Links, Pics and a Thunderclap

Some links to excellent pieces by autistic writers, especially on the subject of Judith Newman’s book To Siri With Love. Details of a thunderclap on the subject of driven grouse shooting and some of my own photos.

INTRODUCTION

I have had a busy few days imaging for James and Sons’ final auction of the year (takes place on Wednesday – click here to view on online catalogue), so it is only today that I have time for another post. Before getting into the main meat of today’s post there is a small matter of an…

APOLOGY

Some of you may have noticed snowflakes falling across pictures on this blog (as I did today, when I accessed it at the library to get a picture I needed for something I was doing). I am aware that some of my followers have sensory issues that make this sort of thing unwelcome, and I have changed my settings so that those snowflakes will not appear again. I apologise to any who were inconvenienced by this ‘seasonal’ addition of WordPress’s.

SOME AUTISM RELATED PIECES

I will start this section by stating that most of the pieces I link to here were drawn to my attention by Eve Reiland at americanbadassactivists. Another excellent source of good material by autistic people is Laina, both in her own right at thesilentwaveblog and via her specialist sharing blog Lainascollection.

My first links concern the representation of autistic people in the media:

Eve (see above) has produced an excellent piece giving details about how we are misrepresented in the media and linking to a…
…change.org petition calling for a change in how we are represented in the media.

The remaining links in this section all related to…

#BOYCOTTTOSIRI

The title of this section refers to the backlash by the autistic community against Judith Newman’s book To Siri With Love. Although they make unpleasant reading, because of what they reveal about the book, I urge you to follow up the links I give, all of which, save one, are to pieces about this book written by autistic people. The exception, which ends this section, is to an alternative reading list, and was also created by an autistic person.

I start with what is actually last piece I read about this issue, “An Autistic’s Thoughts On To Siri, With Love by Judith Newman” which was posted on writeabledreams.

My next offering, by Susie Rodarme is titled “AN OPEN LETTER TO HARPERCOLLINS ABOUT TO SIRI WITH LOVE“, and was published on bookriot.com.

Next, courtesy of goodreads.com comes Kaelan Rhywiol’s review of the book – it is a superbly written take down of the book.

Next we turn to autistichoya and “Why we must #BoycottToSiri / An open letter to Judith Newman“.

The last specific #BoycottToSiri piece to which I link is Eve’s as yet unanswered closing challenge to the author “Judith Newman | Stop The BS and Evolve into an Actual Autistic Ally #boycotttosiri”

I end this section with a link to a post on huxtales simply titled “The Essential Autistic Reading List“.

A THUNDERCLAP

To take part in a thunderclap you have to be on at least one of facebook, twitter and/ or tumblr. I am on the first two named, and as such have contributed approximately 5,500 connections to this thunderclap calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting. If like me (see here for a previous piece on this subject) you hold those who take pleasure in shooting at birds in utter contempt, and you are on one of the three networks mentioned please add your voice to thunderclap – more details below:

PICTURES

Bus window 1 — This network of cracks were in the upstairs front window of an X29 bus – when it is a double decker I invariably sit upstairs, and the best seat is the front window seat on the side opposite the driver.

Olympics 50p.jpg — I needed this 50p for my bus fare, so I could not keep it until a better opportunity to photograph it arose.

Answers

Answers to a query of mine and to a puzzle that I set, accompanied by some photos.

INTRODUCTION

This little post features answers to two problems and at the end a few photos.

BIG AVIAN FIND

A couple of hours ago I put up a post featuring some large water birds that were new to me. Since then two people in the comments section (Cindy and Vicki) have suggested Muscovy Ducks as a possibility, and my twitter friends @team4nature have made a similar though more detailed suggestion.

This level of consensus is sufficient for me – these are Muscovy ducks, possibly domesticated and possibly crossed with some other breed (possibilities raised by @team4nature). Here to conclude this section is the feature image from the previous post:

SUPERPRIME RESOLVED

I offered up this problem from brilliant last night:

This is my own solution, posted as such on brilliant, and reflecting mu frustration at the sheer number of people commenting based on failure to fully read the terms of the question:

PHOTOGRAPHS

To finish here are some more of my photos:

Can You Identify These Birds?

