Paratrooper's family flees home after Afghan spider 'kills dog'

A paratrooper's family have fled their home in Essex after a large and possibly deadly spider apparently hitched a ride back from Afghanistan with him.

Lorraine Griffiths, who believes the spider killed the family's pet dog, Bella, is refusing to move back into the Colchester house with her three children until the sandy-coloured creature, thought to be a camel spider, is captured.

Her husband, Rodney, returned home from a tour of duty in Helmand province in June, and she believes he accidentally brought the spider back with him. He has since returned to Afghanistan.

She said Bella had confronted the spider when it first appeared but ran out whimpering after the creature hissed at it.

"It seems too much of a coincidence that she died at the same time that we saw the spider," the 37-year-old told the East Anglian Daily Times.

She said the family, who have now moved in with her mother, had unsuccessfully laid traps for the spider, which she had identified using the internet.

An RSPCA spokeswoman said: "If it is the spider they believe it is, then normally they don't attack humans but could give a painful bite."

It "hissed" at her? It "hissed" at her?! I've said it before and I'll say it again: if I saw that thing in my flat I think that I would literally die of the shock.

Article found here.

The Vegan Organic Network

My Granddad still has one of the best gardens I've ever seen and has passed on an obsession: since I was able to walk I've loved helping plants to grow. It is still perhaps the simplest and greatest of joys. The most inspiring and wise people I've ever met have all shared this passion and this year has been just incredible in terms of this. I've decided to write about each person and associated event/s one by one...




















In keeping with permaculture principles, our very own local hero is Graham Cole. Jamie and I had an instant affinity with Graham when we first met him at our local seed swap three years ago: he was vegan and liked to grow veg organically/permaculturally (is that a word?!). Every year we end up talking to him for longer and longer! This year we visited him and his equally lovely partner Diane at their home, where Graham works as a gardener, growing fruit and veg on a HUGE estate. He does all this vegan organically, which is even more amazing considering he works for a Lord and Lady, who in all likeliness (the Class War in me would say) could be right up their pampered arses about such things.

The Vegan Organic Network are the most important progression for an ethical future - and especially for any vegan who buys an organic vegbox. There's not many options for a combination of the two, despite it being obvious as it's the natural way of things anyway. If crop rotation and permaculture principles of dealing with pest problems are applied instead of chemicals, then why oh why do organic and biodynamic farms use manure and the slaughterhouse remains of animals to achieve fertility??? Veganic growing, by contrast, is the most natural and sustainable way. Most vegans already know that a plant based diet, as well as being more ethical, is far more sustainable in terms of land use. Far too much arable land (as well as food and water!) is used to keep animals for meat production. The same amount of land could be used to feed thousands more people, as well as grow green manure.

We visited Graham and Diane's twice this summer and also went to a talk Graham did on Vegan Organics at a local cafe. At each of these events Graham spent a little bit of time speaking about green manures. Green manures are plants that can be introduced as a part of the crop rotation cycle, to improve the soil's structure and fertility naturally. This is as opposed to churning up the growing beds (either by breaking your own back digging or relying on fuel-driven machinery) and upsetting the delicate life forms which have a symbiotic relationship with the soil, causing poor soil health, nutrient deficiencies and the false need to use animal products or byproducts to correct all of this. Mulching and using composted matter are other ways of achieving fertility. But on a large scale, and with recent food crises in mind, green manures are by far the most efficient.

So this year we've experimented with a small patch of green manure, to save bare soil and consequent erosion, in between sowings. We've also made our own fertiliser to Graham's recipe (just nettles and water - this makes a concentrate which you can then dilute. Warning: this can be extremely stinky!) and used it to help our ailing apple trees, which are in pots (and ailing no more I'm glad to say!) The two strawberry plants we bought from Graham in Spring have now multiplied to twelve, through sustained summer-runner-staking, and finally, we eventually got around to joining the VON!!

Thanks to Graham for all the help and advice, food, book loans, the goji plant (I tried all Spring to grow one from seed with bagel luck!) and for sharing his own garden with us, giving us the chance to see all this theory in action.

