Thermal

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.

Another genius idea for a website that is both hilarious and scary: Speak Your Branes.

The neatest way of summing up the site is contained within it’s URL: ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com

What they’ve done is simply trawl through the BBC’s Have Your Say site, where ‘ordinary people’ get to comment on the day’s stories and filter out the scariest, funniest and downright depressing examples of a modern Briton slavering over their keyboard in righteous indignation.

Then add a sarcastic comment on to it:

An old one I just found, on the death of Michael Crichton.

Why ask me for my reaction – I’ve no idea who he was.
Douglas Lee, London

I like to imagine Douglas in a permanent state of shock, leafing incredulously through rail timetables full of destinations he’s not intending to travel to and TV schedules full of programmes he doesn’t watch.

Lovely.

Or we have the delightful Ian Jempson apparently from ‘revolutionsville’:

Instead of a database containing our private movements , perhaps a more effective border police force , proper imigration checks coupled with really harsh hard punishments from the courts like hanging for planting bombs would stem the flood of crime ! Lets face it we are the dumping ground for the european criminals they are here all ready

Right. Hanging will deter suicide bombers will it? Which bits do we hang then, assuming we find any?

If you love internet stupidity, then Speak your Branes is the place for you. Just make sure you don’t get quoted on it……

It’s seen a few: The 4000 year old Tyrebagger stone circle.

I took this photo in September for a photography competition but didn’t get anywhere. Which wouldn’t be so bad but the finalists were almost without exception awful – haloed HDR abominations, dull subjects and shots that looked like the camera went off by accident. Still, I’m not bitter.

Anyway, I like it and it was worth walking up a hill in the dark at 5am…… I think.