Pump it up

The queen of soul

Storming piano on this and guess what - it's Aretha playing! Is it true?* Superb. On the Cliff Richard Show.

* Damn straight. Here's Aretha playing an extended piano solo: Hard Times.

Stop the leak NOW!

Oil on a beach. Where is the "Can Do" spirit? Put me on the committee deciding how to stop the leak. I simply cannot accept that it cannot be stopped with a large weight of concrete on top of it. The oil will break down over a couple or three years but the leak has to be stopped NOW.

Ossian

University of Plymouth SHORT FICTION results

Announcement

Winner: 'The Underwater Room' – Jill Widner
Runners-up: 'Salt Man' – Jo Cannon 'The Pilgrims and the Half Good' – Louis Malloy

This morning brings news of more accolades for New Short Stories authors, this time Jill Widner and Jo Cannon. :)

Ossian

WH YouTube favourites - Someday we'll all be free

Every time Jacintha is moved to add a new favourite to the Willesden Herald YouTube channel, it will be posted here if practical (not all the videos allow).

The prisoner of Rangoon

Before duty called: pictures show Aung San Suu Kyi as a wife and mother | World news | The Guardian

In another photo the future leader of the Burmese Democracy Movement is tending a barbecue on the Norfolk Broads, where the family were enjoying a narrow boat holiday with friends. Within 10 years she was back in Burma, leaving them all behind in order to fight for what she believed in. It was her destiny, she said, and her family accepted it: before her marriage to Michael Aris, she told him: "I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them." (Guardian)

Aung San Suu Kyi's desperate plea to the world - Asia, World - The Independent

In a hand-written letter smuggled out of Burma and passed to The Independent, U Win Tin writes: 'I want to repeat and echo her own words – 'please use your liberty to promote ours'. I want to add more to it. Please bring more and more liberty to us, to our country, Burma. We are starving for it and we are waiting for someone or some institutions or some countries to bring it to us.' (Independent)

Authors Society recognises Carys Davies

Society of Authors' 2010 Awards, London, 15 June 2010

Very pleased to report that twice Willesden Herald short story competition finalist Carys Davies has been awarded the Olive Cook Short Story Award for her story 'The Quiet'. The award, worth £1,000 and judged by Jane Gardam and Jacob Ross, was set up in 2004 and is awarded every two years. Carys Davies joins the impressive list of previous recipients, Claire Keegan, Bethan Roberts and Alison Macleod.

Ossian

The view tonight

The FIFA World Cup 2010 is not working

The din of the vuvuzelas is intolerable. The bone-breaking foot-high lunge tackles and foot stamping, gobbing and jetting of snot by blasé, mercenary and viciously cynical professional footballers is disgusting and degrading. The ball is not a proper football with its visually disorienting patterns that make it hard to address precisely, especially for goalies watching it spin. For tradition and consistency, the definition of a soccer ball should be a sphere made out of hexagonal and pentagonal panels. The result of all these travesties is a tournament in South Africa that is not only tiresome but essentially null and void for not using a proper football. Professional sport has become the sow that eats its own farrow.

Malachy

Stylite cat

Picture by Craig

Catchy music & video for the movie "Boy"

A hit film from the director of "Two Cars, One Night", Taika Waititi (trailer)

How's my driving? Helmet cam

Signpost

Gladstone Park

Recumbent tree

Gladstone Park

Sunday, end of May

Roundwood Park

Seven-a-side in King Edward's

King Edward VII park

Maggie Gee to judge the 2011 short story competition

We are pleased and honoured to announce that local literary heroine Maggie Gee has agreed to choose the winning entry in the next short story competition. Somebody at the Herald must have done something good in a previous life has to be the only possible explanation.

Here is Maggie Gee's page on the British Council's Contemp-orary Writers website. If that doesn't impress you, most likely nothing will. :) <-[WH's first ever smiley. Ed] Her latest book is a memoir, My Animal Life (Guardian review). Here is Maggie Gee's page on Amazon.

Scroll down the right to see a link to The Blue (Amazon Associates link), if you would like to find out the judge's kind of short story. The submission window (a sort of hatch with a winch at first floor level on Herald House), will open in September.

The international Willesden Herald short story competition is proud to be supported by Willesden Green Writers' Group:

Ossian

Use concrete slabs to staunch Gulf of Mexico oil leak?

The idea is to keep adding concrete slabs till the flow is staunched on the same principle as first aid for an arterial bleed. The concrete slabs can be made rapidly as was done for system-built apartment blocks in the 1960's.

A tongue and groove system could be used to seal the edges and where the flat sides come together. The size of the panels would be geared to the capacity of the delivery machinery available. Would 10 x 10 x 2 ft be too heavy to put in place?

The result might be a partial pyramid, possibly 100 m² with several interlocking and overlapping layers, as many as are needed so their weight exceeds the force of the gusher, in the same way  that we are told to apply pressure to an arterial bleed, for example. The seabed might need levelling though, unless custom cast pieces can be created to fit to the existing topography.       


|-------100m?-----|

      ___ ___

    ___ ___ ___

  ___ ___ ___ ___

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

                        *

                   ( leak)

An alternative approach might be to lower one absolutely massive piece of concrete onto the leak but such a heavy piece might not be manageable, in which case "the one piece" could be put together lego-like by lowering it down it in interlocking sections each on top of  the previous - a bit similar to the tiling plan but with much bigger pieces over a smaller area.


Is it not the case that if you pressed a gusher like that forcefully enough that it could not continue? Why would this not work?

Kronk

Corporal Clegg and General Cameron

Coalition degenerates into a bunfight while in Afghanistan the British army continues to fight for its life

You can hear it now...
General David "Dec" Cameron: "I am the Prime Minister, do what I say."
Corporal Nick "Ant" Clegg: "I am the leader of the Liberal Democrats, I will decide what we do. Without me you are an ex-Prime Minister."
General David "Dec" Cameron: "What about the five year deal?!"
Corporal Nick "Ant" Clegg: "That was before the cartoonists started showing me as a chihuahua licking your feet."

Friday evening

View west

View northwest

Tuesday evening

Ant & Dec preside

We're being ruled by mothers' boys. Your mother would love to have them to tea but they are not men. That was a man Nick "Wee Jimmy Cranky" Clegg betrayed.

Feargal

Melancholy song for the sellouts

Let The Heartaches Begin - Long John Baldry