Hot news in Fife

What can you do? You have to take a picture when you see this as the banner headline outside a newsagent in St Andrews.

And can you blame them? I mean, the Courier only really covers North Fife, and it's a daily. They have to get a major news story every day to put on their posters.

Apparently the story had a purrfect ending (and I'm not making that up.)

p.s. By amazing synchronicity, the same day I snapped this, the BBC asked for newspaper billboard photos. This photo is now part of their Flickr pool.

Double headed fritillary

This is of personal interest rather than anything else. In our garden we had a double headed fritillary. I gather from Googling that it's rare but not unknown, so I don't think we can breed it and make a fortune. Here it is.

The end of cinema?

I went to see Aliens vs Monsters 3D. The 3D was indeed impressive and it worked well, and the film was fun.

But here's the thing. I think the movie industry is hoping that 3D will save cinemas, because (like smellovision and indeed 3D in the 50s, you can only do it in the cinema.) But I think it might kill cinema. Because the cinema has a fixed size screen, and the film-makers have to work around it. If they're smart they get it right, but at best the real estate available for 3D is limited. If I had lcd display goggles, or retinal projection, then I would get a genuinely immersive experience. Then everything would be better at home, and nobody will go to the cinema ever again.

Could be wrong, but then again, years ago I thought they were nuts not putting XP virtualised into Windows Vista, and now a major blogger goes on all about this as if it was a new idea. Of course I didn't write down my ideas last time. Hence putting Cinema death predictions online now.

One hit wonders

My last post had a new word in it. A word describe the killing of a pulmonaria. When I wrote the blog post this word had zero hits. Now it has two! But I like to think of it as one really, because they are two different routes to the same blog.

I think there's a word for a google search returning only one hit, but I can't remember what it is. (Googlewhacking is I think finding pairs of words to return one hit.)

Tom Kelsey and I once tried (not very hard) to find the smallest number (I mean positive integer) which has no hits in Google. Of course if we posted it here it would get a hit. But the interesting thing is that the number (whatever it is) is surprisingly large. Try it yourself. Of course your expectation may be more accurate so you won't be surprised.

Drifting thoughts

Tulips look best in lines.

Daffodils look best in clumps.

Snowdrops look best in drifts.

Cyclamens look best in carpets.

I don't know what this means, I just like thinking about these different words.

Meanwhile I've lost three pulmonaria, which is rather sad. I suspect whatever conifer they were next to of pulmonariacide.