We all know that Naomi Campbell can be difficult but...

Today's Guardian has the following headline:

Naomi Campbell granted special protection during war crimes trial

Apparently she will also have extra help from lawyer during the tribunal and no one may photograph her as she enters or exits the court building...

Supermodel tantrums are one thing but, oh Naomi, what have you done!

Not sure of the species

but it was a big devil and with a colour scheme and markings that make it rather different from the other bee and wasp visitors to our garden.

Andorrans in Mars face cover up

There are those who believe that the world is controlled by reptilian aliens in human form; others who believe that it's the Bilderbergers and the Rosicrucians that hold the reins of power.

In reality every event on the planet is controlled by the population of one tiny Pyrenean state known as Andorra. If the Argentines recapture Falkirk then you can bet your bottom dollar that the Andorrans were behind it. Lose a sock in your laundry and the Andorrans did that too.

For no good reason that can be established the Andorrans took umbrage when the Viking mission took photos of the Cydonia region of Mars and found the famous face.

It is certain that a number of people at Nasa got disappeared to beyond the French and Spanish border for that mistake. Since then they have done everything in their power to rubbish the idea that the face is evidence of an ancient civilisation.

Now it seems that the Andorrans have won. The latest high definition images of the area show that the face is just a mesa.


We have managed to confirm that the Andorrans are a terrestrial people with no known alien contacts so why they are trying to cover up the existence of the face is a total mystery. I fear that the truth is too horrible to contemplate....

Take off

Holly blue butterfly taking off

A groaner of a joke that needs a Scottish accent and knowledge of football

What do you call an machine gun carring heifer wearing a Celtic shirt with number 7 on the back?

A right-wing military coo.

Windmill II

Upminster Windmill

Upminster Windmill

Sorry for not much visiting over the past few days. There are things I need to think about. I will be back to my normal visiting soon though

Catalonia bans bullfighting

I know this is not a hot new item but it is still very pleasing to see that bullfighting is to be banned in Catalonia.

According the Guardian deputies voted by 68 to 55 in favour of a people's petition calling on the bullfight to be banished from a region that once played host to some of the world's greatest fights. The ban will start in 2012.

About 13,500 fighting bulls die in Spain every year – many in bullfights funded by local authorities who are estimated to pay out up to €550m (£457m) in subsidies.

In Spain, critics have accused Catalan nationalist deputies of voting out of spite, because the fighting bull is an emblem of Spain – where it is known as the "national fiesta" – rather than of Catalonia. The local El Periódico newspaper reported that several nationalist deputies had decided to back the ban only after Spain's constitutional court struck down parts of the region's 2006 autonomy charter earlier this month. At least 430,000 people, or 6% of all Catalans, protested on 10 July in Barcelona against the court's decision ,which declared Catalonia was not legally a nation.

Animal rights campaigners were upset that identity politics had been brought to play. "The issue is a moral one, not a nationalist one," said Dr Salvador Giner, head of the Catalan Studies Institute in Barcelona. "Bear-baiting was suppressed long ago and this is the same logic. Are we a modern nation, or are we going back to the middle ages?"

Dr Giner said the bullfight had a long history in Catalonia. "But it is a barbarous tradition." He also denounced those who voted against bullfighting but protected the correbous, a form of bull-taunting popular in village fiestas in southern Catalonia. "That should be banned as well, even if politicians lose votes. That would be consistent."

The bullfight has been in decline in Catalonia for decades. There is only one major ring functioning in Barcelona, with just 15 fights a year. The city's other emblematic bullring, Las Arenas, is being turned into a shopping arcade, following a redesign by Lord Rogers.

"There was never a strong tradition of bullfighting there anyway, they do not breed bulls," said Frank Evans, the Salford-born veteran British bullfighter. "It is like Devon staging Rugby League games."

Bullfight campaigners said the ban would cost €300m in lost revenues, and argue that the fight was an art form, rather than a cruel bloodsport.

A petition calling for the ban to be extended to the capital of Madrid, home to the world's most famous bull-ring, Las Ventas, has 50,000 signatures. But there is little prospect of success.

The regional government, like that of Valencia, has declared the bull-fight to be a part of its "protected cultural patrimony".

Personally I welcome this move. As far as I am concerned what consenting adults get up to is usually not the concern of anybody else. The caveat is always that it does not involve children or animals. Bullfighting is cruelty dressed up with ritual, nothing else.

I will leave the last word to poet Pree Gimferrer who decribed the ban thus:"It is the worst attack on culture since our transition to democracy,"

I hope he didn’t mean that democracy destroyed Spanish culture!

An ancestor of the Americans

A BBC series that became essential viewing in the last gasps of the previous millennium and the first few years of the current one was Meet the Ancestors. Anything that deals with reconstructing faces and bodies from bones will always grab my interest.

The Seattle Times and numerous other sources reported on a fascinating reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears. The reconstruction appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought.

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History recently released photos of the reconstructed image of a woman who probably lived on Mexico's Caribbean coast 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The female is known as "La Mujer de las Palmas," or "The Woman of the Palms," after the sinkhole cave near the Caribbean resort of Tulum where her remains were found by divers and recovered in 2002. Because rising water levels flooded the cave where she died or was laid to rest, her skeleton was about 90 percent intact. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists calculated she was between 44 and 50 years old when she died, was about 5 feet tall and weighed about 128 pounds.

Anthropologists had long believed humans migrated to the Americas in a relatively short period from a limited area in northeast Asia across a temporary land corridor that opened across the Bering Strait during an ice age. But archaeologist Alejandro Terrazas says the picture now has become more complicated, because the reconstruction more resembles people from south-eastern Asian areas such as Indonesia.

"History isn't that simple," Terrazas said. "This indicates that the Americas were populated by several migratory movements, not just one or two waves from northern Asia across the
Susan Gillespie, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, noted that while the Bering land-bridge theory still has a lot of support, "the situation is messier than the straightforward scenario ... of big-game hunters chasing woolly mammoths over the exposed 'Bering bridge' to Alaska."

"Recently there has been more serious inquiry into the various origins of migrants, modes of transportation, and dates of when they got here," Gillespie said. "Dates for peopling of the Americas have been pushed way back, and with the finding of very early skeletal remains, the genetic/skeletal linkages to peoples of northeast Asia has become more cloudy."

But Gillespie cautioned against comparing a reconstructed face from 10,000 years ago to modern populations in places such as Indonesia, which also have probably changed over 10 millennia."You have to find skeletons of the same time period in Asia, or use genetic reconstructions, to make a strong connection, and cannot rely on modern populations," she wrote. "Do we have any empirical data on what Southeast Asian women looked like ... 10,000 years ago?"

Fascinating stuff! While Terrazas is going to have to come up with a lot more evidence than just facial features to prove his hypothesis it would not surprise me if it were subsequently proved that the population of the Americas was a lot more complicated than thought...

Another post that stems from Jams O’Donnell’s almost childlike wonder at the world we live in!