Eh?

Okay - perhaps Dee shouldn't go away without me in future. Without her calm, reassuring presence I've decided to get fit. What better way than to enter myself into a triathlon?

I currently get out of breath climbing the stairs, have knackered knees and am one of the laziest people I've ever met.

So all I've got to do is race 599 health freaks over 16 lengths of the pool, run outside, get changed and then cycle 20km up and down very steep hills then get changed again to run the final 5km back.

Aiming for survival, and finishing the race.

Will be happy with 600th!

Updates from time to time - if it goes VERY quiet then I'll be in a hospital/morgue.

The Hand of God?

Maybe, maybe not but a cool picture nevertheless .

Coming home?

Strange, but that's how I think of going out to Australia. Yesterday, after much faffing and almost a whole afternoon spent trying to buy flights that had already sold out (thanks Emirates!) I finally bought my ticket!

Only 258 days to go.......I can smell the Eucalyptus trees already

And then it won't be too long until it's a one-way ticket - and I can get out of this bankrupt country.

Not to forget the leg on the new Airbus. I worked on the Airbus project when I was an aerospace chemist (feels like a lifetime ago) so should you ever decide to take a key to an A380 you'll uncover an exceptionally well designed primer. Took me nearly a week to get the drying characteristics right - the only downside to the job was literally watching paint dry.

The upside was (a) being able to tell girls (quite rightly) that I was a rocket scientist
(b) designing the colour schemes for Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Thomas
Cook, Thompson, Aeroflot (less proud of that one) and the Eurofighter
(c) the projects I'm still not allowed to talk about under the Official Secrets Act!
(d) NASA projects

So whenever you see one of those planes, you can think of me!

Where have all the Cobblers gone?

How very odd. Having bought a pair of shoes a mere 6 months ago and already having knackered the heels and soles (hard miles repping you see) I decided to have them re-heeled and soled rather than wasting another £60 on a pair of shoes. Thrifty eh?

The shoes themselves are rather nice (Jasper Conran darling - got them in a sale!) and were in perfectly good nick. I googled, went through the phone book and asked around and there are only 3 cobblers in the whole of Hull!

It could be complete bollocks of course, but i remember there being a cobblers/key cutting place on every little parade of shops when i were a lad....and now there's 3 in a whole city?!?

Found a dingy shed called the Heel'n'Key Bar where I got new heels and soles which look better than the originals for the princely sum of £14.

Bargain.

I don't need there to be any more cobblers now, I've found the best one ever....but I reckon there should be more.

When i'm president...

Supermassive Black Hole....

Baaa da daaa da da da ba da dalladadaaaaooowwnnn...

A view of the central region of the Perseus galaxy cluster, one of the most massive objects in the universe, shows the effects that a relatively small but supermassive black hole can have millions of miles beyond its core. Astronomers studying this photo, taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, determined that sound waves emitted by explosive venting around the black hole are heating the surrounding area and inhibiting star growth some 300,000 light-years away. "In relative terms, it is as if a heat source the size of a fingernail affects the behavior of a region the size of Earth," said Andrew Fabian of Cambridge University.

Photograph courtesy NASA/CXC/IoA/A. Fabian et al.

Meet Nanobama!

This image shows the tiniest representation of the new US president yet. Each face is built from roughly 150 million carbon nanotubes . As the artist/mechanical engineer that made them, John Hart, puts it "that's about how many Americans voted on November 4". Although, of course, only about 53% of those nanotubes actually voted Obama......

Picture Perfect

Some more stunning shots, this time from the 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year hosted by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife magazine.

The show by Catriona Parfitt (UK) Young Wildlife photographer of the year. No lion in its right mind would dare to attack a grown giraffe: a well-placed kick from one of those long legs could be fatal. Yet as Catriona and assembled gemsbok watched one evening near a waterhole at Hobatere Lodge in Damaraland, Namibia, this young male lion repeatedly harassed the thirsty giraffe.

First encounter by Brian Skerry (USA) Winner of The Underwater World category"Swimming along the ocean bottom with a 14-metre long, 70-tonne whale," says Brian, "was the single most incredible animal encounter I have ever had."The picture was taken some 22 metres down off the Auckland Islands, far south of New Zealand.

Snowstorm leopard by Steve Winter (USA) Wildlife photographer of the year and winner of the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife Steve had taken a number of pictures of snow leopards between January and July, but the shot he was after eluded him: a snow leopard in a snowfall with a backdrop that conjured up the atmosphere of its extreme environment. Checking his camera one freezing May morning, he found this snow leopard gazing back at him exactly in the place in the frame he had hoped it would be.Today, the snow leopard is at crisis point, hunted as a predator of livestock but also for its luxurious coat and its bones.

Frodo's prize by Cyril Ruoso (France) Winner of the Animal Behaviour: Mammals categoryFrodo, now 31 and going grey, may have lost the alpha status he held for many years, but he is still the biggest, most powerful and most skilled hunter of the Kasekela chimps in Tanzania's Gombe National Park.Usually the chimps go for monkeys. This time Frodo, egged on by the frantic screeches of the rest of the group, had caught something much more unusual: a bushpig. There had clearly been a frenzied tug-of-war, because the bushpig's body was ripped in two.

Deadlock by David Maitland (UK) Winner of the Animal Behaviour: All Other Animals categoryIt was at about midnight when David discovered this life-and-death struggle. A cat-eyed tree-snake, coiled around a branch, was locked in an embrace with a Morelet's treefrog - a critically endangered species."The snake had failed to get its jaws around the whole of the frog's head," says David. "It wouldn't let go, presumably because the frog would have leapt away. But it couldn't swallow it, either."