Since Winter-time was a bit dead entomologically, I busied myself collecting galls from oak trees in the region. One of the first that I found were the oak apples.

These are made by the sexual phase of the cynipid wasp Biorhiza pallidas. From the holes made in it, it looks like the larvae inside this one lived a happy little life and them pupated into pretty little adult wasps.

Another oak apple in my collection wasn't quite so lucky. I had an inkling that something wasn't quite right with it, so I put it in a coleslaw pot to see if anything came of it. That was about three months ago. Fast forwards to this week.


This little girl is from a family of parasitic wasps called the Torymidae, which specialize on the larva of galling wasps. The galls that would protect the larva from most other predators are no match for that enormous egg laying tube.

The exact species escapes me, but it's a lovely surprise to have something so pretty pop out of a seemingly lifeless blob of wood.

We had a nice stroll in Wivenhoe woods yesterday, where I was lucky enough to find a still developing marble gall on a young oak tree. Since I'm lucky enough to have access to a dissecting microscope at work, I spent some of my lunch opening it up.



The little bag of snot in the centre of the right hand slice is the developing larvae of a gall wasp. It causes a little sphere of woody tissue to grow around it, giving it protection and food.



You can get a feel for just how formless these little guys are from these microscope photos. S/he reminds me a bit of the brain bugs in Starship Troopers



This was taken under maximum zoom, and you can just about make out the few hard parts which are a bit darker than the skin, and are part it's tiny head.

It was my first time finding a live gall wasp larvae. With a little luck I might be able to work out what species or at least genus it belongs to later.

Just failed my driving test.

Messed up the time and had to rush there an hour earlier than I thought. It was going well despite that shake up. Then in the last quarter of the run I had to perform a real emergency stop at a mini-roundabout because of another driver signalling left, but then going straight ahead. Coming out of that frazzled, but successful, I promptly tried to overtake a queue of traffic. Instructor had to grab the wheel to pull me back.

Major cock-up, but I'm not too angry at myself considering the circumstances. Got the rest of the day off at least, and I'll be taking the girlfriend out to lunch later.

Signed up for twitter as bug_tea. Led Zepplin's Kashmir was playing at the time, which made the process seem much more epic. Currently only following l_j_b's at the moment, which feels slightly stalkerish.

It's amazing how little I can think to do with the girlfriend in Newcastle. Just finished playing through Half-life (well worth the 99p I paid for it). Maybe I'll dig out my Deus ex CD.

All my plans for getting stuff were cut short by the storms. I did buy supplies for dinner though, so I won't be reduced to eating potato peelings. bridgeannkell seems convinced that I'll simultaniously freeze, starve, die and decay in the few days she's gone, and will return to find my emaciated husk sunk into the sofa surrounded by dirty dishes and tins of food I was too handless to open. My petty revenge shall be leaving an imaculately clean flat for her to come back to, and cooking simple but robust meals, made with vegetables and everything.

A very productive weekend:

We bought 7 books, with thanks to my stockpile of Waterstones vouchers that my Dad always sends on Birthdays/Christmas:
Nation and Unseen Academical by Terry Pratchett;
Graveyard Book and Coraline by Neil Gaiman; (Coraline has black page edges, so it's a goth book)
Orcs by Sean Nicholls
Collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories;
Collection of Oscar Wilde stories.

These shall keep us busy, and entertain for quite some time.

We also went to see Up, and I bought bridgeannkell an awesome Owl pattern top.

I got new boots, and the original Half-life CD for 99p (a piece of history!)

Between all of that and the stripped down Nethack varient Powder I installed for my DS card, there's very little time for sorting out the growing damp in the flat. We'll probably be buying a dehumidifier to sort that out.

Me and bridgeannkell are now moved into the new flat (the address of which I'll need to send out to people sometime. It's just down the road from the last one, but much much bigger. Most of the volume is in the depth of the flat, so we've named it the Tardis after the comments made by the guy delivering all our second hand furniture. Most of the stuff is still in boxes at the moment, so it'll be another weekend until everything is ready. We'll have to have people round sometime for wintertime roasts sometime.

This weekend we'll be heading off the Cambridge for a Halloween party with l_j_b . Time is quite limited for costume making, so hopefully ours won't turn out too crappy looking. Will definately post picture of it.

FYI, the fantastic little game "World of Goo" is available from the publisher 2dboy.com/games.php for the grand total of $(anything you like).

