We have several butterfly species in the garden at the moment, but not all are as easy to photograph as this Painted Lady.

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And one of the poor bloke I painted very badly in the cockpit...

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Here's a nose shot...

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Recently started making model aircraft again for the first time since I was a teenager (many years ago...). My first effort as this tropical liveried Spitfire Mk V

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Just had a shower, started singing Army by ben Folds Five. I think this is a sign. Buggered if I know what the sign is though...

Went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed over the weekend. The grinning idiot on the left you might recognise from my profile. That's right, it's me. The dashing Finn on the right you might or might not recognise, depending on your degree of interest in motorsport, as Marcus Gronholm, world rally champion in 2000 and 2002. Inset is his 2006 Focus WRC. Bloody hell! Note how tall Marcus is - I'm not exactly miniature at 6ft2, and he's towering over me! The rest of the day, a birthday present to my petrolhead father, was brilliant, including seeing my brother (who took these shots) as a giant on the big screen, listening to a McLaren F1 car starting up five feet from us, and watching Jenson Button tearing up the strip in his Honda, completely obscuring the opposition. Fantastic day...
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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Ants 'use an internal pedometer'
The way they found out about this is frankly bizarre. There is, as often noted, a very fine line between genius and madness, and I think these guys have a foot firmly planted on either side. Hopefully it won't spoil the surprise too much if I say "Ants on stilts anyone?"...

Went to a gig by the band The Feeling last night. Fantastic band, full of energy, and decent tour t-shirts too... This is the only photo I took that came out looking right, but to be fair I was using a cameraphone to take it. Buy album, play album, smile.
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There's really not a lot to say about this picture, other than to confirm that yes, it is absolutely genuine. Thank goodness for cameraphones, eh?
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Ok, so the weirdness was set to continue. The friend with whom I had the conversation which sparked my last post made things a little more confusing shortly after the last blog. She needed my help deciding what to buy a friend of hers for the wedding that she was attending a few days later. Sure, I was glad to help. I asked what the bloke was like, since she seemed to be keen to buy something he might like rather than the usual girl-oriented gifts (which is fair enough, wives have to put up with their husbands, they might as well get something nice, and usually do). I asked what he was like, and she replied, describing Ben as a bit of a computer type person.
"That's odd," I thought to myself, "my brother's going to a wedding this weekend, of someone called Ben, a friend of his, who did a computer science degree. I wonder..."
Turns out there was no need to wonder. It was the same wedding...
Of course it doesn't end there. Why should it? You see, it turns out that a good friend of my colleague, Starr, has recently moved into my brother's house. That would be a decent dose of extra strangeness were it not for the fact that Starr was a good friend of a friend of mine from halls at the beginning of university, eight years ago. I sort of knew her, talked to her a few times, and she's living with my brother.
I don't know what's going to happen next, but I can tell you it's got to be fucking strange to out-do that...