PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

part 3: northern england trip report -- the long way home 2008-10-04 - 7:34 p.m. all photos � 2008 by elaine radford the famous baby, and they expected this thing to perform actual work? rube goldberg, we hardly knew ye Note: You are reading Part 3 of our trip report to Northern England. To start with Part 1, Morecambe Tern Project and Leighton Moss Nature Reserve, click here. To continue with Part 2, historic Lancaster and a hike up Arnside Knott, click right here. Part 2 is, of course, the entry where you will read of Roger lifting a pint in the historic Golden Lion pub. Doesn't that look cozy? It's like your own living room, if your own living room served beer to witches on the road to the gallows. Friday, September 26 We took the taxi back to Manchester this morning. Now, if I'd been traveling alone, I'd have to hike or bus my bags down to the Lancaster train station and grab the Manchester Airport train. But that's the advantage of tagging along with a business traveler who has a huge and important suitcase full of huge and important clothes suitable for appearances at the scenic scrapyards of Northern England. After we dropped off our bags at the airport hotel, we took the train into the Manchester city center and then the tram to the Museum of Science and Industry area. We didn't know, until after we'd purchased the tram tickets, that travel on the tram was free with our airport train tickets. Oh well, that's 1.4 pounds we didn't need to spend. Almost a $3 screw-up. DH was eager to see "Baby," one of the first "modern" computers. I use the word "modern" advisedly, of course. Everything was so large and clunky in the past. And looky here. Are those vacuum tubes? Friends and neighbors, those be vacuum tubes. I have a theory that the very last vacuum tube tester in the world was at the K&B Drugstore in Gentilly. No more vacuum tubes, no more K&B, and now, over a widespread area, Gentilly isn't so much there any more either. How time marches on. But the theory can't be true. I assume that the way it was actually told to me, the last vacuum tube tester in America (not the world) was the one at the K&B in Gentilly. And maybe that was even a stretcher. It was definitely the last vacuum tube tester in New Orleans and so Louisiana but all America? Who can tell from this vantage point in time? Before we explored the museum, we stopped for lunch in one of those atmospheric English pubs, the White Lion. I had the chicken tikka masala, a popular English dish by way of India that I have found to be sometimes excellent and sometimes meh. This one was excellent, with quite a nice kick of spice. Lots of old time equipment from the early industrial age, lots of old trains. We actually strolled by some of the Roman ruins at Castlefield but didn't have time to find the gardens. I did grab a photo of the weirdly unsafe looking Hilton Hotel, which I'm sure is actually a high tech marvel and perfectly safe, through the fake walls of the reconstructed Roman tower. We also found this a statue of... sheep. Ho-kay. But they are not the real English sheep until they are spray-painted as proof of ownership, in my humble opinion. By the way, since some of our internet advisors did not seem to be aware of it: Many of the important museums in Manchester are now free, including the Museum of Science and Industry -- which boasted a huge banner announcing "now free" so perhaps this is a recent change -- and the Museum of Manchester. We had a bit of an adventure finding the Museum of Manchester, which turned out to be in the universities district, but it was worth the confusion, the crowds, and self-proclaimed former crackhead singing "praise Jesus" to view the spooky naturally mummified corpse of the Lindow Man. I remember reading eerie stories when I was a kid about the bog men found in the peat bogs, and now I could actually see one. It was a bit chilling, though, an effect only enhanced because the bulldozer (?) or whatever equipment that stumbled upon the man had actually cut him neatly in half at the waist. I never knew whether the bog men had simply wandered into the bog and gotten lost or what, but apparently the forensic/anthropological evidence is clear now that they were sacrificed. It looks like the man was well treated and not allowed to do any manual labor up until the moment where he had his head bashed in and his throat garroted. They didn't allow photos of the bog man, and indeed, after reading some of their rather defensive signage around the museum, I was afraid to photograph their impressive collection of Egyptian mummies also. I didn't know that Manchester was such a hotbed of political correctness, but apparently there's a fierce debate about whether or not human remains should be displayed. They even asked the visitors to comment, which I thought was asking for trouble, because mostly won't the kooks be the one to make the loudest outcry? I'm pretty sure that if I was dead for hundreds or even thousands of years, and my body turned up as some atmospheric mummy, that I wouldn't be bothered at all if someone looked at it. I'm guessing that I wouldn't even be aware of it. As part of the debate, they displayed the mummies in different stages of wrapped and unwrapped. Some had been completely unwrapped in the 19th century and looked pretty much completely skeletonized. Some were completely covered. And of course we had all the stages in between. There were some Greco-Roman sarcophagi -- if sarcophagi is the plural of that word! -- with somewhat naturalistic faces painted on them. The sign said with a sniff that one of the paintings showed the face of the mummy when he was considerably younger than he actually was when he died. I admit that if I were in charge of picking the painting used for my sarcophagus, I might do the same thing. Like the man said, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. We even had time for a super-fast spin around the fossils and minerals. They had a huge display of fossil tree roots, and I don't mean small weed trees either. I asked Roger to guess the weight of the largest, since the wood was completely turned to stone, and he hazarded that it was right around 20,000 pounds -- the weight of the entire oak tree that fell onto our house. Can you imagine finding a thing like that