Wednesday’s #SOPASTRIKE in numbers
On Wednesday, alongside thousands of other sites across the internet, Another Kind Of Mind went dark in support of the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign. Despite the fact that said campaign still has some way to go, the blackout appears to have had quite an impact already. In advance of next Tuesday’s Senate vote, here are a few eye-opening stats about what has been called “the largest online protest in the history of the internet”:
10,000,000 – The total number of signatories to all anti-SOPA petitions
4,500,000 – The number of people who signed Google’s anti-SOPA petition alone
3,000,000+ – The approximate number of emails sent in support of the anti-SOPA campaign on Wednesday
2,583,000+ – The approximate number of tweets referring to SOPA/PIPA and the protest on Wednesday alone
511,111 – The number of people who ‘liked’ Mark Zuckerberg’s SOPA statement on Facebook (as of today)
115,000+ - The number of (recorded) sites taking part in the protest
45,000 – The number of WordPress sites involved in the protest (including Another Kind Of Mind!)
Another Kind Of Mind supports #SOPASTRIKE
Syon Lane Community Allotment: Updated
Some new photos from Syon Lane Community Allotment, showing the site looking very different in winter! For some of my previous photos from Syon Lane, see here and here.
Quote of the Day: Happy Birthday Jimmy Page
If I ever really felt depressed, I would just start putting on all my old records that I played as a kid, because the whole thing that really lifted me then still lifted me during those other times. It was good medicine for me, and it still does that for me when I put something on. Isn’t it wonderful that we’ve got all that good medicine? I think it’s got to be all part of our DNA, this mass communication through music. That’s what it is. It’s got to be, hasn’t it? Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn’t let me down.
Today is Led Zeppelin guitar legend Jimmy Page’s 68th birthday. To celebrate the day on which one of the greatest and most influential rock guitarists of all time was born, I found this fantastic quote from the great man himself. It comes from an interview he gave to The Scotsman in 2010 – and, personally, I couldn’t agree more with his comments….
The Solstice Fire
Mulled Wine: Mulling it over
Mulled wine (image by maoquai via Flickr)
We drink it every Christmas (in fact, I’ve already been glugging away at it over this last weekend!), and many of us see it as an integral part of a ‘traditional’ festive celebration. These days, you can even buy it ready-made in most supermarkets – although it really does taste much nicer if you make it from scratch (see below for some easy recipes to try).
We all know that it’s a spicy and warming seasonal tipple, but what exactly is mulled wine? Where does it come from? How ‘traditional’ is it? Has the recipe changed over time? And, more precisely, what on earth is ‘mulling’ when it’s at home anyway?
Put very simply, to ‘mull’ wine means to heat and spice it, often adding fruit to the mixture too. This process infuses the wine with the spice (and fruit) flavours, giving it that familiar warming kick. Other alcoholic drinks can also be mulled, including cider, mead, ale and brandy, as well as fruit juices.
Variations on this theme of adding spice to booze have been popular for centuries in many European countries, and there are historical records of a number of old English recipes for mulled wine – some of which date back as far as the fourteenth century, although these recipes were almost certainly very old even then.
Feed the Birds
Goldfinches on feeder (image via Wikipedia)
After a strangely warm autumn, winter is seriously kicking in now, with snow and winds of 100mph and more in some parts of the UK during the last week – and this stormy weather looks set to continue. It’s getting bitingly cold for us humans, but can you imagine what this weather is like for wildlife; especially for the birds in your garden?
Birds can really suffer in such severely cold conditions, particularly young adults and the old or sick. They all need food with a high fat content to help them stay warm in their roosts during the cold winter nights, and if they can’t find enough suitable wild food, they simply won’t survive.
Which is where you come in. As the colder weather begins to bite, putting some food out for the birds in your garden could help them get through the icy winter by supplementing their meagre wild diet at this time of the year – and hopefully give them a better chance of breeding come next spring.
Feeding the birds in your garden (or even on your balcony) is also an immensely rewarding process. It’s fascinating to watch as various types of birds visit your feeder or bird table – in my mum’s small suburban back garden, for example, just one bird feeder brings in more than half a dozen different species, including a very cheeky, very territorial robin who acts like he owns the place!
Festive Felonies
You might remember that some time ago I blogged about the weird things people leave behind in hotel rooms. So naturally I was fascinated to discover that a large hotel chain has recently released data on the equally random things light-fingered guests liberate from their establishments across the country.
It seems that people indulge in a serious amount of hotel thievery at this time of year – and I’m not just talking about bottles of shampoo or those fluffy bathrobes either. Everything from tinsel, fairy lights and baubles to a Christmas tree and an entire Nativity scene have been pinched by guests from various Best Western hotels in the run-up to Christmas!
And that’s not all. People must check out and bring a Transit van round to the back of the car park. How else would they get a leather two piece suite home? Or a suit of armour? Or a twelve foot model Concorde? Or a papier mache full-size model of a man? Or even the entire movable contents and furniture from a hotel room (except the bed)?
You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front recently. The reason for that is a very exciting one – my friends at The Crisis of Civilization asked me to help them set up their brand new website, which went live (after a lot of hard work from the web team!) last week.
There’s already lots to read, watch and listen to on the new site. You can find out more about the crises featured in the film, discover how The Crisis of Civilization came to be made, watch some of the archive footage used in the film, read how artist Lucca Benney created the film’s distinctive animated sections, listen to radio interviews with the director Dean Puckett and the writer and narrator Nafeez Ahmed, or even learn how you can help by subtitling the film or by putting on a screening yourself!
And on the subject of screenings, I have some equally exciting news…
After last week’s successful London premiere at the Whirled Cinema, we have three more FREE London screenings of The Crisis of Civilization coming up in the next few weeks! Forget the consumerist excess of Christmas and come join the team for one, two or all of these:
15th December 2011 - Transition Brixton, 6-8 Robsart Street, SW9 0DJ – 7pm
16th December 2011 - UBS Bank of Ideas, 29 Sun Street, EC2M 2PT – 7.30pm
19th December 2011 - Tent City University at Occupy LSX, EC4M 8AD – 8pm
For more information on how to get to these venues, visit The Crisis of Civilization website here.
Quote of the Day: Back in the USSR?
I love this.
Rock ‘n’ roll has always been rebel music. Or at least that’s how it started out anyway. And nowhere was it more rebellious to be into western rock music than the Soviet bloc of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a place where authoritarian leaders frowned upon western pop cultural icons like rock bands and blue jeans.
In the USSR, the government saw itself as all-powerful, and what it said went. This was reiterated by the two major media organs of the state: Pravda (or ‘Truth’), the official voice of the Russian Communist Party, and Izvestia (or ‘The News’), the official media outlet of the Soviet government.
These were powerful papers, but many Russians naturally took their on-message pronouncements with a rather large pinch of salt – hence the old Soviet joke that there was no news in the Truth and no truth in the News! It seems in some ways almost inevitable, then, that western music – the Beatles in particular – would have such an impact on Russian youth culture.
