Thank you to Notes from Poland Online for the Headline
Scientists from Poland are seeking to solve the mystery of Poland’s ” Crooked Forest”- a set of 90-year old trees with bizarrely curved trunks by developing “tree bending technology” to recreate their unusual growth. Bonsai on a big scale.
The research is being done as the Crooked Forest located near the town of Gryfino in Northwestern Poland has some trees that are getting older, and dying out. They are pine trees and the objective is to understand why they grew their curves and to replicate it to grow a Crooked Forest 2.
Historically the reasons why the trees were grown that way in the first place have been lost, but it will not be an easy feat to replicate and may take many years. Meanwhile the forest which once consisted of about 400 curved trees now only has about 100 left and time is running out.
Thanks to the Standard London Online for the Headline
Just shows what can happen when someone moves on in their job having made a decision that no one at the time thought was very important.
Wandsworth Council apparently paid out £600,000 to redecorate and upgrade two railway bridges at East Putney Tube station including “pigeon proofing the site “. Locals are renaming it the Ikea Bridge in honour of the famous Blue and Yellow of our favourite Swedish Furniture supplier. Nearby residents feel the colours are garish and do not fit in with the area, meanwhile Network Rail and a senior transport planner at the council say that the “negative comments” are relatively few considering the large number of local residents and station users and there are no plans to repaint the bridges.
Thanks to Lisa Young and BBC Online News for the Headline
And here’s a rub everyone should know about. The CQC charges those who need assessments to provide healthcare a £1000 registration fee along with the significant administration commitment to maintain registration and have the required inspections.
Unfortunately due to a change of Law, remote voluntary search and rescue organisations now fall under the remit of requiring a CQC inspection and the organisations themselves being purely voluntary and really being made up of knowledgeable mountaineering enthusiasts and rescue dogs simply do not have the money or the time to achieve this registration and therefore will have to cease operating. This is a ridiculous situation.
Thanks to Katharine Hay and the Scotsman for the Headline
Apparently this is a problem in Scotland , though I think it’s also a Welsh problem too. I’ve got to admit I don’t like seeing Rhododendron’s taking over roadsides or forests, much as their blooms and colours are very beautiful, they are like the bully of the plant world.
Thankfully, the Woodland Trust has taken the stem by the roots and has asked the general public who visit Garden Centres to play detective and to report if they are selling Rhododendron ponticum which is native to Asia and was introduced to Britain as an attractive ornamental plant, however, it’s spread throughout the countryside and out of domestic gardens has had a detrimental effect on the landscape of wildflowers and native species.
The Woodland Trust of Scotland is looking to bring in legislation to stop Garden Centres selling these plants , in the meantime they are trying to gather the information so that they can find out where the plants are coming from. Adds a bit of spice to an otherwise pretty uneventful garden centre visit.
I was intrigued by this headline as when I arrived back from holiday after three weeks away , all my lavender that I had grown in containers and pots had died, literally shrivelled to a woody mass. The main problem was the heat of the sun, and the fact that positioned where it was at the front of the patio that the heat and lack of water destroyed it. Except it is supposed to be a very hardy plant. Although I’ve got to admit mine was very old.
Nice to know that the French have a similar problem, there is a possiblity that the Instagrammers will no longer be able to picture the swathes of purple in acres of fields to the instantaneous delight of their viewers. French growers for many reasons are switching to growing almonds, pistachio and pomengranate. Some are moving to raising laying hens under new French agricultural emergency acts( a shortage of eggs).
There are climatic changes too, so an infinity pool of purple into the distance may no longer be an option while sipping your impeccable dry rosé, but at least you can nibble almonds and pistachios with it.
Chickens wander through blooming lavender rows near a table with rosé wine and nuts.
Not knowing anything about the German language I never really understood what Hitler was saying or how he managed to enthrall so many people with his speeches. I suppose he really was speaking nonsense, that appealed to generations of people who felt they had been unfairly treated, it did not need to make sense, but it did need to play on their reactions or fears. A soundbite and then a lot of rabble rousing cheering.
Is it possible that today’s politicians use the same technique? Polarising people into thinking or believing what they want and then mobilising them into actions which history will judge as shameful.
Let’s hope we have moved on, I really think we have.
So this claim by President Trump that China had used “the largest compromise of election data in history” contradicts the findings of a Senior Intelligence Expert who investigated the claim in 2020 and is now the CIA director no less. Yes Joe Biden beat Donald Trump fair and square.
Well, we may all laugh at his claim and the fact that President Trump is belittling even his own Security forces. The President took twenty five minutes to rant about it on a recording that some will believe because they want to believe.
I think I understand better how Hitler worked and how he mobilised those who wanted to believe him.
My experience, though is tempered by the people who made fun of Hitler, I was a child born in the 1960’s and there was some brilliant television programmes made by men and women who had lived through the war. One “Dad’s Army “has always stayed with me. The programme itself was genius but the opening credits stuck a chord.
” Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?
If you think ol’ England’s done
We are the one’s who will stop your little game
We are the one’s who will make you think again.”
The tone was definitely Hitler was a clown, a clown who unfortunately resulted in a horrendous amount of innocent people getting killed. Even during the War though there were colloquial songs aimed at making fun at the Nazi Establishment ” Hitler Only has one ball” which was very funny. There were others too, I found this one You Tube it made me laugh . I do believe Spike was from California
The Chinese Embassy in Washington stated that China ” has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US” and also wary of the need to fact-check the president’s claims first- several US networks chose not to broadcast it live on their main channels.
It’s funny what thoughts reading a headline generates, the article explained that the Republican’s are concerned that their mid term election results will be weak and perhaps this is the reason for the twenty five minute rant about the Chinese bogey man .
In the end though a sense of humour ridiculing the pompous and corrupt works wonders and I’m afraid the headline made me smile.
Torn newspaper fragments swirl dramatically against a dark red backdrop.
I just thought I’d cheer everyone up with this headline or cause a bout of mass hysteria.
It popped up on my timeline,I can’t give you any more details without signing up for a monthly subscription.Sorry.
So I’m in the same boat as you lot and will have to worry about the possibility of the pathogenic fungi and have no facts that you can refer to.
I mean mushrooms can be tasty or deadly and anyone who has seen the video of spores being flung into the air at volumes a human sneeze can only dream of will know what I mean.You can Google now if you like.
Add to that the wonderful vocabulary of the mushroom world,such as septate mycelium(walls nutrients can flow along).Rhizomorphic thick rope,root like strands that colonise aggressively and Tomentose ,Cotton,Cloudy or fuzzy mycelium that spreads softly and dare I say it creepily.
Well the permutations of catastrophic illness and destruction are endless
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.
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.
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.
thenotsomightyom 