Gerry Anderson programmes

What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

I remember so many Gerry Anderson classic TV shows from my childhood. The first ones were puppet shows:

Fireball XL5

Stingray

Thunderbirds

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

Then mixed puppet and live action

Joe 90.

Then sci-fi live action

UFO

Space 1999

I also watched

Dr Who

The Tomorrow People

White Horses

Star Trek

Blake’s 7

The Champions

Department S

The Avengers

Is it any wonder I’ve always been interested in Science fiction?

Diamond prompt

It’s about time I tried to join in again so here’s a digital drawing attempt of a diamond stone for the prompt diamond for #bandofsketchers.

Drawn in the Sketchbook app on my phone. I’ve missed several weeks of drawing and sketching. I just haven’t felt well enough to do it but I wanted to try. Watch out, more to come! It was interesting to try and a crystalline symmetry.

Yellow at the lake

I enjoyed painting this a few years ago, I used a phone app to change the texture of a photo then worked off that. This is acrylic on canvas. I keep meaning to do a few more pictures like this. It’s just deciding what images to work from. I’ve hit a bit of a block recently so I’m hoping if I do something like this it might encourage me to do more.

Wet

It’s a bank Holiday weekend in the UK so of course we are having 60 to 70 mile an hour winds and very heavy rain in places. We had a bit of rain this morning but not as bad as other areas. Scotland was one of the worst places with very stormy weather. And Leeds festival was hit yesterday, with video of tents blown away in the wind. A food festival was damaged and all the market stalls knocked down. And an articulated truck was almost blown over on the Humber Bridge near Hull. The bridge was later closed to traffic until the storm had passed.

The weather might be a bit better tomorrow, but it’s almost inevitable that with it being a bank Holiday that it won’t be that good. Meanwhile temperatures have been mostly cooler than normal this summer. We have had a few hot spells, but not to the same extent as recently. Apparently the jet stream is to blame and the remains of hurricanes from across the Atlantic coming our way. Happy holiday!

It hasn’t changed

What’s your favorite recipe?

It will always be trifle

Ingredients

Jelly powder or cubes to make up about a pint of jelly. Choose your favourite flavour.

Fresh fruit, I use raspberries, blueberries or strawberries.

Blancmange powder or if preferred custard powder to make a pint.

Pint of milk.

Two tablespoons sweetner or sugar.

Fresh double cream, choose how much you want.

Toppings, can be glace cherries, or chocolate sprinkled on top or hundreds and thousands.

Make up a pint of jelly /sugar free jelly with about 3/4 of a pint of boiling water and a little slosh of port or sherry and add raspberries or blueberries or strawberries or a mixture of all three (I don’t use sponge fingers as they are too sugary.).

Let cool then store in the fridge overnight to set thoroughly.

Next mix blancmange powder or custard powder with a small amount of milk from a pint and sugar or sweetener to taste.

Put the rest of the milk on to boil, as it starts to boil carefully pour into the custard or blancmange powder mix, stir it in and then pour back into the pan, bring to the boil while stirring and let it thicken on the hob over about a minute.

Turn off the heat and let it cool. To stop it being too hot to pour onto the jelly (it will melt) place the pan of custard/blancmange  into a larger pan of cold water (without getting the mixture wet) this allows it to cool, stir it every few minutes to stop it going lumpy and setting. When it is cool enough pour over the jelly.

Finally whisk the cream into stiff peaks and put on top of the custard/blancmange.

The sugar free version is nice to have if you are diabetic but still want a treat.

Serve in nice glass bowls if you can. This gives 6 good sized portions.

Inchworm

My friend posted a video of a caterpillar stretching and then the back end moves forward to meet tne front so the middle of it rises up in a hump.

I posted the question “Inchworm” and she agreed.

Then I remembered a song “Inchworm, Inchworm, measuring the daffodils?” from a film I watched in the 1960s. So I googled it. It’s actually “measuring the Marigolds”. It’s a film with Danny Kaye from 1952 about Hans Christian Andersen.

Wikipedia says:

The song’s lyrics express a carpe diem sentiment, with the singer noting that the inchworm of the title has a “business-like mind”, and is blind to the beauty of the flowers it encounters:Two and two are fourFour and four are eightThat’s all you have on your business-like mindTwo and two are fourFour and four are eightHow can you be so blind?

Subsequent verses include the lines “Measuring the marigolds, you and your arithmetic / You’ll probably go far” and “Seems to me you’d stop and see / How beautiful they are”

Loesser wrote a counterpoint chorus that, sung by itself, has become popular as a children’s song because of its arithmetical chorus:Two and two are fourFour and four are eightEight and eight are sixteenSixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

In the film, a children’s chorus sings the contrapuntal “arithmetic” section over and over inside a small classroom, dolefully and by rote, while Andersen, listening just outside, gazes at an inchworm crawling on the flowers and sings the main section of the song. Loesser loved the intellectual challenge of such contrapuntal composition, which he also did in other works such as Tallahassee.[1]

Water storage

How would you design the city of the future?

Cities are working out how to store water and prevent flooding, with massive tunnels below them to allow water to flow away. Storage spaces to trap water then release it slowly as the waters receded. Having beavers upstream in rivers to dam and slow the flow of water downstream. And also reinstating rush beds or filter beds to hold onto the fluid and clean any sewage that has leaked into waterways. You could also build buildings up on higher ground or stilts. Or raise buildings in heavy rain or storm conditions. There is still a lot we can do to combat climate change.