On that earlier post

And by that earlier post, I mean this one. It was only when I sent the concert information to Mrs 6000, who is was looking forward to our Bergen trip , that she put two and two together and worked out that the concert in question was to be staged outdoors.

Perhaps it was this bit that did it:

Remember that you should at outdoor concert! Dress practical and according to weather conditions. Check the weather forecast! Wear comfortable shoes, there are long standing. Do not forget that the concert will take place in Bergen and dress accordingly. If there is a chance of rain, bring a raincoat, then the umbrella is not allowed in the concert area.

Google translate with the assistance there. I can see we’re going to be playing with that a lot while we’re away: Min norsk er forferdelig. My English isn’t much better.

But that line about “dress accordingly for Bergen”? Well, that would be because of this sort of stat:

Compared with Sweden and Finland, Norway has a much more humid and rainy climate. It is impressive to note that the precipitation in some areas of the country may reach the impressive 3000 mm per year, which is one of the largest quantities in Europe.

Here you can find the city of Bergen, which is considered to be the rainiest city on the continent.

Oh joy. Tell me more, Wikipedia:

Bergen experiences plentiful rainfall in all seasons, with annual precipitation measuring 2,250 mm (89 in) on average.

Cape Town’s annual average is about 450mm. Exactly one fifth as much.

It’s still a way off to the concert (in weather forecasting terms), but I can tell you that the weather in the lead up to the main event looks somewhere between utterly dismal and bloody awful. It’s cold, it’s wet and it’s windy. Add the wind chill and the temperatures are remarkably stable at 1ºC. Having grown up in Yorkshire, I am untroubled by this sort of thing. Having grown up in Cape Town, Mrs 6000 is less keen on the whole “chilly weather” thing.

The Norwegian for “divorce lawyer” is “skilsmisse advokat”.

Snakes

Not too much time to do anything other than repair last night’s damage, so here’s something I spotted on the Snakes of South Africa FB page earlier.

Yes, obviously it’s about snakes. If you’re frightened of snakes, maybe look away now or something, although, given the title of this post, what were you thinking clicking through anyway?

It concerns the photography of a python. Because pythons are apparently misunderstood:

There is a great deal of myth about pythons, especially with regards to attacks on people. Pythons in Africa do kill people, but rarely so. There are as few as 3 proven cases where people were killed by pythons in Africa in the past 100 years+.

Well, ok, fair enough.

FB_IMG_1461514677140But they can still give you a nibble right? Uh-huh.
Look:

FB_IMG_1461514685272

Apparently, this is “a willing volunteer”. His name is Shawn. Right. I was once a willing volunteer for something far more dangerous than this, but it didn’t involve being bitten by a snake. That’s just silly. Haven’t you heard that they have a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and the ability to inflict very nasty bites, often resulting in stitches?
You hadn’t?

Pythons do have a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and have the ability to inflict very nasty bites, often resulting in stitches. The reason is that people pull the pythons off and the sharp teeth rip through skin.

Well, there you go.
But yes, folks. It’s the pulling off of the python which causes the injuries, rather than the actual bite. So next time you’re bitten by a python, just leave it hanging on whatever bit of your body it’s hanging on and wait for the feeding response to subside and it’s grip to subside. I don’t know how long this takes, but if it’s not hours, then it must at least feel like hours. If it is hours then it probably feels like more hours than it actually is.

To finish the set on the FB page, there was an image of Shawn holding the snake’s mouth open for one last snap of those lovely teeth.

LOOK AT HIS ARMS! LOOK AT THEM! THERE ARE BLOODS!

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And (at the time of blogging this), the only comments on that picture?

What flash are you using there?

and the reply:

That’s a Canon MT24EX. Best macro flash there is.

Yeah – because the Canon MT24EX is the most striking thing about that photograph (I’m being sarcastic, but actually it does have some fantastic reviews). What are these people thinking? Why no mention of the copious amounts of claret cascading down Shawn’s manly forearms? And what of Shawn? Is that a look of scientific curiosity on his face there or is he grimacing, wondering why the actual funk he is spending his Sunday morning flat out on the African dirt bleeding from wrist to elbow?

