Read: The Trees by Percival Everett ★★★★☆📚
Racism, lynching, half detective, half horror. Also laugh out loud funny. What a strange book. Raced through it. The conclusion was a bit abrupt, but I am not sure how it could be finished with complete satisfaction.
Category Archives: posse
#SilentSunday
Holding Back the Years
As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.
I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.
A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.
I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.
It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.
Update, 22 Aug 2025, I’ve improved this somewhat and moved it here: Flickr By Month. Defaults to butterflies now.
Kilpatrick: First hawthorn leaves, just & no more. Blackthorn buds, later here. Buzzard, larks, raven, grouse & goldfinch. Lesser celandine, golden saxifrage & First primrose. Trees on the moor bare.
Read: An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie ★★★★☆ 📚
Sort of Top Boy in Bristol. Once you adjust to the patois, it is an engrossing & exciting read. I felt quite conflicted by the resolution.
Watched Perfect Days this afternoon. Lovey quiet film. I think someone must have lifted the box of cassettes I threw out a decade or so ago. 🎬🎥
As we got to the top of the hill a golden eagle came from behind it at about our height. It soared, folded its wings and dived. Another appeared and they crossed the glen soaring and diving all the way. To entranced to lift my camera.
A name for something I knew about, canopy shyness, but didn’t know.
“When the leaves are almost gone, the branches show their ‘canopy shyness’ – a phenomenon observed in many species of trees in which the crowns of mature trees do not touch each other,” says Niven.
I love trees from below. The photographs on the British Wildlife Photography Awards are amazing.
Read: The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff ★★★★☆ 📚
A nice trip to a distant part of the world, funny too. The dramatic climax a bit too unlikely.
Kid Pix
This is a blast from the past. This was one of the first applications I saw first apps when I first used computers. My classes at the time really enjoyed using this.
The other apps I remember from those days included Claris Works1 and HyperCard2
Amazing to see a Mac with kid pix running in emulation at archive.org. It feels snappier than the LCs we had back then.
A pity I can’t get it going on iOS as I’d love to see my current class using it. The is a dialogue to input your name and I can’t type in it on iPad. Workarounds welcome.
The featured image is of the ‘bomb’ eraser ,which my pupils would use endlessly.