A pre-alert means don’t panic yet, but check before you go out. High winds are expected tomorrow (Thursday) in the eastern Canaries: Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, and Fuertaventura, and the day after (Friday) in all the islands. They expect gusts up to 75 km/h / 46 mph. That’s Force 8 on the Beaufort Scale: “Twigs broken from trees. Cars veer on road.” So Friday might not be the best day for…
More about the Music of the Stars Concert
I’ve been wondering how many people they thought they could get up at the Roque, given the need for things like parking and toilets. According to Canarias 7 (in Spanish) the answer is “perhaps 2,000”. The idea is to transmit the concert to huge, open-air screens in each of the Canary Islands, and also in Madrid and London, and maybe Paris and Brussels. Jean-Michel Jarre and Brian May are said…
More Magic
Fitting another mirror segment to MAGIC II The MAGIC gamma ray telescope is getting a twin. MAGIC II will work together with MAGIC 1 as a two-telescope array. The first thing you notice about MAGIC is that it’s huge. The mirror is 17 m (55ft) across. This is because Gamma rays never reach the earth (unless they come from an atomic bomb). What the telescope is looking for is something…
Crazies.
Yesterday was my day for coming across craziness, and not the good sort. First up, this video from This Is True. (I love This is True) An American politician called Brent Rinehart is running for re-election with a comic book full of s**t stirring and spelling mistakes. (Does a County Commissioner have much to do with education in his district?) It also talks a lot about “The homosexual agenda”, without…
A free contest
Writers need to read. Did you ever hear of a chef that didn’t notice what s/he ate, or a musician that never listened to music? One of the online magazines I like is GUD, which stands for Greatest Uncommon Denominator. It’s not free, although it is cheap. Much as I like to read for free, I don’t expect to write for free, and they have to get the money to…
St Maurus’s Church, Puntagorda
The first church on this site was built in the 16th century, when this was the centre of the village. Since then, the population moved uphill, leaving the church rather isolated, and the church has been rebuilt twice (the current building dates from the 19th century), and finally fell into disuse and ruin. It was replaced with a newer one, in the new centre of the village, in 1951, but…