Dan Q
This checkin to GLCCBZ9M Melting Mouth ~ The Best Ben reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found with fleeblewidget while exploring along the lochside (and grabbing a few caches as we went), during a holiday to celebrate our anniversary. I was still peering at the numbers on my GPS when fleeblewidget jumped straight onto this one.
This checkin to GLCCBZ79 Melting Mouths ~ Crumble Cake Falls reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found with fleeblewidget while exploring along the lochside (and grabbing a few caches as we went), during a holiday to celebrate our anniversary. Cache is a little waterlogged and needs some TLC. TFTC.
This checkin to GLCC5ZEV Jass @ Jammy reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found with fleeblewidget on the first day of our narrowboating holiday (riding Nerys out of Cambrian Cruisers). We spent the night moored up just a little further North-East of the cache, overlooking a broad and beautiful valley to the South. TFTC.
My secret bonus segment to my review of Godzilla Huntley’s Family Vlog (“IRL”), Episode 11.
My review for Episode 11 of Godzilla Huntley’s Family Vlog, in which I mock Godzilla for what’ll probably turn out to be a mental illness, and then I’ll feel guilty. There’s a secret bonus video to complement it.
This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.oxforddnb.com/templates/article.jsp?articleid=30513
[since originally being published on Reddit, the resource in question has been moved to http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30513]
This link was originally posted to /r/TrueReddit. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/oana-romocea/romania-rosia-montana_b_3920165.html
This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20106985,00.html
LARRY WALTERS FOUND FAME AT 16.000 feet. On July 2,1982, the 33-year-old truck driver rigged 42 helium-filled weather balloons to a Sears lawn chair in San Pedro, Calif., and, as friends looked on in wondrous support, lifted off. The sight of Walters floating in the sky shocked pilots, who radioed perplexed local air-traffic controllers. Walters returned to Earth by using a pellet gun to shoot out some of the balloons and landed safely about 10 miles away in Long Beach. The 45-minute stunt earned him an appearance on The Tonight Show as well as a spot in a Timex watch ad, after which he quit his job to deliver motivational speeches. “People ask me if I had a death wish,” he said. “I tell them no, it was something I had to do.”
But the attention didn’t bring enduring happiness. Walters and his girlfriend of 15 years, who had helped him pay for his adventure, ended their relationship. His speaking career fizzled, and he worked only sporadically as a security guard. He sought solace by reading the Bible and walking in the San Gabriel Mountains, where he worked as a volunteer for the U.S. Forest Service. “It seemed like Larry came to the mountains because he was disappointed with the way his life was going,” says his friend Joyce Rios, a fellow volunteer ranger.
On Oct. 6, unable to deal with the world he had briefly delighted, Walters, 44, hiked to a favorite spot in the Angeles National Forest and ended his life with a single bullet through the heart. His mother, Hazel Dunham, did not disclose his death until Nov. 22. Although Walters did not write a suicide note, he had left a Bible with several passages marked at Dunham’s house in Mission Viejo, just before his death. Among them was John 16:32: “Indeed the hour is coming…each to his own, and will leave me alone. And yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.”
People
In my review of the tenth episode of Godzilla Huntley’s Family Vlog, I try to educate the family in the nature of acronyms and in US history. Who knew that vlog-reviews could be so educational?
This video makes reference to my dislike of Monopoly, which you can read about here.
Those of you who’ve met my family will probably already have an understanding of… what they’re like. Those of you who haven’t are probably about to gain one.
It started on a weekend in April, when my mother and I went to a Pink concert. The support act were a really fun band called Walk the Moon, who finished their energetic set with I Can Lift A Car, with its’ catchy chorus hook “Did you did you… did you know know: I can lift a car up, all by myself?” Over the weeks that followed, perhaps because of its earworm qualities, this song became sort-of an inside Rickroll between my mum and I.
At one point, she sent me a link to this video (also visible below), in which she is seen to lift a (toy) car. My sister Becky (also known as “Godzilla”) was behind the camera (and, according to the credits, everything else), and wrote in the doobly doo: “I think I’m gonna start doing family vlogs.”
She’d experimented with vlogging before, with a short series of make-up tutorials and a “test video post” on her blog, but this represented something new: an effort to show off her family (and guest appearances from her friends) as they really are; perhaps this was an effort to answer the inevitable question asked by people who’ve visited them – “are they always like that?” Perhaps that’s why she chose the name she did for the Family Vlog – “IRL”.
At the time of writing, Becky (on her YouTube channel) has produced eight such videos (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight), reliably rolling out one a week for the last two months. I thought they were pretty good – I thought that was just because they were my family, but I was surprised to find that it’s slowly finding a wider reach, as I end up speaking to friends who mention to me that they “saw the latest family vlog” (sometimes before I’ve had a chance to see it!).