Can you identify these large water birds that I saw near Kettlewell Lane, King’s Lynn, today?

INTRODUCTION

I was out walking this afternoon, and one of the places I walked was a section of river that runs parallel to Kettlewell Lane in King’s Lynn. It was there that I saw some birds I have never seen before…

BIG NEW AVIAN FIND

These are large birds, similar in size and build to a goose, but with colouring unlike any goose I have ever seen, and not matching any of the goose species listed in my bird book. They were probably about half as big again in each direction as the mallards that I also saw (and due to being overfed King’s Lynn mallards are bigger than average mallards!). I have lots of photos for you…

Based on the size of the birds and all the features that my camera managed to pick up can you identify them? If you can please let me know by commenting.

A Meme, A Puzzle and Some Bird Pictures

A meme about Evolution and Creationism, courtesy of @AtheistRepublic, a puzzle courtesy of Brilliant and some bird pictures of my own.

INTRODUCTION

Just a brief post to keep me on your radar!

EVOLUTION IN A MEME

This was posted on twitter by AtheistRepublic, and I think it is very good indeed:

A PRIME PROBLEM FROM BRILLIANT

This little problem generated a surprising amount of controversy on brilliant – though it is not particularly difficult, and there were no real grounds for controversy:

I will reveal the solution tomorrow.

BIRD PICTURES FROM KINGS LYNN

We had a bit of sun in King’s Lynn today, but in consequence of it being December it was already virtually level with the horizon by 3PM. However, it being as pleasant as a December day in Blighty can be I did get out a couple of times, and augmented my stock of bird pictures along the way:

Birds

A bird post provoked in part by the Angling Trust seeking permission to double the rate at which they cull cormorants.

INTRODUCTION

This post has two elements: first, I saw on twitter something about the Angling Trust calling for cormorants to be shot “to protect stocks of coarse and game fish”, and following the link located the details which you can see here, and second while out looking for cormorants to photograph for this post I saw something else that I had not previously captured.

CORMORANTS

I would take a lot persuading that increasing the number of cormorants licensed to be shot copuld be justified in any case, but the grounds given, which amount to a statement that “our sport counts for more than cormorants” fail to come even remotely close. There is a cormorant colony within walking distance of central King’s Lynn, and although they were not about in big numbers when I went looking, there were four of them in evidence. Here are the pictures:

AN ASPI.BLOG FIRST

While observing the cormorants I also a got a couple of pictures of this:

Going through my bird book I could find only two birds with black wings and a white bar across their tail. The first, the Storm Petrel was an unlikely option given how far King’s Lynn is from the nearest ocean (it is an ocean going bird). That left me with the second, the Lapwing, a medium sized wader that likes marshy or muddy conditions (not a problem in the vicinity of the Great Ouse!). Here to conclude this post is what my bird book has to say about Lapwings:

Sunday in Cornwall

The Sunday of my Cornish holiday.

INTRODUCTION

We have reached the Sunday of my Cornish holiday. I am going to cover the day in three sections for reasons that will become apparent as the post develops.

SUNDAY MORNING

From my point of view most of this day was taken up with editing my pictures from the previous day’s excursion (see here and here), but Fort Picklecombe also provides regular opportunities for taking photographs, and I also took a number of these opportunities.

We were going out for Sunday lunch, and at about 12:15 we got ready to leave. We were lunching at an establishment that doubles as an art gallery and is located in a set of Nissen huts in a village called Maker. Here is their Sunday menu:

In the event we did not have starters, and each of us went for a different main course – I went for the slow-roasted pork shoulder, my father for the beef and my mother for the hake. It was a long wait to be served, but that was because they were cooking the vegetables from fresh. The pork was excellently cooked, with crackling that was both crunchy and flavoursome, and the vegetables were excellent. The roast potatoes however were not as good as they would have been had I cooked them – the potatoes had been peeled but not chopped, hence were very large and therefore somewhat lacking in the crunch factor. Overall, considering all factors, I rate this meal at 7.5/10. Here are the rest of my pictures from lunchtime:

Nissen Huts — A good picture of the Nissen hut in which we ate.

