Tag: pareidolia

Things that look like other things

Double Cucumber

The biggest cucumber in our garden was this bifurcated/conjoined specimen so it joined our homegrown radishes and shop lettuce and tomato to make a salad for our family meal of courgette and tomato gratin (recipe by ChatGPT), stuffed eggs and boiled potatoes, with trifle for afters. The cucumber slice has a cute little face.
Lena joined us for our meal and we had two weeks of quizzes to do. We scored 10.5 on the first (thanks to Lena’s knowledge of Italian desserts) and an impressive 12 on the second thanks to everybody.
Admin1 is rereading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. Admin2 is rereading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel; moon colonies, time travellers and three pandemics.

Cloud of the Day: Elephants on Parade

A sublime cloud photo, taken in Sheffield Park (which seems to be in Sussex, not Yorkshire) by the inestimable Beth.
November was, on average, exactly the same as November 2021 by day, but slightly warmer by night and was one of our wettest months ever: 144.3 mm and the third least sunny November of all time.
Admin1 is reading One Way Out by AA Dhand. Admin2 is reading Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, a rich and captivating book which requires rereading with a Hindi dictionary at hand.

Rusty Eyes

Somebody has had a bit of fun with this corroded junction box.
Admin1 is reading The Hiding Place by Simon Lelic, a compulsive investigation into bullying and a subsequent 22-year-old murder at a boarding school. As both Admins went to boarding schools, this rang very true 🙁 .
Admin2 is reading The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, a disturbing pre-WWII novel in which a Jew trying to escape the Nazis travels round and round Germany by train, without ever finding a way out. (If only Europe had had open borders and tolerance of asylum seekers.)
We scored 9 on the GSQ.

Cloud of the Day: Flying Horse

A nice day, considering it’s October: 22.0 °C.
Admin1 is rereading The Outsider by Stephen King. Admin2 is reading The Guest List by Lucy Foley: a “Sunday Times bestseller”; a sure sign that a book is speedy, superficial and uses the word “adrenaline” as a substitute for conveying excitement through the text.

Cloud Chasing Cloud

Well, you can see its eyes under its hood and its hand holding its e-cig and the massive plume of vapour it is expelling.
Admin1 is reading Stop Dead by Leigh Russell. Books 4 and 5 in this series have got gorier and even more misanthropic than before, especially towards the “lower orders”. Think I’ll give up on LR.
Admin2 is rereading Black Day at the Bosphorus Cafe by MH Baylis.

Ramblin’ Man

A cloud man wandering through the sky with his backpack and dog.
Admin1 is rereading A Song from Dead Lips by William Shaw. Admin2 is reading The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson; an English governess experiences the liberating influence of the avant-garde amid the privations of war and the ferment of the Russian revolution.

A Cloud that Looks a Bit like a Lion


Our blog is back after days of server errors and the weather is back to clouds and rain.
Admin2 is reading Machines Like Me by Ian Mc Ewan, a novel about a sentient robot in an alternative 1980s which apparently isn’t science fiction because nobody is wearing antigravity boots. It was an enjoyable read though, somewhat in the style of Adam Roberts. Admin1 has been watching Keeping Faith.

Clouds That Look Like Things: Bacterium


This is actually a cloud of yesterday; today there were no clouds at all and the solar panels did 12.87 kWh: best day this year.
Admin1 is reading The White Road by Sarah Lotz — an interesting ghost story about potholing and mountain climbing, with an unlikeable but engaging protagonist; not a book for those worried by depths or heights. Or ghosts. Or cold. Or for claustrophobes or agoraphobes.
Admin2 is reading Before the Fall by Noah Hawley; a plane crash deconstructed.