they've installed new webcams in yosemite valley

http://www.yosemiteconservancy.org/webcams/high-sierra

stop press: burly trucker's top-secret aspirational slimming programme revealed

daniel pink ... fascinating animated run through some counter-intuitive discoveries about what motivates workers and innovators

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u6XAPnuFjJc

link provided by lucy at "being of sound mind"

http://lucewoman.blogspot.co.uk/

regellers at prince's ... provoking a short meditation on welshness and non-welshness

i suppose that, from having spent a part of my childhood amongst people with a welsh way of speaking and thinking, i must have become both sensitized and de-sensitized to some aspects of welshness

consequently i was neither dismayed by the people i encountered last week, nor downhearted by the dilapidation of the towns

indeed, i found myself thinking how much fun it might be to live in a nice little terrace with welsh neighbours on either side ...

tom jones on the one side, perhaps, and catherine zeta-jones on the other !

bruce hood's "meet your brain" lectures

http://richannel.org/christmas-lectures/2011/meet-your-brain#/christmas-lectures-2011-bruce-hood--whats-in-your-head

i hadn't realized that the cortex is only three to four millimetres thick !

... and if you're already up to speed with cognitive science and with philosophy then you might enjoy a long interview on a lot of subjects and ideas that he's done quite recently for edge

http://edge.org/conversation/essentialism-

and i shall tell my grandson that they leap straight in to the tins ...

aunt mavis ... my trusty native guide in the valleys

i do hope the loved one remembered to plump my pillows

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw126774/Herbert-Westfaling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Westfaling

tom denny's celebration of thomas traherne's ecstatic mysticism ... small windows in a tiny side chapel at hereford

tom denny's left hand window at great malvern

with some explanatory notes ...

tom denny's right hand window at great malvern

more of the same details from tom denny's left hand window at great malvern

to prince's ...

.. where i encounter one of ponty's most magnificent old boilers !

its a traditional welsh unicorn trap, mr spock ...

... they used to bait them with maidens back in the day


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn

are we adrift in some kind of time warp, scottie ? or have we strayed in to an unfolding alternative universe, spock ? .... the federation's clear-desk policy clearly isn't holding

i've been reading about all the methane in the farts of the herbivorous dinosaurs ... but what about the stench from the carnivores' ?

shadow self-portait ... anyone might think it was the mayor of london creeping ...

"The Trap" 

The first night that the monster lurched
Out of the forest on all fours
He saw its shadow in his dream
Circle the house, as though it searched
For one it loved or hated. Claws
On gravel and a rabbit's scream
ripped the fabric of his dream. 

Waking between dark and dawn 
And sodden sheets. His reason quelled
The shadow and the nightmare sound.
The second night it crossed the lawn
A brute voice in the darkness yelled.
He struggled up, woke raving, found
His wallflowers trampled to the ground. 

When rook wings beckoned the shadows back
He took his rifle down, and stood
All night against the leaded glass.
The moon ticked round. He saw the black
Elm-skeletons in the doomsday wood.
The sailing and the failing stars
And red coals dropping between bars. 

The third night such a putrid breath
Fouled, flared his nostrils, that he turned,
Turned, but could not lift, his head.
A coverlet as thick as death
Oppressed him: he crawled out: discerned
Across the door his watchdog, dead.
"Build a trap," the neighbours said. 

All that day he built his trap
With metal jaws and a spring as thick
As the neck of a man. One touch
Triggered the hanging teeth: jump, snap,
And lightning guillotined the stick
Thrust in its throat. With gun and torch
He set his engine in the porch. 

The fourth night in their beds appalled
His neighbors heard the hunting roar
Mount, mount to an exultant shriek.
At daybreak timidly they called
His name, climbed through the splintered door
And found him sprawling in the wreck,
Naked...with a severed neck. 

~ Jon Stallworthy

seen through a glass, darkly ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

revised travel plans

the blessèd tom denny at malvern priory ... i haven't been there yet, these pics from flickr are by Aidan McRae Thomson

there is an article about tom denny with an interview by ann wroe, the author of that wonderful book about orpheus ...

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/arts/ann-wroe/alive-and-glowing