For Week 26 (of the countUP) the link below will give you a line up of dinosaurs by size. Not that they could ever have lined up in this way as they didn't all exist at the same time.
By the time the later dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the early ones were no more than ancient fossils.
In fact, the gap between the existence of Tyranosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus is greater than the gap between Tyranosaurus Rex and the iPhone.
Image by AndreasIken from Pixabay
For week 25 (of the countUP) here is a neat bit of horsey maths from one of my favourite YouTubers.
I can’t think of a reason why you would need to work out
which are the three fastest out of 25 horses, but maybe you can. And anyway,
let’s suppose that’s the case.
OK, you have your 25 horses and you take them to a racetrack.
Hey, that’s a MASSIVE lorry you have. Does it need a special licence to drive
it?
The racetrack owner says, ‘Please use my racetrack but only
5 horses at a time please. Oh and I need it back, so be as quick as you can.’
Right then! 25 horses to be raced 5 at a time. What’s the
smallest number of races it will take? Go!
**Happy Festive Season to one and all**
After Jack the Horse got things underway many weeks ago and Professor von Puppet made initial introductions, we have met almost all the new cast of Horse of the Same Colour.
As to who else will be joining Megan and Amy in their new adventure, you can be sure that Naylor O'Neill and her gang will push their way to centre stage. Their long-standing teachers will do their best to keep things under control; fearsome Mr Connor, Miss Blanchard, the new teaching assistant, and the absent-minded Mrs Linstead who turns out to have hidden depths. And the traveller family who join the school for the autumn term also make quite an impact, in particular brothers Menowin and Patrin and their little sister, Rosella.
Here’s a quick reminder of the characters who have been introduced over the past few weeks. Have you decided upon a likely favourite? If so, please leave a comment to let us know which one.
Oh yes, the secret of the unicorn ... I'm afraid I'm not allowed to divulge that. It will all come out when Horse of the Same Colour is published in 2021.
The person who knows Nutella best describes her thus: “Totally a foodie.”
Now if you’ve been monitoring the unfolding
introductions of the cast, that description might have elicited a disbelieving
laugh. Is there a single one of them who is not wholly consumed by thoughts of
food and how to snaffle it from under the noses of its rightful owners?
Well, no, there isn’t, they’re all
obsessed with food, how to track it down and how to grab a share, but of all of
them, Nutella is the worst. There isn’t a single task, no matter how important,
that Nutella won’t interrupt in the pursuit of a tasty snack.
Nutella's favourite snack would look something like this:
Zack is the youngest of the bunch who are in on the secret. He is small and chestnut in colour, with a very cheeky face.
Zack’s role model is Jasper, but he always rushes to Flo when he’s in big trouble.
This is Snowy with her ‘Oh no, what now?’ look as she watches Zack race into the barn.
If you’re a toadaphobe, look away now.
Peanut isn’t a toad but he has toad
eyes that he can put to good use if the gang need to have someone distracted.
And the gang often want to distract someone, especially if the someone is
guarding a stash of food.
Peanut creeps up on people and
peers at them through some handy obstacle like a hedge, then he opens his eyes
W-I-D-E. For a second, they think they’ve seen this:
And if they are bufonophobic, they will run away and leave their picnic unattended.
Spice is friendly and loves chatting with people and ponies. He’s very discreet, though, and you won’t learn any secrets from him, which is a pity as he’s one of the ones with a BIG secret to share.
Unfortunately, Spice doesn’t like being photographed, but here he is just after he was talking to a person and a pony.
Koby Blue is a member of a very secret society – so secret that I’m not allowed to say, but everything will be revealed in the book (that’s a clue, by the way).
Fmelodie is the one that the Prof said sounded Fmiliar. Ha ha. See what he did there?
Fmelodie is quite a character but her real accomplishment is something you’ll never see, because she’s a masterof disguise. Here is a cat wondering what woke it up. Of course it was Fmelodie but she’s so fast that the cat is looking in the wrong direction.
Some of the gang like to have names that mislead, such as Flo not minding being called Slow Flo, but there is nothing misleading about Mischief’s name.
‘Mischief by name, mischief by nature,’ Snowy has been heard to murmur, when even she can’t keep Mischief out of trouble.
Mischief’s party trick is the concealed nip. If a pony suddenly bucks for no reason at all, look around and see if Mischief is anywhere near. Snowy says she sometimes thinks Mischief is no more than a set of teeth and a pair of eyes looking for ways to make trouble.
How many creatures, human or otherwise, are in the photo? Flo’s there, of course, but we can also see two separate legs and one hand, so that could be three different people. Oh yes, and there’s a horse’s head, too, so that makes five.
Sometimes Flo gets teased for being
slow, but it’s not that she’s slow, it’s that she keeps stopping to snack,
which often makes her late.
Jasper is a born leader who takes the whole gang to where they need to go – and a lot of times to where they really shouldn’t go. They don’t mind that Jasper leads them into trouble so often because they all know that if he didn’t, then they’d all get into trouble on their own and have no one to lead them out of it.
Jasper is especially fond of grass, but he knows his gang prefers fancier treats so he doesn’t take them to empty meadows, he takes them to popular picnic spots where he can eat grass while they make nuisances of themselves in and around all the picnic baskets.
Like most of the gang, Jazz has a lazy streak, but if you find Jazz lazing about, say upside down on the couch when he’s really not supposed to be in the house at all, he will tell you he was practising his special skill and just happened to doze off.
Polo might be small but he’s speedy and he turns tight corners like you wouldn’t believe. Polo’s agility is very useful when it comes to keeping things secret, and he certainly has a big secret.
He’s another of the gang that knows everything there is to know about the secret of the unicorn. If you happened to be a pony watching through a window when Polo went by, all you would see would be a blur.
Ossie has one characteristic in common with Smirf, he is greedy. In fact he will go to such lengths to grab a bite to eat that he has become quite an acrobat.
There is no obstacle that Ossie won’t tackle if he thinks that food lurks beyond it.
Ossie is another one with a special link to the unicorn but because the real secret of the unicorn has yet to be revealed, there will be no spoilers in the blog.
