ruminant

The Whispering Trees

2011-06-22T03:06:00.000-07:00

I love these paintings by Chinese artist Tzu-chi Yeh, they remind me of the upper reaches Fowey estuary where I grew up, they're a bit 'Heart of Darkness' too..........

The Dreaded Mankle

2011-06-20T03:41:00.000-07:00

Seems I'm not the only one scared of the rise of the mankle.

Arty B*llocks

2011-06-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

The arty b*llocks generator, an invaluable resource for someone like me...

Swiss Air Posters

2011-06-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

Awesome collection of Swiss Air posters

False Nostalgia

2011-05-23T10:45:00.001-07:00

I took the above picture from my balcony whilst on Honeymoon. Its's taken with an iphone app called Hipstamatic, which replicates electronically what analogue cameras like the Lomo do, namely creates a sort of instant nostalgic feel to a picture. The press of a button gives you an automated, no talent required, dreamy snapshot, and gives otherwise mundane images a soupcon of artistic gravitas. Found an interesting article today that attempts to unravel the popularity of this sort of thing - namely that

"The faux-vintage photo is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past."

The Euthanasia Coaster

2011-05-16T12:49:00.001-07:00

The Euthanasia Coaster - "a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. "

White Caviar

2011-05-01T11:06:00.001-07:00

Apparently the latest gastro-trend is for snails eggs - now being sold as 'white caviar' and with a price to match. Wouldn't mind giving them a go...apparently they taste strongly of geosmin

Out there....waiting.....

2011-05-01T03:01:00.001-07:00

Unreleased Works

2011-04-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Aphex Twin meets young girl

Cow Windows

2011-04-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

Seeing as I am a ruminant, something the always excellent Bldgblg mentioned rather interested me today - cow windows, which according to wikipedia, are to be found in a cow that has been surgically fitted with a porthole-like device which allows one to view its innards in action. Poor cow

Escape Vehicle Number 6

2011-04-11T13:29:00.001-07:00

The case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died. - Philip Larkin

2011-04-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

Two of my favourite things combined: The Natural History Museum and Butterflies

Unfinished London

2011-04-06T03:27:00.000-07:00

A rather crazed documentary about the incompleteness of London's ring roads. More documentaries should be like this - BBC producers need to snap this guy up!

Back Again

2011-04-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

A chance comment from a man in a pub (a Mahlerman in a pub) made me feel sufficiently guilty enough to galvanise me into kicking this thing back into life!

To begin: Abandoned Wrecks - photos of coastal delapidation (I note that the images are very cheap to purchase too!)

Save The Words

2010-08-20T03:27:00.000-07:00

I love words. Weird, strange, odd, obscure words. So I enjoyed finding out that that the Oxford English Dictionary has launched a website aimed at keeping moribund english language words in use. The page uses flash to encourage you to explore new words, which you are then invited to 'adopt'. All very silly, but quite fun. I particularly enjoyed Hymnicide.

Perfection

2010-08-16T02:08:00.001-07:00

Watched a programme featuring Puffins at the weekend. They look so comical and clown like with their markings like napoleanic overcoats and their drunken amble, yet something suddenly struck me - are puffins the ultimate animal? The Puffin has mastery of all three elements -On land, whilst amusing on their little orange feet, they are actually fairly nimble. They can fly prefectly adequately, and they can float on water, and exist submerged for decent lengths of time, flying through the water to great depths to catch their food. Is there another animal that can do better?

Something for the weekend

2010-08-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

Rubbish weather outside, so best to stay in. Although I'm about to set off on a 5 mile odyssey to a country pub.

Here's a pretty little BBC4 film about wild swimming and the writing of Roger Deakin that will warm your cockles. Catch it whilst you can, as it's only online til Sunday night.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/t9r28/

streaming content

2010-08-11T23:50:00.000-07:00

Momentous day, as over at The Dabbler, I make my first post, all about a river that got lost.

Aeropain

2010-08-10T00:31:00.000-07:00

Somewhere over northern Germany the large scottish man wearing a t-shirt saying 'nae neck' opened the aeroplane's toilet door, grimaced, and turned back to his group of mates and said

'Jaysus, it stinks of burning plastic in here!'

The stag party laughed. But then the cabin began filling with the smell of cooking electronics. When our pilot spoke through the intercom, we could hear that they were using a respirator. We were told that we had to make an emergency landing. People started making birdlike noises of concern. A quick descent and we bumped into Cologne airport, where an armada of fire engines raced to meet us. Sheparded inside, we sat and waited. Of course, they could find no fault, but we could not fly on. It was a day of two halves. After 5 hours of waiting, we were taken by taxi to Dusseldorf to be put up in a luxurious hotel for the night, with all meals paid for, before finally flying home the next afternoon.

