Gigantic playing cards.
Larger than standard US printer paper size.
Why?
j
Some people just have big hands, I guess.
Did you not watch ‘Play your cards right’? Or the USA original version ‘Card Sharks’? They both used giant playing cards.
Rainbow over a dragon:
Cool shot!
This was a few days ago, but I’m doing a lot of catchup at the moment.
These days this is an unused sloping parking lot by the sea shore. So what? - you might ask. Well, it’s kinda tricksy.
If you look closely amongst the buildings in shot, you’ll see a hovercraft. Indeed, that’s a hovercraft museum .And behind me as I took the photo, a couple of miles across the water, is the Isle of Wight. So I assumed - as you might - that it was a slipway built for a hovercraft ferry service to the island: how interesting - and completely wrong.
In fact those buildings back onto what was The Royal Naval Air Station Lee-on-Solent, aka (back in the day) HMS Daedalus. (Not all HMSs are ships). Daedalus was established as a seaplane base and training center in 1917, and the Daedalus Slipway (as it is properly called) was built for the purpose of launching seaplanes.
Cool huh?
A couple of links, if anyone is interested.
j
ETA - I forgot to mention that the slipway was later used for hovercraft, as Daedalus played a role in evaluating them for military use.
There are a couple of fun 1930s military or airline seaplane facilities still left in existence around the US. It’s hard now to get a current photo of them except from the water.
Most of them are long gone as waterfront perimeter in working ports is at such a premium. Lots of the old sites are now landlocked (and buried) as the commercial harbor has been partly filled to make more land-side port capacity and more piers to pull ships alongside of.
I guess this is in between civilization and nature. There is a project near me to dredge out the harbor and redeposit the sand in an area that has been heavily eroded by ocean currents modified by a several-decades-old breakwater. They have laid two big pipes about 1/4 mile long from the harbor to the deposition site and today have started pumping a slurry of sand and seawater through the pipes. You can see the outflow just below the bulldozer. Also, for some reason a bunch of seabirds have decided the new pool is an awesome place to hang out.
The remains of an old mill along the Patuxent river in Maryland, probably abandoned about 100 years ago
Close up
Heard, not saw:
An unusual sounding jet. Flight Radar 24 told me it was a “IAI Kfir”
A what? I thought.
So the Israeli air force was attacking rural South Carolina.
(Back to Google)
We just spent the day at Aigues Mortes on the Camargue (south of France). It’s a big medieval walled city, square in layout with huge city walls.
Now. La course camarguaise is a big thing around here - it’s the local version of bullfighting. The animals aren’t harmed - raseteurs attempt to snatch things like pom-poms and ribbons off the head and horns of an annoyed bull. So it’s not harmful but I assume it properly pisses them off.
The big festival at Aigues Mortes starts in a couple of days, so preparations are underway. The “Bullring” is…. Uh…. Well, it’s this (click thru as usual)
So, couple of things. Yes, that two bar fence is meant to contain enraged bulls; and those uneven wooden structures contain the crowd. Here’s the view from the other side.
We were told the following by a woman working on the bullring. Those structures are all tiny, family owned grandstands. There are maybe a hundred of them (plus a couple of (temporary?) scaffolding-type stands). The family stands (“Theatres”) flat pack away, are got out and erected for the festival, and then afterwards packed away again. Note their bull-proof nature.
Now. Returning to the two bar fencing - think that’s 100% bull-proof? Take a look at the fronts of the theatres and note the horizontal wooden spars on the front. Rather like the rungs of a ladder. Kinda handy if you need to get out of the arena in a goddamn hurry, huh?
j
Oh, and obviously the bullring is outside the city walls, so it’s easy to deliver the bulls to it. Right?
Well kinda. They drive them straight through the city. The route is already prepared by laying down protective sand.
j
At the supermarket today, I found the teenage (probably 16 or 17) cashier and bagger discussing the Eleusinian Mysteries. I told them that I found it refreshing to find people of their generation who even knew about the subject.