1. Kamchatka
2. Lake Baikal
3. Lake Vostok
4. Lake Natron
5. The Okavango Delta
6. The South Downs

That's all for now - Happy New Year!

Clue = 'storm', 7 letters, first letter 'T'

It could be: Tornado, Thunder, Tempest, Typhoon, Twister.

(The answer was 'Tempest', btw).

Ohmygosh - has there ever been such a duplicitous quick crossword clue?!

A rhyme for orange

I thought for a fairly long while that I had invented a rhyme for the word 'orange', fabled as an unrhymed word (PS. That's my first link to an anchor ever!). As you may see, somebody else has spent a lot more time on the topic. Oh well.

Internet journey #2 - Rotting Flesh

I once read about a massive lump of rotting flesh that was washed up on a beach in Chile. Experts were guessing it might be some new species, but it was just decomposing whale, where the skeleton had fallen out of it leaving the floating blob 'o' blubber.

The idea that it was some sort of cephalopod made me search for giant squid information. I read that they are fairly passive in their feeding habits, hanging at 45° deep in the ocean, waiting for poor fishies to stumble into their tentacles.

Then I read about an even bigger squid - the Colossal Squid - which is quite active in its feeding, known to chase Patagonian Toothfish on the surface of the water!

"Patagonian Toothfish"?? It turns out that this is another name for the Chilean Sea Bass, a recently fashionable fish on our platters, but one that takes several years to mature and is consequently in danger of extinction from overfishing (that'll teach it to be tasty).

The third installment

Spiderman 3 is not as good as Spiderman 2. Last night I saw Die Hard 4.0 - a pale shadow of the John MacLean I know. A bit like Terminator 3, it has all the constituent parts but the whole is less than the sum of them. Shrek 3 and the Bourne Ultimatum were good, but ultimately it was more of the same.

Internet journeys.

You know how one topic leads to another; and before you know it you have accumulated another x KB of potentially useless but fascinating information by clicking links online when you know you have extremely important but inversely boring things to do? I call these 'hyperlink journeys'. They are essentially linear by nature, though not necessarily sequential. For example, a 'knowledge path' may diverge and each option would be explored in turn till their end was reached.

Here's one I made the other day.

'Throwies' on Wikipedia produced a pair of paths:
> invented by the Grafitti Research Laboratory > The Boston Mooninite Scare
> Alamo at Astor Place, NYC > Rubik Cube stunt.