Toodle Pip

2010-07-30T03:24:00.000-07:00

Apologies all for the light, nay moribund bloggery going on around these parts - massive work deluge exacerbated by the fact that I'm off on holiday to Deutschland for 10 days! Catch you on the flip side, homies - and in the mean time, don't forget to check out the most exciting new media project since The 11 O'Clock show:

The Dabbler

Thickos

2010-07-20T04:54:00.000-07:00

It is common knowledge, to me only, that middle class Labour supporters, despite being city dwelling, news-reading types, are often very much thicker than Conservatives. I really liked this blog post and the comments afterwards, as it got me thinking about why it is that so many of my contemporaries so blindly trumpet the New Labour line, when it seems obvious that many of them have never really asked themselves why. I hadn't considered that many people simply choose to become left wing through peer concensus, due to not really having a clue what to think, and so, frightened to offend, take the path of least resistance...with a subconcious groupthink feeling that to be left wing is to mark yourself out as 'a nice person', thus the choice of being a Labour supporter is almost a consumerist one.

Sydney

2010-07-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

I've only ever read one book by Howard Jacobson, called Redback, and I absolutely hated it. It seemed like a rambling example of literary clever-cleverness that had somehow escaped a decent editor. Not sure what his current stuff is like, but a little interview with him today in the Guardian piqued my interest. Jacobson worked for a while in Sydney and he was talking about his experiences there. It struck a chord with me as I had lived there for a similar length of time too. All of what he says rings true of me too:

"You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness. If the person already embodies the spirit of the place that has seduced you – its beauty, its liveliness, its quickness, and somehow its faraway sadness, for Sydney always struck me as melancholy – and if your trysts are indistinguishable from this landscape, the city as much the site of passion as your heart, you fall heavily."

"So why, since I loved Sydney so much, did I leave less than three years after my rhapsodic arrival? The simple answer is that you can have too much of a good thing: there was too much fun and not enough work, Sydney had become a sort of Lotus Land to me, a seduction of the senses, and I was, after all, an Englishman with English ambitions to which the sunshine and the wine and the overall beauty of everything and everyone were at last inimical. It's a sad but necessary fact for some of us to face: that we fare better when the going isn't easy."

and on returning to visit it again:

"I can't trust me in the place. It's too like visiting myself as I was, as I might have been, as I had no business being."

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Julio the Sewer Diver

2010-07-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

Topmost horrible and scary job of the year award must go to Julio the Sewer Diver - a guy who spends his days being lowered, sightless, into the black depths of Mexico City's sewers, in order to feel his way along the flooded tunnels and clear away blockages of human waste and dead bodies. Fascinating interview with the chap over at superblog Edible Geography

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Fiona Banner

2010-07-09T00:18:00.000-07:00

You may have seen photos of this exhibition already - Fiona Banner at the Tate. The Harrier looks to me like an enormous shark, strung from a gantry. Its the upside-down silver Jaguar that I really like, the alien form of it, the way it looks like it has just fallen from the sky, and the juxtapostion of the shiny futuristic surfaces with the warm romanesque stone of the gallery. Both pieces of military hardware take on the form of powerful captured beasts. Strange how the positioning of an object can render it mundane, or elevate it into something special. She could have been pedestrian and just displayed a shiny plane as is. But she chose to flip it on it's back and made it into something memorable. I would love to go and see it when I'm next in London.

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Greenaway

2010-07-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

Still feeling fragile, having returned from a weekend in Cornwall, where I attended the stag party of an old school friend. I'd become rather bored of the usual uninspired stag cliches of go-karting, paintballing and despoiling eastern european cities, so it was a pleasant change to go coasteering. I spent the summers of my adolescence throwing myself off cornish cliffs for free, but apparently now it has a name they can charge you for the privilege.

Anyway it was actually great fun and I would recommend it to anyone who is struggling for an idea of something to do for a stag weekend. We spent the day exploring the cliffs around Polzeath, and leaping into the murky green water - even though I've been doing it for years, there's still something edgy about the cliffs and the deep green water and grasping bladderwrack that lurks in my primordial cortex. I love the sea, yet also fear it. Betjeman, the local sage, captured that very same feeling of fear and wonder in this poem about Polzeath:

Greenaway

I know so well this turfy mile,
These clumps of sea-pink withered brown,
The breezy cliff, the awkward stile,
The sandy path that takes me down.

To crackling layers of broken slate
Where black and flat sea-woodlice crawl
And isolated rock pools wait
Wash from the highest tides of all.

I know the roughly blasted track
That skirts a small and smelly bay
And over squelching bladderwrack
Leads to the beach at Greenaway.

Down on the shingle safe at last
I hear the slowly dragging roar
As mighty rollers mount to cast
Small coal and seaweed on the shore,

And spurting far as it can reach
The shooting surf comes hissing round
To heave a line along the beach
Of cowries waiting to be found.

Tide after tide by night and day
The breakers battle with the land
And rounded smooth along the bay
The faithful rocks protecting stand.

But in a dream the other night
I saw this coastline from the sea
And felt the breakers plunging white
Their weight of waters over me.

There were the stile, the turf, the shore,
The safety line of shingle beach
With every stroke I struck the more
The backwash sucked me out of reach.

Back into what a water-world
Of waving weed and waiting claws?
Of writhing tentacles uncurled
To drag me to what dreadful jaws?

