More from Wrong Hands, who brought you Lumineers, described. And this one is a little bit meta and a lot deep:
But you’re not really wasting time here: you’re getting informed on important matters.
Right?
Category: learning curve
Paris Eagle video
I don’t know about you, but if I had an eagle, I’d definitely strap a camera to it and fling them both off a tall structure in France at the first available opportunity. You can’t do that with a beagle. Well, you can, but beagles can’t fly.
Or can they?
That flying beagle is probably attempting to escape from the angry man whose internet connection he has just eaten.
But I digress. Often.
There’s great news: someone has done the whole tall structure in France thing (with the eagle, not the beagle) using the Eiffel Tower and they’ve posted the results on Youtube:
Some thoughts:
- Do eagles have to live with that wind noise all the time? It would drive me mad.
- Note how many times the eagle flaps its wings. Pretty much zero. This is how planes work.
- The zeroing in on the appropriate guy at the Trocadero is fairly amazing.
The guys at Freedom have used cameras strapped to their eagle to record other videos.
Go and have a look.
Incidentally, here’s what video from a camera strapped to a beagle looks like.
Far less glamorous, far more flappy ears. Just as you’d expect.
Thoughts on Ebola screening
Having been to the UK this last week, having traveled (twice, nogal) through the global hub that is Dubai, and with Ebola knocking ISIS from the headlines at the moment, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts I had while attempting not to contract Ebola or any other virus.
Firstly, that headline thing. Yes. Ebola is the number one headline in the UK news at the moment. Mainly stories around the country’s preparation for any incoming cases and the screening at the airports. Or ‘airport’, anyway. Fly into Manchester and you’re home free – no scans, no questions asked, no nothing. Just a hint for any suicide bioterrorists there.
So yes, number one headline, despite the fact that there are no UK cases. It’s an odd way of allaying fears and avoiding hysteria and it’s cementing my opinion that Ebola is a “superstar disease”. The current outbreak is bad news, certainly, but needs to be put in context – perhaps with some sort of graphic:
The fact that it needs ringing in yellow says a lot. And yes, I realise that the Ebola thing is current and it’s acute, but still. This outbreak has killed thirty times fewer people than even “Fire, heat, and hot substances”. And let me tell you, some of those hot substances can be pretty damn deadly. But joking aside, you’re seventy times more likely to die of malnutrition than Ebola and we don’t seem to be quite as concerned with that. That’s rather sad.
But if the rest of the world is to have a reaction to Ebola and is to try and prevent its spread, then it needs to be a sensible and organised approach so as to be effective, hence my confusion at the screening being solely at Heathrow (and possibly Gatwick and bizarrely, on Eurostar trains). If you’re serious about screening passengers and keeping Ebola out of the UK (and despite the fact that it’s not a particularly effective means of determining who’s carrying the infection), then why not do it at Manchester airport as well?
There’s no point in locking your front door if you’re going to leave all your windows open.
No-one at Manchester batted an eyelid when I flew in from Dubai, even though there are excellent links from there to West Africa. Every bit as good as the ones to Heathrow.
And, with that in mind, I saw nothing – NOTHING – at Dubai about Ebola. And that place is like some terrestrial version of a Star Wars space station – what an extraordinary mix of people and nationalities. If Ebola is to get a foothold anywhere else, then it may well be through Dubai. But there’s no mention of it there at all.
Finally, Cape Town, which (amazingly? reassuringly?) had the best response of the airports I used. And that was merely an announcement asking me to “go and talk to the people at the Health Desk if I’d been to West Africa in the last few weeks”. This self-reporting with a disease which carries a stigma like an STD? It’s not exactly foolproof, is it?
I’m really not sure there is good reason for screening passengers arriving at any airport, although there are some experts who believe that there are other benefits besides the limited chance of detecting anyone carrying the virus:
Prof David Evans, a virologist at the University of Warwick, says that while testing passengers is “unlikely to detect symptomatic cases” as they arrive in this country, “the introduction of inbound passenger testing will both raise awareness and provide information that should ensure that passengers who subsequently develop symptoms can rapidly seek medical advice and, if needed, treatment.” The measures are, therefore, sensible, “primarily because they raise awareness of the disease in travellers and their contacts.”
But it also seems utterly pointless if you’re not going to do it thoroughly.
UPDATE: And, as if by magic…
Public Health England confirms #ebola screening will be rolled out at Manchester and Birmingham airports but no start date has been set
— Sky News Newsdesk (@SkyNewsBreak) October 17, 2014
What a good idea, guys…
Have I Got Hues For You
UPDATE: On seeing this, I realise the photo is a bit fuzzy. But then, so is the dog. Accuracy abounds and needs must.
