Clouds are really worth spotting, wherever you are. They're extraordinary. I mean, they look really light and fluffy, but the rain in a cubic mile of cloud can actually weigh as much as 400 elephants.
Or possibly even 402 elephants, if they've cut their toenails.
Clouds can be beautiful:
Colourful:
and sometimes deeply worrying:
No one knows all this better than the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Apart from the clouds in the sky, there's cloud computing, which as far as I can make out is when you use lots of computers from all over the place to solve your problems, instead of just the one computer and a lot of shouting.
Do hope you spend some of today on cloud nine*; or, if that's out of reach, cloud-cuckoo land**.
Spot the Frippet: cloud. This word comes, bewilderingly, from the Old English word clūd, which means rock.
Rock? Good grief, that'd be even worse than 402 elephants.
*Cloud Nine is a 20th century expression meaning a state of bliss. It may be linked to the expression:
**cloud cuckoo land, meaning in a daydream. Cloud Cuckoo Land itself first appeared in Aristophanes' 414 BC play The Birds.
I am a big fan of clouds and love your pictures. I once had a picture cut out of a diary called 'Pictures from the cloud gallery.' A Japanese picture. That's how I think of clouds: as exhibits in a kind of celestial gallery.
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