in your field? No wonder the guy called the scientists and donated it to the museum. It would probably cost a fortune to move otherwise. Alas, we had to turn in early because our flight was leaving at a ridiculous hour, but on our way out of Manchester, we did have a final pub stop at the Salisbury. Saturday, September 27 KLM had told us to arrive at the airport 2-1/2 hours before our flight. Well, since the hotel was practically at the airport to begin with, I thought it would be OK to schedule our shuttle for 2-1/2 hours before. I secretly thought it would be one of those deals KLM does where they tell you to get there at an obscene hour and then their staff ain't there themselves. Wrong, bunky. We arrived to find a huge old big-ass LINE. Thank goodness I'm an Elite. I pulled DH into the business class line, and we were swept through ahead of the hoi polloi. No upgrades to "Select" in this direction. The breakfast was, therefore, really not much more than two pieces of bread. We pulled out the small amount of cheese in one of the rolls -- the other held nothing except jam -- and then gave it all back when they picked up the trash. It seemed wasteful but what can you do? At least we had our mixed nuts to nibble. We had a longish layover at AMS and, even though it was daytime, all of the comfy chairs were taken. Tsk. We did stop by and see the free museum at the airport, with some of the old masters from the Rijksmuseum. The current exhibition is "Books in the Age of Rembrandt" with a number of paintings and the actual books (or at least the same or similar editions of books) featured in the pictures. I'm not really a huge fan of realism or super-realism, but the attention to detail was amazing. They also had a fun painting from the era, but not part of the temporary book exhibit, that featured one of those paintings of a huge outdoor collection of poultry, waterfowl, and exotic birds including a cassowary. I think that large groups of semi-random birds was a popular subject in those days because it allowed the artist to show off his ability to duplicate the feathers. Two of the birds were fighting -- which I believe is also a popular part of theme. What better way to see the feathers fly? Again, I booked our seats so that we had no one sitting between or next to us. This time, I tried it with me in the aisle in 15C and DH in the other aisle in 15F. But we were foiled again, as another couple was placed between us at the last minute. The lady sat next to me, and was both small and somewhat timid. In 10 hours, she never asked to be let out once to the use the lav. She only got up when I got up. So I really can't complain and indeed I felt a little sorry for her. But DH was seated next to the man, who was not small and who was, in fact, in DH's words, "fidgety." I think it drove him to drinking, and I really can't blame him much. At least it was a daytime flight, so it wasn't very important to try to get some sleep. I watched four movies. The first one, The Baker, was about a hitman who had to hide out in some atmospheric Welsh village, which didn't look much different from the atmospheric English villages I've seen. It was pretty funny. DH said he heard me laughing. I then tried to watch The Transporter, where the hero/evildoer was hiding out in some atmospheric south of France village. Maybe it was too much on the same theme at a time, or maybe it was the tedious amount of "action adventure" in the plot, but I'm afraid it actually put me to sleep and I woke up at the end with no desire to rewind and find out how the day was saved. Next came Shallow Hal, which everyone has already seen except for me, I'm sure. It was not as funny as The Baker but it was OK although it was a little bit squirm-inducing at times. It was amazing how often that seeing someone's inner beauty, and not their outer total lack of same, caused the guy to hurt the innerly beautiful person without meaning to. Then I watched Anywhere But Here, which we all know was about the sociopathic stage mother's crusade to make her daughter "a child star while you're still a child," but which totally missed the point of the story, wherein the "child" does actually become a star and not another A student in search of an advanced degree just like her mother. They really didn't get it at all, did they? The mother had already tried all that higher education crap and where did it get her? That's why she wanted more for her daughter. The story makes no sense if the girl gets into Brown because mom gives up, appreciates her for being a nerd, and sells her Mercedes to pay for college expenses. In the book the girl got into Brown because (and I paraphrase here because I no longer remember the exact words because it has been so long since I read the book) even they are impressed if you've been on TV. So it's a movie that totally missed the point of the book, and who is going to see that movie who hasn't read the book? I'm sure Susan Sarandon had a blast playing the mother, though. Finally, back to Memphis, where we learned that DH's new passport doesn't call for any special screening and that he can now go through customs quickly and efficiently like everyone else. Whew. For some reason, KLM put us in the computer wrong, as non-Elites, even though we'd been treated as Elites for the entire trip, and the gate agent had a really rough time fixing the issue. In fact, she had to call someone to get help fixing it. So, a shout-out to a hard-working gate agent is due here, because thanks to her persistence, we did get our seats in first. DH promptly fell asleep, and who can blame him? With all the security hoo-ha and the five hours in AMS, we'd been on the go for 19 hours straight. There was no pre-boarding cocktail, but after we achieved lift-off, the FA tiptoed quietly around DH and treated me to a double Bailey's on the rocks, so all was right with the world. Back at MSY, we discovered that they'd lost his bag. Oops. We filed our report, then took a taxi to D's house and conked out right away. In the morning, D. and his mom fixed us a great low carb breakfast with lots of wonderful bleu cheese. Then he dropped us off at the Park 'N' Fly, where we grabbed our car and headed on. A delivery service came by with DH's bag around 5:30 in the evening. And so to bed. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford