Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Nora Leggs,
not if effort is applied,
Well, my father in law doesn't seem too concerned for the health of his beans, and I don't know who owns the corn outside the gate (our village land is parcelled out old-school peasant style), but it's a couple of metres tall and looking much healthier than the morning glory vine, and the flowers are pretty, so I'll leave it up to somebody else to tackle it. Besides, I'm back in Beijing and probably should be more proactively preparing for the impending start of semester.
Oh, and I read that morning glory is good for shading houses in the summer, so perhaps next time we're out there I might try and sneak a seed or two into one of the cracks in the pavement along the front of the house... We've already got a bit of corn growing wild out of those cracks, but it doesn't seem to do so well as the corn planted properly...
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Just three and a bit years ago the patch of courtyard where those blue ones are doing their best to smother the beans was home to 50-odd sheep, and it took some time before anything was growing there again after the sheep were sold, so these ones must be fairly new. I guess they're there to stay, now.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Lilith __,
That does look like them. And I realise now I got my flowers backwards - it was my blue ones in with the beans and pink ones wrapping themselves around the corn. Now I'm curious how the blue ones spread so thoroughly through the beans. It's not like my father in law to grow flowers or let anything interfere with his crops.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Lilith __,
Surely both the blue and the pink are morning glories aka convolvulus?
No idea. The blue were on a very thin vine winding itself around the corn. The pink were so much a part of the same tangle of vines as the beans I couldn't see if they were separate or not, equally distributed throughout the beans my father in law was growing in the courtyard, and in a place where one would not expect anything to be growing wild, unlike the blue.
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1. Not spring flowers, I know, but I was quite taken with these ones on a bean vine of some kind my father in law is growing in his courtyard.
2. And these pink ones growing on a very thin vine wrapping itself around the corn in the field just outside our gate.
3. And for the baby animals file, this wee fella was very hard to catch, being so wary of anybody outside his immediate family. He'd pop out for a look, then dart back into the undergrowth fast as lightning.
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Speaker: Selling the Dream: The Art of…, in reply to Peter Alsop,
Congratulations, Peter.
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
But they cost shitloads, it is unfair to criticise politicians for being stingy with the funds.
No it's not. They're involved in the decision-making process, and they decide how much money to give to MoD and the military.
For example one Canadian made LAV costs the same 10 Australian made Bushmasters.
So it's not as simple as inadequate funding. The article I linked to had some quite nice things to say about those Bushmasters and their ability to keep soldiers relatively safe.
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On the subject of our soldiers' security in Afghanistan, I trust you've all seen this:
The vehicle's fatal flaw, a 2008 Pentagon inspector-general's report found, was that its "flat bottom, low weight, low ground clearance and aluminum body" left it vulnerable to IEDs.
Aluminuim! Jeez!
Didn't the Royal Navy experiment with aluminuim-hulled ships? Y'know, to save weight? And then lose at least one such ship in the Falklands War to an Argentinian exocet that didn't explode? The exocet's engine exhaust set the hull on fire, apparently, which isn't terribly difficult to do if the hull is aluminuim.
Dear Taliban,
If I remember high school chemistry rightly, aluminuim's flashpoint is 600 degrees celsius. You can set it on fire with a candle or cigarette lighter (I have seen this done with my own four eyes). The hotter the explosions of your IEDs, the more Kiwis you'll kill.
Ah, New Zealand, continuing that fine old tradition of leaving our soldiers to beg, borrow or steal if they want any decent equipment, otherwise just leaving them to make do with whatever shit the meagre pittance of a budget our tightwad governments allow them. If we're going to have a military, can we not just fund them enough to do their jobs properly with decent gear?
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Russell Brown,
He had some very interesting and quite worrying comments on the security situation.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Venetia King,
How'd you get the flowers to glow from the inside? Great play of light, great photo.