Badlands

2010-06-30T02:22:00.000-07:00

Through cultural osmosis it's become something we can all identify with - the 'badlands' of New Jersey. The poisonous brown swamp that flashes past in the opening credits of The Sopranos, reeds and factories, chimneys and motels. Fly-tipping and gangster hits. The footnote of the city, where the toxins of the metropolis bleed from its porous edge. We have our own badlands too, of course, in our Thames Estuary, and also in the gypsy-raddled wastes that stretch out past Uxbridge. I've been toying with buying a photobook, by Joshua Lutz, of the new jersey badlands (which apparently are actually called The Meadowlands) for my coffee table, I really enjoy these spooky, lonely photos.

(click on images for a bit higher res)

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Unbeleivable !

2010-06-28T01:59:00.000-07:00

I must confess that in my daily rambles around the web, there is often the chance that I perform my spelling and punctuation duties in a rather slapdash fashion. However, one of my many failings is that I am quite good at spotting the mistakes of others, and it is a rare event that I don't find at least two or three spelling mistakes in every book that I read.

I purchased this Penguin Modern Classics version of Lolita on Saturday - it's a book that I have never read, and so upon seeing it I snapped it up. When I got it home and put it on my shelf, something about it seemed odd.

One thing you would think is that people working at Penguin would be pretty tight on proof reading, especially when it comes to their front covers... I wonder if the person responsible for this ever got found out, and if they did, were they fired? Have any of my readers ever seen a typo incident worse than this?

Gym Addicts

2010-06-23T00:41:00.001-07:00

Quite understandably, I only go to one gym- but I'm pretty sure that there's one in every gym in the country - a solitary woman perpetually sweating away on the running machine or the stair thing. She gives the impression that she's never actually stepped off it since you joined the gym last year. Whenever you go, she's there, still on the same machine, filmed in a layer of sweat, yet never seeming to actually lose any extra weight past the point that she has reached (an unattractive, wiry sort of 'Madonna' look, with very prominent rib cage) I often think about these 'gym addicts' and wonder if the gym staff ever approach them and say 'Look, you've done enough - just go home'

Rockerfeller Centre

2010-06-22T03:22:00.001-07:00

Gotham made real. Photos of the Rockerfeller building under construction.

Courtesy of online art gallery ButDoesItFloat

Saint Beckham

2010-06-21T00:29:00.000-07:00

Mixed emotions at Worm Towers, with both the german and english teams performing woefully in their last games. My already low enjoyment of football is flagging somewhat. I was so bored during the england game I went off to try and discover what type of bird it was that perched so portentiously on the keeper's net. I'm pretty sure it was Columba Arquatrix, a female juvenile African Olive Pigeon.

Something has come to my attention that has been puzling me somewhat - what exactly is David Beckham's 'role' in this world cup? Is he, as I suspect, on the bench as a kind of 'talisman', intended to spur our players on by his very presence?

Is it really the done thing to have non-essential people on the bench? If Beckham is allowed pitch-side for no particular reason apart from to be a guardian angel in a grey suit, then doesn't this set a dangerous precedent for other teams to follow? - Barack Obama on the bench for the USA, Nelson Mandela standing in the dugout for South Africa and Mel Gibson in a kilt shouting on the scottish? Where will this madness end?

Underground Art

2010-06-16T02:13:00.000-07:00

I like stories like this alot. Here's a collection of 1950's posters uncovered at Notting Hill tube station during recent renovation work. The colours are still really bright and vivid, and of course the artwork is brilliant. My view on these is similar to Gaw's views on CGI in films -the strong hand-drawn graphic style of these posters seems so much warmer and better than todays clean and boring photoshop stuff.

courtesy of Kuriositas

John Heartfield

2010-06-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Whilst work is a maelstrom, life in the Worm household is very cheery at the moment, as my german hausfrau is clucking around the place all happy that her football playing countrymen wiped the floor with Australia last night. All this german-ness reminded me to post about an artist that I have been finding out a bit about over this last week, John Heartfield, or Helmut Herzfeld to his parents. Heartfield was a german from the Dada school, with strong communist leanings who used his art to comment on his mistrust of Hitler and the Nazis, moving to England in 1938 before relocating to communist East Germany after the war. I saw an exhibition of his at Tate Britain a few years ago and thought it very interesting to see the work of a chap who is relatively little known, yet seems to have had a strongly graphic cut-and-paste style that may have had quite an influence on artists down the years, including Peter Blake, Terry Gilliam, Jamie Reid and Banksy.

Temples of Dune

2010-06-11T02:16:00.000-07:00

Really loving these photos by Christoph Morlinghaus. He's managed to make these modern churches look like sets from a 1970's noir sci-fi film.

Topical Thunder

2010-06-08T00:31:00.000-07:00

Having very little time to read blogs or post anything at the moment!

but here are some of my current thoughts on life:

I am very excited about the whole 'star chamber' thing currently being discussed by the ConDems- the once in a lifetime opportunity to have a decent whack at thinning out a bloated government is a most wonderful prospect. Of course, government being involved, I am cynical of it ever living up to what they are promising, but if it did it could be amazing. If i'd known before the election that the Tories would be doing this, I would have been queuing at dawn at the polling station to register my vote for them. The really interesting thought though is wondering what situation we would now be in if a Lab/lib coalition had come into power. As supporters (and creators) of big government, how would they have wielded the cuts? I suspect that they would still be shilly-shallying around trying to avoid the subject and somehow hoping it would just go away.

