Personal Blogs

The authorities are after a couple of bad guys. Apparently they are Juan, Ted.

This fearsome creature is a robot wolf.

The city of Takikawa in Hokkaido has been having problems with bears venturing into the city after food.

So the city has invested in robot wolves with motion detectors. The robot wolves have bared teeth, flashing red eyes, and a repetoire of 60+ noises that bears find frightening. A bit like a mechanical scarecrow, but for bears.

You can see a robot bear in action here

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/japanese-town-deploys-monster-wolf-robots-to-deter-bears

My latest book is about turtles. It's only available in hardback.

Q. What word is not the same as itself?

A. My answer: "Any word, apart from 'itself', but my favourite is 'sausage'."

I didn’t get this one at first. Then it clicked.

Q. What goes "99, 100, Phew!"

A. A centipede counting its legs.

This intersting little animal is a pademelon, a kind of marsupial, related to kanaroos and wallabies.

I had never heard of pademelons, but the name came up in a quiz tonight. There are seven species but the Wikpepdia article is a bit sparse on detail.

Here's a video from of young pademelons playing.

I’ve been asked to write a short piece on procrastination. But I can do it later.

“That ditch is swarming with some kind of insect”, said Tom trenchantly.

This features my friend Mike Lloyd playing a duet, remotely of course, with Sebastian Pompilio, a professional guitarist and guitar teacher based in Argentina.

Mike says they did the duet with a lot of help from audio/video editing software, recording parts separately and then stitching them together.

An old shelf collapsed today, sadly; a bottle of Port fell and broke. No use crying, but why is Port called Port?

It's named for Oporto which means 'The port' in Portugese. I knew that but wanted to dig deeper.

Portugal itself seems to have been named in Latin, Portus Cale, the first element meaning port or gate or mountain pass etc. in Latin, the second a Celtic name, of a deity, or a people, or lots of other possibilites, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Portugal#Etymology

But what about Latin portus? What are its origins? I was surprised. It is conjecturered to stem from a word pertus = crossing in the long-ago origin of most (but not all!) European languages.

So, even more surprisingly perhaps, the English word ford has the same origin. Grimm's laws documented that words that began with 'p' or 'q' in Greek or Latim have mutated to start with 'f' in Germanic languages, so e.g.

pater (Latin) -> father

pisce (Latin) -> fish

pyre (Greek) -> fire

pente (Greek) -> five

quercus (Latin) -> fir (not the same tree, but the same word root)

pothi (Greek) -> foot

If you want to feed in anything more, you have an opportunity to do so in the Comments.

Death. Is it just around the coroner?

I heard this scientist going on about "Black coals in space", I thought hey look in my cellar.