Thermal

Lots more like this at Yahoo! Answer Fail – you hope some of these are faked, but……

Growing tired of being slothful (ironic, no?) and wasting weekend mornings in bed, I ventured up at half five last Sunday morning and took the short drive to East Aquhorthies stone circle.

Dawn was due to break at just after 7 and when I parked the car with half an hour to spare, the sky was already lightening. A short walk up the farm track and I was at the 4000 year old prehistoric site and sorted out my tripod and camera. I am surprised by how un-spooky it is arriving at these places in the dark – you would think it would be creepy being in the middle of nowhere in the early hours, but I would definitely rather be there than walking the streets of a city at that time.

Nonetheless I could feel eyes boring in to my back as I waited for the sun to crest the horizon. Slowly turning I found myself face to face with a cow wearing the most human ‘what the f…. heck are you doing here?’ expression I have ever seen on an animal. Satisfied I didn’t want any of it’s grass it went back to chewing.

Dawn broke and I started firing off the camera. It’s amazing how fast the sun comes up once it’s made up its mind, and the light was continually changing as it advanced across the fields towards me. Pinks, oranges, reds and yellow all came through with varying intensity. Then, in less than 20 minutes, it was gone. The sun slipped above the clouds and wasn’t seen again for the rest of the day.

But I saw it:

More photos at my Stone Circle website, and you can see this photo larger on my Flickr page.

What could go wrong?

Scar your kids against aquatic life forever….

Oh my God, how true is this? The most worthless dialog of a worthless operating system summed up by XKCD.

11 minutes of your life well spent, a cracking little short film & some universal truths….

We’re all doomed! Maybe…..

More at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The weekend before last we went for a walk (though that’s understating it somewhat) around Loch Muick which is near Ballater and Her Maj’s Estate for those of you further afield. It started off as a beautiful Spring Day:

And was very pleasant. As you can see it’s a huge dark loch, contained within a steep sided glen. Our side was often in shadow on the way out, but the sun falling across the loch made for some good photo ops. The boys were as ever up for a good hike:

We don’t tend to take any chances, no matter the time of year, and although our rucksacks stuffed full of wet weather gear got the odd funny look, by the time we’d reached the top of the 2nd mountain on the left in the top photo (the one in sun) we were glad we had. The clouds raced over Lochnagar, the temperature plummeted and the wind began to howl. It was a tad breezy on top:

It was pretty freezing, and a mixture of rain and snow began to fall. It was a relief to turn and begin the long decent down the side of the hill, but even that wasn’t easy as a slip of old snow covered about 20 feet of path on a steep angle. We edged across on all fours, with the prospect of a 300 yard slide down the mountain focussing the mind wonderfully and returned to the valley floor, where again our gear attracted sneers from those in trainers and carrying umbrellas (using an umbrella up top would have resulted in me taking off and landing in Norway).

We finished off the thick end of 10 miles and 7 hours with a walk in soft Spring sunshine as seen below, feeling privileged to live in Scotland, but also reminded not to take it’s countryside lightly…..

This is a totally unofficial video made by a guy in Sweden to accompany a song off the new John Frusciante album, The Empyrean. It’s an impressive enough amateur effort, but to be honest just listen to the song – it’s something else.

An amazing guitarist & musician.