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Article Summary 2nd August 2010

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This is a list of articles that I have written on Associated Content in the last week, I hope you will take a look at them and also enjoy them.

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something.

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

  • The weekend provided a number of news items that would have been good to write about, as far as getting plenty of traffic, but an author doesn’t always feel like digging deep into some stories. To write about something I need to be inspired.
  • I bet you wonder what this article is about, and I’m not going to tell you unless you click on the link and peek inside, but I will give a small clue – it’s not about night clubs and girlie bars. It does however involve screws and a head stripper.
  • The port of Portsmouth is next door to Southsea, and the port of Southampton a few more miles further west, provide a lot of shipping traffic that sails past Southsea. These are a few of the vessels we saw while we were walking along the promenade.
  • Yesterday I saw that I was less than 800 page views away from 100,000, so I set myself a goal of trying to write articles that would get me there in one day and to promote them. Did I make it, or did I fail yet again?
  • A witty and catchy headline is very often what makes us click on an article to see what it’s all about. Sometimes the headline gives us a clue, sometimes not, but it’s all part of the art of getting more visitors
  • The final part of our tour of Southsea takes us to Clarence Pier, the funfair and beyond. There is so much to see in Southsea, it’s a good place for a day out.
  • A teenager in the UK has been quoted a price for car insurance that is eight times the value of his car, a whopping £17,000 (or US$24,000).
  • With counterfeit pound coins in the UK now estimated to be circulating at a rate of one for every thirty-six genuine coins, the Royal Mint may be forced to scrap the pound and re-issue it. How to identify fake pound coins.
  • This week on Offbeat News read about the bank robber with fake breasts, how a garage sale purchase made a man millions, the truck driver who tried to sell the Ritz Hotel, a Plastic Bottle Boat, and an award winning Hanging Shoe movie.
  • The Anhinga, sometimes called a Snakebird, Darter, American Darter, or Water Turkey, is a water bird of the warmer parts of the Americas. It is a cormorant-like bird with a very long neck, and often swims with only the neck above water.
  • The news we read every day is rarely happy news. Our world could be a much happier place if more people just cared. If they cared about our planet, our environment, and about their fellow man, how much better life could be, instead of full of sadness.
  • A French woman concealed eight pregnancies from her husband, and murdered the babies having given birth. This is one of the most bizarre infanticide stories in recent years, and something that is hard for most mothers to accept.
  • These are photographs that I took of a Blue Heron and Wood Stork while on a walk around the lakes at Deer Creek, Deerfield Beach in South Florida.
  • All attempts at trying to increase visitors to my articles in July have failed miserably, and so I am turning to poetry to get it off my chest. Everyone loves Limericks right :)
  • A Vicar in England conducted 383 phony marriages to allow Africans to have UK residency. The worst thing is – their partners were from Eastern Europe.
  • South Florida is becoming overrun by Muscovy Ducks, which seem to think that sidewalks and benches are theirs. The White Ducks were always swimming or walking in a group and very cute.
  • Squirrels, Ibis, Egrets and Egyptian Geese are all common sights around Deer Creek, a community in Deerfield Beach, Florida.
  • If you enjoy walking by the river, watching boats, seabirds on the marshes, and taking in plenty of fresh air, I definitely recommend walking from Swanwick along the Hamble River to Warsash.

If you enjoy my writings, poetry and photographs, why not register with Associated Content, and then you can get an email every time I publish something.

Now that I am back into writing I already have a number of additional articles published.  You can also Click Here to see my latest articles, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

Article Summary 26th July 2010

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This is a list of articles that I have written on Associated Content in the last week, I hope you will take a look at them and also enjoy them.

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something.

