Wired for Sound.

Yes, I know, I'm just a shill for Sony's advertising campaign.
The town in the video, is Seyðisfjörður, on the western edge of Iceland. I've been there, my bike and some other stuff were sent to me from England, via an Icelandic trawler, it was a lot cheaper than normal freight, but.....
It was supposed to come to Reykjavik, where I was living, in a couple of weeks, but the skipper diverted to the north, found good fishing, landed his catch in Norway, went out toward Jan Mayen to get more. That was five weeks...I got a message to say the nearest he'd be coming to Reykjavik for another month was Seyðisfjörður, to land his catch, and take on more ice.
So I decided to take a few days off work and take the slow bus, and my trusty little tent, around the south of iceland, up the crinkly west coast, and retrieve my bike.
Ha!
I had to bribe a guy at the fish dock to steam-clean it.
Never ship a bike on a trawler. It will arrive all pearly with fish-scales, and the stink of cod.

An Anglo-Saxon Hoard

Recently found in Britain by a metal detector. The hoard of gold and silver contained about fifteen hundred items, the biggest such find ever in Britain. It was buried in what is now south Staffordshire, archaeologists believe, in the seventh century .
More HERE.

All of the pieces are believed to be from weapons and armour, I'm staggered by the quality of craftsmanship here, from a time we think of as the primitive "Dark Ages". Oh how I wish I could stumble across things like this in the muddy stubble of a field. Yes, it's worth a huge sum, in monetary terms, but I don't care, I'd just love to find something like this, rub the mud away, and keep it as a thing of beauty, and a thing of mystery, I'd muse about the people who made it, those who carried it, chieftains, princes, the king, perhaps of the kingdom of Mercia. Or were these, perhaps trophies of battles against others?

This one in particular... I want it.

Artichoke

I intended to eat them, but left it a bit late. I love the flowers, they look like a gas flame burning efficiently....
Yes, I'm qualified as a combustion engineer, I like playing with fire, i like the whole business of burning things efficiently, kiln control, thirty feet of flame out of a little stick of wood, a cone of fire out of a kiln chimney, on final reduction, like a jet exhaust.
And I like these beautiful flowers. They're about 3"-4" (75-100mm) across.
I should clarify... these pics were taken in august, not now, the plants are dying back for winter now. For those who don't know them, Artichokes are a bit like giant thistles.

You cook the bud, a thing the size of a large fist. They take twenty or thirty minutes to cook (steamed, grilled, laid in hot coals)....
It's debatable whether it's worth the effort.

It's Been a Busy Week

No time for myself, gales, flooding, long hours at work sorting out flooding, blocked drains, damage, dismantling trees, etc.

Partially blocked.

Yippee, this one's as it should be.

Oh dear, This one's been full to the top, see the debris on the sides? Water gets away, but only at a certain rate. If the rain fall is above the rate at which the drain can soak away into the earth, this will fill, and overflow. The top of this chamber is six feet above the nearby building's floor level. And there's a basement ten feet below that.

Looks harmless enough, doesn't it?

It's about ten feet deep, the old step irons have broken off further down. Not allowed to use them, these days, anybody going down there need to be lowered by winch, wearing a recovery harness and gas detector. It looks harmless enough, but methane gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide can pool in the bottom of holes like this. The person who goes down becomes unconscious quite rapidly, and then a rescuer goes down, and the same thing happens.
Repeatedly.

