuous process.
Ultimately, there isn’t really an escape and there’s always something to remind you, even from the civilised world beyond. A couple of days ago, I watched 'In The Heat of the Night' (www.imdb.com/title/tt0061811/?ref_=sr_1), the classic film about an isolated community, this time linked to civil rights. In one scene, a black detective approaches a racist’s home, which has a racist statue outside, reminding me of a former friend and his gollywog. I’d felt uneasy about the gollywog on his mantlepiece whenever I visited, but I left it. We’d once had an argument with a lad from Wolverhampton who agreed with me that black people (those who aren’t assimilated, anyway) in Kidderminster tend to have a different look in their eye to what they have in other areas. My former friend tried to argue the toss, saying we were wrong, but his argument was extremely weak and didn’t stand up.
Weeks later, after I’d forgotten about it, he’d engineer an argument with someone else present so that he could ‘win’, according the local definitions of ‘winning’ (which is usually pulling any stunt to save face and suggest to others and yourself that you’re right, regardless of the facts). Soon after, we had a discussion, where I agreed that he couldn’t possibly be racist and that his gollywog was nothing more than an expression of free speech. What’s the point? We’re no longer friends because it dawned on me how, as I get older, this place can drag such people down even further than they ever were and if racism isn’t part of that, there’ll be something similarly unpalatable. It isn’t worth the hassle or the effects of having such associations, as such things can have knock on effects for other areas of your life and it really is better to concentrate on the people who’ve survived, who’ve eventually emerged to see the town’s culture for what it is and who’ve benefited from that experience.
Some people I know around here agree with my take on the area and also tend to try to keep their distance from what the place can do. Some others locally, though, clearly haven’t been happy about my criticisms of the area and its institutions. But they don’t discuss this, which is a pity. There’s some good ‘uns in that category and we’ve all got our interests and ways of dealing with things. I haven’t changed my opinion of them and I hope they haven’t of me but, if so, I suppose that’s just the way it is. However, that’s one of the ways the detrimental elements of the local culture maintains its hold over the area, with implications for yet another generation of locals whose lives will be all the poorer in later years for how this place often limits and diminishes people.
I’ve experienced how, once you come, you never leave Kidderminster, knowing the lengths people with even only links to the local community can go to shoot any messenger who tries to get the word out, even in the era of social media, as I saw in one of my Flickr posts, which concluded with a bizarre lack of irony about a joke I’d made about Birmingham’s Mailbox that was taken literally: www.flickr.com/photos/jaseanton/7850248708/in/photostream (you may need a translator to understand just what’s going on in those comments, if you don’t know the intricacies of the mindset involved, but don’t ask me. I’ve retired and could do without the inherent dangers). One of the tragedies is that I think the unwillingness of people who know better to not challenge the local culture gives more strength to the people who both suffer and yet remarkably protect, maintain and replicate it. Then again, it’s easy to feel defeated about such things and leave things be, I suppose. Nowadays, I couldn’t really give a shit, so long as I don’t have to deal with it.
Anyway, I’m looking out at Clent Hills, thinking of the world beyond...and solutions, mainly for me, rather than places such as this, which probably won’t ever change. Looking at those hills now and again is one of the only things there is to do until I get the fuck out of here, one day, though I’ll probably never really completely leave, as with those who mistakenly entered Royston Vasey. I don’t intend to post too often about the vibe in the town, but it’s a theme I will return to and something which will probably affect my output in some way, shape or form (like when I’m trying to recover from the trauma). There’s no way for it not to, it’s that endemic. This is a local place for local people and we’ll have no trouble here, so I suppose if I ever did get close to a solution or to exposing the culture to an extent where someone, somewhere, somehow would see it and do something about it, I’d yet again see how truly local Kidderminster, and places like it in the horror movies where they’re screaming to get the car started, are.
Meanwhile, Netflix is calling me.