Pig Sty Avenue

391- War of the Worlds , originally uploaded by M R Fletcher .

Loopyluuk was the first person to drop by Pig Sty Avenue back in 2004. I'm taking her blog off the links list because she's not posted anything there since Christmas. Pity. I did the same last with some other blogs. One tries to avoid the moribund.

Exactly 28 years ago, there was terrible accident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in the USA. And what's the significance? Sweet fuck all, except that it's March 28th today. Likewise the 200-years-since-the-abolition-of-the-slave-trade fandango which has been wall to wall on television for the last week. They've even made a really bad film about it. The cherry on the cake was a service at Westminster Cathedral, which proved too much for one man who interrupted the proceedings and shouted protests. I don't blame him, and would likely have joined in, had I been there. At first the whole breast beating bullshit looked like another exercise in white middle class people finding something else to be guilty about. Maybe it's more than that, though. Keep the public eye off Iraq for a week or two, perhaps? It's just the sort of numptyism which would fit the bill. "We stopped the slave trade 200 years ago! Hooray! Aren't we nice peopl...

I found this when looking for dialogue for a spoken discourse exercise.

This story is giving me a right laugh. The big McCheeses are clearly genuinely narked by this. They complained back in 2003 when the word was defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary. Now it's included in the OED and they're complaining again. It's clearly an ongoing offensive because they gave out this press release in April 2006. Victoria Coren gave me another laugh on this subject this morning . But what's really funny is McFucktard's inability to let it go. Spending at least four years crying over a spilt McMilkshake is good evidence of corporate nuerosis.

FLICKR CENSORSHIP AND HOW TO TURN IT OFF!!! , originally uploaded by Gail Orenstein . You now know what to do.

I don't particularly want to harp on about this. But the Independent "retraction" (ffs) got on my nerves. This morning in The Guardian it was succinctly debunked by Ben Goldacre , (now there's a lad who knows a cherry pick from a control group). And this wee league table made my common-sense, I-did-inhale heart glad. You can get the full text of The Lancet report here - (you'll need to register with them, but you don't need an Athens log in or anything). This is quite interesting, too.

5-Meo-DMT is the psychoactive substance which is found in the glands of the Bufo Alvarius toad, apparently. It says here that it doesn't work when taken orally. You need to collect the secretions, dry the stuff and then smoke it. So licking your bog standard British toad would be fruitless.

washing left out in the snow , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Is that it, then? Was that the winter? I'm going to try growing sweet potatoes this year.

Yesterday, BBC News 24 and Radio 4 news reported the conviction of a young man who savagely murdered two of his friends with a knife. He was defined in the reports as a "cannabis addict" or "heavy cannabis user". The Guardian's report this morning gets onto the same angle and quotes somebody as saying "We now know that cannabis can be a trigger for mental health problems and smoking it under the age of 18 can double people's chances of developing psychosis." Do we know that? How do we know that? Where's the evidence? Having a quick shufty in Google scholar just now, this article , a " review of clinical and epidemiological evidence" gets the most hits for a search on "cannabis psychosis". Then you see it's not so cut and dried. Admittedly "cannabis use can exacerbate the symptoms of schizophrenia." Just like eating pie and chips six times a week will exacerbate the symptoms of a bad heart.

Preparing for a Skills for Life speaking and listening exam, I wanted to get students ready for a listening text which involved a nurse, and wanted some images for the smartboard. Hmm. Try google imaging "nurse" - there's a lot of sex. (By the way, if you really want to liven things up in your staff room, try google imaging "blonde", with the filter off... oh dear, oh dear). But then I came across good old Nurse Ratchet. She calmed the situation down.

...how everything's gone green? And every ONE , actually - especially politicians . Not that I'm cynical or anything, but it does feel a bit fishy. First of all, the domestic consumption of power is much smaller than the industrial. So you've got to wonder whether not leaving your telly on standby makes a difference in the great scheme of things. With recycling, too - all the beer cans and wine bottles and copies of The Guardian that go in our box and get taken away by the council, in a diesel burning wagon... And presumably get moved in big lorries elsewhere for melting or pulping or whatever. But it makes you feel better, eh? We've all got to do our bit, and all that. Maybe. Or maybe it's just make-up applied on top of a fatal skin cancer.

allotment toad , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . I'm calling it the allotment toad, but actually we found him/her when excavating years of rubbish left by the previous occupiers in the broken down shed at home. But we took her/him to the allotment. Toads are great, we're told because they eat slugs. The question is, do they only spawn at the pond they come from, or will s/he spawn in the allotment pond, (assuming s/he finds a consenting friend of suitable gender)?

tramasnw.jpg , originally uploaded by shveckle . Here's a photo taken a couple of days ago in New York by my mate Shveckle. In Blighty, too, winter's not going out without a reminder that it can still make you wrap up warm. Must be confusing for the plants and beasts who thought it was spring weeks ago.

What was once a bit of annual social glue for the diaspora, has become a method of selling Guinness to numpties. I won't have it. Capitalism is a virus that adapts itself to anything.

There's not as much time as I'd like for this, but our new house having a decent sized back garden, I can now set about a project I've been mulling over for years. The idea is to get as big a variety of wildlife into the garden as possible. Most obviously, this is manifested through garden birds. I'll have a bird table next winter, but lots of species won't use it, so, I want to attract lots of insects, butterflies and moths, which tend to breed near a source of food, and they are then a source of food for the birds. Or something. This page about which plants attract which moths is a canny starting point. I notice that hawthorn attracts a lot of moth species. Well, that's a good start. And I'll get some hedge bedstraw to include in the hedgerow. Bladder campion's another good one, and there's a load of that at the allotment, a year old now. I'd best get it dug up and ready to move afore spring get on much more. Hemp agrimony has an in...

... this caught my eye this morning. Then I thought, ffs. There are many things Governments simply can't do. And encouraging fellas to take the bairns when they go to hoe the weeds is one of them. Dysfunctional dads (like the three blokes getting pissed in The Longship last Sunday dinner time whilst their kids ran riot - but that's another story, don't get me started...) are unlikely to have an allotment in the first place - though they might grow mushrooms in their underpants.

The sort you get a Chinese takeaway in. The box that is. Clare and I picked the hawthorn berries at the end of last year. They spent the next three months stratifying in the fridge, (along with bay , Pedicularis procera "Giant Lousewort" [!], Hawaiian Baby Wood Rose , and Virginian Skullcap ). Today they all came out of hibernation and went to the allotment. There are 300+ hawthorns. Even if 50% germinate, that's more than enough for the hedgerow I'm planning. Clare will have a peculiar relationship with this nascent hedge - more about that later. Lots of other gardening: we bought dozens of packets of vegetable seeds, and sulphate of potash for the prize parsnips. Putting up shelves and stuff at home, too. Desperately domestic.

big feet and chef , originally uploaded by mikegarlington1 . Click on this photo to look at other stuff from the same photographer. SERIOUSLY good.

...of the blogging soul. I'm just really busy.

...no more. Studying, that is. Once the current lot is out of the way. The Certificate in Further Education is the most discouraging because it's so practical. You teach for years abroad and think you're the bees knees because your students like you - and that means they come back for more, and keep paying the fees, so your school's management likes you too. And then you come back to the highly regulated atmosphere of a proper FE college in Blighty, and you realise your teaching is actually appalling. Or "confused as to methodology" as one of my class room observations put it today. It doesn't matter if the students are happy and learning. You must cross the T s and dot the I s. However, you shake your head and box on.

Lunar Eclipse March 2007 , originally uploaded by vee8 . This is definitely the best photo I've seen of the eclipse last night. Brilliant!

Defend Free English Language Classes , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . ...was to protest at cuts in English classes for speakers of other languages. It's unclear whether her motive was political or altruistic, or perhaps a combination of the two. She could have been inspired by self interest - if her dad loses his job, there'll be less cash for peas, her latest favourite food. Grapes also - she's eating a grape here.

mind altering substances , originally uploaded by monaxle . I should say so.

365 days xx-something , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . See what I mean? It's not bad for a cameraphone, but all the same...

Brooklyn is my kinda town , originally uploaded by smoothdude . Somebody told this lad, my pal Smoothdude, that such a hat would get him a beating in an English pub. Granted, he'd stand out somewhat, but I can't believe it would lead to outright violence, without some kind of backstory. What do you reckon?

...about this 365 Days fandango. On the one hand, committing yourself to a single subject, photographed day in, day out for a twelvemonth should teach all but the biggest numpties something about photography. On the other, your own ugly mug gets more than a trifle tiresome; and it's all a bit, well, wanky. Kind of. It's like so much in life though, eh? Put yourself into a long term situation, a job or a marriage, say, and you've no real idea how it's all going to pan out. But you might as well stay the course, see what happens. Or something.