Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Creature Comforts- animals in the zoo

Everybody's a star in this Aardman Animations Oscar-winner in which animals discuss life at the zoo. Accustomed to open spaces and sunnier climes, they comment on the accomodation, diet and the English weather.

An animation about animals in the zoo called" Creature Comforts".. if they could really speak, what would they say? Probably something like this:



Sunday, February 18, 2007

First signs of spring


I took these pictures in my parent's garden yesterday, Leo the cat is really enjoying the first sunbeams ..


Saturday, February 17, 2007

Picturetrail

A really cool site I found where you can upload,manage your pictures, and moreover make certain arrangments for your blog etc.. try it - it is fun..




Cool Slideshows

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The Sunscreen Song

This is one of my favorite songs, I posted the lyrics in an earlier entry..Here is the link to listen to it, it has got ots very own and special philosophy about life, I just love it. Please tell me what you think about it...http://www.barminski.com/frame/sunscreen.html
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Monday, February 12, 2007

Devoted Birds of Australia

These birds seem to love Daniel, as he just wanted to feed it's colleagues, suddenly it took a seat on his back... i think it looks amazing..animals seem to accept humans as a part of their nature, or do they just want to say .... off? :-)
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Monday, February 05, 2007

Flowers of South Africa




South Africa's plant life
South Africa's large areas of semi-desert scrub and grassland might suggest a certain poverty of plant life. Aside from the fact that a tract of pristine grassland can hold up to 60 grass species, nothing could be further from the truth.
There are five major habitat types in South Africa: fynbos, forest, Karoo, grassland, and savannah. The country can also be divided into seven biomes, or ecological life zones, with distinct environmental conditions and related sets of plant and animal life: Nama Karoo, succulent Karoo, fynbos, forest, thicket, savanna, and grassland.
Whichever classification is used, some 10% of the world's flowering species are found in South Africa, the only country in the world with an entire plant kingdom inside its borders: the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which contains 8 600 species, 68% of them endemic. The Cape Peninsula alone boasts more plant species than the whole of Great Britain.
FynbosThis southwestern area of South Africa is the home of the fynbos, which is composed of ericas (heathers), proteas and the grass-like restios. Most spectacular in flower are the proteas, which include the king protea - the national flower - and others of broadly similar shape, the pincushion leucospermum types and spiky leucadendrons. The colour range is vast.
The ericas, the largest genus of flowering plants in South Africa, are more delicate, repaying close examination of their almost infinite variety of colour and form. One or other of these species will be found in bloom at almost any time of the year.
These share their Cape home with such beauties as the red disa orchid, one of South Africa's 550 wild orchids, which grows in the mountains, as well as numerous irises, pelargoniums and many more.
South Africa's pelargoniums, in particular, have contributed greatly to gardens all over the world, as have the arum lilies - the classic white species is from this area, the yellow and pink from elsewhere in the country.
The world's gardens also have South Africa to thank for the agapanthus, gladiolus, Barberton daisy and Gardenia thunbergia, to name a few.
Carpet of flowersThe Cape in the spring is a breathtaking sight, but even more astonishing is Namaqualand. Dry, rocky and desert-like for the rest of the year, it yields its floral wealth for a short few weeks in the spring in dazzling sheets of colour.
The golden yellow and orange Namaqualand daisies are predominant, but in between them are a wide variety of flowers, including the iridescent succulent mesembryanthemums. Colours here are particularly intense, although there is also much fascination in less colourful species such as the quiver tree (the San, or Bushmen, used to make quivers from its fibrous stem) and the bizarre-looking tall succulent known as the halfmens (half human).
And anyone interested in plants' abilitiesto adapt to harsh circumstances in a myriad different ways (not all are succulents) need not wait for spring to visit the area.
ForestsAlthough South Africa has more than a thousand indigenous trees, large species are relatively scarce in many parts of the country.
But they are very much at home in some areas, such as the Knysna-Tsitsikamma forest with its tall stinkwoods, black ironwoods and yellowwoods, and the northeastern region in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, home to the ancient cycads and Lowveld species such as the fever tree - so called because of its association with malaria areas.
It is also in the north that one finds the famous thick-stemmed baobab, which according to African myth was accidentally planted upside down, accounting for the odd shape of its branches.
Then there are the forests of KwaZulu-Natal, where the beautiful shade-loving orange Clivia miniata, a now much cultivated member of the amaryllis family, is found.
Another popular orange (and purple) garden flower, now the emblem of the US city of Los Angeles, originates in the Eastern Cape: the strelitzia. In much the same colour range, South Africa's winters are marked by the flowering of some of the country's 140 species of aloes.
The Eastern Cape's Greater Addo National Park, which stretches 200 kilometres from the coast to the Karoo, includes samples of six of the seven South African biomes mentioned above, lacking only the succulent Karoo.
Medicinal plants and thorn treesThere is virtually no area of South Africa without its particular floral treasure or species of special beauty or interest.
These include succulents that look almost exactly like stones (lithops), mangroves, tree ferns, traditional food plants and those that would kill you if you took a bite, and - one of the most promising fields of study in South Africa - a large number of plants of medicinal value.
Some of these, such as the Aloe ferox, a purgative, were discovered to be medicinally useful by the early European colonists; many more have long been known and used by indigenous African people.
Yet for all the spectacular plants to be found, perhaps the landscape that most eloquently conjures up the spirit of South African flora is the typical savannah, with its (often dry) grasses and more-or-less thickly scattered shrubs and thorn trees.
Lingering images may vary widely, from fynbos field to subtropical forest, but for many South Africans the thorn tree is the nesting place of their hearts. Posted by Picasa

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Snow is snow

Ever imagined looking at a picture of snow and feeling really hot and sweating? It is a fact that our brain works with associations of emotions and experiences it had before, so snow will always stay associated with coldness .. Even when you watch a movie where it is for example raining heavily, you often go outside afterwards being subconsciously happy about the fact that it is not raining, thats because your brain quickly arranges with a given situation and frees certain emotions. Snow is like a common emotion where people react similar, but there are also individual reactions on certain images, depending on personal experience and state of mind.Most of the people will find a picture of a dog nice and positive, but some who made a bad experience with dogs might find it upsetting..


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