The Brave Toads of England - according to CBS

Surfing through the CBS News site on their "World" category I find the only reference to England is a story about - wait for it - toads!
Yes what grips Americans about England is that in Yatton, Somerset (about 15 miles from where I live) they have Toad watches in the spring. Apparently the stupid animals get so intent on sex that they cross roads without checking to see if they're clear. Squishy squashy - very flat toads. So the good people of Yatton go on patrol looking for toads near the roadside - very often with the male riding on the female's back so that other toads cannot screw her - and lift them across the road. The stupid presenter even went so far as to describe the toad's squeaks of obvious fright as a "thank you". This is even worse than the old Disney "isn't that a lovely panda?" type of natural history film.
With this amount of interest in British news from the US media I wonder why we bother to support the US in Iraq. The American public probably aren't even aware that we do support them at all.
After all, we're all miles too busy looking after the toads ...

Severn Barrage Saves the Day - or does it?

Talk in energy-producing circles is returning to building barrages across tidal estuaries. The Severn estuary has one of the largest differences between high and low tide in the world so it is always in the minds of planners trying to satiate the demand for energy. A barrage across this stretch of water would provide 6-7% of Britain's energy needs at current rates. The costs would be enormous financially with numbers far above anything anyone can really think about. But on the plus side 30,000-40,000 people would be employed on building the project over about 15 years. Ongoing employment for about 10,000 people would be generated by the power industry and tourism (water sports, industrial tourism, etc) after the whole thing was built. Great - nothing but positives. A very successful, but much smaller, project in Brittany, France shows us that much of this conjecture is very possible.
Not that simple. What about the environment. This estuary is vital to many species of wildlife. Migratory wildfowl utilise the area. Other local wildlife, including salmon and other fishes, would be radically affected. Silting of the river above the barrage is a problem which has not been adequately addressed by reports and studies.
Nobody is really considering the other options.
Perhaps if the investment made in the barrage was diverted to better energy efficiency in everyones' homes the decreased demand for electricity would be more than the potential energy generated by the scheme. I don't know (here I go again, pontificating without all the facts) but I'm not sure that we should always consider more energy production instead of less energy demand.
Once again better men than me don't have the answers. Nuff said . . .

Smoking kills . . .

So a bloke goes into hospital with a skin disease.
He is treated with a special gel which covers his skin and is supposed to ease his skin complaint.
He is under stress because he hopes the treatment will work so he nips out onto the fire escape to have a fag to calm his nerves.
Nobody has told him that the gel is highly inflammable.
Bloke literally goes up in smoke as he sparks up his fag.
Doctors try to save him from severe burns - they fail.
Bloke dies of severe burns.
Unfortunately this is a true story. It actually happened in a hospital in Yorkshire. I haven't given names - it's not necessary and would only give more pain to relatives.
Smoking is a killer anyway without adding unnecessary additional risks by not telling the patient that he is a living roman candle.

Not In My Back Yard

So the energy crisis is looming in Britain. We will not have enough to meet our needs in the very near future. Not so long ago Tony Blair was all for renewable energy sources - wind power, wave power, solar power - all things which would go on indefinitely without dangerous emissions or waste. All systems which would need strong investment to make them happen. But lots of energy consumers, ordinary people like you and me, didn't like the thought of windmills across their lovely green hills spoiling their panoramic view. Or large barrages across their estuaries causing problems with the wildlife etc. So what seemed to be an ideal answer to the problem became a problem in itself. So now Tony has reverted to thoughts of a new generation of nuclear power stations. That in itself has all sorts of issues over nuclear waste, decomissioning of old power stations, disposal of the radioactive materials left behind etc.
Has nobody thought that the best answer is to use less energy? If we all switched off our televisions and computers instead of leaving them on standby there would be a considerable saving in electricity. If we only used energy efficient lights - and then only when needed - we could save 80% of our lighting energy. If more people walked to work and didn't take their children to school by car but made them walk even more fossil fuel-burning energy would be saved.
Good idea, you say. But it needs to be acted upon by us all. It's no good expecting everyone else to do it without your own contribution.
Nuff said.

Shopper of the future!

I've finally entered the e-shopping age - bought an article on eBay! Sure, I've bought things on the net from various companies before now, from airline tickets to memory cards - but I've never ventured into the auction scenario. No one was more surprised than me to see the message "You've won".
I'm going to have to be very careful not to get the bug so much that I spend too much money. But it does give one a good feeling to know that you have a bargain.

In the Tick of Time

Oh my God, my wife's turned into a nerd!
Yes folks, it's true. She's got the family tree bug again - this time finding more ancestors on her maternal side. Last time we looked at the Quaintance family. This took us to register offices, county records offices and churches in Devon. Out of it we got back two hundred or so years, contacted lots of long-lost relatives, and finally took over a whole village for a weekend for a Quaintance family reunion. It seems like hundreds of us crowded into a village hall and a family tree was displayed which went round three walls of the hall.
This time, however, the wife is older, wiser and much less inclined to travel. She is researching the Renouf side of her maternal ancestry, originating in Jersey, CI. So internet searching is the order of the day. I find her on the computer at any time of the day or night. Sometimes all I get from her is "Let me show you what I've found about Renouf on the net . . . "
So tonight was one of those nights. She got a possible line back to 1700 and showed me how she had got there. Like a fool I sat down and tried a different search - almost immediately turning up a likely link from 1674. We took the tree back to him and it looks as certain as one can be that this is her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. That's a great number of greats - I think that makes her eleventh generation. Wow! I'm finding this quite exciting. She should have asked me in the first place! In the process of this search I noticed in one search a reference to an 18th century long case clock signed Edouard Renouf. I even found pictures of two different clocks by this bloke. I'm now searching for references to 18th century clocks to see if I can find more about the man and whether his family continued in the same profession. I can see I'm getting drawn into the net. But at least while I'm doing this I can get on to my computer to write this blog.
Saved in the tick of time.

Keep Walking

Steve Vaught is a remarkable man. He realised he was grossly overweight and decided to do something about it by walking from one side of the US to the other. Starting in SanDiego he has marched through eleven pairs of shoes so far. The BBC caught up with him in Cambridge, Ohio and told his story to the world. Steve has so far lost more than six stones in weight and walked more than 2,000 miles. His intended destination is Manhattan. His weight-loss is coming along fine but it is not helped by the fact that most eating places serve "fried this, battered that ..." As the report said Steve would have been happy to breakfast on meusli but Ohio is definitely not meusli country. In the walking interview he noted that the billboards on the outskirts of towns usually consisted of adverts for fast-food joints or churches. He remarked that both types of establishment catered for the same thing - to ease your pain. Feed your stomach or your spiritual needs. That's a neat analogy Steve. Perhaps if more of us got out of our cars and off our fat asses and walked we wouldn't feel the need for either of these types of false plastic establishments. It would certainly lead to cleaner air with less gas-guzzlers on the road. Perhaps it would help the environment too. But most of all it could possibly change a whole mind-set of consumerism.
I hope you have started a revolution Steve - you're a real hero.
Think on all you burger-eating, gas-guzzling, lazy good-for-nothing layabouts.