Many of the pubs along the Thames have waterside dining available for their patrons. A few have taken that one step better.
At Ye Olde Swann there is underwater dining available this week. The recent rains along the Thames have swollen the river until the tables on their riverside dock are underwater. This picture was taken after the waters had already started to subside. At the highest point, the water on the dock was up to the seats on the picnic tables.
I was not kidding when I said that it has been raining - a lot! Frankly, all this rain is for the birds. (Ducks and swans mostly…)
And of course, weather being mutable, today it has changed again and it is windy. There are gale-force winds blowing with gusts of up to seventy miles-per-hour. Ironically, the icons on the weather forecasting section of the BBC website show the icon for showers today and the icon for windy tomorrow!
I hope wherever you are today, your weather blows you a way, figuratively - not literally!
Don Bergquist - 11 January 2007 - Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK
At Ye Olde Swann there is underwater dining available this week. The recent rains along the Thames have swollen the river until the tables on their riverside dock are underwater. This picture was taken after the waters had already started to subside. At the highest point, the water on the dock was up to the seats on the picnic tables.I was not kidding when I said that it has been raining - a lot! Frankly, all this rain is for the birds. (Ducks and swans mostly…)
And of course, weather being mutable, today it has changed again and it is windy. There are gale-force winds blowing with gusts of up to seventy miles-per-hour. Ironically, the icons on the weather forecasting section of the BBC website show the icon for showers today and the icon for windy tomorrow!
I hope wherever you are today, your weather blows you a way, figuratively - not literally!
Don Bergquist - 11 January 2007 - Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK
2 comments:
Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story about Fanny Flagg being the meterologist in Birmingham, AL. Apparently she knew nothing about the science of weather except that in the US weather fronts usually start on the left/top side of the map and move to the right/down.
Reportedly each evening before the weather forecast she would move all of the magnetically attached fronts and clouds on the US map (used as a prop behind her) to the right and down, and things that fell off the edges of the map would be artfully arranged on the left/top side. She would then read the forecast for temperatures from the teleprompter in front of this map.
It seems that this worked quite well for her for several months until one notable day when the map behind her bore absolutely no resemblance to reality.
When pressed, she admitted her ignorance of meterology.
The amazing part is that the morning "meterologist" turned out to be equally ignorant and had been applying exactly the same algorithm to map creations.
It just goes to show it isn't what you know that gets you on the television!
Dear Anonymous Reader:
Thanks for the comment! You're right! The placement of icons on the BBC weather site does seem to be something like the random movement of patterns on the weather board in that story. The story may be apocryphal, but I've heard it too!
At the risk of showing my age, I remember her telling Mike Douglas this story on his show one afternoon. Not that I typically watched Mike Douglas, I do remember seeing it occasionally. Perhaps it was raining that day.
I did a little research on the story and can find no reference to it on the web. I know that Fannie Flagg was at WBRC-TV in Birmingham (I once was at that station and there are only two things I remember about it. One was that every time we went to lunch, the girls from the Traffic Department pointed-out that you could see Vulcan's Butt, the other is that they told me at least a dozen times that Fannie Flagg had been a morning show host there in the sixties or seventies.) I vaguely remember being told that she was at WHNT-TV as well, but that may be my increasingly faulty memory.
I checked connections to both those stations on the web and found confirmation of a connection in Birmingham but not in Huntsville. Anyone with citations, please post them. It would be appreciated!
Thank you for your post!
djb
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