I bought it yesterday and gave them $8 for it, and was very much impressed. The offer ends on the 19th though.

Off to Edinburgh tomorrow, which is nice. But it is a 7 hour journey, which isn't so nice. Postal strikes and such means that I don't have my new DS game to accompany me, so it'll be mostly old games and books to keep me occupied. I've recently started on Tom Clancy's "Hunt for Red October", which is so far shaping up to be pretty good.

I'll be arriving about 6pm in the 'burg. Climate might be a tad different from sunny Clacton, so I'll be cracking out the winter gear. I'll be spending the evening with my Dad and his girlfriend, but after that I'll be free to meet up with people. I'll be free to meet up with friends after that, although I'm not sure how many people will be free. Looking forward to just being able to go do Edinburgh things again anyway. Been a while since I dropped by the Elephant House for a coffee.

Failed my driving test.

Clacton threw pretty much everything it had at me. It took 5 minutes just to pull away safely from the test centre. Two lorries badly parked, school closing time, the first rain storm in months (so I hadn't ever driven in proper rain). I even passed a car crash (suppose I did better than him at least). Only got 9 minors, but in the end I lost to two instances of undue hesitation at a roundabout. Bad conditions and even worse traffic meant it was just a matter of chance going round them, and the numbers came up against me.

Work day tomorrow. Maybe it'll rain on me again.

We've been flat hunting and sloe picking this weekend!

Flat-wise we have a super looking flat as a fore runner not far from the current flat. Nice and spacious and a guest bedroom too. Plenty of room for our brewing and general bric-a-brac. Pretty much no interest in it due to the recession, so it's pretty much ours if we decide on it. Look forward to having a flat warming party already.

Quite an adventure was had sloe picking. We went out to Wivenhoe and and wandered along to the wilderness which surrounds it. We started sloe picking on a big patch on the outskirts, and pickings were initially a little light. So of course the logical thing was to wander along the side of the bushes adjacent to the river (which was tidal). Even after a few wet feet, I kept going, mostly out of a kind of bloody minded booze-lust. My latent alcoholism was eventually rewarded, because I found the bloody mother-load of sloes. Nestled in a little alcove of young sloe bushes was an ancient group of bushes, crusted over with lichens, and laden down with berries. This patch was completely inacessable to any kind of sane sloe picker, but over the duration of an hour and a half we were able pick a grand total of 2 and a half kilos of sloes. That'll make up about 3 to 4 litres of sloe gin, which we'll be using to buy and retain peoples friendship over the Christmas period. Sadly sloes and covered in prickly thorns and by the end my arms were as scratched and bleeding as an aspiring emo, but by jove we had a crap load of sloes. We escaped the rising tides, and returned to the picturesque little town. We'd earned a couple of pints and a few chips, and after that we went back to grim Clacton.

A grand day out I though (I also found some marble and oak apple galls for my gall collection).

I'm nicely rested by my holiday now. German beer is fermenting nicely and we've got a nice chicken roast in the oven, so I'm feeling terribly culinary. I had an inexplicable rash a few days ago, threatening to turn me into Twoface, but it's fading now but leaving slightly scratchy skin. Probably something to do with the new pillow covers. It hasn't happened again so I'm inclined to ignore it.

Rented Rise of the Silver Surfer and Incredible Hulk yesterday. Bad acting filters started overloading. How can you send that much on special effects but not on a script writer or acting lessons!? Silver Surfer was the worst offender, and was just terrible, but not quite terrible enough to start being entertaining. And lets just stop the godlike being with a spectacularly pitiful deus-ex? You pillocks. Sadly it wasn't quite bad enough to start being entertaining again. Incredible Hulk at least delivered some good moments.

Next up is one of the big famous pictures La Dolce Vita.

I'm back from my trip to Orkney to visit the family. Whole house has pretty much degenerated into a skip. Glad I only had the 3 days there. The trip is about 700 miles according to google maps. At least that's a good excuse not to visit often.

Onto happier things, Silfest is tomorrow. The annual Silwood music festival was very enjoyable last year and hopefully will be again. The weather is threatening to make it a bit more down, but fingers are crossed. We'll be staying the night at the campus in our new tent and will hopefully meet l_j_b  for lots of music and drinking and eating.

Next week is our bit get together in our flat. Roast is not yet decided on (any preferences) and there will be lots and lots of our home brewed cider and probably lots of chocolate puddings because I'm feeling really doting on everyone at the moment.

