h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Cute little short from Pixar.

http://www.cyberthing.net/video-play.php?id=71

Finally got some decent weather this morning, so I went down to Felixstowe, quiet but for a few joggers and dog-walkers, to get some fresh air and futz about with the shutter setting on my camera. Take a look if you want, these are all at 1/1500s. Not all of them look like Tubgirl's money shot.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris-miller/

Beautiful photos! I especially like the ones that are "underneath". Is that a bridge?

I remember Felixstowe being a reasonably quiet, and nice place. It reminded me a little of Racine, Wisconsin. Only with an ocean rather than a lake. Which reminds me how incredulous I was that the blob of land I saw on the other side was Norway!

Don't think you can see Norway from here, nice as that'd be. That is Felixstowe pier, sadly inaccessible after the encroaching tides have eaten away at it, and are chipping away at the coast.

I was pretty alarmed standing on the shore of Lake Michigan, as big as the North sea, but no tide.

Er...Norway from Felixstowe? No. You can just about see France from England, and Ireland from Scotland.

Was the big mass of land on the other side of that bit of sea another part of England, then? Or perhaps some other Scandiwegian place?

If you were looking south, you might have seen Essex, the other side of the Stour Estuary, and Walton-on-the-Naze. Directly out to sea is mostly Holland, but a bit over the horizon - turn left and you eventually get to Norway. There are plenty of cruises and freight ships to and from Felixstowe.

Of course somewhere out there is the *real* smallest country in the world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

There are some foreign coins worth getting hold of

Must have been Holland I saw a little bump of. And then gotten confused as to what I saw.

Argh- there's a challenge if ever I heard one! Me and my foreign coin collection. It started for purely dorky reasons, but now my mission is to obtain at least one coin from every country, if I have to visit them all to do it. And I could've bought some old Chinese coins in Chinatown yesterday, and didn't kick.

I saw some Franco pesetas at the boot sale this morning. Come to think of it, at the collectors' shop in town I saw a Nazi coin - 5 pfennigs maybe, couldn't tell... looked like it said funfpfennig. Eagle and swastika and all. Not sure I could bring myself to get that one!