Broadstairs is a Kentish town by the side of the sea (beside which i do like to be). Every year since 1965 they have held a festival there and it goes on for a whole week. Hence the name.
A Section of Broadstairs
This year the dates are Friday 7th ’til Friday 14th August and the line-up includes, to give but a brief summary, Hot Club of Cowtown, Eric Bogle, Shirley Collins, Devon Sprule, Spiers & Boden, Leon Rosselson & Robb Johnson, Faustus, Snapdragons and The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. You can find out more about tickets here.
To be honest, when i first started writing this post i thought it was going to be a competition but it turns out it isn’t (which is fair enough, look at how many gigs are going on during this week!). But i’m in the mood for making up a competition question anyway.
In keeping with the theme of step-sized platforms of differing altitudes (like stairs, see?), what (presumably) natural geological anomaly exists in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, which consists of multiple rocks in the shape of hexagonal prisms?
a) The Giant’s Causeway
b) The Elf’s Escalator
c) The Midget’s Motorway
Leave your answer as a comment below (wordpress only, facebook users click here) and if you’re feeling particularly ambitious you can postulate how these rocks formed. I reckon someone was shipping loads of hexagonal prisms around, as was the custom in those days, and they crashed into the shore depositing their craggy cargo.
Entrants must be mammalian, sentient and capable of using a keyboard. If i think your entry is particularly good i might even send you a mystery prize.
July 3, 2009 at 12:04 PM
[...] 1 votes vote Broadstairs Folk Week! Broadstairs is a Kentish town by the side of the sea (beside which i do like to be). Every [...]
July 4, 2009 at 8:39 AM
a) The Giant’s Causeway
the remnants of a game called hexadoms that the giants played who lived in this area – on each edge there would have been different numbers which had to match to insert into the game – unfortunately over time the numbers have worn off!!!
July 5, 2009 at 7:34 AM
a) The Giant’s Causeway
Pipe organs were the most popular musical instrument back in the days (and nights) when the Pixies ruled the world. While this may be widely known, what is less widely known is that for most Pixies the idea of a ‘good night out’ was to either a) mine (or just dig), or b) carve wood.
Over many months, maybe even a year, the industrious little Pixies managed to dig a whole so big ‘to the east of that big tree over there Seamus’, that we ended up with what we know today as the Irish Sea. But of course, this wouldn’t have been half so much fun,w ithout a bit of pipe organ music to move things along….
You’re catching up now, I can see.
So, while most Pixies dug, some built and then played large wooden pipe organs. Sadly many were lost to time and Trolls (who find wooden pipe organ music rather fuddy-duddy). Generally the Trolls went around with their giant Sousaphonachines, using the advanced physics of resonatering that they had developed in their own spare time, simply blasting the pipe organs to bits. Not always though.
The Troll attempt to put the Pixies Pipe Organ at “the giant’s causeway” (quote, unquote) out of action relied on a bit of clever practical thinking by a certain Timmy Troll the Twelth, public works engineer for the local Troll community. He was having big trouble with his waste treatment systems (you can guess where this is going, right?). And so he hit on the bright idea of simply pumping all of the waste he had lying around down the pipes of the organ.
It was a marvellous success to be sure to be sure, but of course highly impractical as an anti-pipe organ measure in the long term. Given that, as you know, Trolls are very tidy and non-wasteful personages in general.
Anyway, the Pixies decided to abandon the “giants causeway” (quote, unquote) pipe organ and over time the “waste” fossilised, the wood of the pipes decayed, and today all we humans can see is long hexagonal tubes. That is until the Irish Sea dries up and the truth finally becomes widely known……
July 5, 2009 at 9:53 AM
Millions of years ago, insects were much larger. Dragonfly-like fossils with wimgspans of 1.5 metres have been found. The ancestors of modern bees were similarly over-sized. The so called “giant’s causeway” is the result of a sudden volcanic eruption overwhelming a colony of these insects and what we see is the petrified remains of their nests, which have slid down the hill to the sea-shore.
July 5, 2009 at 3:43 PM
a Giant’s Causeway
Because when you squash circle (or columns) you get hexagons
C
July 5, 2009 at 4:15 PM
The Giant’s Causeway
Result of piling too many hexagon patchwork templates together.
July 5, 2009 at 5:49 PM
answer : a) The Giant’s Causeway
[address provided]
July 10, 2009 at 9:31 AM
a) Giant’s Causeway
Constructed using ancient stone pencils (pointy bits down). They soon ran out of pencils but at laest they had a go. Today we’d have used up the pencils writing a “Giant Feasability Study”, but it’s hard to imagine millions of visitors coming to look at that thousands of years later!