Ships and disaster.

After the World Trade Centre was destroyed by terrorists (I don't believe that 'inside job' conspiracy), a ship was made out of the steel that was recovered. The USS New York is a battleship, which seems appropriate.

What is really spooky about this is that while the excavations are underway for new building at the site of the World Trade Centre, they uncovered the remains of... a ship. Part of a ship, anyway, from the 1700's and most probably used as landfill to extend Manhattan's land area.

So the building that became a ship was always standing on top of a ship. Funny how things tend to go in circles, isn't it?

The one worry in all this is that if they are digging foundations in a place where a very tall building stood and they've found something they haven't seen before... were the previous foundations really deep enough?

Film watching, and fun with mirrors.

Chaos still rules the weather here. Thursday night was a monsoon, Friday was tropical heat, and today (Sunday) we had hail. If there were any Americans here who fancied a 4th July firework celebration, the hail was powerful enough to knock those rockets back down. Nobody has anything to investigate, none of those outdoor venues are safe to visit while the weather remains unpredictable, so I have to find other things to do.

I finally managed to see a film Southern Writer recommended a long time ago - 'Paranormal Activity'. It was a very entertaining film with pretty accurate background information. Within the 'artistic licence' range of accuracy, naturally.

Some points - if you have a haunting, ouija boards almost always make things worse. You might think it's a good idea to play with a ghost but you know, they might have games in mind that you don't want to play. Once you have invited them to play with you, you lose the choice of when the game ends. You hand over control to the spirit and that is never a good idea.

Why do you think those old magicians designed all those elaborate and time-consuming diagrams? It's because what they were calling was dangerous and had to be contained. If you were taking delivery of a wild-caught tiger, you'd be sure to have a strong cage in place first, right? Playing with an ouija board is like taking delivery of that tiger, giving it the run of the house and thinking 'It just wants to play'. It does, it wants to play cat-and-mouse. You get to be the mouse.

The paranormal investigator who opted out of the job was right to do so. This particular job was out of his skill set. If someone wanted an exorcism, I wouldn't do it. I don't have that skill and if I tried, I'd make matters worse. Rather than sedating and removing the tiger from your house, all I'd achieve would be like poking it with a stick until it was really angry. The spirit world is not a TV channel. It's not there for entertainment and if you turn it on, you can't turn it off. I think the film makes that part clear.

A very entertaining film, with pretty accurate background. Don't have any drinks in your hand for the last fifteen minutes or so.

Anyway, with nothing to do, I decided to wander with my camera on Friday. A blue-sky day, rare in these parts lately, and the heavy rain the night before had washed everything clean. In particular, it had washed a certain mirror clean.

On some roads with blind corners, there are convex mirrors so you can see whether anything is coming around the corner. These give a distorted view but all you need to know is whether anything is moving, so they do the job they're supposed to do. Unless they are dirty or coated with condensation.

This one was the cleanest I've ever seen it. I trimmed the photo down to just the mirror and its black backboard.


I've never owned a fisheye lens. These mirrors provide a decent approximation of the effect.

Pity they are fixed in place.