Weekend, with trees.

Had a fairly meh weekend due to my entire body crapping out on me on Saturday. I'd wanted to go to Birmingham BiFest but with my back, legs, right hip and left ankle all hurting, I wasn't going to manage 4 hours on trains. Even my gall bladder decided to get in on the action! I haven't had gallstone pain that bad in years. Instead I spent 15 hours asleep. Woo.

Yesterday was much more interesting. Richard & I went to see Ghost Forest in Trafalgar Square. It's an exhibition of tree stumps from rainforest trees in Ghana. Some of the trees had been felled sustainably (every tree in the rainforest there is numbered, and you can only take a certain quota of trees from a particular area in a 40 year period), others had fallen naturally. It was particularly useful to have the exhibition there because Nelson's Column is a similar height to the mature trees, so you had an immediate reference for the size of them when living. Also the plaque alongside each tree had a simple graphic comparing it to Nelson's Column (like when blue whales are compared to London buses, or in a video game info screen where you see size of monster compared to your character). Richard took lots of photos and I shall prod him until they go online.

Today the exhibition was being taken down, and sometime this week the trees are going to Copenhagen for the climate change summit. I don't know if there is a comparable building to be a size reference there.

I like the story about the Denya tree not wanting to leave the ground.

Bears of the Day

From yesterday's Sunday Times: It’s a grolar, the climate-change polar bear. The photo in the paper was even cuter, it featured much more of the bears and you could see that the polar bear had his paw on the grizzly bear.

From today's Metro: Dramatic pictures of polar bear encounter. Featuring omg baaaaaaaaaby polar bear triplets! Obeys many of Cute Overload's rules of cuteness, e.g. #7: A thing, accompanied by a smaller version of that thing, is always cute and #9: Piles of a cute thing jack up a cuteness rating exponentially.

Also, some other newspaper articles:
'I lost the gift of joy for a while'. The artist behind Purple Ronnie and Edward Monkton writes about depression. I hadn't realised it was the same artist but it makes sense - they're both simple art styles with surreality.

And I have been checking the date to make sure it's not April Fools' Day... London commuters in a spin as Circle Line becomes a tadpole. Seriously - there was once a time when I would have known about this sort of thing months before normal Londoners. I miss Usenet.