Russ Abbot Triple
Blame a friend on a social network for posting the phrase “I love a party with a happy atmosphere” as the inspiration for this trio of music videos from British comedian and actor Russ Abbot. I’m very sorry. Atmosphere The video that, of course, came to mind where Russ sings about parties with happy atmospheres and his love of them all while sporting a happy and atmospheric party jumper. We’re A Folk Group From his Madhouse TV series and featuring Les Dennis, Dustin Gee, and Jeffrey Holland performing a pleasant little comedy folk number. I’m softening you up for the final video. The Four Bottoms I’ve saved the best for last. The same foursome from the same TV series and a parody of a Four Tops number. With blackface! And a bleached lead singer! Ah, can you watch this without...
Floral Photography By Emi Nakajima
Another photographer I’ve come to appreciate from Google+ is Miyagi prefecture-based Emi Nakajima. Despite my fondness for street and industrial photography there’s still plenty of room to love photography of flora, whether taken with a macro lens or not, and with Emi hailing from Japan you know to expect gorgeous bokeh and occasional soft focus with high key. These first two photos show how different the leaves from possibly the same tree can look depending on the quantity of them and the amount of background light that comes through. I love the deep warmth that comes from the lower picture but no more or less than the more sparsely-filled photo above which seems to carry with it a quieter feel. I’m always happy to see a bit of lens flare or light leak and this one helps to pick out the bokeh too in this much cooler photo. What’s also nice – and most likely a happy coincidence – is how the circular bokeh patterns mimic the fruits on the tree branches. This shot by Emi is actually a crop of an earlier photo she’d taken and it’s a better composition for it in my opinion. Beautiful depth of field and a nice contrast between the richness of the flower and the pale background. I’ll be honest: I didn’t know marbles grew on tree. But now that I do know that this is a lovely, almost surreal shot from the Japanese nature photographer. And to finish from Emi’s collection a fruit in a natural cage. I love the detail in this picture and the glow from the bottom of the flower that lends this an ethereal feeling. If you’re on Google+ or just interested in seeing some more gorgeous, floral photographs then check out the rest of Emi Nakajima’s...
Lyme Regis
Lyme Regis is a small, coastal town in Dorset, England. The town's name literally means "misspelt, small, green, citrus fruit named Regis" and it won it in a game of poker with twinned Yorkshire village Lemmin Geoff. Lyme Regis is part of the south of England's famous Jurassic Coast, an area that stretches from Exmouth to Swanage most notable for existing simultaneously in our time period and a pleasant Thursday in the early spring of 153 million years ago. Lyme Regis is popular with tourists wishing to kill dinosaurs in Earth's distant past, skin them, eat them, then sell their cleaned skeletons in the town's many fossil shops. #dorset #thecobb #sooc #justkiddingaboutitbeingsooc Google+: View post on...
Christadelphians
Through the letterbox popped something from Portsmouth Christadelphians… Scepticism about the Bible? I was intrigued. Could this be a local group with a rational outlook when it comes to religious matters? I took a look at their website The Evidence – You Decide. The answer to my question was no. I’ll explain. The website starts with a challenge: The Bible is either a great hoax or a message of great relevance and help. Immediately, they’re removing other options so that they perform a little trick: if they can subsequently remove one of the two choices you’ll be more likely to fall for the message that whatever remains must be the truth. This is a con. Over the rest of the website all they need to do is produce enough weak or anecdotal evidence to support eliminating the hoax option and that will leave them with the “message of great relevance and help” and, by extension, reinforcing the “it must all be true” mantra. Where are the other options? That it’s just a bunch of stories told by superstitious shepherds that morphed into a religion? That it’s a collection of appropriations from other religious tales and in no way the word of a sky pixie? That it’s a means to control people used throughout history by whoever is in charge? That it undergoes changes in interpretation over the centuries to fit the facts of the time? The next section is “accurate predictions” and included are a handful of different types of predictions: vague ones that can mean anything, obvious ones that anyone could see would happen, and potentially specific ones. The problem is that the predictions almost universally come from the portion of the Bible that was passed down by word of mouth and not written until long after the events. Further, the accurate predictions all refer to things that already happened absolutely ages ago, conveniently enough. Where’s the prediction about Islamic State? Where’s the prediction about Americans and Russians almost starting nuclear war? Where’s the prediction about what’s going to happen in the next hundred years? This is not evidence of anything other than the gullibility of humans. Many of the techniques used in these sorts of predictions are used these days too by the scam artists who go around calling themselves psychics and mediums (people that the Catholic church itself says are charlatans because a) it’s true and b) they don’t want anyone else muscling in on their territory). Moreover, this section is a great example of cherry picking data. Why doesn’t the site present the “predictions” that didn’t come true? Skipping over to the “Science & The...
Doug McClure And Kevin Connor Movies
In 1978 I was taken to the cinema to see a movie called Warlords of Atlantis. It was a movie that appealed to me on a lot of levels; Atlantis!; nasty creatures!; a bathysphere! I was young and bathyspheres were cool, so sue me. The movie’s lead was played by Doug McClure and over the years that followed thanks to the explosion of VHS films and then weekend showings on television I became introduced to a few other Doug McClure films too – The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and At The Earth’s Core – all of which had a common theme of explorers exploring, adventures adventuring, and monsters monstering, and all of which were directed by Kevin Connor. The Land That Time Forgot (1975) Based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs book of the same name and set during the first world war the story follows what happens when survivors of a German U-boat attack take control of the vessel but end up chancing upon an isolated, volcanic island where dinosaurs still exist alongside various types of humans. Just like in the Bible. The first lobby card from the movie shows the scene on the island of Caprona where we learn that the dinosaurs have learned over the millenia to abhor violence. Here, a prehistoric creature takes the dangerous guns from the sailors. America’s NRA launched a successful lobbying campaign of their own to get this particular scene cut from the American release of the film and to dub over the movie’s dialogue where Doug McClure’s character Bowen Tyler speaks of his admiration for the dinosaurs’ evolved sense of morality, replacing it instead with a wish that there was a good monster with a gun nearby to terminate the bad monster with his own gun. A memorable moment from the movie captured in this card when the German submarine commander performs a thrilling cabaret with some of the various creatures swimming around near his boat. The act of holding his hand within the jaws of an enormous plesiosaur demonstrates his bravery and helps to cement a blossoming relationship between himself and Tyler. The final lobby card shown from The Land That Time Forgot features a still from the middle third of the movie, the infamous hardcore sex scene between Susan Penhaligon’s character Lisa Clayton and a caveman. Gratuitous, very graphic, and highly censored worldwide it’s subsequently been very difficult to get hold of a print of the film that leaves much of the scene intact which does make the ending of the movie with Clayton nursing a hairy baby a tad confusing. The People That...
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