Naturally, then, the only logical thing to do was to start producing my own YouTube series, on my channel, providing reviews of each episode of my sister’s vlog. I’ve managed to get seven out so far (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven), and I’d like to think that they’re actually better than the originals. They’re certainly more-concise, which counts for a lot, because they trim the original vlog down to just the highlights (interrupted only occasionally by my wittering atop them).
The widget above (or this playlist) will let you navigate your way through the entire body of vlogs, and their reviews (or lets you play them all back to back, if you’ve got two and a quarter hours to spare and a pile of brain cells you want killing). But if you’re just looking for a taster, to see if it’s for you, then here are some starting-out points:
Well done! You found the not-so-very-secret bonus to my review of Godzilla Huntley’s Family Vlog – Episode 7.
For die-hard fans of vlog reviews only.
The seventh of my reviews of Godzilla Huntley’s (CaptainAvAngel) weekly Family Vlog, “IRL”, which features a not-very-well-hidden link to a secret bonus review video. Keep an eye out for it!
This blog post is the sixth and final part in a series about buying our first house. In the fifth post, we finally exchanged contracts with the sellers after a long-running disagreement about who was going to repair the front door…
A series of days flew by in a cardboard-box-filled blur, and suddenly it was the last Friday in July – the day upon which our sale was completed. I’d run out of spare days of annual leave, so I was only able to justify taking the afternoon off to pick up a van, scoop up Ruth and Matt, get the keys to the new house, and meet JTA there.
The estate agents were conveniently just two doors down from a locksmith, so we got some keys cut to what we believed to be the new front door, while we were there. It’s also sandwiched between a funeral home and a florist, which makes it sort of a one-stop street when somebody dies and you want to put their house on the market.
We soon discovered that the “fix” that had ultimately been applied to the broken front door was simply to swap it for a different exterior door, from the inner porch. A little cheeky, and a little frustrating after all the fighting we’d done, but not the end of the world: we still had a perfectly good front door and – as we planned to use the annex as part of the main house, anyway, we were happy to take the door down and leave an open doorway, anyway.
A vacant house feels big and empty. Our new – large! – living room felt enormous. Meanwhile, packing up our old house – with its painted walls and wooden floors – was beginning to sound echoey as it became emptier.
We spent a long time working out which of the many keys we had fit which of the locks, as there were quite so many: there’s the front door, the inner front door, the other inner front door, the back door, the outer conservatory door, the inner conservatory door, the gate lock, the shed lock, the window locks, and a good handful of keys besides that we still haven’t identified the purpose of. It’s was like the previous owners just bought a pile of additional keys, just as a prank.
We’d rented a van over a long weekend in which to do the majority of the move, and we’d hired some burly men with a bigger van to move some of the heaviest furniture, and to collect a piano that we’d bought (yes, we have a piano now; booyah).
Very helpfully, Alec came and joined us, and helped run an enormous amount of boxes and furniture down and out of the three-stories of our old house, and in and up the three-stories of our new house. Why do we keep torturing ourselves with these tall buildings? At least our new staircases are a better shape for carrying mattresses up.
The weather stayed good, with only occasional showers (and thankfully, never when we were carrying soft furnishings between a van and a building) and one brief but wild thunderstorm (that we managed to avoid only with a quick re-arrangement of the van contents, slamming the doors, and sprinting for cover), and we worked hard, and we ended up a day ahead of schedule before we were finished.
In order to minimise the amount of the deposit that we might otherwise lose, from our old place, and because we rightly anticipated being too exhausted from the move to do all of the requisite cleaning ourselves, we’d hired some professionals. By this point, we weren’t even able to think in terms of money like normal people – by the time you’re spending five figures on tax and lawyers, you find it pretty easy to shrug off the cost of a team of cleaners!
This did mean that Ruth and I had to each work from home, from the old house, for one last day while we let the cleaners, gardener etc. in. We left in the old house an absolute minimum of furniture: a single desk, chair, laptop computer, cup (for water), router, and cables.
As I left the house for the last time, as empty and quiet as it was the day we first moved in, I felt a sense of serenity; a calm that came from a number of simultaneous realisations… that this was probably the last house move I’d have to do in a long while… that I finally lived somewhere that I didn’t (theoretically, at least) have to ask for somebody’s permission before I put a picture hook up or painted a wall… and that at long last I was paying off my own mortgage, rather than somebody else’s. It was the beginning of a new era.
Changing tack from the theme by which our houses have been named since 2010, our new home is called Greendale. And yes, there’s a website (albeit a little sparse, for now). There’s always a website.
There’ll be a housewarming party on 22nd September: if you’re a friend of one or more of us, you’ve probably received an invitation already. But if you haven’t – and it’s not impossible, because we weren’t sure of everybody’s best email addresses these days – and you expect you should have, let me know. It’s not that we don’t love you: we just don’t love you enough to remember to invite you to stuff, that’s all.
