Acute accent by a perplexed blogger

There is a delightful little garden in St. Johns Wood, North West London.

One of its boundaries is the noisy Wellington Road, near the glass-covered Park Plaza Sherlock Holmes Hotel in London and the Lord’s Cricket ground. The address of the former burial is Wellington Place, Wellington Road, NW8 7PF.

The St. Johns Wood burial ground dates from 1807. It covered an area of two and a half hectares (six acres). The burial ground was used from until 1855 when the St. Marylebone Cemetery at East Finchley was opened. There are thought to be 50,000 graves here.

For more information about the park, call the City of Westminster council at 020 7641 5271 or check the list of all Parks Gardens and Open Spaces managed by the City of Westminster.

The Mill Lane Open Space is a diminutive natural area in West Hampstead. Its narrow entrance does not anticipate the nice surprise that this piece of London nature is. It is in Mill Lane, London Borough of Camden, NW6 1. It is owned by LB Camden.

There are two great things about the space: the pond and a corner with a large pile of logs. They both support a good number of frogs and newts.

We visited the site at the end of May. Some big Yellow Flag Iris (Iris pseudacorus) dominated the dry pond. The plant is native to Britain but cultivated worldwide. In some regions, the flag iris scaped to become an invasive aquatic plant. Its rhizomes make the pest practically impossible to eradicate.

In Mill Lane however, the flower is a very nice feature of the site.

You can find the most interesting pubs pown the Thames on a boat full of turists.

There are pubs with names of famous historic characters, like Captain Kidd (the pirate) and Samuel Pepys (the administrator). Some pubs look from the river as lame as their names suggest, like The Banker, The Brasserie and the Old Salt Quay. The old pubs look like a piece of History looking over the river, like The Grapes, The Mayflower and The Prospect of Whitby.

It would be great to enjoy a couple of pints in one of the oldest pubs. If I visit one, I will choose one where I could book a table in a balcony in to watch the boats pass by. Probably in one lazy afternoon in the summer.

A diatom Cyclotella ocellata from the Lake Hovsgol, Lake Khövsgöl or Hövsgöl Nuur in Mongolia.

The lake Hövsgöl is several million years old. Glaciers probably never reached it during the last Ice Age.

The lake is 136 km long and between 20-40 km wide and its deepest point is at 262 m. It contains almost 70% of the surface freshwater of Mongolia. The area supports low levels of human activity and the lake itself is remarkably preserved.

The interest in social bookmarking sites is growing upon Google Insights. For some reason many queries about social bookmarking sites come from India and Philippines, err…

They are going down in use. The ones I like most, digg.com, stumbleupon.com and del.icio.us are slowing down their traffic upon Google Trends.

Some sites just disappeared earlier this year: ma.gnolia.com went down in February due to a mechanical failure and furl.net changed hands a number of times until it shut down last month.

I love the United Kindgom only a little bit more than I hate it. I have been paying taxes here for almost a decade and I may intend to keep doing so for as long as the balance stays like that.

If we take the cosmopolitan and exciting London out of the equation, what is worth in a country with grim urban areas, an over-rated but remarkably limited cultural heritage and an imploding economy? In the video of the post “British Icons” we hear John Lyndon wonder: Do I buy Countrylife because I yearn for the British countryside? What really is outstanding about the UK is a bunch of their men and women (for clariy, the above mentioned individual does not count among them). I find that some of the geniuses in this country makes up for the barren land they live on.

Many foreigners in this country might not have heard about a comedian with the name of Bill Bailey. I had only watched him a number of times in some TV programs like IQ and Never Mind the Buzzcocks until I watched “Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra” this weekend. I was surprised by his multiple talents and how he managed to keep me smiling for 60 minutes and occasionally make me laugh.

Bill Bailey is an entertainer with the worst hair cut in the industry and sufficient panache to conduct a show about orchestral music in the Royal Albert Hall.  The show is about how the orchestra works and the influence of some 20th century composers. He was helped by the conductor Anne Dudley and her BBC Concert Orchestra.

