A colourful dinosaur from Giliell, click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
A colourful dinosaur from Giliell, click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
Frank Amedia and his Potus Shield clown circus are back at it, just praying their little red noses off. If you aren’t familiar with Mr. Amedia, you can pretty much find out all you care to know in his recounting a miracle he performed: the resurrection of an ant. Today, they are all trembling over the “deep state”, witches, warlocks, and the antichrist.
“I think we need to be wise to understand that this presidency is going to be taken to the edge of destruction by evil forces, by deep state forces, by a conspiracy that has already been named,” Amedia warned. “We know it’s coming. We need to withstand against that. We need to be the watchmen that say, ‘Don’t take your eyes off, the storm is coming.’”
“We prayed for the Lord to just stir up that storm,” he continued. “Stir up that storm of that president. We declare right now, in Jesus’ name, stir it up. Stir him up like a tornado, don’t let him stop. Let everything fly out that needs to fly out, let everything be exposed, don’t let anything be put back into a place that could come back and linger again.”
That’s a veritable treasure chest of filthy jokes, just waiting to be made. Speaking for myself, I don’t want to see anything flying out of the Tiny Tyrant, and I most emphatically don’t want to see anything exposed. :shudder: Okay, now that my mind has jumped out of the gutter, as far as exposure goes, the Tiny Tyrant and his crew of incompetent cronies are doing a fine job of that themselves. No assistance is required.
Amedia, Mark Gonzales of the U.S. Hispanic Action Network, and Bishop Harry Jackson then initiated a spiritual warfare prayer against Trump’s enemies and critics, with Jackson taking specific aim at the “witches and warlocks” who have cursed the president.
“We lift up witches and warlocks who have been a part of this assignment,” Jackson said, “as they have gathered in numbers almost immeasurable to curse this specific president. We cancel, we bind their authority, we bind their curses, we lift up your word that says you shall not revile the gods and neither shall you bring a curse upon the rule of God’s people. We declare those assignments null and void and we claim the souls of many of the witches and warlocks.”
The Gods? Hmmm. Anyroad, I think we need a serious rule here. This is the 21st century, and people with views that are the same as those prevalent during the inquisition and witch trials? They have no place in a modern society. What they do need is a nice re-created 13th century village, lots of land surrounding, where they could play at witch hunting all they liked, and they could leave the rest of us in the current century alone.
Å.
Å is Swedish for river. These pictures are from the two biggest rivers flowing in Helsinki. Vantaanjoki (Vantaa river, the Swedish name is Vanda å) and Mätäjoki (rotten river, the Swedish name is Rutiån). Mätäjoki was the original channel through which Vantaanjoki flowed into the sea, west of Helsinki peninsula, but about 3000 years ago, Vantaa changed its course eastward and started to flow into the sea east of the peninsula.
Mätäjoki is more like a brook, even though it’s called a river, a few kilometers long, flowing in its oversized channel. Vantaanjoki, on the other hand is 101 km long and a proper river.
The first two pictures are from Vantaanjoki at the Vanhankaupunginkoski (old town rapids, the modern Swedish name is Gammelstadsforsen). The city of Helsinki was originally sited near the rapids at the moutgh of the river in Helsinge parish (the name is a Swedish name, the population was mostly Swedish speaking).
The third is a picture of Mätäjoki flowing through a park in Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki.
The fourth is Vantaanjoki a bit upriver from Vanhankaupunginkoski.
The fifth is from the same park as the third and the sixth is a bit upriver from the park, Mätäjoki is flowing between a street and a residential area.
In the seventh and eighth it is again Vantaanjoki at Vanhankaupunginkoski. There’s an island in the river at the rapids. The western channel has been dammed and there’s a power station there (nowadays a museum, but it produces electricity), but the eastern channel has been restored closer to the natural state and the salmon and trout can swim through the eastern channel upriver to breed in the river.
The letter Å is one of the so called Scandinavian letters. It originates from late medieval Swedish and is nowadays used in Danish and Norwegian as well. It is used in words which used to have long a A in Old Norse but the pronunciation changed to an O (think of Latin or Standard German wovel sounds, not English).
More photos under the fold, click for full size!
A leafhopper from Lofty, click for full size. Now that’s a Spring Green!
© Lofty, all rights reserved.
From Nerd of Redhead, flowers are popping!
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© Nerd of Redhead, all rights reserved.
House Finch, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Have you ever been happily reading, and come across an idiom, expression, or turn of phrase you’re familiar with, and suddenly the absurdity of it strikes you? Came across one yesterday in one of Jim C. Hines’s Princess series, The Mermaid’s Madness. (Re-reading, they have become comfort reads).
“That earned another chuckle. “He’s prince of Lorindar. He’s not used to feeling powerless.” He climbed to his feet.”