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php

Important little fact: English libel law is the worst in the world, and this has serious consequences for anyone involved in science.

The current case of Simon Singh vs. the British Chiropractic Association puts this into stark relief. Simon wrote in The Gaurdian that many of the treatments recommended by the BCA have no scientific evidence (like 'popping' children's backs to cure ear infections, I shit you not). In response, like the good little quacks they are, they're sueing him for libel.

This has been happening quite often in recent times, the last case was Ben Goldacre getting sued for exposing the sale of vitimin tablets by Mathias Rath as AIDS cures.

English libel cases are also the most expensive in the world (by orders of magnitude) making it a very useful tool to intimidate individuals or simply bankcrupt them. And it gets better, anyone in the world can effectively be sued under English law due to the sheer stupidity of the system, leading to 'libel tourism'.

This kind of abuse of the legal system is going to carry on, and get more common as organisations realise that sueing people is much easier than backing their claims up with science. The campain to change the system is starting to gain some fairly major momentum, and many major names from science, journalism (they've been getting hit by this crap for hundreds of years), entertainment and law. And yes, we've got Steven Fry too.

The link above goes to the Sense about Science main page, where they are collecting signatures to keep libel laws out of science.

After well over a month sitting unopened on my game shelf, I've finally started playing Alpha Centauri...

It's already clear that the king of 4X is going to eat many otherwise productive hours, so I'm making sure to limit the time I spend on it.

Found a rather interesting little thing the Royal Entomolgical Societies guide to the immature stages of British Diptera...

Find you nearest can of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Yummy stuff, I'm sure you'll all agree. But it has a surprising entomological secret hidden on the can, that stretches back to biblical times. You might not have looked at the picture on the can before: it's a lion laying on the grass, with some specks above it. The slogan underneath is "Out of the strong came forth sweetness".



This relates to the story of Samson, when he passes a dead lion covered with bees, and later returns to find a honey comb where it once was, leading him to say what is now Lyle's slogan. However, what you might consider a run-of-the-mill miracle, is actually a rather interesting piece of ancient misidentification.

Heavily decomposing bodies are fairly rare in our modern sanitary world, so we don't have much experience with them on a day to day basis. They can actually play host to a wide range of insects, and one of the more unexpected is the drone fly Eristalis tenax, which anglers may recognize as the rat-tailed maggot. Normally a detritivore in ditches polluted with sewage or other unpleasant materials, the rat-tailed maggot is quite happy to feast on the mush of bacteria and protein in corpse juice. The "rat-tail" of the maggot is a breathing tube, that lets the larvae survive in otherwise completely oxygen free environments (including a few cases, I believe, of human lower colons), by placing the breathing end up towards the air. In it's adult stage the drone fly is also an extremely good mimic of a honey bee, and easily mistaken for one by non-entomologists (or even rookie entomologists). Ancient people saw what was apparently a cloud of bees around the rotting remains of large mammals, and a saying was born that is almost completley forgotten today.

So, we saw the Watchmen at Clacton cinema...

Honestly, I didn't really care too much about the changes to the plot. I got a nice little smile out of Ozymandias having a folder called "boys" on his computer. But the acting was atrocious, and lots of the dialogue was pretty painful to hear. What reads cool doesn't always sound cool. Overall, I had fun though.

Homebrew is bottled. Will need friends round soon to drink it...

We went on a trip to Wivenhoe, a lovely little olde English town. Nice bit of pub lunch and drinking, but before hand we went for a little wildlife stroll. Here's a picture of one of the Peacock butterflies we found.

I've been paining Warhammer models for the first time in about 5 years, really only for the sake of painting them. It's actually quite fun when I'm painting things for the sake of them being awesome, rather than because I need them to fill a role in a 1000 point army even though they look like crap.

My Tyranid lictor is about half painted now. The pictures don't really do it justice though. I bought it half painted, mind, the yellow bits are still the original paint. I'll find something suitably creepy for the feeding tendrils.

I think I may have stabilized things now. I've got a relatively healthy diet and the flat is reasonably tidy. I'm actually doing the washing up without being nagged, and nothing smells now. I impress myself. I'm drinking a Black Sheep ale as celebration. Sadly, successfully coping doesn't make for an interesting livejournal post.

Driving lesson at 6pm tomorrow. That means almost no time to myself, but I'll get my Saturday free. I think I'll go into Colchester and buy nice things for the flat, so the girlfriend is happy to come back :3