And the results were:

We came 16th on the Orange course, which feels good when we were very much feeling our way.

I really enjoyed it and want to do more.

Posted via email from grasuth

Gordon Brown today warned that the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic” future of killer heatwaves, floods and droughts unless governments speed up negotiations on climate change before vital talks in Copenhagen in December.

This applies to the US as much as anyone, he said, adding that “there is no plan B”, and that agreement cannot be deferred beyond the UN-sponsored Copenhagen conference.

Posted via web from grasuth

from London Lite (freebie commuter paper) 1/10/09

A nightclub owner and self-proclaimed “tantric master” called Dr Earth has been selected by the Tories to contest Edmonton seat.

Andrew Charalambous, 42, who claims “all you have to do is dance to save the world”, runs club nights using a hi-tech floor that generates electricity from the movement of dancers.

A fruitarian, he is also a barrister and volunteer police officer, and has a PhD.

Not saying I would vote for him, like. But can’t help savouring his mere fruity existence, knowotImean yeah?

http://grasuth.com is now my personal blog. Was having some hassles
working out the right voice for gravyland being a family blog for us,
and well, just want to write my own stuff.

http://grasuth.blogspot.com is where I dump writing exercises and
creative writing. Really, the audience for that one is me.

http://calculators.posterous.com is where I collect examples of web
calculators and visualizations. Mostly calculators, though.

and

http://co2.posterous.com is where I put relevant CO2 measurement and
savings links and thoughts.

These last two are really more link lists than blogs per se, however,
I will feel free to add longer pieces to either of them if warranted.

And there are the existing ones:

http://gravyland.net — our family blog and my old blog archives from way back

And for business there’s the company blog:

http://nodestone.com

Feels like too many, but I guess the posterous ones are pretty
lightweight anyway.

Posted via email from grasuth

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

It makes perfect sense. Read this press release.

Posted via web from grasuth

This Saturday 12th of September we are having a belated UK 40th for Lib (me). Yay! Taken a lot to get back on the social organising horse. Don’t know how people find the time and energy to do it often… but really looking forward to playing with folk.

Join us

for an evening of sleuthing and merriment.

Saturday 12 September

A belated 40th birthday party for Libby.

Our journey starts at

London Road train station (eastbound platform)

at 19:30 hours.

(We will be wearing dark glasses in case you don’t recognise us.)

Bring your puzzler, notebook and pencil.

Briefing begins here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage.

First clue and codeword to follow after RSVP.

Binoculars or spy cameras welcome.

All martial arts accepted.

Dress code: sexy spies & spooks, circa any era

- eclectic and eccentric as you fancy

Check out the splendid cryptic crossword created by Julia Dunlop (a nodestone blog-school graduate). Commission your own via www.juliadunlop.co.uk. Great for engagement & participation, education, special events, fun… Many thanks to a very clever lady.
Let’s see if anyone can get an answer or two (leave them in comments section) or crack the whole thing. Hint: most answers relate to the party (ie. spies, me etc). Bit of an ego trip or what!

If you aren’t coming and like the sound of this kind of thing, get in touch and let me know. There is a fun day out in London on 4 October for another of the fab Vanessae Green Producations – Treasure Hunt. We are putting a team together if you want to be in it.

Plus other fun stuff coming up. Time to start enjoying life a bit more me thinks!

“When one stands before a hive of bees, one should say quite solemnly to oneself: ‘By way of the hive, the whole cosmos enters man and makes him strong and able’. Rudolf Steiner

Nothing so genteel from this piece, inspired largely by the rough diamond Donny Davy (my dear Dad) and the questioning nature / wisdom of children, as conveyed by The Little Prince.

My New Friend & Bees

Thought it was up on my old old writing page, but alas. We surely need to do some maintenance work on all our sites. Been publishing creative, personal and biz stuff since mid-90s, so you get that… sigh. Anyone know a good social media consultant who can sort me out?

Never forget dear Pete Morris calling his website “a hungry elephant in the backroom demanding to be fed.”

“What does his voice sound like?”

“What games does he like best? Does he collect butterflies?”

“Have you taken him to your favourite rockpool yet? What did you see together? Did the Octopus come to visit?”

“Where were the crabs? Did you see them scurrying over the baked bread rocks?

Watch out for jo-blakes round there.

Smell the bush rosemary. So sweet and dry.

What about the dropbears.

If they found you – walking home tired down the track one night – by moonlight – whose head would they gnaw off? Yours or your friend’s?

How can it be that a dropbear can eat a whole head? What of the big head bone? A bit hard to swallow you might think hey..?