Climbed to his feet. That means to stand up, but it’s a damned silly expression. The more I think on it, the sillier it becomes. I used to have a bunch of these absurdities in my head, but naturally I can’t think of any of them now. Out of curiosity, does anyone else have favourite absurdities of expressions? Or peeves?
IV treatment helps Pillalamarri live another day. Courtesy of District Administration, Mahabubnagar.
An amazing story, this.
If the roughly 800-year-old banyan tree in Mahabubnagar, India, could talk, it would probably tell you the IV inserted in its branches is saving its life. Termites infested the tree, reportedly one of the oldest in India, and gradually chipped away at its wood until the poor banyan was near the brink of death. Last December, some of the tree’s branches fell down because of the infestation, resulting in officials closing the attraction to the public.
Known as Pillalamarri because of its many interweaving branches, the banyan tree measures 405 feet from east to west and 408 feet from north to south, according to Mahabubnagar District Forest Officer Chukka Ganga Reddy. The crown of Pillalamarri extends to 1,263 feet and the tree is spread across nearly four acres. Underneath the tree stands a small shrine that supposedly dates back to the year 1200, but the tree’s exact age is unclear. Nevertheless, calling the Ficus benghalensis a great banyan tree would be an understatement.
Pillalamarri’s branches bend close to the soil. Courtesy of District Administration, Mahabubnagar.
Such greatness attracts 12,000 tourists per year from every corner of the country to awe at its sheer vastness, but this tourism has also caused some troubles for the tree. According to Telangana Today, when Pillalamarri turned into a tourist attraction nearly a decade ago, the state government cut down branches and built concrete sitting areas around the tree for tourists. Tourists picked at the leaves, climbed on the branches, and carved names into the bark. Furthermore, to keep the area clean, the grounds team burned fallen leaves, which was bad for the soil. A recently installed dam on a neighboring stream restricted water flow to the tree.
I will never understand the pointless destructiveness humans indulge in. A 700 year old living being should, at the very least, garner some respect.
…Officials initially injected the trunk with the pesticide chlorpyrifos, but saw no improvement. So they tried another method to prevent decay: hundreds of saline bottles filled with chlorpyrifos, inserted into Pillalamarri’s branches.
“This process has been effective,” Reddy told the Times of India. “Secondly, we are watering the roots with the diluted solution to kill the termites. And in a physical method, we are building concrete structures to support the collapsing heavy branches.”
…Despite the tree’s stable prospects, the public won’t be seeing Pillalamarri any time soon. When they do visit in the future, “this time people have to see it from a distance away from the barricades,” said Reddy. For now, drip-by-drip, the banyan tree’s health is returning to its former glory.
What a shame that all those who would show proper respect won’t be able to do so anymore. I’m impressed and happy that a way to treat Pillalamarri has been found, and profoundly sad and disappointed by the people who were so damn destructive. It doesn’t speak well of humans at all.
Revisiting the original crew, they were 16 days old in these photos. I’ll try to name as best I can. And today’s music is something of a tie-in. :D
The front, l-r, Gytha, Oliver, Chester, Beatrice. At the very back, Giles, Agnes, Amelia, and Vasco, who are sitting on top of Neville. I think.
Basil. I think.
l-r, Giles, Agnes, Vasco, and the last two could be Oliver, Chester, Theo, Neville, or Dexter.
l-r, Amelia and Beatrice. Amelia was cute overload from the start.
Chester and Amelia.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Zuge.
Zuge is Helsinki slang for a train. In standard Finnish train is juna and in standard Swedish tåg. The z is pronounced ts in Finnish, like in German, but a bit more lazily.
Helsinki slang takes its vocabulary from many sources. Some words come from Swedish, English or Russian. Zuge comes probably from the German word for train, Zug. Old Helsinki slang was to a great extent a mixture of Finnish and Swedish, which was understood by both Finnish and Swedish speaking working-class youth. Now the slang is much more influenced by English.
I’m not really in the slang speaking demographic, being a bit too old and not born and raised in Helsinki.
All the train pictures here are electric multiple unit trains, with no locomotive. Except for the Pendolino high-speed train leaving Helsinki Central Railway station in a cloud of snow, all are regional trains operating in the Capital Region and its surroundings. The Pendolino is a long-distance train with a somewhat troubled history. The Italian technology has had a lot of problems with snow and frost.
The red train is an old Sm2 regional train made by Valmet Lentokonetehdas (Valmet Airplane Factory). The other train photographed from the same place on the Linnunlaulu bridge is a Sm4 regional train used for longer regional lines. In the summer picture from Vantaankoski station in Vantaa, the train is a Sm5, which is used for the shorter lines in the Capital Region.
Click for full size!
© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
Seeing as it’s Raturday…and check the moves! There’s more than a touch of the Dancing Plague going on.