I've got a feeling shares and currencies have some way to fall against each other over the summer - which, whilst being disasterous for just about everybody and lead to years of hardships, may at least mean that I get a good exchange rate when I want to buy lunch when I'm on holiday.

I have an overwhelming sixth sense that we will be totally rubbish in this world cup and get knocked out really early and underwhelmingly.

If anyone else has any questions about the future that they would like me to ask the spirit world, then please cross my palm with silver.

Aliens among us

2010-06-01T02:39:00.000-07:00

Really liking these amusing yet sinister and almost alien west african ceremonial clothes. Would make awesome avant garde ski outfits..

pics courtesy of ButDoesItFloat

The Lone and Level Sands

2010-05-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

'It was Conrad's always offshore view that the estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination, yet he knew that 'their appeal is not always a charm'. Mudflats, after all, are austere and grim-looking places, and low sandbanks are not always improved by their 'shabby and scanty vegetation'. And yet Conrad insisted that the 'dispiriting ugliness' of an estuary was sometimes only a 'repulsive mask', and rarely more so than on the Thames, which was less built up, and therefore open to more 'romance' than any other commercial British river.

The estuary shore is littered with relics of the imperial history that Conrad knew, and of a long-running drama of invasion and defence that extended up through the Second World War. But nowadays, this history seems strangely disconnected from the present. Indeed, in our time, the romance of the estuary lies in the experience of coming across your own history and realizing, whether with sadness, bewilderment, or an unexpected sense of relief, that it consists so largely of voids, hulks and ruins.'

Currently reading the excellent 'The River, The Thames in Our Time' by Patrick Wright

Road rage

2010-05-25T01:17:00.000-07:00

I have decided that the world can be grouped into two kinds of people.

Those who just go to the petrol station, quickly fill up, pay and leave.

And those who go to the petrol station, ease themselves slowly out of the car, slowly put on a little pair of plastic gloves and then fill up their tank until it's overflowing (by squeezing the pump in little bursts for ages, ooh Freud would have a field day) and then slowly screwing on the cap, removing the gloves, reaching back into their car for their wallet. Ambling across the forecourt and then mooching round the shop for a while deciding which chocolate bar to have, before finally paying and slowly wandering back out to their car, where they get back in and check their teeth in the rear view mirror and have a little conversation with their passenger before driving off.

The Missing Will

2010-05-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

At the suggestion of Brit, I have just finished reading 'The Missing Will' - the relatively obscure autobiography of Michael Wharton, who was better known as the very long-standing writer of the Peter Simple column in The Telegraph. I remember reading the column a bit as a youngster and liking it in small doses -
( I actually preferred the Craig Brown version that followed, probably because I had grown old enough to understand it a bit better) The book is an excellent read, he certainly has a very easy way with his words and sentences, and his life was fairly colourful. Apart from his rampant infidelities, I was also interested to note that he describes himself as a 'Tory Anarchist'. He also puts forward a point that I haven't actually read in print before -that the voting in of Atlee and the creation of the welfare state was a bad thing for Great Britain.

Wharton believed strongly in the benefits to society of noblesse oblige, and thought it a grave error to hand over these feudal traditions to the 'trendy' urban left - who, in his eyes, were driven by envy to dismantle things they couldn't obtain. We are told in countless history books that this turning point in 1945 was the start of a long trajectory upwards for the common man, whereas Wharton thought that this was actually the beginning of the end. Interesting to read such an unashamedly right wing view in print.

Architectural artifacts

2010-05-22T02:14:00.000-07:00

Found these cool photos on BLDBLG. I really like the juxtaposition of marginal, barren surroundings and incongrous futuristic structures that have seemingly landed like alien craft upon the landscape.

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper

2010-05-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading a very pleasant book, concerned with good manly things like fishing and the benefit to young chaps of having a mentor. It's one thing that I really regret - never having the luck to have had one of those special teachers who can truly enthrall you on a subject. Perhaps if I had, I may have managed to get to a university...

My father had an amazing teacher at his school -who I was lucky enough to meet in his twilight years. He was a chap called Walter Strachan (pronounced 'Strawn') and whilst being a language teacher at a minor public school, he was also a tremendous polymath who spent his spare time writing books on the history of art, being official translator of serious authors like Herman Hesse, and various poets from french, italian and german into english, being the best friend of Henry Moore and collecting art.

My father had been so enthused about art and languages by him at school that they had remained in touch for nearly 50 years, writing a couple of times a year and meeting occasionally. I was frequently taken along on these trips in the hope of learning something.

Strachan lived in one of those early metroland-style semis, all box-hedge, porch and leaded windows - part of the creeping fringes of suburbia that EM Forster likened to 'red rust'. Inside the house was a chaotic mess. Each room was piled high with a dusty labyrinth of books, manuscripts and folios. On every wall were original sketches and works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century. Many were personally signed to him. As a 13 year old I could only recognise the signature on the large Picasso on the stairs, but i'm certain that all the other pictures in the house were of exceptional provenance. The art on his walls was worth a fortune, yet his cardigan was full of holes. He didn't care about money, only art. I remember him offering me some very stale buns, which I ate out of politeness.

His archive now resides at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge - I would love to go and look through it some time. I have many of his books on my shelves at home - they are mostly books of his letters to Henry Moore and frighteningly highbrow tomes on french engravers of the 1930's and the like. But all are inscribed inside to me, and I shall always treasure them.
I suppose that I just missed this generation of teachers, those bright young things who were at oxbridge in the 1930's and then further formed by their experiences in the war. I don't think we shall ever see their like again.

Sweet Thames Run Softly

2010-05-15T06:45:00.000-07:00

Babycham

2010-05-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

I have been quiet of late, as I have been ensconced in Shepton Mallet, dealing with blue-sky thinking and endless paradigms, my eyes glazed from the cold blue flicker of non-stop powerpoint presentations. Horrid.

The only thing of any interest that I could find in our immediate surroundings was the Babycham factory. As soon as I saw the rather cool giant fawn standing out the front I felt a tiny pang of regret that, whilst not being the target market, I had never tasted this mythical concoction. I must confess that until I looked it up on the internet I didn't even know it was made of pears and not apples. Apparently they still make it, but, like Blue Nun and Watney's Red Barrel, I think its really one of those things that you had to have tried back in the 1970's for the full effect.

I wonder if we'll ever have another decade or era characterised by a drink? I suppose the last sociological drink phenomena was 'alcopops' in the 90's. Will this current era be remembered as the age of people who were dumb enough to get excited about putting ice-cubes in overpriced cider?

Reflection

2010-05-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

In the Guardian is a piece about a chap who has written a book about why we should 'downshift' our office-based careers and take up manual work instead. I can sort of see what he's saying, firstly because I'm middle class and thus this kind of 'simple life' longing is practically genetic.. And also because i've had plenty of manual jobs, some of which were genuinely satisfying and enjoyable. I have felt more satisfaction from building and finishing a stone wall than I ever have in an office job. Anyway, this chap said something interesting about futurism and ideas, things which readers of this blog will know I am interested in. Turns out my interest in these things may be a manifestation of narcissism:

'Our physical surroundings no longer hold our attention, and we start to succumb to what Crawford calls "virtualism" – "a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy." This is the vision peddled by numerous commentators on the future of the internet: an ethereal, anchorless world in which all we do is exchange ideas, where everything is funded by advertisements for everything else, and in which all that matters is the production of knowledge – not the sewers and electricity networks and kitchen tables and washing machines on which the knowledge-producers will still presumably rely.This is turning us into narcissists, Crawford claims: we believe that reality is what we make it.
Confronting the material world brings us back to the realisation that there is an undeniable reality, and grappling with it requires us to get over our self-absorption.'

The Mysterious Bittern

2010-05-06T04:03:00.000-07:00

As a child I absolutely adored Fungus the Bogeyman. There was something about the dank and dismal atmosphere that really appealed to me - probably because Raymond Brigg's perpetually brown, slimy-drizzling underground world seemed so similar to the early 1980's Cornwall I grew up in. Today's dreary weather outside reminds me of that book's twilight gloaming. And, in perfect synchronicity, I read that a Bittern has been filmed booming for the first time. The bittern, the most funereal and melancholy of birds, is a creature that has always been lurking in the distant reedbeds of my mind. Aged six, I was mystified by ‘the bogey bittern’ in Fungus the Bogeyman, a drab subterrenean version of the bird, decribed as being ‘Like Surface Bitterns, and like Bogeymen themselves, they are SOLITARY, SKULKING and CREPUSCULAR.’

A curse be on your houses

2010-05-05T04:19:00.000-07:00

I am in the rather unenviable position of being a 'first-time home buyer', and for those of you who haven't been one for some time, let me tell you that now is not a good time to be looking for one's first house. A year or so ago, I was rubbing my hands with glee at the prospect of falling property prices meaning that I could finally purchase a decent sized place and begin having a family.

However that price drop never materialised - what transpired was that nobody wanted to sell their houses, which meant a smaller and smaller pool of properties to choose from, keeping prices up through scarcity and leaving only overpriced tat. It's shocking what absolute dross is out there for comical prices. The thing is, I could definately afford to move into a house tomorrow - I just don't want to move into a tiny council estate shoebox with no garden. There's currently no way that we could afford to move into a house anywhere near as luxurious as the one we're renting. And let's not forget that I am already in the lucky situation of having a pretty decent salary compared to many my age - I dread to think what it's like for teachers and others like them.

I wonder how long this constipated market is going to continue for? Will there ever be a proper correction or is it just going to keep on going up and up?

Nature is Imagination Itself

2010-04-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

I love this precise moment of spring, the way that the budding leaves on the trees are so fresh and vital, their golden inflorescences draped from branches like showers of soft green foam.

