Category Archives: Froggy Foibles

Forestry workers were felling trees in southern Scotland when they noticed something peculiar among the roots and bracken: An iron door. It turns out the team had accidentally discovered a lost WWII-era bunker, built to house one of Great Britain’s most secretive — and suicidal — military forces. Known as the Auxiliary Units (or sometimes “Churchill’s secret army”), the force was a corps of volunteers similar to Britain’s Home Guard, charged with defending the country in the event of a Nazi German invasion. Unlike the Home Guard, however, the Auxiliary Units were a guerilla warfare brigade shrouded in secrecy. …The locations of these bunkers were such fiercely guarded secrets that many of them still remain undiscovered today.

AUSTRALIA — A delivery truck carrying toilet paper has burst into flames in the Australian city of Brisbane, ratcheting up a sense of panic about the availability of the product generated by the coronavirus outbreak. Shoppers have swept the shelves clean of toilet paper all week and supermarket chains Woolworths and Coles have had to limit the amount people can buy. The government has urged people not to stockpile it and tried to calm consumers worries. …The driver escaped without injury and the cargo, including toilet paper, was also largely unaffected. …Some media have taken the opportunity to poke fun at the toilet paper panic. The NT News, a newspaper known for its tongue-in-cheek antics, published eight blank pages in the middle of its Thursday edition saying it was giving readers what they needed.

CORK, Ireland — It has captured the minds and imaginations of generations who have wandered through the grounds of Blarney Castle. Now, having last August won the 2019 Irish Tree of the Year title, the ancient and imposing ‘Witch’s Yew’ in the Mythical Rock Close on the Castle grounds is now vying to win the prestigious European Tree of the Year crown. The Yew Tree, which has been estimated by experts to be more than 600 years old, sits on top of a natural limestone outcrop that houses the Witch’s Kitchen. …According to legend, the area is the home of the Blarney Witch, who first told mortals about the Blarney’s Stone’s magical powers. …In what may be considered a lucky omen for Ireland, the winner will be announced on St Patrick’s Day. 

Imagine that you roll out of bed onto a living fungus floor. The walls and ceiling — heck, the whole apartment building, down to the plumbing and electrical systems — are made of fungus too. Wood and concrete are remnants of the distant past; this entire city, from the schools to the stores to the hospitals, is made of living fungus — constantly growing, dying off and regenerating itself. That’s the vision laid out in a provocative new paper, which a team of European academics say is the first-ever exploration of living fungus’ potential as a raw material for futuristic, eco-friendly “monolithic structures” that would, in their telling, revolutionize the entire built environment and economy. “We propose to develop a structural substrate by using live fungal mycelium,” reads the paper. “Fungal buildings will self-grow, build, and repair themselves.” The idea is a response to the prospect of catastrophic climate change.

The ancient Romans relied on long-distance timber trading to construct their empire. …In this study, Bernabei et al successfully date and determine the origin and chronology of unusually well-preserved ancient Roman timber samples. …Based on the sapwood present in 8 of the thirteen samples, the authors were able to narrow the date these oaks were felled to between 40 and 60 CE. …”This study shows that in Roman times, wood from the near-natural woodlands of north-eastern France was used for construction purposes in the centre of Rome. Considering the distance, calculated to be over 1700km, the timber sizes, the means of transportation with all the possible obstacles along the way, our research emphasises the importance of wood for the Romans and the powerful logistic organisation of the Roman society.”

A landmark statue has burned to the ground around the Mile 62 mark on the Alaska Highway in northern B.C. The enormous fibreglass lumberjack that used to stand just outside of the former Clarke Sawmill, about 25 kilometres north of Fort St. John, went up in flames late Sunday night, said Debbie Lee Clarke, whose father bought the statue in the late 1970s. …No one knows for certain what caused the fire, but Clarke thinks someone may have shot fireworks or a flare gun at the lumberjack. … For those outside of the Clarke household, the statue was a landmark that signalled how far people were from Fort St. John.

A London Plane tree located on the grounds of Ireland’s oldest law school has a big appetite. The tree, which is near The Honorable Society of King’s Inns, appears to be “devouring” an iron bench over time, Fox News reported. According to the Tree Council of Ireland, the tree is 69 feet tall and 11.4 feet wide. It was one of many trees that were planted in the city in the 1800s and two years ago, the council declared it a “heritage tree.” …In 2017, Dublin city councillors passed a motion that called for the protection of the old tree and iron bench, The Irish Times noted. …It’s uncertain how long the tree will be “chowing down” on the iron bench, but there’s still time to see this strange, yet beautiful sight in Dublin.

On September 1, 1830, the 28-year-old poet Victor Hugo sat down to write Chapter 1 of a book called Notre-Dame de Paris. …It got poor reviews but the public loved it, and it was quickly translated into other languages. The English edition was called The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. And Hugo became world famous. …Nearly 200 years later, on April 15, 2019… Notre-Dame was on fire. I understood what was burning and how the fire was gathering force. …I had, in doing research for The Pillars of the Earth, my novel about the building of a fictional medieval cathedral. A key scene in Chapter 4 describes the old cathedral of Kingsbridge burning down, and I had asked myself: Exactly how does a great stone church catch fire? …Excerpt from Notre-Dame by Ken Follett, to be published on October 29, 2019.

This innovative electric motorcycle from French company Newron is among the first to break the traditional motorcycle design trend. The first thing you’ll notice is that quite a lot of it is made out of wood. That alone is a radical departure from typical motorcycle design, but one that will not catch on where there is any kind of weather. The second thing you’ll notice is that pillar of wood right at the front of the seat. Stop too hard and that thing will be all up in your business, and not in a good way.

Elephants do a lot of damage to plants as they stomp around the jungle, but, counterintuitively, this activity increases the biomass of the forest, letting it store more carbon. If elephants were to go extinct, the amount of carbon stored in central African rainforests could ultimately fall by 7 per cent, according to a new analysis. …Fabio Berzaghi at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France… built a model of plant diversity and simulated the impact of elephants by increasing the mortality of smaller plants. …The model showed that elephants reduce the density of stems in the forest, but increase the average tree diameter and the total biomass. …These effects may also account for the differences between African and Amazonian rainforest. 

…Residents in the South Yorkshire city have been left perplexed by slices of white bread popping up on tree trunks left right and centre. Yes, you read that right, people are stapling slices of bread to the bark. … “This week the trees on the north side of the road have been ‘decorated’ by persons unknown with slices of white bread which have been stapled in place. “They are on the north side of the road and on the north east sides of the trees. Is this part of some weird new cult?” …stapling bread to trees is actually a very weird, slightly deranged, mildly hilarious viral online craze. Online geeks from around the world have been showing off their bread-tree fancies on a Reddit thread,with some even branching out from the classic loaf to em-BARK on a slice of bagel stapling.

The Queen was not letting the small matter of her advancing age stand in the way of that most quintessential royal job: tree planting. Rejecting an offer of help on Tuesday to plant a hornbeam sapling, the 93-year-old declared: “No, no, I’m still perfectly capable of planting a tree.” With that she seized the spade and started energetically shovelling in the soil to commemorate 100 years of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany just outside Cambridge. The NIAB chairman Jim Godfrey had been primed to plant the tree for her, and for Her Majesty to “supervise”. …Tina Barsby, chief executive of NIAB said: “It was very impressive to see her planting the tree. She wasn’t scheduled to plant the tree, it was just to supervise the planting. But she handed her handbag to her someone and seized the spade. She obviously wanted to do it!”