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

  • New photographs show that an alarming amount of ice has been lost from the Himalayan Mountains compared with the same view photographed in 1921.
  • The daily news site Fortitude which opened in June has increased the number of articles to be published on the Front Page and boosted payments as part of a new membership drive.
  • We all receive emails daily from people with millions to give away, from a dead relative or secreted away from a foreign government. If only these were real, but amazingly enough people still fall for the 419 scams.
  • The more you read about Mel Gibson’s crazed rantings at girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, new revelations that she agreed to a $15 million deal to keep the tapes secret, and then his plans to return to Australia with his ex-wife. It makes you wonder…
  • Worth Matravers is a small village in the Purbeck Hills in Dorset, between the towns of Swanage, Corfe Castle and the village of Kingston. The houses are built of local Purbeck Stone, and it’s very picturesque.
  • This edition of Offbeat News includes a man arrested for having sex with Christie Brinkley, dummies left guarding a jail, the return of the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, Air Crew robbing passengers, and the Ambassador who left his wife but took their 40 cats.
  • The second part of our walk around the village of Worth Matravers shows the architecture in the village, and the unique way that people have used some of the local fossils.
  • It seems that “Little Girl Lost” Lindsay Lohan’s jail sentence of 90 days has now been cut to just 9 days. Is this ridiculous or what? Get the lowdown on that has been happening with Lindsay Lohan and see her in her orange jumpsuit.
  • If claims that he was violent to his girlfriend prove to be true, Mel Gibson’s career in the movie industry could be over. Or could it? What will Mel Gibson do next? Learn who is supporting him.
  • The village of Corfe Castle in Dorset, on the south coast of England, guards one of only two gaps in the Purbeck Hills, allowing access to the north. The castle was destroyed during the English Civil War in the 17th Century.
  • A transvestite has sex with a dog in an English castle, much to the surprise of the dog’s owner who found them. Strange people abound in the news these days. Come inside for the full story.
  • The seaside town of Southsea is next to Portsmouth in Hampshire on the south coast of England. Southsea beach is mostly gravel, with sand exposed at low tide. It has two piers, both with amusement arcades, and also a funfair.
  • On the second part of our tour of the seaside town of Southsea in Hampshire, we look at the shore from the South Pier, and the South Pier from the shore.
  • In part 3 of our tour of Southsea, we take a walk along the promenade, take in a bit of history, and meet a surprising visitor.

If you enjoy my writings, poetry and photographs, why not register with Associated Content, and then you can get an email every time I publish something.

Now that I am back writing I already have a number of additional articles published.  You can also Click Here to see my latest articles, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

The Snow Returned

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If you have been following the saga of the bad winter weather here in the UK through our blog, last night when I returned home from work, I was able to shovel the melting slushy snow and ice off the back path and steps up to the house with little difficulty.

I had hoped that the snow they forecast for southwest England overnight would miss us, but it didn’t, and we had between one and two inches fall by the time I woke up at 6:30am and looked out of the bedroom window.

Where I had cleared the garden path the night before it looked more like an inch or less, because the temperatures were slightly above freezing, and the snow was already a bit slushy.   However on the roads it was still deeper, where it lay on the previous compacted snow and ice.

The car was covered with about two inches of snow, which was easy to brush off, and the windows were not frozen, so I was soon able to start my journey, deciding to leave for work at 7:30am to try and beat most of thr traffic.

Our road, which is on a steep hill, was very slippery, and the main road just around the corner which goes up a very steep hill was slick, but fortunately I had enough traction to keep going, albeit slowly, and got to the top of the hill and over the other side.

It was then I hit the first problem, a solid queue of traffic towards the bottom of the hill, waiting to cross the bridge at Wood Mill (see below – click on the picture for a larger image).  

Wood Mill Bridge, Southampton. Click on the link for a larger image.

Wood Mill Bridge is only a single lane of traffic, with a double bend in the middle of the two parts of the bridge.   Normally, three cars will go from one end, stop in the middle section, where it is wide enough for three to four cars to pass each other, and then drive on.   If people adhere to this policy of only three cars at a time, then the traffic flows pretty well.

However, since the end of December there have been temporary traffic lights on either side of the bridge, and they keep jamming up, so that only one side shows green.  I am not sure if that is what happened this morning, but the traffic was already backed up to half a mile my side of the bridge at 7:30am.

For me to get to the last section of the road that runs past the park and leads to the bridge, I have to cross two mini-roundabouts, and the road coming from the right onto the first roundabout has priority, so if only one car moves forward at a time, invariably another takes it’s place, and my stream doesn’t move. 

This time of the morning, in the rush hour, there are very few cars going south across the bridge, most of the traffic heading north across the river.  Under normal conditions, the flow is constantly moving, albeit at a slow pace, but this morning it took me 35 minutes to get to the bridge, which is only a mile from home!  