The boughs in their shape come close to resembling the imaginary powder-puff trees of artists like Claude Lorraine and those early Australian artists who could only paint the bush containing the soft-leaved european trees of home rather than the alien, unknowable eucalypts. Either their minds could not yet accept what they saw before them, or perhaps they were just too lazy to learn how to paint these new trees, because maybe they had no imagination & didn't view trees as important in their own right, beyond being a useful method of framing a picture. It was William Blake who wrote

Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some
scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination,
Nature is Imagination itself.

On a side note - I typed 'inflorescence' into wikipedia to check I was using the right word, and was pleased to find that it is a sphere of information that contains many brilliantly obscure and wonderful sounding words. Ones I liked included:

peduncle
bract
involucre
sympodial
basipetal
axil
corymb
umbel
spadix
spathe
bostryx
thyrse

Have a good weekend everyone!

Fox Tossing

2010-04-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to present to you a new sport that I hadn't heard of until today - Fox Tossing. It was featured on Ptaks Science Books, a good source of weirdness. Here's what they say about this exciting new pasttime:

In the early 17th century there existed a German Court sport of fox-tossing. What would happen is this: a coral would be made of cloth screens; court favorites would entire the enclosures with ropes while disabled foxes were also introduced; the people would pair up with a long rope between them, held slack to the ground; the animals would run in an enforced terror around and through the pairs and over the slack ropes; when the fox tried to run over the rope, the pair would yank the rope taught, launching the fox into the air. And so on until everything was up in the air or dead. And that’s it.

Skilled male tossers could toss a fox 24 ft. high...At a famous fox-tossing in Dresden there were tossed some 687 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers, 21 wild cats, and at the end 34 young wild boar and 3 wolves....”

Apart from the strangeness that time has leant the thought of purposefully killing animals for a bit of a laugh, you do have to wonder exactly how bored you would have to have been to invent this as a sport...

Ballots to the lot of them

2010-04-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

Oh well, looks as though this election will be fought without my input. I had decided that this election would see my first ever time voting, but I received a letter last night informing me that I had registered too late, so in the meantime, they'd like to keep my details on record and send me carefully selected marketing promotions. Brilliant.

Loveliest of Trees

2010-04-27T01:15:00.000-07:00

There's a beautiful cherry tree outside our office that seems to have held back its modesty until this week, and now it's making up for lost time with a blowsy candyfloss explosion of coral-pink blossom. Apparently this year the blossom has been better than in recent years due to the combination of weather since last autumn. The tree outside is testament to this news, as it looks particularly lovely today, picked out in sharp contrast against the cerulean sky.

One of the poems I had to learn at school was 'Loveliest of trees' by AE Housman, taken from his famous 'Shropshire Lad' cycle. It didn't mean much to me at school, seeing as I was of course immortal at that age. I remember that I used to amuse myself by reciting it in the voice of Michael Caine. It means a bit more to me now, especially as I live near the 'blue remembered hills' that Housman wrote about so eloquently. Interestingly, Housman wrote most of the Shropshire Lad poems whilst living in London, before he had ever visited those Shropshire hills (about thirty miles from his home), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his 'land of lost content'. It's not a particularly good poem, but the words have stuck very strongly in my mind since the age of 10, and I still know it word perfect.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now


LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Worm's inside guide to wine

2010-04-23T04:02:00.000-07:00

I once spent a very pleasant summer working in a decent wine shop. It was a lovely job that I would recommend to anyone, and I have certainly often toyed with the idea of setting up my own store, if I could find a town large enough and posh enough to do it without having to go head to head with Majestic. Anyway, I thought I would make myself look like a pompous patronising git by sharing with you some of the things I learnt in those halcyon days of talking to friendly alcoholics and having access to unlimited free booze:

Regardless of what newspaper wine writers tell you, supermarkets very rarely have any wine worth drinking at all. Waitrose is an exception. Majestic is very good too.

An empty bottle, a fancy label and a screwtop generally cost the wine producer approximately one pound. The import tax on that bottle is about £2.50. Basically, if you buy any wine under £4, the wine inside is in effect worthless, which means it is very very unlikely to be any good. It is usually thought that the cut off point for a quality wine (made with care) is £6 - of course you can have good wines for less than this, and bad wines for more than this.

Supermarkets are particularly devious with wine offers and promotions. The way they offer wine discounts (half-price!) is to sell wine at double it's RRP. Then they simply halve the price for a week, selling lots as people buy it from the aisle-end displays, little knowing that they are actually buying it at normal full price.

Much of the wine offered by supermarkets and wine clubs is made of blends - created by UK buyers who go to France, Australia or South Africa and simply buy up entire giant metal barrels of surplus low quality wine on the cheap, then blend it together until it tastes drinkable, then stick a whimsical label on it ('The Old Red Tractor') and flog it to gullible UK punters. The label is often created for one blend then disused, which is why the wine club often has all sorts of bottles you've never heard of.

People buy expensive vintage wine and expect it to taste a certain way, and are then often disappointed. Expensive vintage wine or champagne can taste quite strange and can be an acquired taste - sort of like jazz. Just because it's old and expensive doesn't mean you're going to like it (or even that its good - you really need to know about about good vintage years to have a good stab at getting a good old wine)

A high alcohol content has the effect of making a wine taste more 'velvety' and 'smooth' in your mouth.

