Daily archives: June 4, 2003

I want to ride my bicycle

This entry was posted in Canal photo on by

Well, I finally managed to leave the house today. After telling myself for the last week and a half I was going to take advantage of the lovely weather and go for a bike ride, I fanally got round to it. I took a random wander down roads I used to drive along on my way to Sheffield until I ended up in Denton, then I hit the canal. I’m a bit of a cheat with my mountain bike- I like nothing more than pottering along nice flat tow paths. I tend to break out in a sweat and come to a grinding halt at the sight of a hill.

Anyway, I followed the canal back, supposedly to Stockport, but actually only to Ashton Under Lyne, where I met the Ashton canal. I wandered along here instead. It got ever more familiar as I did, and I finally realised I’d been this way before when I spotted an abandoned tractor I put in this photo-

Click on image for full picture

Then along and past Sportcity and home.

Five minutes after I got home, it started to pour down.

Burn Garfield Burn!

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by

Griff exploded Pikachu a couple of years ago. In a similar vein, someone decided to immolate Garfield. Don’t worry, he didn’t feel anything. They gave him what you might call a full frontal lobotomy beforehand.

Note: Always wear safety goggles when you are using small explosive devices to perform psychosurgery on a stuffed animal. Perhaps that goes without saying.

Thanks to Dave for finding this one.

Pykrete

This entry was posted in Heavensent Pykrete on by

I’ve had a lot of hits in the last two days from searches for Pykrete. Someone must have a class project going on. So another quick recap on this wierd stuff is due.

Pykrete is made by mixing water and sawdust or wood pulp and then freezing it. A rather eccentric British inventor called Geoffrey Pyke dreamt it up as a material to build super huge ships from, based upon an idea of Churchill’s to create floating airbases. A 60 foot long test model was created in a Canadian lake, but the project never went any further than this, except in fiction.

The number of Pykrete resources on the web have increased since my first posts about the stuff in relation to Heavensent. Cabinet magazine fills out some biographical details of Pyke in their overview of the project, the story has been adapted for kids’ science TV, there’s been a radio play about it (I haven’t read the full text yet) and the Guardian has the obituary of Max Perutz, who also worked on the project.