Secret locations we knew about anyway

Today’s Guardian reports that the The Ordnance Survey has finally stopped falsifying Britain's maps, almost 80 years after the government first ordered cartographers to delete sensitive sites in the hope of thwarting German bombers.

The Landranger map series will, for example, now show the nuclear warhead plant at Burghfield, near Reading, previously shown as a mysteriously empty field while the access road appears for the so-called Corsham Computer Centre in Wiltshire, thought by conspiracy buffs to be Tony Blair's nuclear shelter.

AWE Burghfield ( from its own official site)

Censorship started in 1927 when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin secretly instructed: "No work of defence shall appear upon any map on sale to the general public” During the cold war, the Ministry of Defence listed 4,800 "key points" to be deleted. Censorship was later slashed to a more manageable list of super-secret targets, such as the Windscale nuclear plant, and GCHQ, the radio espionage agency.

But technology was moving too fast. Firms such as Multimap systematically made aerial surveys available from 1999, and now satellite pictures are available on the web and via software like Google Earth.

GCHQ (from a government better public buildings website)

Intelligence writer Duncan Campbell said the tampering was a "futile farce that creaked on 40 years after it had ceased to have any conceivable value. It didn't even stop Hungarian diplomats taking picnics outside Burghfield in the 1960s."

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Yet Another Crab Spider Photo!

Shame the fangs are a little blurred but I do like this shot of the spider

From Nagyrev to the Yorkshire Dales

Helen Mirren is set to star in a new film called Angel Makers, a tale based on the murders that took place in the Hungarian village of Nagyrev from the end of the First World War until 1929.

The film was inspired by a documentary by the Dutch film-maker Astrid Bussink who spent four months in the village investigating claims that, after the First World War, an epidemic of poisoning claimed the lives of men who had recently returned to their wives from the trenches. The spouses were the suspected culprits.

'Angel maker' was the name given to the village midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas, who supplied the women with arsenic. This was originally a euphemism for her part-time trade of administering abortions but when village women complained about their drunken or violent husbands, Fazekas told them: 'If there's a problem with him, I have a simple solution.'.

Injured soldiers came home to a severe economic depression. It was a hard life. The circumstances were extreme, and feeding another mouth that couldn't contribute anything was too much of a burden on the family.

Over the years, with the village cemetery filling up, police suspicions grew. They started to exhume bodies. Out of 50 bodies examined, 46 contained arsenic. Fingers pointed towards the midwife. Mrs Fazekas cheated retribution by taking some of her own poison but 26 women form the village stood trial. Eight received the death sentence, the rest went to prison, seven of them for life.

Nagyrev women facing trial

The updated, fictionalised version of the story will see the women of a Yorkshire farming community take the place of the Hungarian villagers. They turn murderous when their British husbands return from the trenches to discover their places have been taken by German prisoners of war.

Note I have been advised by a good Hungarian friend that the expression Angel Makers is not appropriate as a description for the murders. It is an expression used in Hungary to describe aborted foetuses.

Story

BBC report on Nagyrev

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European Spider of the Year 2006

The not-wife called me out into the garden at lunchtime to show me another crab spider. The other ones we have seen in the garden were white but this one was yellow with red stripes on its abdomen.

According to the European Society of Arachnology , what we had seen was a female flower crab spider, Misumena vatia, exactly the same specie as the white ones we had seen and photographed earlier. Amazingly it has the ability to change its colour from white to yellow.

Like all crab spiders, Misumena has crab-like legs rotated onto their sides, which give the family its name. The flower crab spider is, a sit-and-wait predator. It mostly lurks among flower petals waiting for insects to fly by. The front legs, which are held outwards, will grab an unsuspecting visitor with amazing speed, while at the same time a poisonous bite is administered. Prey is mostly eaten on the flower and is sucked dry through tiny holes, such that an almost complete exoskeleton is left over.


Typical habitats are open spaces like meadows, moors and fields, but also sunny paths and forest margins, wasteland and gardens. In the UK the species seems to be occurring exclusively in the southern parts. In Europe Misumena occurs from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.

The European Society of Arachnology has designated the flower crab spider as its spider of the year for 2006.


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Tag, you’re it

I have been tagged

1: One book that changed your life:

No book has actually changed my life as such. Some have definitely influenced me. I
will choose 1984 by George Orwell, not because it changed my worldview but because it represented a major change in my reading tastes.

2: One book you have read more than once:
Quite a few have been given a second or third re-reading but I will choose The Poor Mouth by Flann O’Brien (well my blog takes its name from this book; I had better give it a plug!)