Chilean reds are probably the best value and most 'reliable' out of cheaper wines, due to Chile's almost perfect wine growing climate. Sicilian whites can be very good for the price too.

Pinot gris is the same grape as pinot grigio (its amazing how many people didn't get that) but it can have a different taste due to the way it's made...One of the amusing things that happened regularly was the amount of people who came into the shop saying they wanted a white wine - "ABC, Anything but chardonnay!(snort, guffaw)" and then they'd proceed to buy a case of chablis, proclaiming how much they loved chablis, of course unaware that chablis IS 100% chardonnay. Same went for people who said they didn't like sauvignon blanc and then proceeded to buy a bottle of sancerre.

*edit: Thought of another one: When you go in a wine shop, they frequently offer you some posh cheese to go with a tasting. This is not as altruistic as you think - the cheese, whilst tasting delicious with the wine, also has the added effect of ironing out many less than perfect aspects of a wine, and can make many wines taste a bit better than they maybe are.

It's a shame that I don't work there anymore, as I certainly never get to drink nice wine these days now that I actually have to pay for it.

To our brave Cyclists

2010-04-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

Today I went to a business meeting that was rendered almost enjoyable by the fact that we got to conduct it outside, sitting at a long table surrounded by beds of flame red tulips and buzzing throngs of industrious bees. The meeting was held at a hotel in a pleasant village called Meriden, a little place just off the M42 in the ever shrinking greenbelt that seperates Birmingham and Coventry. After the meeting was over I sauntered in a sun-becalmed way to the village green, to sit a while on a bench and eat a Cornetto.

As a person with a declared interest in boring municipal statuary, I was drawn to the large sandstone obelisk on the green. Nearby lay a plaque proclaiming the spot where I stood to be the very centre of England, the furthest point from our coastlines. Wikipedia has since disabused me of this romantic notion by informing me that the real centre of England is in Fenny Drayton.

It was the obelisk that was most interesting though. It turned out to be a memorial 'in remembrance of those cyclists who gave their lives in World Wars I & II', which I found to be both moving, whimsical and amusing all at the same time, whilst being somehow terribly British too.

White hot technology

2010-04-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Breaking technomoligimical news from your reporter in the field- I've just had a play on an ipad. I went to a talk on social media by Bill Thompson, who is a technology reporter for the BBC and he let me have a look at his ipad afterwards (ooer)

Verdict - well it's certainly a fun toy, and would be great for business instead of lugging round a laptop. But I can really see it to be useful (once made cheaper and far more robust) as a classroom aid. I can really picture schoolkids with one containing all their study books, that they can type on, write on and stand in front of class with, and that fits perfectly in their quaintly old-fashioned satchel (aka manbag)

I look forward to reading this post in ten years and laughing at it, in much the same way that I laugh now when I think how cool I felt showing everybody my enormous brick of a Nokia mobile phone back in 1996.

Having myself a rant

2010-04-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

I am not a grammar Nazi. I realise that language is flexible and changes over time. However, there is currently one particular piece of grammar-mangling popping up everywhere that is driving me to distraction - the endless addition of the words 'myself' and 'yourself' into any business-based conversation. i.e

'The deal organised between myself and yourself is terrific. I'll send a confirmation email to yourself.'

This drives me potty. Even worse, my normally well spoken father tried to correct something I'd written to him this morning by telling me that '-even you!' should be '-even yourself!'.

This way of talking also has the side effect of making everybody sound slightly Irish.

The usual thinking is that this all initially stems from people's fear of incorrectly using 'I' and 'me' in sentences. However, I think a lot of this has also spread from people picking it up off each other and thinking that that is the way they should actually talk in order to sound 'professional' - in much the same way that hostesses on aeroplanes can only refer to 'drinks' as 'beverages'.

I don't think any of my readers would mangle their words in such a way, but to confirm, lest somebody else should stumble across this post:

"Myself" and "yourself" are usually correct in only two situations:

To emphasise or contrast: "Paul knows everyone, but I myself am new here." "Your sister has blue eyes, but you yourself have brown eyes."
When you're doing something to yourself: "I ask myself..." "You set high standards for yourself."

Freaky

2010-04-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

Unfortunate apostrophe alert - I found this classic this morning on a pet care leaflet -

'Separation anxiety - leaving your pet's behind'

Rock n' roll bride

2010-04-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

Blimey, turns out our wedding photographer submitted some of our wedding pics to this trendy wedding blog for people who have 'trendy weddings' called rock n' roll bride. (I didn't think our wedding was trendy - but apparently if you basically try to cut every corner as a money-saving exercise, that counts as 'rock n' roll') You can check them out here if you're that way inclined:

rock n' roll bride

Scars

2010-04-14T02:04:00.000-07:00

Is there any programme more likely to disappoint with the glaring disparity between what's promised and what really happens than Timeteam?
Show after show, you are tantalized with all sorts of wonderfully exciting things, yet all they ever find are some foundation post holes and an old fireplace. Indiana Jones it is not.

