Monthly Archives: September 2012


The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) – mounted on a turret at the end of the Curiosity rover’s robotic arm, had its dust cover removed over the weekend and is now officially in action. Among the first pictures that NASA engineers took were a series of views of the rover’s undercarriage

The above composite was then stitched together by blogger Astro0 at Unmanned Space Fight.

Phwooar.

iheartchaos/universetoday

Davy Dunne And The Shopping – Try

Sean Connolly writes:

You have MANY fans in Canada. Anyway, enough of that…I know you don’t normally plug stuff like this, but my mate in Ireland Davy Dunne and his band “Davy Dunne & The Shopping” have a great new video for their track TRY. It’s about inspiring people to get up and doing something in these tough times. It might bring a smile to someone feeling lowly, or at least get someone dancing around the kitchen to the catchy tune.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxMslIwsCZU

What you may need to know.

1. Hitchcock biopics are so hot right now. This is the one that doesn’t have Anthony Hopkins in it.

2. Toby Jones plays Hitch here: he’s one of the most reliable character actors in the game these days – AND his Dad’s in Emmerdale.

3. Remember Sienna Miller? She’s best remembered for her co-starring role as Jude Law’s girlfriend and, more recently, her role in the News International hacking scandal.

4. Hitchcock’s Vertigo was voted The Best Film EVER Made in the prestigious Sight & Sound poll earlier this year: our own choice, Sam Raimi’s seminal Evil Dead 2 (1978) (1987), failed to make the Top 100, thus making the entire poll utterly redundant.

Release date: October (TV)

Nice ink.

From the ‘History and Topography of Ireland’ by Gerald of Wales.

Gerald of Wales was born at Monorbier castle, in Pembrokeshire, in 1146. He was educated at Gloucester and Paris, and became Archdeacon of Brecon in 1175.

He visited Ireland in 1183, 1185, 1199 and again for about two years from 1204. A version of his text–which is largely concerned with the marvellous things he saw or heard about there–is known to have been read publicly in 1188.

This manuscript was written perhaps at Lincoln, probably before Gerald’s death in 1223, and it has been suggested that he personally supervised its writing and decoration. This manuscript was later owned by St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury.

Ireland has no reptiles, Gerald says, but it does have harmless spiders, leeches, and frogs. Gerald says that the only harmful animals in Ireland are fox…

Marginal Drawings Of A Stag, A Marten, A Badger, And A Beaver, In Gerald of Wales’s ‘History And Topography Of Ireland’ (Europeana)

Thanks Sibling of Daedalus