I had a wonderful Isle of Man related quota photo lined up for today, but the will have to wait, because we’re struggling with internet connectivity today.
The reason for this outage can be seen in the photo below. Attached to the front end of the dog (I’m no expert, but I think it’s the other end from the kinked tail) are the teeth that chewed through the Telkom junction box, effectively cutting us off from the rest of the world.
“Least said, soonest mended,” he seethed.
The photo above, with all its lovely hues, was taken this morning in Tokai Forest. Tokai Forest was still full of (other people’s) dog mess. Everywhere.
Before we had a dog, I figured that there must be some technical or logistical reason why dog owners didn’t clean up after their pets. Now that I am a dog owner, I realise that it’s just laziness, a lack of responsibility and a complete disregard for other people.
I suppose that it’s good to have that clarified, if nothing else. Tossers.
But while we’re on that (rather distasteful) note, does anyone know how long it takes for a Telkom PZ50 switch to “pass through” a beagle, please?
Beaglegas
Previously, my email inbox looked fairly normal. Some family stuff, a Superbru reminder or two, a bit of hate mail from some Afrikaners about something I wrote on Steve Hofmeyr in 2007. Nothing particularly unusual there.
Now, however, my email inbox seems to have emails about beagles in it. Often. And some of those emails look like this:
Lovely. And WTF is a BeagleKiss? Eww.
It turns out that Beaglegas is yet another drawback of dog ownership. I don’t know if it is any worse than Spanielgas or Poodlegas, but it’s far from the pleasant end of the scale when all you want to do is chill out in front of a game of footy on the TV. There are two main reasons why Beaglegas is more dangerous than the mustard gas used during the First World War: firstly, because it’s unexpected – you’re not on some godforsaken battlefield in the middle of Belgium, you’re on your couch watching an Everton Europa Cup game – and secondly, because it’s colourless, meaning that there is no visual warning of its impending arrival at the gates of your respiratory system.
In addition, there is no incoming shell here: the method of delivery can be as innocuous as a dozing puppy. In fact, I’m rapidly learning that there’s actually nothing innocuous about a dozing puppy at all. Those moments when the dog is calm, and everything (including its back door musculature) is relaxed, are the moments of most danger. But that’s not to say that you are safe from Beaglegas attack during the dog’s waking hours either. Earlier this week, I inadvertently trapped Beaglegas in the kids’ school lunch boxes after an early morning run-by attack in the kitchen. Not nice for anyone. And it dissolved their cheese rolls.
There are several hints and tips available via that BeaglePro email, hints and tips which one can employ to reduce the incidence of Beaglegas. They’re most likely tried and tested by other Beaglegas sufferers and would probably work in reducing the incidence of Beaglegas in your proximity at any given time. However, I can (quite easily) recall a time when there was absolutely zero Beaglegas in my home. That was fewer than two months ago and those were magical, fresher times; times where one could happily breathe deeply, confident in the knowledge that it was going to be nitrogen and oxygen making up the bulk of your inhalation, rather than the manifestation of Satan in aeriform.
In fact, the only individual in our house who seems wholly immune to Beaglegas is Colin. This is strange. Given that Colin’s sense of smell is allegedly somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 times (depending on which book you read) more sensitive than ours, it should, by rights, have between 20,000 and 50,000 times more effect on her. It should be instantly fatal. Very fatal. In fact, given those astonishing olfactory comparisons, it wouldn’t surprise me – upon exposure to Beaglegas – if Colin was immediately vapourised and she was erased from photos of herself with the family, like Marty McFly in Back To The Future. And Michael J Fox just messed with the passage of time, he sensibly steered well clear of anything as serious as Beaglegas. Lest we forget, when given the alternative methods of powering the infamous DeLorean, he and Doc Brown took one sniff at Beaglegas and opted instead for plutonium stolen from a heavily-armed Libyan terrorist group.
They knew.
And suddenly, I’m in two minds as to whether to publish this post. I need to express my suffering, yes. I require your sympathy and I need other sufferers to understand that they’re not alone. But it concerns me that some terrorist group might read this, have a lightbulb moment and understand the gravitas and power of Beaglegas. They would then get some beagles and completely ignore all the BeaglePro advice in order to produce and harvest vast volumes of BeagleGas before launching a terror attack that would make 9/11 look like a unfortunate incident in a Lego factory.
But then I figure that they could just Google for “most evil things on earth” and somehow find themselves at a page which at least mentions the rectal emissions of tri-colour hounds.
I can’t be the only one who has found cause to write about this heinous compound. Or maybe I am the only one who has managed to put pixels to paper before inevitable asphyxiation.