3: One book you would want on a desert island:

How to Build a Teleportation Device with Two Coconuts and a Hermit Crab by Alexander Selkirk

4: One book that made you laugh:

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Part by Louis de Bernieres. A mix of the very dark and the riotously funny

5: One book you wish had been written:

Anything by John Kennedy Toole written after a Confederacy of Dunces. His suicide meant that this was his last.

6: One book you wish had never had been written:

The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. Utter shit

7: One book that made you cry:

No book has made me cry but there are a few where I wanted a happy ending. Emile Zola’s Germinal is an example

8: One book you are currently reading:

Talk Talk by TC Boyle

9: One book you have been meaning to read:

Not one book but a book cycle: In search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

10: Now tag five people

Redwine

Obokun

Dave

Gert

Elasticwaistbandlady

Size Zero?????

Nicole Ritchie

Today’s Independent reports that the "size 0" look favoured by Hollywood stars(?) such as Nicole Ritchie and Lindsay Lohan is beginning catching on with girls in Britain,.
Size 0 equates to a UK size 4 and is now cropping up on the UK high street. If it caches on it would herald a major shift in beauty ideals from the "perfect 10" that used to represent the ideal female shape in Britain to by the tiny LA look. There is some evidence for this shit: Victoria Beckham, a mother of three, was recently reported to have worn jeans that would fit a seven-year-old.

Victoria Beckham

The former Cosmopolitan editor Marcelle D'Argy Smith said the size 0 craze represented the "death of the grown-up woman". She believes that those who portray size 0 as a "normal" body shape are perpetuating a cult of thinness. "What is so bizarre about all this is that they are being praised for their bodies. Who is defining these bodies? Some gay men in the fashion industry who want to hang their clothes on stick insects," she said.

Karen Fenn, buying director for Topshop, said that its size 4 was intended for girls aged between 12 and 14. Only 2 per cent of sales in the Petite range were size 4. Ms Fenn said: "It's for a small and young customer. It's not something that is by any means for a grown woman."

Women come in all shapes and sizes, some will be waif-like and will be able to fit such a size but most will most certainly not. For me it beggars belief that anyone would consider the figure of a young teenage girl to be the ideal shape for an adult woman. The only people I can think of that have a penchant for the young teen look normally get hounded out of their homes and spend their prison sentences in isolation!

Arthur Lee RIP

Love - Alone Again Or (2003)


Arthur Lee of the 60s psychedelic rock band Love has died of Leukaemia in Memphis at the age of 61. A full obituary can be found here.

Iranian Woman Awaits Stoning Decision

I have reported previously on Naznin Mahabad Fatehi here and here The Save Nazanin site reports that following her death sentence being overturned she will face a new trial starting early this month. Here’s hoping that the original death sentence will not be upheld.

Meanwhile today's Independent carried a report on Ashraf Kalhori a woman who has sentenced to death by stoning for adultery and conspiring to kill her husband. The chief of Iran's, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, declared a moratorium on stoning in December 2002, but it remains on the statute books and his decision could be reversed. Last month Mrs Kalhori was told by a special verdicts court that she would be executed within 15 days but after protests from her lawyer and international rights groups, Ayatollah Shahroudi is reviewing her case.

Shadi Sadr, the lawyer representing Mrs Kalhori, says she is optimistic. "We are campaigning to make the moratorium actually enacted in law," Mrs Sadr said. "While the law remains unchanged, cases of stoning can happen anywhere in the country despite Shahroudi's order because the head of the judiciary is not above the law."

Mrs Kalhori's husband, Akbar Estiri, was killed in April 2002 after quarrelling with their neighbour, Mahmoud Mirzaei. She says that the killing was accidental but police say she was having an affair with Mr Mirzaei and encouraged the attack. The sentence of stoning is for adultery, but she was also sentenced to 15 years in prison for her alleged part in the murder. Mrs Sadr says that if the stoning verdict is upheld it should not be implemented until after her prison term.

Mr Mirzaei received 100 lashes instead of stoning for adultery because he was unmarried, but was sentenced to death for the murder. However, this cannot be carried out for another nine years, when the youngest of the Kalhori children turns 18 and can decide to take blood money instead.

Human rights groups also say that issues such as stoning can divert attention from abuses for political crimes. Last week, a student leader, Akbar Mohammedi, died while on hunger strike in prison. A liberal academic, Ramin Jahanbegloo, has been held without trial for several months. Rights groups say incidences of such cases have increased since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election because officials do not expect him to interfere. They also point to an apparent strategy for countering political opposition by relaxing social rules while cracking down on political dissent

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Echinops 3 - in full bloom

Small portions but many courses

Cephalaria

Cephalaria gigantea