Nuclear weapons

Posted on January 18, 2024 Posted in UncategorizedTagged bloganuary, bloganuary-2024-18, Curie, dailyprompt, Disaster, discovery, Fears, Medicine, nuclear bomb, nuclear weapons, Thinking2 Comments

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Yes, I know that there are weapons that have as much power as nuclear bombs but they are big and heavy and more difficult to lob at your enemies. I think we should un-invent nuclear weapons.

I would still keep power stations if they were built with safety features that stop incidents like three mile island, chernobyl and fukushima. Mainly because of the horrific damage nuclear material can cause. It’s tasteless and does not smell and you can’t feel it, but it burns and causes cell damage and death.

Sometimes radioactive isotopes are used in medical techniques such as imaging areas affected by tumors or other illnesses. I would keep these substances. I’m glad that the elements were discovered by scientists such as Marie and Pierre Curie, but turning it into bombs was, I believe, a terrible mistake. I realise they ended the second world war but the worry is that mutually assured destruction is still a serious possibility.

Lost lens and Masking tape….

Posted on May 4, 2022 Posted in Sketching, UncategorizedTagged Art, Broken, Diary, Disaster, Help, Kitchen, Lens, Lost, optician, Shouting, SketchingLeave a comment

Screaming for help from hubby this morning. I was just cleaning my glasses but with my shaking arm I wobbled and dropped them onto the kitchen floor. I picked them up, but a lens had come out. I tried to find it but having one focused and one unfocused eye didn’t help. Started shouting, but hubby was upstairs and is deaf. I looked all around, the eye with the missing lens closed so I was just looking out of the lens still in my glasses. I moved the fridge back a couple of inches very gingerly and moved the bin, no sign. I shouted some more and went upstairs and woke my hubby. Help! Please help! He came down and straight away found it! Half way down the kitchen under the overhanging base of the sink (how did it get there? Must have skittered across the floor). The lens wouldn’t fit in very well. So.. Tape? I found masking tape, and parcel tape, then a very broad roll of sellotape. I managed to cut a thin strip. The lens is just about in place. I’m going to get the opticians to fix it later…. So of course I decided to illustrate the glasses!

Idyllic?

Posted on July 18, 2021July 31, 2021 Posted in UncategorizedTagged blue skies, Disaster, Hot, looking back, Memories, Sunny, Time, TV, Walk, WalkingLeave a comment

Hot day, blue sky, barely a cloud in the sky, cattle in a field, reflections in the canal. Memories are made of this, blues and greens, shade and light.

I have memories of days like this, maybe not as hot, but they were calm and happy. I remember a time when things were not scary. Oh there were diseases around, and awful things were happening. But I was a child. I didn’t know about them.

Then I remembered the disaster at Aberfan. There was a land slip of old mining waste. It slid down a hill and landed on a school. Children and adults died. That was the first TV report I remember seeing.

Now rivers rise and places flood all the time, “hundred year events” happen every ten or twenty years. Storms dump three months water on a country while other places suffer heat domes and wild fires.

Will the wonderful days of summer be once in 100 days instead? Maybe we need to sort it out NOW!

I wrote this a few days ago but for some reason it did not publish? Now on a grey, dismal day I look back after another walk and Im sad it wasnt like this, but glad it was a lot cooler!

Almost a disaster!

Posted on August 17, 2020August 17, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Coursework, Disaster, Learning, Life, Luck, PowerPoint, Slides, Text, Word, WritingLeave a comment

I decided to type my work in PowerPoint because I struggled with word documents jumping around and the text ending up half way on one page and half on another.

PowerPoint relies on slides, so you have to fit your text into a space which is of limited size.

I’d created a new one and went to start typing, and bam! A page of text just disappeared. What? Where? For some reason I couldn’t see the back icon, I couldn’t restore the page! Panic!

Then I remembered that I had copied the text into a word document because I couldn’t find a word count on PowerPoint!

Phew. Restored slide. Lesson learnt. Now all I need to do is stop the cat jumping on the keyboard!

Five minutes to save the world

Posted on March 31, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Bad story, Creative writing, Disaster, Distopian, Random, Reprieved, Sci fi, Thinking, What if?Leave a comment

Time marched on. Suzanne looked up into the blue sky and saw a bird up high. But the bird was blowing a line of smoke from its back and its wings did not flap. What was it?

She remembered her childhood, when the Great death came. Each of her grandparents, and her mother were gone in a week. Her father tried to raise her, but he had to work and earn money. So he was always away in the woods, cutting and sawing for people who could not gather firewood. They lived in an old house. Central heating did not work, no one knew how to fix it, and there was no longer a gas supply.

She looked up again, the bird, or whatever it was, had flown over the horizon, and the smoke was disappearing into the beauty of the blue sky.

Over in Omereca, a man stood by a screen, his hand hovering over the red button. Yes or no? He had the choice. The clock was running down. Would he press and destroy everything?

His aide ran in as the clocked ticked to 11.55pm.

Sir, he said quietly, the plane, its come back! They have images, there are people there, they saw woodsmoke.

The Restidebt took his hand away slowly from the button. Now we start to rebuild he said as they left the room together.

Almost a Sacred Duty.

Posted on September 4, 2019September 4, 2019 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Art, Audley, Coal mining, Coroners inquiry, Disaster, Explosion, Halmerend, Minnie pit, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Play, TheatreLeave a comment

We went to see a production of Almost a Sacred Duty tonight. A play and presentation at the New Vic theatre. The start was a brief history of what had happened in 1918 by a local historian. This was followed by a play with people from the present and three characters from one hundred years ago. It was about the Minnie pit disaster in 1918, the 18 months it took to find the 156 bodies of men and boys working in the mine who died in the disaster and about 80 miners who survived.

The inquest was held in 1919 after the last body was found. After the hearing, which took weeks, the conclusion was that dust in the mine had contributed to the explosion although nobody was found accountable.

The people acting were playing present day residents who were commemorating the disaster and also played people from 1919 who were at the inquest. The whole thing was only about 45 minutes long but it was really good.

Jim Worgan is a mining historian who gave a short presentation.

Sue Moffat wrote the play and it was directed by Anna Poole. There were three professional actors plus a community cast and the play was supported by the Minnie pit centenary commemoration group, the heritage fund, and New Vic borderlines.

The play used information from William Cooke, a local historian and writer who had given permission to use his book ‘The Minnie pit : Disaster and Controversy”.

Mallaband-Brown

Tag: Disaster