The best of the show, temporarily available on iPlayer, Docteur Qui at the piano and the parody of the US TV cop shows in the 70’s.

I made some research about the comedian. This is an extract of an article that I found of Bill Bailey (source: The Observer):

… for the artificial enhancement of musical enjoyment, here is a rough guide. Wine with jazz, mescal with jazz (or anything, come to that), beer with rock, beer and a cigarette with punk, beer and a sandwich with Saxon, spliff with reggae, spliff and a Bourbon biscuit with dub, cider with the Wurzels, cider and crisps with folk, Nurofen with Slipknot, and a nice big basket of fruit with prog.

I also found the lyrics of Golden Brown by The Stranglers, which Bill Bailey mentions in his article:

Golden brown texture like sun
Lays me down with my mind she runs
Throughout the night
No need to fight
Never a frown with golden brown

Every time just like the last
On her ship tied to the mast
To distant lands
Takes both my hands
Never a frown with golden brown

Golden brown finer temptress
Through the ages she’s heading

West
From far away
Stays for a day
Never a frown with golden brown

Never a frown
With golden brown
Never a frown
With golden brown

Which reminds me of another cryptic lyrics of Jerk It Out by the Caesars about the love to some other vice:

Wind me up
Put me down
Start me off and watch me go
I’ll be running circles around you sooner than you know
A little off center
And I’m out of tune
Just kicking this can along the avenue
But I’m alright

Coz it’s easy once you know how it’s done
You can’t stop now
It’s already begun
You feel it
Running through your bones

And you jerk it out
And you jerk it out

Shut up
Hush your mouth
Can’t you hear you talk too loud
No I can’t hear nothing cause I got my head up in the clouds
I bite off anything that I can chew
I’m chasing cars up and down the avenue
But that’s ok

Coz it’s easy once you know how it’s done
You can’t stop now
It’s already begun
You feel it
Running through your bones

So you jerk it out

Coz it’s easy once you know how it’s done
You can’t stop now
It’s already begun
You feel it
Running through your bones

And you jerk it out
And you jerk it out
And you jerk it out
And you jerk it out
Oh baby don’t you know you really gotta jerk it out
When you jerk it out baby don’t you know you really gotta jerk it out
When you jerk it out baby don’t you know you really gotta jerk it out

Is there a really useful and public Location-Based Service for mobiles? Read about Dial4Light on popupcity.net. Dial4Light is a pay per light system using a mobile phone. Some German cities, implemented this system and the locals seem happy with it.

A good novel by Marie Phillips, funny and quick to read. Apollo is less powerful than he think he is. Everyone thinks of him as an arrogant and not particularly clever god. His aunt Aphrodite reflects on how to exact revenge on Apollo while having sex with him.

Jesus Christ started the beginning of the end for the Olympians. Formerly civilised and proud Mediterraneans, for some reason the divinities ended up in the the barbarian and repressed North. Now their decadence is set between Hampstead Heath, which by the way is boasting a glorious spring these days, Islington, Angel and Kings Cross in London.

I just found that the book is mainstream. This is a screenshot of the homepage of Amazon yesterday:

A Watt (W) is the unit of power of equal to one joule of energy per second.

A human climbing stairs needs 200 watts of power. The best non-doping cyclists in history could deliver almost three times as much power:

A car engine produces 25,000 watts (approximately 33.5 horsepower) while cruising.

The capacities of average nuclear power plants net summer range between about 500 and 1300 MW (10⁶ W).

The largest offshore wind farm in Germany, Innogy Nordsee 1, will have a combined capacity of 960 MW (10⁶ W) to be delivered by 150-180 wind turbines. Spain had an installed capacity of wind power of 16 GW (10⁹ W) in 2008 (source: REE).

Kids’ toys are colourful and noisy. And some toys boast lots of style. For example, this is a trolley with lively colours sold by Hamleys with just the right design.

And we have the Italtrike Classic Rosso for some Mediterranean sophistication and motoring tradition, erm, in trikes…

The trike is a Classic of Italtrike sold in the UK by Fun4Kids. The trike weights 6.5 kilos only and, like some Ducati motorbikes with the same racy red, it looks great, and it can be noisy at times.

