out of his element

Having seen some huge birds of prey recently, which may or may not be Iberian eagles, I have a tendency to watch the skies when out walking.

This morning there was a blob high up which looked vaguely like the waspish ultra-light we often see. Since it was making no noise, and seemed to be hovering rather than going anywhere, it was clear, though, that that wasn’t what it was.

When I got close enought to see, it turned out to be a helium balloon:

This reminded me of a story I’d seen early in the week about medical helium stocks running low while the gas is squandered in balloons.

diplomatic immunity (the silly season II)

When I started to write the previous post, I was actually intending to talk about this ‘news’ story:

The headline comes from Antena 3 and translates as:

Judge pardons King Balthasar for ‘caramelazo’ in the Three Kings cavalcade.

‘Caramelazo.’ What a lovely word. And what a wonderful language Spanish is that it can produce such words:

poems not bombs

I wrote recently about the automatic responses from WordPress when you publish a blog post, and how one of my posts was greeted with:

In the comments to that post, it was suggested that perhaps this was intended as an imperative, but I assure you I am not responsible for the story that prompted this blog post.

The original headline that is referred to comes from hoy.es and reads: Una poesía provoca una alerta por bomba – ‘poem causes bomb alert’ – a news story from Badajoz earlier this week. If your Spanish is up to it, please go and read the post on quadernodenotas, if not, you’ll have to make do with my hurried – and somewhat ‘creative’ – summary.

from this week’s news

A couple of things that have caught my eye on the BBC website this week.

First, from the ‘most popular’ links, comes this:

Sadly, it doesn’t mean that having children can drive you to drink, which is what I imagined. It actually linked through to a story with the headline “Parenting style strongly affects drinking, Demos says”.

The second is from a story about UK social surveys and comes under the headline Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock.

scheduled water fights

The Guardian have published a story about a guy being charged for arranging a ‘water fight’ using BlackBerry Messenger.

The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.

Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.