Random pix

[fontoponto]

Just a pic from my city, from the actual street I live in, about 81,5 years ago, when World War II ended and Eindhoven region was liberated by the US 101st Airborne Division and the Second British Army. With what's going on these days in the world, I wanted to show what actual liberation looks like.

Coming from a country of the wrong side of history, my home town was not liberated but annihilated by 98%. I think it's nice to see larger cities that still have their old buildings standing strong.
Obviously mankind will never learn from their mistakes.
Sorry for OT...

 

[PapaBear]

Man, as a dude with 6 herniations and a nearly non-existent L5-S1, I'm so happy for you!
Take your time with the recovery. Feeling better is great but give it all the healing time it needs. I learned that the hard way with my second rotator cuff surgery.
Pace the PT when you get to it but don't slack. Hope many better days are ahead for ya.

Yeah I lost my L5-S1 back in 2012 had a microdiscectomy done after I fractured the disc in a fall.

 

[tegendemuur]

Coming from a country of the wrong side of history, my home town was not liberated but annihilated by 98%. I think it's nice to see larger cities that still have their old buildings standing strong.
Obviously mankind will never learn from their mistakes.
Sorry for OT...

Well, Nazis are Nazis, so a few days later it looked like this...



But that was beside the point I tried to make.

What is your home town? I'll never let a chance to learn something pass. Especially history. It helps in making sense of today's troubles. Not that there's a solution towards peace to be found; just peace of mind. Humans as a whole will never move foward. People are cool though.

It's how you end up with statues like this one... "This statue is a tribute to him and all who do good in evil times.”

"In the autumn of 1944, as World War II raged across Europe, a moment of extraordinary humanity occurred in the Dutch village of Goirle. On 6 October 1944, just three days after his eighteenth birthday, Karl-Heinz Rosch saved two Dutch kids from certain death. Yet, this act of courage would remain largely unknown for more than sixty years because Rosch was a German soldier in the Wehrmacht—an enemy in an occupied land."

The Heroic Deed That Earned Karl-Heinz Rosch a Statue

www.amusingplanet.com

 

[tegendemuur]

Looking around for four tree species for cuttings, for penjing / bonsai, and found my Little Louisiana (bald cypress).

I grew up here, and a whole lot of misbehaving during my teens took place here. These were here way long before me, and just now I really noticed them.

Frank Relle's Photos Revel in Louisiana's Otherworldly Swampland

The New Orleans-based photographer captures the swamps of Louisiana, watched over by bald cypress trees draped in swathes of Spanish moss.

www.thisiscolossal.com

Yeah, if I ever visit the US, it will be Louisiana. The movie Angel Heart was the initial cause of this. Then came the cajun food. And blues. And the swamps.

 

[jimilee]

Very nice. Looks like a nice place to do good and bad things.

 

[PapaBear]

Man, as a dude with 6 herniations and a nearly non-existent L5-S1, I'm so happy for you!
Take your time with the recovery. Feeling better is great but give it all the healing time it needs. I learned that the hard way with my second rotator cuff surgery.
Pace the PT when you get to it but don't slack. Hope many better days are ahead for ya.

I've been trying my best to behave especially since the PT at the hospital told my son she could see right off I was going to be an overdoer, I think that has helped me some, but I've paid the price a few times.

 

[jwin615]

I've been trying my best to behave especially since the PT at the hospital told my son she could see right off I was going to be an overdoer, I think that has helped me some, but I've paid the price a few times.

All ya got is time papabear.

And sorry bout the white washers.

 

[jessenator]

This is from two years ago. No idea how it ended up this close to present day in my photos app…

That was a terrible time, but this trip with family was about the only silver lining. Tubing in April… definitely couldn't happen this year with our abysmal snow pack

 

[PapaBear]

All ya got is time papabear.
View attachment 115473
And sorry bout the white washers.

No worry about the white washers what I had to recover was only a small fraction relative to the full content

 

[Cybercow]

An AI Generated amp demo . . . .

 

[dot matrix madness]

An AI Generated amp demo . . . .

Obviously class A.

 

[Cybercow]

Still have my Wigginton Voltage Tester from 1976 . . . .

 

[Feral Feline]

An AI Generated amp demo . . . .