Nissen Hut PIc — A bad picture of a Nissen hut (as you will note not much of the art on display here could really be considered good).

Then it was back to the fort, and back to photo-editing, although in between editing pictures from the previous day I captured some…

RAINBOW PICTURES

Penzance

An account of the time I spent in Penzance on the Saturday of my Cornish holiday.

INTRODUCTION

I have finally edited all the pictures from my recent Cornish holiday and have now at last got time to get back to blogging about it. My last post described my journey down to Penzance, and this post provides the story of the rest of the day.

GETTING MY BEARINGS

Having arrived in to Penzance pretty much bang on schedule I visited the local information office, purchased a detailed and very cheap souvenir map (I will conclude this series of Cornish posts with one featuring all the publicity materials that I collected while down there), and set out on the first part of my exploration of the town. An early necessity was finding somewhere to eat lunch (although I am not entirely inflexible on the matter I generally aim to eat lunch some time close to 1PM), and having walked past the Harbour and the Chapel I found an establishment suited to my needs. The Turk’s Head was not too extortionate (there are no cheap places in Penzance). I opted for a BBQ Chicken, Bacon and Davidstow Cheese melt, and enjoyed it, although I felt that it did not really live up to its name on two counts:
1. There was precious little evidence of bacon (though they had used good quality chicken)
2. Davidstow is supposed to be a strongly flavoured cheese and yet I barely noticed it over the other flavours – if I ask for something of which cheese is a featured ingredient I want to taste said cheese.

Here some photos taken between leaving Penzance station and having lunch:

Air pressure — The first of a number of shots of interesting items on display at The Turks Head

BN1 — There were five sets of framed banknotes starting with this one.

Devon and Cornwall — Poor lighting prevented me from doing full justice to this map.

Map — This, and the two set of framed cigarette cards the follow it were in a narrow passage that meant that I could not get them fully in shot from front on – had to photograph at an angle.

POST LUNCH EXPLORATIONS

Having consumed my lunch I headed for the Promenade, and walked along it. From the other end of the Promenade I walked back to the train station and then did some exploring on the other side of the train station, locating a path that ran between the tracks and the sea. Here are some photographs…

Jubilee Pool 1 — In November one would not expect an open-air pool in Engalnd to have much custom, and indeed the Jubilee Pool was empty.

Helen Glover post box — A number of post boxes were painted gold to honour people who were successful at the London 2012 Olympics – this one Penzance is dedicated to rower Helen Glover.

I conclude this post with two special sections, firstly…

ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT

Being grey the whole time, and misty for most of it this was not a great a day for taking long-range photographs, but St Michael’s Mount was not a target I could resist, even under those circumstances, so here are the results:

You will notice gulls in a couple of these shots, which leads to the second special section, which concludes this post…

BIRDS

There are many seabirds to be observed in Penzance and I was able to capture some of them on camera…

The journey back was uneventful, and with the train departing Penzance at 16:41 on a November afternoon it was too dark for photographing through the windows of that train.

Picklecombe Fort, Kingsand and Cawsand

An account of a visit to the villages of Kingsand and Cawsand.

INTRODUCTION

The feature of yesterday was a walk along the coast from Fort Picklecombe to the villages of Kingsand and Cawsand, and then back. I have many photos from yesterday, and will be sharing the general ones here. I have a fairly sizeable collection of pictures of boats and ships already, and I will be doing a special post about these immediately I have completed this one.

FORT PICKLECOMBE TO THE VILLAGES

In olden times the two villages in this post were on opposite sides of the Devon/ Cornwall boundary – Kingsand in Devon and Cawsand in Cornwall, but nowadays both are comfortably within Cornwall, since the county boundary is the Tamar River. This part of Cornwall, known as the Rame Peninsula has its own official website. The coast path which we followed on our way to the villages is good although a little sticky in places (prolonged heavy rain would undoubtably turn it into a quagmire). Here are some photos from this section of the journey:

KINGSAND AND CAWSAND

We visited the Post Office, where my parents had some stuff to post and something to collect, and then walked down to the sea front by way of a road that was unsuitable for motor vehicles. Here are some pictures from Kingsand and Cawsand…