The traffic lights were eventually working, letting about ten cars across from each direction at a time, but with a huge wait time in between, so most of the time the bridge was actually empty.   Oh the frustration, since the next bridge to the east is out of my way and usually very heavy under normal conditions, and the next to the west is blocked northbound for a few weeks as they work on it.  So I don’t really have any choice but to take this route to work.

Once across the bridge the traffic was light for a mile or so, until I came to Burgess Road, which runs west past the University, and this was by the time I got to it pretty heavy.  I decided therefore to not continue along there, but to take the back roads through “The Flowers”, a section of back roads that are named after flowers, and which are narrow but cut out a lot of the traffic.

Well these were slippery last week, but this morning it was like driving on a skating rink, with compacted ice under the wheels.  I drove very carefully around the bends and down a hill, but going up the otherside of the hill my wheels didn’t want to grip the road and I was sliding all over the place.  The car in front had managed to climb the hill ok, but I didn’t get enough grip at the bottom to take a run at it, and practically crawled up it, however fortune was on my side and the car kept going to the top.

Once there I hit the next main road, which only had light traffic, and zoomed onto the next hold up.

The last stage of the journey was also very slow, because the road that our office is located on is a two lane road, but there was a queue of traffic on it going in the opposite direction to me for most of the mile to the office, and I got stuck behind a cyclist who was struggling to keep the bike going at a horribly slow pace, and since he could not ride right close to the kerb, there was not enough room to overtake him, and so a stream of traffic just crawled along yet again.

At work there was a group of people shoveling snow off the driveways so that delivery trucks could get in and out.  The road goes all around the offices and warehouse, to the staff car park on the far side of the building, and even the ramp up to the car park was closed as it was too slippery.  I had to drive past the ramp, and up the down ramp to park.

I finally got to work five minutes late at 8:35am, the eight and a half miles having taken just over an hour to complete.

Whether I should have taken the back roads through “The Flowers” is debatable, however just before I arrived at work, they announced on the radio that the road which I would otherwise have taken, “The Avenue”, was partially blocked with a tree branch that had come down.  So, if I had taken that route, I would maybe have taken another 30 minutes to get to work.

Oh the joys of driving in England in the winter lol :)

Winter Hits The UK Hard

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Debbie and I returned home at the weekend from our Christmas trip to Florida to see my daughters, and I consider us to be very lucky, since the northern part of the UK  had already been hit by sub-zero temperatures and record amounts of snow.

It didn’t take long however for Old Man Winter to move south, and by Tuesday we had snow in the south of England.  Fortunately going to work on Tuesday morning it wasn’t as cold as expected, so I didn’t need to scrape the ice off the windows of the car, just use the regular wiper to clean the windows.

Tuesday night we were threatened to have up to a foot of snow, but when I left work it was just light drizzle, and I made it all the way home in almost record time.  It wasn’t half an hour later however when we saw heavy snow falling, but fortunately we only got just over an inch, far less than the forecast said.  

Wednesday morning I set off for work early, expecting to have to have a major scraping job on my hands, and also to have to wade through deep snow, but it was already melting a bit, the car windows were not frozen, so I just had to brush the snow off the car, and got into work 30 minutes earlier than usual.

When I got to work I found that several people who live a bit further out of town and where the snow was falling earlier, had been forced to abandon their cars as they couldn’t get home.  One of them left work at 5pm and didn’t make it home until 11pm, and this is less than ten miles from where I live.  I guess I ought to be grateful that I live where I do.

We had a bit more snow during the day and it was threatening more for the evening, so I decided to leave for home ten minutes early to beat the traffic, and had a good journey home, that is until I almost got home. 

We live halfway up a steep hill, and I managed to take the turning off the main road onto our access road ok, drove the two hundred yards or so along there ok, then made the sharp left turn to go up the hill, and didn’t get too far.  The road was covered in snow and ice, and was too steep for the car to get enough grip to drive more than 20 or 30 yards up the road.   Frustratingly, this was only 20 yards short of where I needed to be to back off the road and down the alley at the back of the house to where I park.  