"On July 26, 1989, five farm workers died after consecutively entering a manure pit on their farm. The pit measured 20 by 24 feet and was 10 feet deep. The victims were a 65-year-old dairy farmer, his two sons aged 37 and 28, a 15-year-old grandson, and a 63-year-old nephew. The younger son initially entered the pit to replace a shear pin on an agitator shaft. (NOTE: Agitation of the manure, which is required to facilitate transfer, causes a rapid release of the gases formed during decomposition.) While attempting to climb out of the pit, the initial victim was overcome and fell to the bottom. The grandson then entered the pit to attempt a rescue. He too was overcome and collapsed. The nephew, the older son, and the dairy farmer then entered the pit one at a time, attempting to rescue those already overcome. Each was overcome and collapsed in turn. A carpet installer working at the farm house then entered the pit to attempt a rescue. He too was overcome but was rescued by his assistant and subsequently recovered. Finally, the owner of a local farm implement business arrived on the scene with two of his workers and, using a rope, extricated the five victims from the pit. When the local emergency rescue squad arrived on the scene approximately 20 minutes after the incident, they immediately began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The nephew was pronounced dead at the scene. The remaining four victims were transported to the local hospital. The farmer and his younger son were pronounced dead on arrival, and the older son died an hour after reaching the emergency room. The grandson was transferred to a major trauma center by helicopter but he died approximately 6 hours after his removal from the pit. Reports of the medical examiner cite methane asphyxiation as the cause of these five deaths [NIOSH 1989c]. "

Best way to do it is to cheat, call for a big suction tanker:-


Then you suck all the gloop out (technical term:-"gloop"), jet the line up and down with high pressure water, stick the four-wheel-drive remote camera in and take a virtual journey along the pipe, looking for cracks, debris, roots, and collapses. In this case, there's a collapsed section and tree roots about 100 ft outside our boundary line, so it's the city's mains drainage department's job to fix it, but access might be difficult for a full size backhoe, they might need minidiggers... and the beaurocratic ramifications of crossing multiple private properties to get there....
But we've informed them of it, and given them the camera footage to show the problem, so if there's another deluge, and businesses on our site get flooded, then the claims will be against the city, not us. We can prove our drains are clear and properly maintained.

Last bit of tree, a few bags of debris, and I can think of going home, to a hot bath, and early to bed. Bliss.

(in this last pic, you can see how the road level on one side of the building is at the same level as the rainwater gutters on the roofs. Any drain problem here can mean a big trouble inside.)

Piglights

Years ago, back in the dark distant past, I had a customer who collected anything to do with pigs. She was a regular buyer of piggy banks, but one day she came in and said "Could you make me a piggy-lamp?".
So I did. Whilst it was sitting on the shelf awaiting firing, several other people saw it and asked for one. So they went into limited production. My mother kept one, and eventually my brother claimed it.
He recently took these pictures and sent them to me.

Why's the sticker still on it? I really don't know, I peel stickers OFF!, but the sticker says, alongside a nice little mediaeval style image of a woodcarver, "Produced by a Member of the Guild of Master Craftsmen".
The guild claimed it only accepted real MASTER craftsmen as members, but in reality, it took cash, with few questions, in return for membership. I expected to have to prove my worth in a selection process. But the guy who interviewed me knew NOTHING about pottery.
I paid up, and I was in.

However, my customers loved the logo and stickers, because it reassured them that this stuff was really good, it must be, because it's got this sticker, see, that says it was made by a member of......

(Logo used for illustrative purposes only)
( I was entitled to use it, at the time the pot was made, but allowed my membership to lapse, long ago.)

I always felt a little guilty about it, knowing that the Guild had not screened me enough to be a guarantee of anything. But undeniably, membership of it was worthwhile, it sold pots.

Maybe I'll start an international Guild Of Master Potbloggers. Send me a bunch of money and you can join.

Disclaimer:My comments refer to the Guild as it was in 1986, or thereabouts. It may be a very different organisation today, it still exists and has a website, Here.

Can You See What it is Yet?, Part 2

Remember this?

Revisited..

Then come the guffaws... when he realises he didn't put it on straight...
Doh!

Still, let's call it a "proof of concept piece", like those motorshow cars that don't actually go.......
I mean, I could come back and do one right, yes?

Might have to put a light in, I throw facing the open garage door, which means the bit in front, and on the right is poorly lit against the bright outdoors. That's my exscuse, and I'm sticking to it.

Ceramics/houses/kilns

http://lyricflight.blogspot.com/2007/11/housing-obsessed.html

Busybusybusy