The BBC and Lord Janner

This BBC article has the following biography of the paedophile Lord Janner.

• Born in Cardiff in 1928
• Served in the Army and studied at Cambridge before becoming a barrister and then QC
• Labour MP for Leicester North West and then Leicester West from 1970 until retiring in 1997, when he was made a life peer
• Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2009
• Suspended from the Labour Party in April 2015
• Ruled unfit to stand trial over allegations of child sexual abuse on 7 December 2015
• Died two weeks later, aged 87

Nothing much there to explain why he should have so miraculously escaped prosecution for his crimes. Or, explain why he was given a peerage when he should have been given a prison sentence.

Here are a few more biographical details that the BBC clearly didn't consider relevant.

Chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews
Vice President – The Association for Jewish Youth
Vice President – The Jewish Leadership Council
President – The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women
Advisory Board – Community Security Trust
Vice President – The World Jewish Congress
Chairman – The Holocaust Educational Trust
Director – The United Jewish Israel Appeal

The Attendant - a coffee shop in a public toilet

The Attendant is a coffee bar in a former men's lavatory in Foley Street in central London. The public toilet was built in 1890 and closed in the 1960s.

It has now been restored, retaining the white tiles, cisterns and urinals. In addition to expressos it serves breakfast, brunch, lunch & afternoon tea.

A row of urinals with a wooden shelf inserted for customers to rest their coffee cups and reading.

These places used to have attendants whose job it was to keep the lavatory clean and discourage homosexuality. Hence, the coffee bar's new name.

Ironically, The Attendant does not have toilets.

The Errol Flynn Autopsy

Exhibited in the Vancouver Police Museum.

Autopsy Table and incinerator

Catching egg stealers in a surveillance state

Catching egg stealers in a surveillance state.

'At the time, the R.S.P.B. was receiving about one report of nest theft per day, some from wives bitter about their husbands’ all-consuming hobby. All tips were kept on file. Collectors were mostly English, and most of the U.K.’s rare-bird nests were in Scotland. Surveillance cameras on the two main roads between the countries were programmed to log the license plates of cars that passed by. Thomas noted two patterns: cars belonging to suspected collectors appeared with greater frequency between March and June, the breeding season; and many of them were registered to members of the Jourdain Society.'

These number plate logging cameras are all over the UK [its just to keep us safe].

San Leo Castle

Photographs of the village, castle and museum.


San Leo Castle is a the Marche region of Italy. Next to the castle there is a pleasant little village with a large square and a few shops and cafes.


The castle is higher up the hill. For much of its life it has been used as a prison. Popes used to stick nuisances in the castle. They would have had nice views and I would imagine there were worse places to while away a few decades.

The castle itself is undistinguished and clearly felt it needed something a little extra to spice itself up. What better than a torture museum to attract the punters? The ghoulish are always with us and go on holidays like everyone else.



As you can see from the photographs there is a small but quite sound collection of tormenting equipment.


The idea of the barrel was apparently to confine somebody in their very own porta-potty.


I am always amazed how much effort people used to put into devising ever more elaborate equipment to discomfort their enemies. Just look at that chair.

You can just hear the designer chuckling fiendishly.

This looks like a early version of a thrill ride.

The people who thought up all this equipment were just trying too hard. The Yanks have demonstrated that if you want to torture someone all you need is a plank and a jug of water.

The Hangmans Toolbox

An Australian hangman's wooden box; used to hold all the equipment he needed to hang someone by the neck until dead. From Melbourne Old Goal. The bush ranger Ned kelly was hung in this goal.

Convict Fun

Some artefacts from Melbourne Old Goal. The leather gloves on the left were intended for those prisoners addicted to solitary amusement. The Goal must have been a bit of a fetish paradise if you add in the masks and bondage gear.

The Art of Art Frahm

The artwork is by an American artist called Art Frahm. He did a number of illustrations on the same theme. His illustrations always involved an attractive but encumbered young lady, an errant gust of wind and snapped knicker elastic. His work dates from the time before women wore tights and when elastic was unreliable.

The drawings look like a male fantasy, in fact the problem was not uncommon. I witnessed it twice, and highly entertaining it was too.

Note the celery in most pictures.

More after the break

Snippet

"Farmyard animals are not being yoked together to pull cars but the fat in their bodies is being converted into biodiesel to drive fleets of the future.

The fat, or tallow, from one poor deceased sheep will produce about eight litres of biodiesel.

That's about 6 1/2 sheep to fill the tank of Astra diesel hatchback, meaning you'll get about 105km out of one animal on Holden's published fuel economy figures.

Pigs are better for travelling longer distances, with one unfortunate beast giving Astra drivers about 140km. One cow will keep the engine running for almost 450km.

Chooks, however, will barely get you to the corner, with one chicken worth just 600m."

Lahar landscape [with Hobbits?]

The Lord of the Rings films made good use of the spectacular New Zealand landscape and tourists still visit some of the location scenes [especially Hobbiton].

Whilst driving in NZ I came upon the lehar fields around Inglewood and between Okato and  Opunake, a landscape so strange that I am surprised it was never used in the Lord of the Rings.  Maybe it will appear in the Hobbit films.

New Zealand is very volcanic and the Taranaki district [the south west] of the North Island is dominated by the volcanic cone of Mount Taranaki. During one of its active periods the volcano threw out gobbets of molten rock which formed what, I think, are called lahar fields. When the lava cooled it formed mounds. Some of these are quite large. We parked next to one that had a two lane road running through it.