They can swallow them whole, like boa constrictors can elephants. (Derr. Haven’t you read The Little Prince?)

It might take all winter to dissolve but think of how strong the snake’s bones would be after that!

All those skinny, curved bones that wrap around its long, long backbone from arsehole to breakfast time.

How do you skin a snake? Do you put the tip of your knife in its bottom and… let it rip? Just like when you clean herring.

Does your new friend know about these things? Will you show him?

Maybe he won’t like them?

Errrrrrrrrrrrgh. Guts.

Gizzards.

Intestines dropping down to the floor.

Inside an abalone when you clean it there’s a sac of guts that’s small but very dark. It doesn’t seem to smell very much. Not like herring. Herring are oily fish. It’s hard to get their fishy smell off your hands, even when you scrub and scrub. It goes right inside your skin.

Why is a ‘bull’ herring called a bull then? Is it because they are boy fish, or because they are big… and strong. Are they the only boy fish with lots of wives? Next time I catch one we can see how hard it pulls.

But who’ll be there to tell me if it’s really a bull or not?

I haven’t seen sheep’s guts for a long time but when you cut them open they really plop out. Gush out. Fall in a heap on the floor but still connected. A fucking fountain of guts.

They’re rather disgusting really.

I feel sick.

My Dad seemed to think it was pretty good to take the guts out of things before you ate them. Some times he’d suck them out. (Crabs stupid.) I mean you had to didn’t you. Can’t leave them in there because they don’t taste very nice at all. (Except crabs… guts… eggs. Sweet lady crabs.)

When you clean the herring they, the girl herrings, well sometimes they have lots of eggs in there – they’re called ‘roe’ – and you can smoke them or just cook them with the herring and they feel grainy on your tongue and taste really nice – specially when you smoke them.

Dad used to have a 44-gallon drum with rods running through it to smoke his fish. He’d kind of cut them in half lengthways – from their bum hole right down until their head split in half and they’d open out like butterflies.

He’d hang them over the rods and smoke them in sawdust and stuff. I think they had some kind of metal big nappy pin thing (like the ones we used-to attach the bait to the crab pots?) That held them open and in place. That’s how I remember it.

The smoked fish were very tasty. They weren’t cooked as such, just smoked – but I suppose the heat in the smoke and other stuff in the smoke kind of cooked them.

Even when it was all finished and had been for days, even weeks, I could put my head in the drum and still smell the fish and the smoke.

These were some of the smells Dad had. Along with beer and fags and the odd bit of epoxy resin maybe – if there was an experiment going on or something being filled, fixed or stuck together.

Over the years Dad’s smells changed quite a bit depending on what he was getting into at the time.

If it was honey time he would smell of wood smoke again (but without the fishiness) and bees wax. He had to dope the bees up with the smoke puffer (after gently lighting the little fire inside) and make them go to sleep while he Raided the Hive.

It always seemed a bit mean – this Raiding the Hive. Like hordes of pillaging Mongols looting the castle or something. But they recovered soon enough.

I think the bees had to have a good Queen to keep their shit together after something like that happened. The Queens were important in the bee scheme of things. Dad used to often talk about them. One for every hive, all bundled up in the middle, protected and fed.

Sometimes I think our Mum was like that. When she was hidden under the doona and Dad brought in her cup of tea every morning – whether she drank it or not. All that being sweet and Motherly and looking after us little children, well she’d need a bit of extra love stored in her cells wouldn’t she. (Wonder if she ever had honey in it.)

So out would come the centrifuge and the hot water and the biggest meanest carving knife (those Raiding Hordes again) and the caps would get sliced off each frame and the smell of beeswax would flow and then the honey would.

In the sun. On the terrace, under the Jacaranda tree.

The frames got slotted into another 44-gallon drum (The Centrifuge). They went into special spots made just for them. This was the green Honey Drum not the Fish Drum. Dad didn’t even make this one it was so special.

We would set the thing going with the big wooden handle at the top, slowly at first and building up a bit of speed until it started to fuge and the honey got sucked from the little bee holes shaped perfectly like cells of life.

It would hit the side and build up and up, thicker and thicker until your arm got tired and it went faster and faster and eventually…. there would be so much honey hitting the side and coming out of the bee holes and slipping down the sides that it would finally! start to ooze its way out the brass tap at the bottom.

There had to be jars handy and in the honey would flow. Honey, hot bees wax, fags, wood smoke, sweat, steam and love.

The bees would be kind of flopping about looking a bit out-of-it still from the smoking (maybe we were too, maybe there was a numero uno doing the rounds).

