21 June 2015 (Sunday) - Streatham Kite Day

This morning as I looked at the Internet I was somewhat perturbed to see that the world is ending in nine days time. On June 30th there is going to be a leap-second. Leap-seconds are being added to clocks every few years because the Earth's rotation is slowing down. It does that. Most spinning things tend to slow down. There's no real need to add a leap-second to a clock, but people seem to like to assign night and day according to clock times and occassionally adding leap-seconds keeps everything straight.
But the amazing people at MessageToEagle dot com have realised that it's vaguely possible that some computers might vaguely be confused by a leap-second. And therefore it's the end of the Internet and consequently the entire world.
The fact that this has all happened before and no one was any the wiser is neither here nor there to MessageToEagle dot com. After all, why spoil a perfectly good crackpot theory?

I did see that a new geo-series has gone live not too far away. If we do survive past the end of the month I may well go for a little geo-stroll on Thursday 2 July if any of my loyal readers are up for it.

We then went for a little drive. Having collected the Bat from Smarden we made our way to the wicked city; despite a sat-nav hiccup we were soon at Streatham Common where there was a one-day kite-flying event. We soon met up with old friends, and we had a bit of a gossip. Pausing only briefly to get tomato ketchup down my shirt I was soon co-opted to anchor the man-lifting kite. It is something that I used to to all the time; it is something I miss. Mind you I wasn't completely happy with the anchoring arrangements. The double-lined method with elasticated roping that we used to use was much more flexible and safer when the pilot crashed. Which he did several times...

With "er indoors TM" spirit kite eventually untangled there was a spirit-fly-in; people either love or loathe those things. And in a spirit of being part of the community we persuaded three policemen (and a rather foxy police lady) to help anchor the man-lifting. It would have worked well had a passing looney not decided to end the event for everyone by taking it on to herself to remove the taping marking out the arena area and loudly announcing that the event was all over.
We left the police arresting her, said our goodbyes and went back to Irene and Terry's place where we sat in the sunshine for a while before scoffing ourselves silly on a rather good but of curry.

Having taken some photos of the fun we had today I then slept all the way home...


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