Another new thing I learned while in the Netherlands was that supermarkets had pretty much stopped selling North Atlantic eel because it's so endangered. It's quite a Dutch treat but it's now not done to offer your guests smoked eel on toast ( Read more... )

Hard News post quoted in full while trying not to drown in my tea:

Tweeted somewhere in Auckland this morning: "A little scared about the Tsunami warning for NZ. It Probably won't stop me from going into the city for some shopping with my sister today."

Be brave, just be brave.

The wave, caused by an 8.3 quake near Samoa, is expected to be a ( Read more... )

Public Address on Friday, "Unless I'm mistaken, my car this morning is finely coated in Australia."

He was not mistaken, as various reports came in that some of Sydney's dust was landing on NZ. It wasn't a lot, so no spectacular pics, and it seems to have been restricted to the west coast of both islands. It's still 2200km away though!

My friend Maria posted some orange-coloured images on Facebook, which I skimmed past this morning while looking for something else. It was only later that I caught the headline about Sydney's dust storms and realised the orange-red landscapes had been shot from her balcony not far from the centre of the city ( Read more... )

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George Monbiot wrote about the food crisis in his weekly column for The Guardian newspaper yesterday.
While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
He doesn't say ( Read more... )

Paddling to New Zealand by kayak is out, so I've been researching carbon offsetting for my flights. I think I'll need to offset the aspirin usage for the headache acquired too. It's a maze of twisty criticisms, all alike ( Read more... )

The Eurostar travelled the distance between Paris and London in record time yesterday, thanks to the new high-speed track on the British side. Of course, within London the Tube wasn't breaking any records thanks to the bloody strike that was on. Cue suppressed sniggers on the other side of the Channel ( Read more... )

Organic food started moving from the specialist magasins biologiques into supermarkets about five years ago. What impressed me is that I can find eggs with the official Agriculture Biologique logo in the budget supermarkets. In the Netherlands, those kinds of products were restricted to the expensive supermarkets. (By the way, don't be fooled by ( Read more... )