The approach into La Paz's El Alto airport was quietly dramatic. Mountains rose up around us, level with the plane; we flew over the great bowl of the city; then a very short descent onto the airport on the rim of the bowl. The airport is up in the sky at 13,000ft ( Read more... )

Hello LJ, I'm back from Peru. It was great :)

The pretext/excuse for the whole thing was visiting khalinche in Cochabamba, Bolivia. And that was where we arrived after about 36 hours of flights and waiting in airports. Edinburgh-Gatwick-Madrid-Santa Cruz(VVI)-Cochabamba. She is a most lovely and gracious host; we spent much of our time chatting, drinking ( Read more... )

From the questiony thing that's been going around:

6. Where on your door is your letterbox?

Oddly specific! But shouldn't it also ask what orientation your letterbox is (portrait or landscape)? And how about aspect ratio? I know a lot of people are unhappy with letterboxing. Maybe they have 16:9 front doors instead.

This is really insightful. Unfortunately it's split over several tweets starting from https://twitter.com/JWMason1/status/612960543524065280 , so I'm parking it here for my future reference ( Read more... )

I've been reading "And The Land Lay Still" on the bus, since I had it recommended as the definitive novel of Scottish nationalism. It's a substantial piece of work, certainly. It has a structure I recognize from science fiction novels, in that the characters exist to give life and motion to a world and a history, but the worldbuilding is the core ( Read more... )

Feel like I owe people a catchup, especially my Bostonian friends; last week I was on a "holiday" trip round the south of England which included a Eurovision concert, Tate Britain, a country house wedding, visiting my parents and various old friends, and an awful lot of running around between things.

- political analogy for Europe involving MV Herald of Free Enterprise- MP's pay and the long-term decline in recruitment quality, qv decline of Scottish labour ( Read more... )

Further to that, we have a new paper up here. Yes, someone launched a daily printed physical newspaper in 2014. It has a frustratingly google-resistant name, the online section is subscriber-only and is some horrible PDFoid thing that's basically unreadable and certainly cannot be linked to. But it's pro-SNP and, unlike almost all the rest of the ( Read more... )

(not mine, this is from two comments http://crookedtimber.org/2015/02/03/greece-surplus-stimulus-strategy/#comment-607720Read more... )

Can't quite work out how to synthesize these stories, but there's an interesting thread ( Read more... )