Well I tried and tried, reversed down the hill and around the corner, tried again, but the car wasn’t going to make it, so I parked at the side of the road and walked the last 1/4 mile home.   I then got changed, put my boots on, grabbed the bucket of salt/grit that we saved from the week before Christmas when we had the last freeze, picked up a garden shovel, and headed back to the car.   I spent a while shovelling snow and ice away from around the wheels, cleared ten feet behind the car and about 20 feet in front, sprinkled the grit down, and tried to get up the hill.   It took me 2 or 3 attempts, including a second round of shoveling having reversed down the hill a few feet, but finally I slithered up the hill and was then able to reverse into the alley.  Phew!

I then took my now empty bucket to the grit bin at the top of the road, hoping to refill it for the next time, but was dismayed to find that the bin was empty.  Not more or less empty though, I don’t think there was enough grit to even fill the palm of my hand.   Oh well…

More snow was forecast Wednesday night, but I woke up this morning to find that nothing had covered my footsteps of last night, however it was bitterly cold, and the snow out the back was crunchy underfoot.   The car windows took forever to scrape as the ice was really hard, and shovel in boot (trunk) I started my way down the alley to the road.

The road was still covered in snow and ice, and there was a car and a van close to the bottom of the slope, both obviously couldn’t make it up the hill the night before.   I turned into the road, then slowly worked my way down the hill, hoping not to slide into either vehicle (which were parked on opposite sides of the road), or to fail to stop and run into the line of trees at the bottom of the road.    I made it, then turned left into the access road, which was really slick and slippery.  At the end of the access road the road turns sharply right and goes downhill, then immediately onto a main road, with traffic that comes around a bend fast.  I decided to go really slowly down the last bit of the access road, because if not I could end up not stopping on what looked like a skating rink, and didn’t relish the idea of sliding into the main road and oncoming traffic.  Luckily the main road was clear, I slithered down the last section of the access road, put my foot down on the accelerator, and started up the main road.  Another sigh of relief…

The main road of course immediately goes up an even steeper hill than where we live, and this is one long haul of a hill too, up one side and then down the other.  Fortunately the road was clear enough, and the rest of the journey to work was uneventful, and also done in practically record time.

Although more snow is forecast and it’s still bitterly cold outside, the sky has been blue all day, and I am hoping that this will be enough for the snow on our road to melt enough for me to get up the hill and home ok.

I emailed the city this morning using their Actionline link to see if we could get more grit in our grit bin, and got a response to say that they would answer my inquire within three days.  Oh joy – maybe we can go shopping on Sunday!  Or maybe not as more snow is forecast for the weekend, and the freezing temperatures are set to continue for another week at least.

As for the two people who didn’t make it home on Tuesday night, neither of them made it into work yesterday or even today.  While the main roads are mostly clear, the side roads after the partial melt and the severe freeze last night have turned them into slick skating rinks, and it’s practically impossible for anyone to go anywhere.

This is so different to my experiences while living in Indiana, where the city had so many snow ploughs and salt trucks, plus a number of other people had pickup trucks with blades on the front to plough side streets and car parks for shopping centres and businesses.  In addition many people shoveled the snow from their own sidewalks or used snowblowers, yet here in England that rarely happens any more. 

Do you have a snow day story to tell?  If so, please leave a comment and let us know.

Another Batch Of Fresh Lenses

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Both Debbie and I have been busy this last couple of weeks creating new lenses on Squidoo.

While Debhie has been working on her collection of lenses about Hampshire, I have been working on my USA States lenses, and also a local one about my daily walks.

Firstly, Debbie created a lens about Southampton, the city where she lives.  Southampton is one of the largest ports in England, in the middle of the South Coast, and has seen many famous ships sail down the river, including The Titanic, Queen Mary and Elizabeth, and also their successors the QE2 and QM2.

She just completed another about Netley, a suburb of Southampton which has a lot of history.  Netley has ruins of an Abbey, as well as an old military hospital, the remains of which have been turned into a country park.

Meanwhile, I just completed a lens about the morning walks that I take where I live in Deer Creek in South Florida.  The lens has over 80 photographs from the walk, including some nice homes, lakes, and much of the tropical foliage and wildlife of the area.

I have also been working on a set of lenses about the states in the USA.  I am creating these in alphabetical order, and so far have completed Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas and California.   Each lens has background information on each state, and a list of other lenses about that state.  If you have a Squidoo lens about any of these states, please feel free to add it to the list of lenses to get some free promotion.

If I haven’t got to your state yet, why not subscribe to our blog so you can be kept up to date with progress.  I hope you enjoy what you see here.