Just outside the Tower of London, were these two RNLI launches. On an otherwise grey day, the bright orange boats provided a splash of colour on the river.
Apologies to the Linux users out there (like myself) who have to put up with an error message when loading that Tower of London page – just click OK and the page loads OK. I have reported the error to the site’s webmaster and PR person, but I doubt anything will happen to fix it.
In the United Red Carpet Club lounge in Narita airport is a beer pouring machine [Quicktime] that you load a glass into, taken from the adjacent refrigerator, press the button and watch as it gently tilts the glass and pours beer into it. As it nears the top, it gently moves back into the vertical position, and then finishes up by adding a head to the beer from a second nozzle. The movie clip, from my cellphone, is not quite long enough to catch this last step, but you get the idea.
I took the video while I was there earlier today waiting for my flight back to San Francisco. When I got home, I found an article at Gizmodo describing a robot that Asahi is giving away that will pour beer for you.
The beer is called Cass Fresh, says “Sound of Vitality” over it and underneath, as shown in the photo, it says 100% Non-pasteurized beer provides ultimate refreshment with fizzy and crisp taste. What more could one want from a can of beer?
Currently sitting in the United Airlines lounge at Narita airport waiting for my connection to Seoul; the airport here is snowed in, most outbound flights are delayed and when I got to the gate 15 minutes before departure time (having just got my boarding pass and seen the departure marked as ‘On Time’ on the screens everywhere), I was told that there was no plane yet. Now it has vanished from the indicator boards and they are telling us to wait for announcements.
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that flying today is not the way to get around. If I had the time, I think I’d prefer to take a ship. At least there you get proper meals, a proper bed to sleep in and can walk around more easily.
A little further west along the coastline is the city of Brighton. Here is a shot of the west pier, which finally collapsed into the English Channel at the end of December 2002. Here is all that remains of a once majestic pier. Now it looks kind of ghostly, especially in this shot where the boundary between sky and sea has blurred.
A more abstract shot than most of the ones I put up here, this is pebbles and shells from the Eastbourne beach, right next to Gemma and NN241.
A little further west along the coastline, between Eastbourne and Brighton, is Beachy Head. Despite some impressive cliffs, and that very tourist-oriented website, not everything associated with Beachy Head is as pleasant: the site is also popular with those wishing to end it all, and has been for centuries, as this report states.
The photo, taken from perilously close to the edge (I wonder how my photographers have fallen from here while trying to get shots of the cliffs?), shows the high point of the cliff and the lighthouse.
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0, and I have to say that so far I am not impressed. They have messed with the image uploader, making it impossible to control where the images are uploaded to, and what size the thumbnails are. Then they’ve made the editor smart, which just means that it doesn’t understand how to do what I want, and not provided a way to turn it off. Disappointing to say the least. At least it didn’t wreck the existing content, or the style sheet though – I guess I should be thankful for that.
The other boat from the beach at Eastbourne; this is Gemma.
