WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Stanley]

Nice one Kev....

[plaques]

I hear than the newer Yeti is not as robust as the old one. Now the Karoq a bigger version. You may be right in moving to a different make although my pals motor (Hyundai) was a bit weak on the electrics.

[PanBiker]

I like my Hyundai I30. Probably not big enough for Kev though.

[Stanley]

Reading this I am reminded that I never owned or drove a motor with a computer in it. Mine were all analogue. Perhaps subconsciously that was why I chucked driving in. The motor that Margaret has hired beeps at her every time she goes over 40mph......

[Big Kev]

I like my Hyundai I30. Probably not big enough for Kev though.

I did look at the i30 but preferred the elevated driving position of the ix35, they're based on the same floor pan. Daughter in law has an i40 estate car which has been reliable over the last couple of years, I looked at one of those too but it was too low to the ground again.

[Tizer]

The motor that Margaret has hired beeps at her every time she goes over 40mph......

The hire company or a previous customer must have set it at 40.

[Big Kev]

Everyone decides to go to Wales the same day as me. What should have been a 2 hour journey took nearly 4, thank goodness for aircon.

[Stanley]

Kev, that post says so much about how things have changed. First we didn't have today's traffic and the only air con that was any good was the windscreen that opened outwards and gave a steady breeze! Besides which it wasn't as warm as this. Can you remember when people like Nigel Lawson were telling us we were all wrong? Funny that we hear so little of the deniers nowadays.
This caught my eye in the Edinburgh News....
"Edinburgh Zoo penguin killed by fox was the oldest of her species in the world. A penguin thought to be the oldest of her kind in the world has been killed by a fox that broke into her enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo. Northern rockhopper Mrs Wolowitz hatched in 1987 and this year celebrated her 35th birthday marking double her life expectancy. The flightless bird - named after a character in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory - was killed by a fox that managed to enter her enclosure in the early hours of Thursday morning."

[Big Kev]

United Utilities sent me an email, they're coming to connect the new water pipe on Monday.

[Tizer]

Are you going to supply them with water from a borehole in your back garden, Kev?

[Wendyf]

Watch out for the Red Arrows over Barnoldswick just before 5pm this afternoon, on their way to Blackpool. They should be over Gloria's house at about 5.30 ish.

[Stanley]

That sounds hopeful Kev!

[Big Kev]

Are you going to supply them with water from a borehole in your back garden, Kev?

I did dig down a fair way but only found clay.

[Stanley]

How much better I feel than yesterday. Perhaps one day I will get it through my thick skull that carbs are bad for me!
(BP this morning is 40 points down on 117/74, 16 year old lad territory.....)

[Tizer]

Are you going to supply them with water from a borehole in your back garden, Kev?

I did dig down a fair way but only found clay.

Don't despair, Kev - Nick Park made a small fortune out of clay! LINK [And I know you like cheese!]

[Big Kev]

[Tizer]

This finding is itself interesting but so also is the the bit about how they might have been attracted by the ability of this quartz to emit light when pieces are rubbed together...
`Prehistoric Brits used rare rock crystals to mark burial sites, research finds' MyScience

Here's a page on triboluminescence: Geology.com and the Wikipedia page LINK has more detail including this:
`The Uncompahgre Ute indigenous people from Central Colorado are one of the first documented groups of people in the world credited with the application of mechanoluminescence involving the use of quartz crystals to generate light.[1][2] The Ute constructed special ceremonial rattles made from buffalo rawhide which they filled with clear quartz crystals collected from the mountains of Colorado and Utah. When the rattles were shaken at night during ceremonies, the friction and mechanical stress of the quartz crystals impacting together produced flashes of light visible through the translucent buffalo hide.'

[Stanley]

The use of the unusual crystal reminds me of the collection of white pebbles from streams and their deposition at religious sites, like the foundations for a stone cross or a font. Are they quartz as well?
What grabbed me this morning was the forecast 22C today, seven degrees less than yesterday! I shall be grateful for a rest from the heat. (And in a few weeks when the CH kicks in we will be wishing we had it back....)

[Stanley]

I've just remembered something. In weather like this where there was a possibility of thunder my mother used to have a window open in any room that had a fireplace in it. This was to let any thunderbolts out that came down the chimney.
I've often wondered if the fact that a chimney is lined with pure carbon could make it a conductor and increase the chance of lightning strike. If so, mother could have been right .... again!

[PanBiker]

My mum did that also until we got rid of the coal fire and put an electric fire in.

[MickBrett]

My mum used to turn the wall mirror's around so they faced the wall

[Stanley]

I've heard of that too Mick but my mother never did it. We didn't have single clap of thunder yesterday despite all the warnings. I've just had a look and the lightning map shows just one strike in the Channel.

[Tizer]

Down here we were having lots of rolling, rumbling thunder and heavy rain but no lightning visible. In the late afternoon a giant black cloud in the form of an inverted cone moved slowly towards and above us. It was a bit like one of those Armageddon films but it just passed by and rumbled at us. A benign giant!

The use of the unusual crystal reminds me of the collection of white pebbles from streams and their deposition at religious sites, like the foundations for a stone cross or a font. Are they quartz as well?

Most of them are and they were being collected thousands of years ago and are found at Neolithic sites. Those are mostly made of opaque white milky quartz rather than the transparent colourless rock crystal form found in the study and which is relatively rare. I guess the use of white milky quartz at burial sites runs all the way from the Neolithic to our own cemeteries where white chippings are often spread over or around graves. There's also a fashion now for spreading them on gardens but I doubt the young householders these days know about their traditional use on grave sites!

[Stanley]

Some of you might remember me saying that the red Accrington brick building on the fire station site was once the main sub station for electricity coming into Barlick. There are a lot of civil engineering works going on there at the moment and today I walked past the front of the building for the first time in a week or two. There is an excavation there and There are more heavy electric cables than I have ever seen in my life in there, I'm talking about cables over 3" in diameter and there are possibly about 20 o0f them. All of them entering the original sub station and not the modern one in front of it. There must be a cat's cradle of cables under there, some of them dating back to the 1920s. Well worth having a look at while it's open.

[Tizer]

A recent episode of `George Clarke's Amazing Spaces' on, I think, Channel 4 showed old copper pipe bring recycled in a modern factory. It was fascinating to see them melting all the old piping and making it into a giant cylinder shape then cutting of pieces weighing a ton each. Then a hole is made through the centre of the block while it's in an oven and the `hole' then drawn out to make 74 metres of wobbly soft pipe. Very worth seeing if you get a chance.