Caboose

Every once in a while I get an email asking to use my photos. The first was from Satan’s Penguins (their own website seems to have vanished), a Swedish heavy-metal band.

They ended up using several of my Antarctic pictures on the cover of their album “Birds of Darkness“. The link’s to a review (found by a Google search today) that mentions “On the front cover, four shrouded penguins stand against the sunset.”, that would be these penguins:

(There are actually five penguins, the third from the left isn’t just very fat)

I’ve also provided photos for some educational activities in various places and a book about Greece published by the Danish Geografforlaget.

I occasionally read naijablog, the blog of an English expat living in Abuja. Sometimes it reminds me how two people can live in the same place but see it in a different way.

For example Jeremy is quite fond of saying that the Hilton is Abuja’s city centre, maybe this is true if you’re an expat or an ultra-rich Nigerian. As I saw Abuja it had several smaller centres, spread across the different districts.

For example, for the part of town close to Radio House the centre was the square outside the Garki Area 7 Shopping Centre (UTC). During the day this was mostly a car park for the surrounding shopping complex, with a few small stalls selling videos and phone accessories on the road side. In the evening there were suya stalls and young people playing basketball, pool and table tennis. Sadly, last time I was in Abuja it was fenced off and something was being constructed on it, a loss of a useful public space.

Other districts have their own centres, although the demolitions in Abuja have damaged or destroyed many of them. Wuse Zone 4 had it’s collection of shops, restaurants and bars demolished last year but people still congregate in the area in the evening. Garki Area 2 has a small market and shops around its Shopping Complex.

It seems these centres were designed-in as part of Abuja’s master plan, each district having a “corner shop” or “shopping centre”. The current interpretation of the plan is that these should be (yet more) ugly shopping plazas rather than open, public spaces.

I don’t know the more upmarket parts of town (Wuse II, Maitama, Asokoro) very well but they too probably have some kind of “centre”, you just have to look around you and maybe sometimes walk rather than driving from place to place in air-conditioned isolation.

[via MeFi] A collection of transcripts from the cockpit voice recorders of crashed aircraft.

Very odd.

Seen Shallow Grave? Does anything about this news article seem familiar?

[via Obscure Store]

First there was the hours-long documentary about the Hittite civilisation on our flight back from Turkey, now MeFi has a port about the Hittite language.

[via kottke] Euromyths find out the truth about all your favourite anti-European (aka eurosceptic) exaggerations in the British press.

Bendy bananas, straight cucumbers and many more.

[originally via MeFi] A mention of the town of Concrete, Washington, in this article.

It’s not a place that gets mentioned much.

[via MeFi] An online “dictionary of units of measurement”, lots of interesting stuff here. It even includes one of my favourites the Glasgow Coma Scale, what would your score be first thing in the morning?

I reckon some mornings I’d only score about 10.

Avon and Somerset Police have published some excellent examples of people misusing emergency services here [via MeFi].

This suggests that a standard number for non-emergency calls to your local police would be a good idea (888 has been suggested).

I rather liked the MeFi comment that seemed to suggest this was all due to the British police being “disarmed”. I’m not sure when that happened, I obviously missed the bit where they were “armed”.

Is it just me (and I have had a few beers tonight) or does the BBC’s “technology analyst” look very much like Father Jack, see for yourself:

If you don’t know who Father Jack is, here’s an introduction to the characters of Father Ted.