Fossilised Remains of Giant Dino Bird Found in China

I\’m just sitting back, having a late-night cup of tea, and browsing the Ceefax pages on TV (Ceefax is the teletext service of the UK\’s BBC TV), and I\’ve come across a fascinating page.

Apparently the fossilized remains of a giant bird-like dinosaur have been recently uncovered in the Inner Mongolia region of China. This guy belongs to the same group of dinosaurs that includes the much smaller feathered dinosaurs, some of them as small as chickens, a group which is supposedly linked to (or were) the ancestors of birds. But the other known dinosaurs of this group are all relatively small, while this specimen is a big beast.

Complete with beak and feathers, this monster weighed about 3,080lbs (1,400kg), which is about thirty-five times heavier than other similar feathered dinosaurs. It was 26ft (8m) long, and stood twice as tall as a man at the shoulder. Yet this one was only a young adult when it died, so we can expect an adult specimen to be considerably larger.

Now that would be a real big Christmas Turkey! 🙂

I don\’t know how reliable this information is (I usually follow good advice – don\’t believe everything you see on TV or read in the papers), but, apparently, the original source is the prestigious science journal, Nature. I\’m definitely intrigued enough to look for more information, so this might be something to watch out for.

If You Can\’t Stand the Heat…

Man, it is hot, really hot. We\’ve had several days of scorching sunshine and high temperatures that are definitely not the norm in this usually damp and miserable part of the world.

And I am suffering in this heat, like all overweight people tend to do in soaring temperatures. I\’m sizzling like a large banger cooking under a grill. Every window and door in the house is wide open, and it\’s still too freakin\’ hot! I\’m reminded of the old saying \”If you can\’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen\” – well, I\’m nowhere near the kitchen, and the temperature hasn\’t gone down any. Short of climbing into the freezer for a few days, there\’s no escaping it.

So I\’m sitting at my computer, cooking in my own juices, and blasting rock music loudly on the hi-fi – \”Shadow King\” by the group of the same name (with ex-Foreigner vocalist Lou Gramm and ex-Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell). Not a bad album. It\’s the weather for cold drinks, ice cream and music, with a computer thrown in for good luck. Whatta way to live!…

Might as well enjoy the sun while it lasts, which won\’t be long. We\’re lucky to get a couple of weeks of bright sunshine per year. Next time I post, it\’ll probably be back to wet and miserable again… (moan, gripe, bitch…)

Hello from a Grumpy Old Git!

Hello there! Welcome to the GrumpyOldGeek blog, where you\’ll find me wibbling on about all and sundry.

Initially, my reason for setting up this blog was quite mercenary: get my API key and forget about it afterwards. I needed the key because I recently started up my first WordPress blog, a self-hosted one at SFreaders.com. But now that I\’m here at WordPress.com I\’m finding myself thinking \”What the heck! I\’ve got a blog, so I might as well use it!\”

The reasons?

Well, number one, I feel that it\’ll put me in closer contact with the great WordPress community, something that\’s severely lacking at the moment with my self-hosted blog (have to give it time – it\’s only been live about a month). Hopefully I\’ll find out more about the community and learn a lot as I go along, and maybe down the line I\’ll start making contributions of my own. I\’m a \”community\” type of person, particularly of the free and \”open\” (unsullied by commercial greed and perversions) kind. I\’ve long been (in spirit) a great fan of the Open Source philosophy – maybe some of these days I\’ll gather up the courage to shift totally away from Windows XP to either Linux or FreeBSD.

Secondly, I\’d really like to get into the nuts \’n\’ bolts of WordPress (what better way to become an artisan than know your tool well), and I reckon that the best way to learn something is to watch how others use it. Learn from more experienced users, and maybe help others out in turn as I become more experienced. As well as the general chit-chat, I\’d like to use this blog to talk about the WordPress specific stuff, and maybe practice my (hopefully) growing skills.

Thirdly, I can rant on about any old thing. My self-hosted blog is a bit more specialized in nature, so I tend not to stray too far from the various subjects in the categories I\’ve created. On here, I can be a bit less restrained and wibble on about any old thing that takes my fancy. Fire off a few rants – I love ranting when the blood gets up. Even when nobody\’s listening. But I gotta watch the blood pressure.

Finally, and this is a purely selfish motive, I want to \”put myself out there\”. To use my blog on WordPress.com to let people know about me and my other blogs, maybe gaining a few visitors in the process. My main blog is a bit quiet as yet, and, although I\’m not obsessed with stats and huge numbers of visitors, it would be nice to have a few.

None of my blogs are (or will ever be) money-making ventures, and SFreaders.com is aimed at fans of science fiction literature, sci-fi movies and TV series, comic books, music, general science, history and a few other things. It\’s mostly the SF literature, sci-fi movie and comic book fans that I\’m trying to attract. So if anyone reading this is of that particular grouping, please take note.

Well, enough from me for now. Hopefully some of you guys will take pity on me and leave a few comments. 🙂

Phil