Welcome to Cawsand Bay — Note the website bottom right as you look: **http://www.ramepbc.org/**

At this point we paid a visit to…

THE DEVONPORT INN

This establishment ticked one box instantly – investigation of the bar revealed the presence of locally brewed cask ale. They had three of the Dartmoor Brewery’s products available, and as someone who is a dedicated Holmesian as well as a fan of locally brewed ales I opted for “Legend”, with its connection to “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. This proved to be a very good choice – it was an excellent drink. As well as the website, which I linked to in the heading of this section they have a twitter account, @devonport_inn. Here are some pictures taken while enjoying my pint…

THE WALK BACK

We started out along the sea front. My mother abandoned this route quite earlu, but my father and I continued along the sea front rather longer (in retrospect this was an over adventurous decision given some of the terrain we had to contend with). By the time we saw a wooden staircase leading up to a campsite near the fort we were glad of a definite way back to the official route. I conclude this post with some photos from the walk back…

Claw — I was intrigued by this claw, but in accordance with Sutcliffe’s Rule for enjoying nature and enabling others to do so (take nothing except photographs, leave nothing except footprints), I left it in place for others to see if they happened to go that way.

A Thriller To Start The Women’s Ashes

An account of the opening salvos in the Women’s Ashes and some photographs.

INTRODUCTION

Unlike the original Ashes, which have been fought for since 1882, the Women’s Ashes is contested across multiple formats. The current scoring system awards two points for a win in a limited overs match, 1 for a no-result and 0 for a defeat, while the sole test match is worth four points.

A Classic Match

The first of three ODIs that the women will be contesting took place at the Allan Border Field in Brisbane. Australia won the toss and put England in to bat. Several England players got starts but none managed to build a really substantial score, Lauren Winfield leading the way with 48. A total of 228 off 50 overs did not look like it was good enough, and in the end it wasn’t.

Eng;land bowled better than they had batted, and at 87-4 Australia were looking distinctly shaky. Alex Hartley failed to hold a return catch offered by veteran Alex Blackwell when the latter had 35 to her name, and Australia were behind the rate, Talia McGrath having occupied 26 balls for a score of 7. This missed chance and some aggression from Ash Gardner (27 off 18) made the difference, Australia getting home in the final over with Blackwell unbeaten on 67.

A highlight of this match was the preponderance of quality spin bowling on show – in Gardner, Amanda-Jade Wellington and Jess Jonassen Australia had three high-class practitioners, while Hartley and the experienced Laura Marsh both bowled well for England.

More details and official reports here.

ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ‘WOMEN’S ASHES’ AND ‘ASHES’

This applies across the board, and not just to cricket between England and Australia, but this seems a suitable place to mention this. I see the distinction between these categories as that between a restricted (“Women’s”) and an open category – if a woman is able to play alongside the men she should have the right to do so – the existence of Women only teams is an acknowledgement that few women could because the men are generally larger and stronger. Similarly if a disabled athlete happens to be performing comparably to their able-bodied counterparts they should be able to compete alongside them.

In terms of cricket I would expect that a woman who earned selection for ‘The Ashes’ as opposed ‘The Women’s Ashes’ would not be a specialist fast-bowler, but I could see spinners, wicket-keepers or batters earning selection.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Here are some recent photographs…

New flats — A new building among the old.

Some Pictures

A largely pictorial account of my day.

INTRODUCTION

I have just finished editing the pictures I took while out and about today. I have a collection of tree pics ready for the next post in my “Trees in Transistion” series, but for the moment it is the other pictures I am sharing. I will put them up in three segments…

NURTURE

These are pictures featuring my aunt’s plants, which I have been watering while she is on holiday. Barring a freak return to summer weather tomorrow I anticipate one more visit on Wednesday being sufficient.

NATIONAL LIBRARIES WEEK

This week is National Libraries Week. I have visited King’s Lynn Library today, will definitely visit Fakenham Library at least once this week after a working day, hope to call in at Norwich Millennium Library when I am in that fine city on Wednesday (an autism event) and on Saturday en route to Musical Keys should find time for a visit to Gaywood Library. Here are some pictures of King’s Lynn Library…

NATURE

We end with some pictures focussing on nature…

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