Graham Cole is a Trustee for the Vegan Organic Network.
Please visit their website, where you will find more information and the latest news, as well as downloadable pdf files on a range of related topics. There is also an online subscription facility (£16 for the year, concessions and family membership options available). Aside from donating to a worthy cause in need of support, you will also then be invited to various VON community events, as well as the lucky recipient of "Growing Green" magazine four times a year, to which you can contribute to yourself!

Btw: the vegan society also has a good page on vegan organic growing here.

Save Totoro Forest

"It is not just about one specific forest. Totoro Forest represents the spirit of our childhood."

-----Totoro Forest Committee

http://www.totoroforestproject.org/

Killer of Kongs

Oh Cleo...

No Jed, you can't have that one.

No more pictures plz...

Lunch on campus

Some pictures from my lunch break...

Another pigeon

Suspicious cat

I done a lolcat...

Shame on me.

猫百科 １００cats

I found this awesome photo set on Flickr a few days ago called '猫百科 １００cats' by mika_tofu, and I wanted to share it with you. Below are a few of my favourites, but you can see the full set and leave your comments here.

Thanks mika_tofu!

Shady characters

Too many cats

This Russian lady is the owner of 130 cats and she keeps them all in her small Moscow flat. She's been taking in stray cats for 15 years and giving them food and shelter. She tiled her walls and floors so that they're easy to clean and the neighbors don't complain about smells from her apartment. The cats are fed twice a day with dry food and porridge.

Golf anyone?

Ha.Ha.Ha.Ha.Ha.Ha.Ha.Ha.

Serves you right.

Our time is running out

In just 100 months' time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change. Recent research by the NEF (New Economics Foundation) found that 100 months from today we will reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer likely that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold.

Today is just another Friday in August. Drowsy and close. Office workers' minds are fixed on the weekend, clock-watching, waiting perhaps for a holiday if your finances have escaped the credit crunch and rising food and fuel prices. In the evening, trains will be littered with abandoned newspaper sports pages, all pretending interest in the football transfers. For once it seems justified to repeat TS Eliot's famous lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

But does it have to be this way? Must we curdle in our complacency and allow our cynicism about politicians to give them an easy ride as they fail to act in our, the national and the planet's best interest? For example, only a government that was sleepwalking or in a chemically induced coma would countenance building a third runway at Heathrow, or a new generation of coal-fired power stations such as the proposed new plant at Kingsnorth in Kent.

In terms of what is possible in times of economic stress and isolation, Cuba provides an embarrassing example to show up our national tardiness. In a single year in 2006 Cuba rolled-out a nationwide scheme replacing inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with low-energy alternatives. Prior to that, at the end of the cold war, after losing access to cheap Soviet oil, it switched over to growing most of its food for domestic consumption on small scale, often urban plots, using mostly low-fossil-fuel organic techniques. Half the food consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city's own gardens. Cuba echoed and surpassed what America achieved in its push for "Victory Gardening" during the second world war. Back then, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, between 30-40% of vegetables for domestic consumption were produced by the Victory Gardening movement.

So what can our own government do to turn things around today? Over the next 100 months, they could launch a Green New Deal, taking inspiration from President Roosevelt's famous 100-day programme implementing his New Deal in the face of the dust bowls and depression. Last week, a group of finance, energy and environmental specialists produced just such a plan. Next comes a rolling programme to overhaul the nation's heat-leaking building stock. This will have the benefit of massively cutting emissions and at the same time tackling the sore of fuel poverty by creating better insulated and designed homes. A transition from "one person, one car" on the roads, to a variety of clean reliable forms of public transport should be visible by the middle of our 100 months. Similarly, weaning agriculture off fossil-fuel dependency will be a phased process.

The end result will leave the people of Britain more secure in terms of the food and energy supplies, and with a more resilient economy capable of weathering whatever economic and environmental shocks the world has to throw at us.

- Andrew Simms ~ policy director and head of the climate change programme at NEF (the new economics foundation).

Amen.

Read the full article here.