It’s been a day of chasing around, sorting stuff out and ferrying family around.
It’s been a year of protests, pandemics (well… one) and particularly heartfelt searching on Google if their review of the year is anything to go by:
Bit of tearjerker, that. But then I think anything could affect anyone in that way after the way things have gone in 2020.
I have bad news about 2021: no quick fix.
But good news too: we’ll get there.
Thumbing through Reddit yesterday evening, I spotted a post entitled “Boring Meme”.
Here it is, shared for your observation:
I’m no expert, but it appears that the creator of the piece is describing the near immediate bad fortune s/he has upon embarking on a particularly important online computer game, which s/he is unable to pause.
Look, I get it. We’ve all just begun something when something or someone demands our instant attention. It is annoying.
For some reason, they have used four images of birds to represent the potential annoyances they might face in their particular situation.
Top left: possibly a baby Great Grey Owl? I’m not big on owls.
Top right is an apparently walking Cinereous Vulture by Canon Ambassador Vladimir Medvedev.
Bottom right is a local fellow (bird and ‘tog) – A Jackal Buzzard by Clint Ralph taken in the Drakensberg Mountains in KZN, South Africa.
But that bottom left image, the one depicting “noob teammates”?
Well, that’s a Cape Vulture and I know that because I took that photograph.
Seriously:
I took it on 20th October 2013 near Plettenberg Bay – a young male who had lost his family to poisoning or poaching and now resides at Radical Raptors, raising money and awareness so that other young male Cape Vultures don’t have to go through what he has gone through.
I’ve had my images published in a few places: a German football quarterly, a UN Water Ambassador’s presentation about Climate Change, a Cape Town lifestyle magazine, a UK steam engine heritage publication – even in an actual National Geographic book – but this is my first (known) example of one being used in a meme.
Except, this guy got the images from here. I had already been memed!
Who knows – maybe this meme will “take off” (pun intended) and vast sums of money will arrive at my virtual door. Except that obviously, nobody except you and I knows that that bottom corner one is my photo, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be quietly impressed.
(Discreet) fame at last!
I found a network of webcams in California (and up the rest of the west coast of the US) which are used for checking out wildfires. You can view them anytime, even when there aren’t wildfires. They look out right across a lot of the countryside and so you can see for miles and miles.
However, when I looked at them yesterday, there were some wildfires. (Spoiler: that’s actually why I was looking at them.) And one of them wasn’t miles and miles away.
One of them was actually very close to one of the cameras:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the feed from this camera just north of Santa Cruz had gone down. This was the last image that was seen from it – some 6 hours before I visited the site.
But if the fire crews were wondering where they needed to be to fight the fires, well… it really is right here.
(That’s… er… here.)
This is my sort of video. 5 minutes filled with neatly explained facts and trivia. And what amazing trivia. I mean, yes. I knew that the Arctic Circle wobbles and I knew it was heading north. But I didn’t know just how that would affect Iceland. Or how they had altered their Arctic Circle monument to deal with that. (Genius, by the way.)
And since I can now add Youtube videos to my log with seeming impunity… Have this:
And the lengths that someone would go to just to find out a piece of (interesting but) mostly useless information?
Well, I liked that too.
Spare yourself 5 minutes and see if Kolbeinsey (for that are the Most Northern Part of Iceland) is still there.
This is a long read about America.
I’m not really into long reads or America, but I actually found it rather interesting.
A combination of anthropology (obviously), epidemiology, sociology, history and politics, with some really interesting facts thrown in here and there. I learned stuff.
Since it’s Sunday – the day of rest – you probably have the time (although perhaps not the inclination) to give it a go. Yes, I was being sarcastic about the time thing.
This was one of the paragraphs from early on in the article, highlighting just what we’re up against in getting a vaccine developed and giving us any chance of getting back to a “normal” life.
And that before we’ve even thought about production, rollout and uptake.
Sobering.