thenotsomightyom

Thanks to Matty Edwards and BBC Online News for the Headline

The main thing that strikes me about this story is that yet again we have a beautiful old building going to wreck and ruin, owned by a foreign group called the “Fragrance Group” from Thailand who had acquired the building known as the “Grand Atlantic Hotel” in Weston Supermare with the promise of restoring it to it’s former glory and having a hotel that attracts high spending visitors to Weston.

Instead we have neglect and an increasingly deteriorating situation with the local Council up in arms as the building is increasingly being targeted by “urban explorers” who break into the premises , filming their exploits and in some cases writing graffiti on the internal walls and the “Fragrance Group” say they are doing everything they can to stop the dangerous and anti-social behaviour and they are working on plans to restore the hotel.

Their approach is to barricade the building with metal fences, however this hasn’t stopped the intrusions.

Perhaps the reality is time will move on , the building will become uninhabitable and the land will be redeveloped into luxury flats. Bye Bye Grand Atlantic hotel and hello profitable real estate deal.

Namaste and Thank You for Reading.🙏

Thanks to Nardine Saad and BBC Online News for the Headline.

Wow, this is something I wish they would pass in our Parliament here, and even President Trump think it’s a good idea. The House of Representatives have voted to make daylight saving time permanent by passing the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday. The bill removes the need for American’s to change their clocks twice a year and put the US under time currently observed between March and November, known as permanent standard time.

There are still those who argue that darker winter mornings will lead to increase in road accident and that increased light in the morning helps the sleep cycle. The rest of us feel that messing around with clocks twice a year is a pain and that your body adjusts naturally to the changing light conditions and does not need an artificial prod of an extra hour or one less hour about Easter and in November.

The mnemonic Spring Forward , Fall Back would be redundant.

Namaste and Thank You for Reading.🙏

Thanks to the Times of India World Desk for the Headline

Seems timely to revisit the choice that was made in Florida at the turn of last century to introduce a non-native tree into the swamplands in order to drain the land and allow development.

Today those invasive trees cover 400,000 acres of native sawgrass marshes and have led to significant changes to the ecological balance. The Melaleuca tree uses vast amounts of water in comparison to the Sawgrass which actually had a natural ebb and flow with it’s surroundings. The land needing an ebb and flow of water. Added to that the Melaleuca’s tree wafer thin and highly combustible bark and there is a double whammy of fire and water environmental damage, not to mention it’s cascading seeds and darkening canopy which prevents native species from thriving or even surviving.

The current cost of managing this invasive species is mounting and has to be met from Government resources. The use of biological methods such as introducing the Melaleuca Snout Beetle and the Melaleuca psyllid from Australia to reduce the tree’s ability to propagate have been moderately successful. Basically however the timebomb was set two hundred years ago without understanding the total picture and the ecology.

Let’s hope we learn from it.

Namaste and Thank You for Reading.🙏