Resurgent Plums

Resurgent Plums

Ah, that sounds a bit rude, and yes the picture is of apples. Thing is, we had a plum tree and it was brilliant until it got smothered by some evil fungal blight. Wasps loved all the rotting fruit and gloopy sap dripping out of it, but it had to go. We cut it down and planned to put something else there, but this year it sprouted again and now appears free of mould. There’s a load of suckers popping up too, so we will soon have a thicket of plum trees!

We watched “Where Eagles Dare” (again) over the weekend. It’s more of a heist movie than a war one, which might be why I like it. It’s a bit silly though, there’s one bit where after they’ve been shooting soldiers left right and centre with their mysteriously silent guns, they for some reason have to sneak up on a radio operator. He of course spots them and sets off the alarm, advancing the plot. It’s a bit of a thin ruse because of the aforementioned silent guns and the fact they’re in German uniforms in an impregnable German fortress and speak fluent German and at this point no one (alive) is any the wiser. If they’d just walked right in and said hello there wouldn’t be any need for alarm. Plot devices eh? Tsk!

This online recreation of Byrne’s Euclid got a lot of mentions by the right people, and there’s a blog post by Nicholas Rougeux on how he made it. I admire things like this for the sheer bloodyminded attention to detail and thoughtfulness involved. One thing bothers me about it and it’s entirely a problem with me, is that I find it so difficult to read anything with ‘ct’ and ‘st’ ligatures, it’s like my brain suddenly has a lisp, and the long s just renders as an f in my mind. Just can’t get over it.

Another thought occurs, in that while Europe was going to shit after the collapse of the Roman Empire and was busy burning libraries and so on, things like Euclid’s Elements and other works from the ancient world were kept safe, and expanded upon, by the Islamic world.

Is there a good app for iOS to resize and compress images? I’ve tried a few and they’re the skeeziest of sketchiest dodgy apps you could imagine. It feels like all the photo and drawing apps have decided we’re all on high bandwidth connections now so they don’t need to provide any options. I have to use some online thing or go use ImageOptim on my Mac. Frustrating.