If I were him, I’d be thinking three things:

1. What braai’ed python tastes like.
2. How deep I would be burying the photographer’s body. and…
3. How much I should put the Canon MT24EX on Gumtree for.

I hope Shawn has learned a valuable lesson about volunteering. And some stuff about pythons.

UPDATE: Please see Shawn’s comments in the appropriately-named “Comments” section below.

On celebrity death rates

I posed the question last night on twitter:

Have more celebrities died in 2016 than in other years or are we just more aware because of a couple of deaths early in the year?

David Bowie and Alan Rickman being those two early ones I was thinking of.
No-one answered. Perhaps that was because no-one was sure of the answer. It’s a very difficult thing to measure. The term “celebrity” is hard enough to define, before you even start to look at clog-poppage rates.

But I wasn’t alone in asking. The BBC website featured the same question this morning. And they have come up with an answer of sorts.

Fullscreen capture 2016-04-22 021617 PM.bmp

And that doesn’t take into account Victoria Wood or Prince who were April deaths. So yes, it would appear that so far, 2016 has been a bad year for celebrity deaths. Which bring us to the obvious next question: why?

The BBC’s obituary editor Nick Serpell has got that covered too:

One factor that may play into the impression that more celebrities are dying is that we have heard of more celebrities than before.

and:

People who started becoming famous in the 1960s are now entering their 70s and are starting to die. There are also more famous people than there used to be.
In my father or grandfather’s generation, the only famous people really were from cinema – there was no television. Then, if anybody wasn’t on TV, they weren’t famous.

So, more celebrities, and more older celebrities. Add to that the social media phenomenon, meaning that no celebrities death has a chance of passing unnoticed, and you have the perfect recipe for huge awareness of vast numbers of celebrity deaths. Thus, there have been more celebrity deaths, but arguably, not a disproportionate number of celebrities dying, given that there are just so many more of them around to die.
And, if the BBC guys are right (and I have to say that their logic seems sound) then this trend of increasing celebrity death will continue.

So yes, 2016 has been an utter bastard thus far, possibly taking several (or more) of our favourite actors, singers, comedians and personalities, but sadly, it seems that it’s something we’re just going to have to get used to.

Descriptive

There has been an element of hyperbole on Twitter this morning…

z on Arsenal TV:

…it’s just a putrid vessel for hate now.

I wouldn’t know. But I can imagine.
____________________________________

Biénne Huisman on voicemail:

…the pinnacle of barbarity.

One of many in the Barbaritiesberg range.
____________________________________

Dorothy Black on pseudo-smokers:

Watching vapers make their mix is like watching crack addicts mix up their dose.

You’re spending time in the wrong places, Dot.

 

Drama abounds, and one should remember to save the hyperbole for when one really needs it:

hyp

Note that I’m not disagreeing with any of the above though.

Fake plastic…

Trees No! Puffins!
Fake Plastic Puffins!

Wait, what?

Remember Radiohead telling us about Fake Plastic Trees?

Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

Here they are doing it at Glastonbury in 2003. (You may remember that I was there.)

And let’s not knock it, because it’s a great song.
But we’re not on about Fake Plastic Trees. Fake Plastic Trees are so passé.
You want to know about the puffins; the Fake Plastic Puffins.

w704

The FPPs are being deployed on the Calf of Man – that’s the small uninhabited island off the southwest coast of the Isle of Man (just next door to the Chicken Rock, actually). And they’re being deployed with a purpose – to encourage Real Meaty Puffins (RMPs) to come and breed again on the island.

Puffins are both gregarious and notoriously unadventurous; they won’t try new nesting sites (technically, puffins live in burrows, not nests, but still…) if there aren’t already some puffins there. But it seems that they don’t need to be RMPs – they can be FPPs and still have the same effect.
Puffins aren’t ever so observant and are a bit daft, it would seem. Aukward.

Manx National Heritage are pretty excited about being involved in the project, and have promised to keep us updated on its progress. I follow them on Facebook, so I’ll pass any news on to you. I know you’ll be interested.

(Thought: Maybe I need to install some Fake Plastic Blog Readers here…? Hmm…)

Meanwhile, here’s another great post about Puffin recipes.
You’re probably best to use RMPs rather than the FPP version for these though.