Inglewood with lahar fields to east

Unfortunately, I didn't take any photographs and I have had to rely on the few photographs that are available on the internet. They do not do the lahar fields justice.  The mounds created a very weird landscape and it was easy to imagine the dramatic effect of a moonlit battle or a chase staged in the fields.

There is very little on the internet about this strange, and perhaps unique, landscape. Maybe I am using the wrong search terms.  If you have any information please add a comment.

Ightham Mote dog kennel

In the UK important buildings are placed on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest.  They cannot be  demolished, extended or altered without special permission. There are three categories of listing. Grade 1 is the highest.


A Grade 1 building is considered to be  "of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important".


This is the only Grade 1 listed dog kennel in the United KIngdom

It is over two metres high and was built for a St. Bernard.

The kennel is in the courtyard of the moated manor house of Ightham Mote.

Medical waxworks

These wax models are in a museum in the Museo di Palazzo Poggi in Bologna. They were used by the university to train medics and anatomists in the 19th century.

New York Underground:

Any other major Western city would look much the same below the streets.

Parasites and suicidal rats

A while ago I listened to a BBC Radio programme about parasites. One interesting item in the broadcast was about a parasite that induces suicidal behaviour in rats. The parasite has a complicated life cycle. It passes through three hosts, the second of which must be a rat, and the third a cat. Rats are hard to kill. Rats do not like new things in their environment, because new things might be lethal. So if you put a trap down a rat is inclined to avoid it because it wasn’t there before. Rats also avoid light, and predators like cats. The parasite doesn’t like this caution. It needs the rat to be bold and get eaten by a cat, so it can move on to the next stage of its life cycle.

So it alters the rat’s brain so that it is no longer cautious. So that it becomes a kamikaze rat. The parasite gets what it needs but the rat gets eaten.

Yesterday I read about another study that has found another parasite that makes it host suicidal. In this case the host is a grasshopper and the parasite makes it drown itself.

A little research on the internet produced this item which has several more examples of parasites which can make their hosts behave in ways that are very much not in the hosts best interests.

I can understand the idea of a parasite which can make you ill, or even kill you. What I find staggering is that there are parasites which can modify the behaviour of their hosts to the extent that they can override such a fundamental urge as that of self preservation.

A couple of quotes from one of the articles

“Every living thing has at least one parasite that lives inside or on it, and many, including humans, have far more.“

“Scientists have no idea of the exact number of species of parasites, but they do know that parasites make up the majority of species on earth. By one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. Indeed, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology.”

Are there parasites which are modifying our behaviour? I remember one of the experts that were being interviewed for the BBC Radio programme said there were. He gave an example of a parasite which was pretty common and was believed to be able to change human actions. Unfortunately, I cannot remember what the parasite did. If anybody knows please add a comment.

Where’s your free will now, Jimmy?

Buried Iraqi Aircraft

"The al Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad in Iraq, a sandy wasteland surrounded by high dunes off the main Baghdad-to-Jordan highway, was the focus of intense search-and-destroy activity after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003; its vast desert spaces were thought to be a likely location for missile launchers or aircraft from which chemical or biological strikes against U.S. troops might be launched.

What military search teams eventually found at al Taqqadum, in July 2003, were remnants of the Iraqi Air Force as pictured above: a reported 30 to 40 planes, including several MiG-25 and Su-25 ground attack jets, buried more than 10 feet beneath tons of soil and covered with camouflage netting. According to the Pentagon, at least one of the MiG-25s was found because searchers spotted its twin tail fins protruding from the sand. Some of the planes had been wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect their electronics and machinery from the sand (and some had had their wings removed), but others were interred with little or no protection from the sand or the elements. The recovery teams had to use large earth-moving equipment to uncover the aircraft. "

Left Behind Series & the Rapture Index

" Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

"A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

I would like to think the Rapture Index is a spoof, unfortunately it is not. I would like to think it is funny, unfortunately the believers have access to nuclear weapons.

Try this page as well.

Yet more morbid stuff - Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome

" This church is noted for its crypt which contains the bones of some four thousand Capuchin friars. There is a series of chambers housing the skeletal remains of the monks. Each chamber has been decorated with the bones of the monks. Various bones are arranged on the ceilings and walls forming intracate patterns or have been sorted in piles against walls. Each of the chambers are different, some even contain the haunting full skeletons of monks clothed in the traditional brown habit."

More Morbid Stuff

Following my item about Sedlac a post about the ossuary appeared in another weblog called Boing Boing. This prompted somebody to write in about a similar place in Poland.

"I realized that here in Poland we've got a similar sacral place. It's located in a village called Czeremna, near a famous spa center called Kudowa Zdroj in lower Silesia. About 24 thousand human skulls are gathered there (3000 in a main hall, the rest in a cellar). A priest named Waclaw Tomaszek dug them out in during the XVIII century, and the chapel itself was built in the 1780s. The human remains mostly date from the 30-year war (1618-1648) and epidemic disease which killed thousands of people in that period."

There is a link to Polish website with some photographs of the site.

Its possible to get a reminder about the transience of human flesh without going to Eastern Europe. A trip to the Catacombs of Paris will provide pretty much the same experience.

Titan Missile Museum

This site is about 25 miles south of Tucson in Arizona. Once there were 54 sites like this but the rest have been destroyed.