Summer and sun and bees and honey and beeswax and pots filling up and questions of what we’d do with it all and who we’d give some to and where the bees had foraged and taste-test fingers dipping in and bees falling about.

Tilly my kelpie would run backwards and forwards wondering what was going on and why the stoned bees weren’t darting away from her at the same speed when she yapped and snapped at them, lips pulled back.

Sometimes I got to make it spin.

There was a real art to taking the waxy caps off frames and I got to do that too. You have to keep the knife hot. You have to keep dipping it in hot water. When I did it right (you can’t go too deep otherwise you bugger up the bee cells where they live for the next batch) Dad would say so and there was even more love and bees and honey.

I never got stung – well I don’t think so anyway.

It was lots of fun and I can remember it well.

My Dad had two hives but the bees out the back of Stevie’s were nasty bastards. We ended up leaving them alone after they bit Dad on the balls about a million times.

……………..

Libby Davy

20.2.2000 Sunday evening
After reading The Little Prince again
1,370 words
Reader age?

A new game we’ve been playing – a variation on the old Davy / Juniper family “Padnag”

Polka

A type of sport, a bitlike poker but more aggressive (Bea)

When you tickle a lady in the armpit with your fork (Libby)

Dessert made from chocolate frogs, jelly and ice cream (Gra)

Subpoena

I type of posh sub (Bea)

A type of submarine shaped like a willy (Bea)

The state of mind a man gets into when he buys a sportscar (Gra)

When you wee in the bath and hope no-one sees (Libby)

Muzzy

A type of old fashioned TV program starring Muzzy the fury yellow bear (Bea)

Smell of old socks dipped in chilli sauce (Gra)

Lubber

A way to walk when you are drunk (Bea)

A salad made from lettuce and whale fat (Gra)

A big, fat loving kind of chap (old English) (Libby)

Tendril

The tentacle from an alien, what they use to suck out your brain (Bea)

Octopus legs which sucker onto the eyeballs and poke holes in them (Libby)

Rabbi

The one-eyed rabbit God. (Gra)

A type of serious disease when you turn into a rabbit (Bea)

A small furry rabbit without any teeth (yet) (Libby)

So sit back and enjoy. Brings a tear and a chuckle to mine eye every time. Some shared memories here perhaps?

Looks best on HQ (high quality).

Brighton Naked Bike Ride 2009 from Rosie Sherry on Vimeo.

No point trying to spot our wobbly bits – always something else on that day, so missed it again! Maybe next year. Find out what it’s all about here

A peaceful, imaginative and fun protest against oil dependency and car culture. A celebration of the bicycle and also a celebration of the power and individuality of the human body. A symbol of the vulnerability of the cyclist in traffic. The world’s biggest naked protest: 50+ cities and thousands of riders participate worldwide, including around 2,000 in the UK in 2008.

• I (gra) am slowly working my way to 100 pushups, I’m in week three now, so maybe half way there.
• We spent a fairly quiet Christmas at home this year, with one friend staying over, briskly walking at Stanmer Park and then spending the day with friends for Xmas Dinner then coming back to ours for Desert and Monopoly.  Brighton and Hove Monopoly, nonetheless.   But why is Preston Park where Whitechapel Road used to be, £60.  What?
• Our big Christmas present that came early, is Olive Tapenade Gravy Sutherland the puppy.  Or Olive for short.  She’s a dream most of the time and occasionally a woof-woof-land-shark-pooping-machine.  Just like a baby.  We are back to broken night’s sleep on and off.  She’s a total darling.  Puppy photo below.  She needs a fair bit of exercise, so this gets us out into the winter sunshine a bit, down at the Withdean Puppy Park.
  

• Nodestone (our business) goes from strength… I’m more and more involved with web development CO2-reduction measurement, calculation and reporting, especially when it is online and social.  I need to write more about this and will do over at nodestone over the next few weeks.  The times are changing. CO2 measurement is becoming important, as are the need for all of us to start changing our behaviour to live in a new, low carbon kind of way.
• Bea is having a well-earned holiday for a couple of weeks after breaking up from school the week before Christmas.  Poor kids, they really end up dragging their heels around towards the end of term as the days get shorter and they get more and more tired.  She’s nearly eight!
• Lib’s just had her birthday.  We went to a creative retreat for the weekend with lovely friends.   It was an excellent way to celebrate really.  We danced and sang and painted and watched the sun come up, welcoming it back after the longest night on Dec 20.  We are looking forward to the days getting longer even if it is still cold for a couple of months.

Lots more to say, but that’ll do for now.  Bea and I are off to the Booth museum to sketch skulls and bones.