View attachment 115884

That's what everybody wants now, an amp that has good range...

I'm 'oven it.

I'm wondering if they used a standard broiler template for that design, or were they just baked when they came up with the fried idea to use AI...

I know as puns-ish meant, I'm going to get roasted for these comments.

Still, GASin' for one of these amps...

 

[HamishR]

Overcooked it.

 

[HamishR]

I was down south (as we like to say here) last week. Walking back to the car from Elephant Rocks (near Denmark - a town in SW Australia, not the country) we were heading through sand dunes on a path and I said to my wife "This looks like dugite territory". No sooner had I said that than we spotted this on the path:



This is a baby dugite. It probably hatched very recently and has already had a few feeds. It's about 20cm (10") long but still every bit as venomous as it's parents. It reared a bit as I stopped to get a pic but it was too small the reach me. A dugite is a member of the brown snake family which are spread all over Australia. The dugite is our south Western Australian brown snake. One very similar to this put my best friend from high school in intensive care for 36 hours when we were teenagers. Without antivenene he would have died.

When I was even younger my family lived in Canberra, on the other side of Australia. One day I saw a snake trying to get into the front door of our house, so called my dad . He killed it with a shovel, being an old farm boy, and I later did some research and identified it as an Eastern or King Brown, the most venomous snake in the world. But we didn't all have phones with cameras in them back then!

Anyway, this is Elephant Rocks - that's the Southern Ocean. People were swimming there even though it's a favourite place to spot great whites! :

 

[HamishR]

When we were down south we stayed in Albany, which is the biggest town on the south coast of Western Australia. We pronounce it closer to how Americans would say "owl-bany". Not all-bany, like the one in New York. Albany is very hilly, used to be a major whaling centre and has a few distilleries now. We stopped off at Lime Burners Distillery which is just out of Albany and has great views across the bay to Albany. I tasted a few of their single malt whiskies which are very good and not particularly affordable . As they are still relatively young for a distillery they also make gin and vodka, including a gin/limoncello. They also have started a sour mash whiskey in a bourbon style. I tasted it and it's not quite there yet so they sell it as a "mixer" bourbon style whiskey. I bought a bottle for a friend who likes it very much neat. Give 'em a few years and I'm sure they'll get there.

While we were there we visited the Gap, a place we've been before but forgotten how dramatic it is. The southern Ocean really pummels the granite rocks there and can produce huge plumes of spray. The noise is remarkable. As the rocks are quite slippery at times and quite treacherous they have really gone to some trouble to make it safer to negotiate. This is the viewing platform they have built to see the sea pummelling the Gap:



And this is the nearby "Natural Bridge":

 

[HamishR]

More coast at the Gap:

 

[HamishR]

My favourite part of our trip was the "Valley of the Giants" near Walpole. It's in a forest of Karri and Red Tingle trees. Karri are the tallest trees in our state. Not quite as tall as redwoods but not so far off. Red Tingles look to be a kind of taller, straighter version of our jarrah trees which are only found in Western Australia. I've built plenty of furniture from jarrah. It's very heavy, a bugger to work as it's very hard and will blunt tools quickly and it's not the most stable of timbers. But it is beautiful, sometimes producing a flamey figure and coming in a variety of colours, mostly in the deep red spectrum.

When you arrive at the valley there is a carpark which often has a coffee van parked by the entrance. After the long drive there it's nice to sit with a coffee surrounded by tall forest. What amazed me was the people sitting facing the van on their phones. We sat facing the forest, and within a few minutes had seen at least three different species of wren, tiny birds with vivid colours. I even spotted a rare mardoo, a marsupial animal which is between the size of a rat and a mouse. The undergrowth is quite dense, and you could just make out little animal highways through the undergrowth. Even the wrens would fly through there, almost invisible to anything above.

In the valley there is a "skywalk" through the tree canopy. It was something I've wanted to experience since it was first built a few years ago. This is some of the most beautiful forest I have seen in years, and we have visited the amazing sequoia groves near Yosemite and driven through the rainforest of NSW. The sounds of the forest with the specialist birds etc are something else. At its highest the skywalk is 40m. It wobbles and is wonderful - unless you're not good with heights.

 

[zeropluszero]

Taking these photos through binoculars and my phone is every bit as difficult as it sounds