The economic downturn and football just bore me too much. My mind drifts now to a few other things:

- Continents are a political concept, not a geographical one. Eurasia is a landmass sitting on one single tectonic plate (except India) and surrounded by oceans.

- maternal, child, and household characteristics are more influential in a child’s cognitive development than television viewing before the age of two. Which is an academic way of saying that Baby Einstein, owned by Walt Disney, is, presumably, a waste of money and time

- The vertebrate species most abundant in numbers and biomass is the Bristlemouth, family Gonostomatidae, order Stomiiformes. Bristlemouth are predated by jellies and larger fishes.

- Why Spotify don’t offer gift vouchers in addition to annual subscriptions? I would have bought a voucher for a few dozen pounds instead of £99 for 12 months!

Iberia flights to and from London will relocate to the T-3 from 25th February 2009 onwards. Iberia and British Airways share the flights codes of their London-Madrid route. Both flag airlines operate this route in virtual duopoly with Easyjet.

The move is justified to reduce connection times between the airlines of the  oneworld alliance, to which Iberia belongs. Joining Iberia at the recently remodelled terminal are Qantas, Cathay, American Airlines, Finnair, Royal Jordanian and Japan Airlines. Most British Airways flights will continue to operate from the new Terminal 5.

I reported an unpaid item on eBay. The buyer got a strike and he complaint so he had it removed and left a defamatory feedback. I sent this email to eBay:

I sold the item no. [removed for this post]. The winner of the auction was [removed for this post].
The third line of the description of the item stated that the item was to be sent by post only. Packaging & posting was set without a pickup option.

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Spaniards are either matadors or flamenco dancers that can be heard talking very loud when not sleeping their siestas. Britons in Spain are unsophisticated tourists who drink inordenately and have little money.

Stereotypes actually tell you more about the fears of the ones who use them than about the subject of the stereotypes.

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The BBC announced earlier this week that BBC One and BBC Two are available online today, in addition to the channels Three and BBC Four.

The iPlayer service left frustrated more often than not, mostly when I tried to watch sports events on the same day or days after. The programs simply were not there. I hope that now most of the content get accessible, either via computer or by interactive TV.

I also hope that the BBC lifts the banning of foreign IP addresses trying to use the service. At the end of the day, the BBC is one of the few British icons with some respectability left in it.

I recently voted at a poll on Expansion.com, a Spanish economy newspaper, to pick the most significant Spanish icon. The web site proposed a few dozens of icons to represent the Spanish and Spain. The sample contained too many commercial brands but the public seems to have set the record straight. The most voted Spanish icons are, sorted in decreasing order of votes (percentage and number of votes):

1. Toro Osborne 44,36%(673)
2. Botijo 43,24% (656)
3. Tricornio 32,89% (499)
4. Baraja española 31,14% (473)
5. Bota de vino 28,74% (436)
6. Bote de Colacao 27,49% (417)
7. Mortadelo y Filemón 25,84% (392)
8. Guitarra española 24,46% (371)
9. Gaseosa La Casera 23,07% (350)
10. Naranjito 21,56%(327)

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This is a post about my recent experience with eBay. A few weeks ago the gloom of the crisis caught me up. I wanted a pcmia wireless card for my laptop. I decided that instead of forking out my hard earned cash, I would earn that money first. I looked around and I found a router that I never got to use and whose box was occupying some place in my cellar. Well, you saw it coming, I posted an offer on eBay for the router.

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Icons are not what they used to be. Nowadays Johnny Rotten advertises a very British brand of butter.

Watching Mr. Lyndon promote butter is not that surprising. The guy is a living ad on two legs himself. He started his career as the perfect fit to a pret-a-porter band, Sex Pistols. That a marketing operation like the Sex Pistols reached an iconic status in our culture is as puzzling as the fact that Sir Cliff Richard is not gay.

This may be the first series of randomly picked figures about the UK. Disclaimer: the quality and veracity of the numbers below is as good as the quality of the source.

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