Whad r we gonna do?

 

While on my lunchtime walk I spotted these three crows sitting at the top of a tree, it reminded me of that scene at the end of the Jungle Book movie (the original one) where the three vultures are debating what they're going to do and going around in circles, much like Trump and his cronies, at least the vultures were useful in the end but somehow I doubt Trump will ever be..

Shelter

I was walking through Belsize Park at the weekend on my way to meet my Son and I noticed this rather strange looking building. It looked very 30s/40s in style and although now a data-storage facility I did wonder what it was originally built for. A bit of googling revealed that it was originally a WW2 deep bomb shelter, connected to the Northern Line which runs parallel to Haverstock Hill it also goes much deeper than the underground. Amazingly it was designed in 1942 and could accommodate 9600 people and extends to 140ft below ground. There are a couple of these in London, built in residential areas and consisting of sleeping quarters, medical facilities, kitchens and self contained power units, hopefully consigned to history such shelters will only now ever be used to store things like computer data archives etc., but the way the world seems to be headed at the moment who knows!

Beak People

Tried one of these at the weekend, it's from  my favourite Sussex brewer Beak and is their table beer. Excellent flavour and mouthfeel for the low ABV, not quite as good as PMST from Verdant but not that far off! Good work Beak people!

Testing Times

Spent a great day at Lords with my Son yesterday, we were watching the test match between England and New Zealand and it was day 2 in the series. We were very lucky with the weather as the rain (only just) held off and a full day of play was possible (day one was shortened by rain). I snapped the picture above at around 3pm, as  you can see the clouds look ominous and the light was so bad that the floodlights had to be switched on (incredible for the middle of the day in June!) Anyway, we had a good day and England did ok, they looked like collapsing in the mid-order and had four batsmen out with ducks, all in a row (as the saying goes) but the tail end did a good job and in the end leaving NZ with 254 runs needed in their second innings, today was a washout, let's hope we get some clear weather tomorrow as I think England could just about win this one..

Friday Smirk

The boys talking about memorising holy books, kind of misses the point of books really, oh and it's usually beneficial if you read more than one..

Midweek Mirth

The excellent xkcd.com. How many times do apps and operating systems "update" themselves these days, I reckon it's a measurable percentage of available time to use them. Good job software developers figured out how to shift the onus of responsibility for bugs from themselves to you.

Where's the passion?

While in Madeira last week I tried the in-house IPA from our hotel. It was called "Passion Fruit IPA", now, usually, I worry that when beers include actual fruit as adjuncts they tend to be a bit on the gimmicky side, i.e. the beer's not up to much so the brewer adds fruit to "spice" it up a bit. I was wrong on that score with this one, it had no fruit adjuncts at all, the passion fruit flavour was coming entirely from the generous dose of Australian Galaxy hops, which do lean toward tropical fruit flavours when used on the cold side. A decent local beer, obviously made by craft enthusiasts!