Fanimal Arm

Gentlemen, enjoy:

Cartography is fun

In the car on the longish journey down to Malvern on Wednesday I decided to enhance my general knowledge by memorising the names, positions, and capital cities of the thirteen South American countries. This developed into a cartographical challenge tonight when I thought it would be interesting to create a block map of the continent. I took a photo of the map in the back of my diary and superimposed a grid onto it on my laptop screen. Approximated borders were then drawn onto some squared paper.

As is usual with any sort of 'project' I set myself, I then got carried away and added capital cities, a legend, and physical colourings. Compare the original with my finished map:

   

click on an image to enlarge it

Violent Veg

As a student on holiday and, as of today, a sufferer of the common cold, I feel justified in spending a lot of time sitting about and browsing the internet. My latest find is the website of a greetings card range, Violent Veg. I've seen a few of these cards before; they consist of posed and accessorised vegetables with humourous captions.

My personal favourite has to be:

Panoramio and Google Earth

If you've used Google Earth you may have noticed some blue dots in various places around the world. Clicking on one of these dots brings up a photo taken from that particular location of the view or other point of interest. A few months ago I looked more closely at the blue dots and found that the photos they show are from a website called Panoramio.

It turns out that anyone can create an account, upload photos to the site, and tag where in the world they were taken. These photos are then considered by the Panoramio folk and viewed by other users; the approved ones are then sent to Google for inclusion in the Google Earth database.

So, I uploaded a photo of Southampton Common a few months ago and tagged its location. I then forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago when I looked and found that my photo is now in Google Earth. This is a definite claim to fame for Bee, as she's in the photo, and for myself as it says Photograph by matkins at the bottom right. 

To see it for yourself: start up Google Earth, enter Southampton Common in the Fly To search bar at the top left, and click on the blue dot in the middle on the common. You'll need the box by Geographic Web under Layers ticked in order to see the blue dots.

On tea drinking...

I bought two packs of tea from Tesco today; it was two for £2 on the Twining Aromatic Range so I chose Chinese Lapsang Souchong and Indian Chai. The Twinings boxes look good and the website is pretty fancy too. Lapsang Souchang smells and tastes like woodsmoke or, according to the artistic description on the website, is

"incredibly evocative – with autumnal flavours: bonfires and chopping wood. It’s not a fresh, bright, or happy go lucky tea – it’s got purpose and is business-like. In fact, a slightly short tempered man striding the moors comes to mind when drinking this."

I'd recommend it for sure.

In The Air Tonight

The song 'In The Air Tonight' by Phil Collins (apparently the lead singer and drummer from Genesis) has cropped up a lot recently. Firstly, in a video of Naturally 7 singing it on a Paris subway train:

And secondly in a rather bizarre Cadbury's advert: