Serf's Up

Went to get your backer-board panels Monday morning last and fell victim to a siren call from McDonalds for a breakfast burger... and spotted this exiting the retail park.

The royal family owns much of Cornwall, besides stately piles around London and elsewhere. I thought they owned the entire foreshore of these islands too, but apparently half of it belongs to local councils, the National Trust or the military.

They do own the seabed as far as the twelve-mile territorial limit, though' that's a moving target with sea-levels set to rise by upto two metres by 2100.

How that works legally is therefore a mystery, as since the time of Magna Carta the extent of property has been fixed by the Land Registry or similar and its borders not allowed to drift. 

As they own the Registry too, however, that shouldn't prove a problem.

Dolly Parton R.I.P.

The queen is dead. I'd a young lodger in Mitcham while setting out on working life in and around London, and he'd always been a huge Elvis fan: unusual in someone so young at the time. He told me how at home he'd gone downstairs in tears, hearing that Elvis was dead.

His father asked him what was wrong, and he said 'The king is dead.' to which his father replied, 'What... the Duke of Edinburgh?'.

Ed. The Duke of Edinburgh was the husband of the late Queen Elisabeth in the UK.

Oh, Come On!

Dronehenge

We don't really know why these people ~ at least as intelligent as the Neanderthals ~ should have erected such a structure in their back garden, but during the summer solstice it points the way to the local Aldi store. These structures could mark the site of ancient rituals, though they could also represent a futile waste of time and effort.

Kit Cat #2

Here are the uprights, and they are made in the same way as the decks. They could have been three-sided as they share an edge with each deck, but sometimes it is easier to use modular construction techniques even should it add extra weight.

The majority of the drones currently in production are not built by robots but human beings, for a number of reasons. Humans are cheaper to employ, faster to set up in manufacture and able to run away should bombs rain down upon their factory. And if you're a dictator, they're also easier to replace.

The first means of industrial mass production anywhere in the world took place in the UK ~ naturellement Rodney ~ and involved rigging-blocks for the largest naval force in the world. There is a picture of one below, and again they'd be made from wood and produced by hand.

So in a funny way, what goes around comes around.

Rebus

As Reno is alight and the Colorado empties out, UK agricultural production fails year on year and Europe burns... spare a thought for London's bus-drivers as all 1500 of them go out on strike today.

They're not allowed to talk about it under Labour's abuse of anyone providing labour but it is all about the fact that legislation forbids carriage of animals in temperatures above 30 degrees centigrade, but not bus-drivers. This has been exacerbated by the fact that there are so few public conveniences left that drivers are effectively denied any means of hydration.

Thatcher would have loved this, and will have been sorry not to have been around in order to send in legions of baton-wielding policemen to beat the shit out of them. She will however be resting peacefully in her grave knowing London Corporation's buses are run by Arriva with focus on shareholder and management remuneration.

But as much as anyone to blame is Thomas Heatherwick's pretty-pretty re-working of the classic Routemaster. Designs are epic when they introduce something new, whereas nowadays as often as not we're happy with re-hashed Minis and Beetles not because we're post-modern so much as the fact we revel in our cultural decline.

Seen side-by-side in this image borrowed from Wikipedia, the older bus was open at the back end, meaning you could get on and off at will. Arriving near school I'd leap from this platform every day wondering how high a speed I could withstand on re-entry. In reverse order, fellow passengers would hold London trains' doors open in an effort to accommodate races between departing trains and tardy commuters.

All that has gone, and Thomas' efforts have concentrated upon three main things:

(a)    The elimination of all means of ventilation

(b)    A maximum of greenhouse-effect in order to raise temperatures

(c)    Windows that can't be opened by anyone anymore

At a stroke, therefore, he's provided any number of bus-drivers with one.

Nonetheless as you see, as with our own efforts foam and plywood are involved in developing even the largest forms of transport. 

Ed. Colin is bitter as he wrote Thomas Heatherwick years ago and never got a reply.

Kit Cat #1

Meantimes boats don't build themselves, do they Gromit? I've decided to build this as a pair of identical pontoons to be connected by the intervening seat or seats and here I've laid out the pair of decks ~ or wings ~ as they'll appear on the watercraft.

We're looking at the underside here and they comprise a picture-frame, based on a quarter-inch laminated backer-board beneath and insulation foam above. The foam will be on the underside and so it does not require a second skin.

This in turn allows for different thicknesses of foam to be applied: here the spars are three-quarter inch (18mm) square, whereas the foam is inch-thick or 25mm. I ran a bead of adhesive around the excess foam except on inside edges, as these will abut the uprights.

There might have been a time I'd have worked on during summer evenings but with advancing age comes retreating ambition. Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote how our lives are like a river: a babbling brook at birth, a torrent in youth and middle age, serene expanse like the Mississippi approaching the sea and its demise.

Whatever book I read I can only generally recall one fact, as here. Of Solzhenystin's voluminous tome about the Gulag I can only remember the bit where he goes for a crap. This suggests that reading, as Faust said, is a waste of time.

Ed. He did like blogs though.