One thing that I have always found exciting and mysterious though is the appearance of crop marks , only visible from the air, revealing all sorts of hidden things (which of course turn out to be a fireplace and some post holes). Much of the chance of seeing these palimpsest lies in the crop being grown. From the blog BLDBLG:

Field archaeologists know that vegetation grows differently on soil that has been disturbed, even if that disturbance happened centuries ago. They know that crops grow more luxuriantly over silted-up ditches, and more stunted where there are buried remains. The site of a Roman villa might go unnoticed until a field of wheat grows and ripens, to reveal most strangely the outlines of buried masonry, only to disappear again at harvest. Slight contours or indentations on the land marking out the site of a lost settlement might be invisible to the eye until a low sun throws them into sharp but momentary relief.

Further:

Barley is a more sensitive ‘developer,’ for example, than oats, wheat, or grass, but only in certain soils. Dry spells can bring about remarkably sharp crop sites.

One of the most remarkable things about aerial archaeology is that very few human processes will completely remove a site from view for ever. It might be decades—centuries even—before the right combination of crop growth, rain, sun, and aerial observer results in a site manifesting itself and being photographed. But unless deep excavations or quarrying are carried out, removing all traces of the site, the possibility remains that one day, under new conditions, it will reveal itself.

I guess in 500 years from now, they'll be digging up endless bits of wooden patio decking and the rusted frames of garden trampolines and wondering what kind of bizarre rituals they could have been used for

You cannot live as I have lived and not end up like this...

2010-04-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

Just had a quick read of the biography of the famously debauched Willie Donaldson. Must say it was for the most part a pretty interesting read - Donaldson seemed like a kind and likeable chap, albeit one who obviously had a cartload of hang-ups, which eventually manifested themselves in a liking for prostitutes and crack cocaine.

It was sobering to read of the man who had brought 'Beyond the Fringe' to the West End and who had even been engaged to Carly Simon spending his 60's sitting in his flat surrounded by twenty-something druggies, underworld-charred call girls, and the sad remains of his considerable talent.
He revelled in his role as a corrupter, a pied piper of decadence. I haven't seen it, but it called to mind what Gaw has said previously about the play Jerusalem.

I particularly liked this passage from one of his memoirs - most apt.

'In real life a person is an unknowable jumble of contradictory qualities. Brave and cowardly. Cruel and kind. Treacherous and loyal. Feckless and prudent. In fiction, this would be confusing...This is a mistake that writers of biography make. They try to shape a life, to give it a fictional coherence. They should just tip the whole mess on the page and say:
"Here is a life of sorts. Make of it what you will"

Otl Aicher

2010-04-09T01:10:00.000-07:00

Otl Aicher is probably one of the most famous graphic designers to come out of Germany. He was responsible for the Lufthansa logo amongst other things, and had a pretty interesting life anyway - he was best friends with The Scholls, executed for their part in the White Rose resistance movement, and he even ended up marrying their older sister. The reason why I'm interested in Aicher is that I collect ephemera to do with the Munich Olympics of 1972.

Aicher was the man responsible for the massive 5 year task of overseeing over 40 graphic designers, and then bringing them together to conceive an identity that remains unprecendented in its consistent execution and innovation of visual forms, symbols and pictograms.

Never before had such a comprehesive and extensive visual identity been created which so successfully spoke a universal, integrated language. It has without doubt become one of the cultural milestones of graphic design, and remains the basis for a large part of advertising and communication to this day - with the 'stickmen' that he concieved for the games becoming one of the most recognisable graphic devices on the planet, seen on every roadsign or toilet door the world over. I have a few of the posters from the games framed on my walls - in the uk they can cost well above £100 each, but with careful looking on ebay.de you can pick one up from germany for thirty quid or so. The amount of objects they produced for the games, all within the design guidlines, is amazing, and makes for interesting collecting. anyway, I hope you like some of the designs.

???

2010-04-07T05:10:00.000-07:00

It's a trite question, but why is it that the majority of 'artistic' or 'creative' people seem to be labour/left voters? Yes, if you're a poor artist on the dole I can see why, but what of all the creative types who work in well paid advertising agencies or such like? Why does being able to be artistic make you more likely to be up for helping your fellow man? And why, as a 'creativey-ish' type person, do I not have the same left-leanings as my fellow creativey-ish types? I'm worried I may be missing out on something

The Dutch Water Line

2010-04-07T01:54:00.000-07:00

Today I've been reading about The Dutch Water Line - interesting to see that effectively the Dutch managed, through massive engineering, to use their system of dykes to turn almost their entire country into a heavily fortified citadel. Also interesting to note that in WW2 the Germans basically then just flew over the water and bombed them anyway, forcing surrender. But still the Dutch held onto the idea and rebuilt a new version to ward off the Russians, who, luckily for the Dutch, never decided to try it out.

Worm on Westminster I

2010-04-06T03:00:00.000-07:00

Over here, Brit wonders about the impending election. I must say the one thing that has got my interest up is the thought of these televised debates - not because I think either of them is going to say or do anything remarkable, but whether or not a performance (or more likely, lack of) could be the thing that swings people one way or the other. I am slightly worried that Cameron will continue to display his (very real) vacuousness in the debates and may play the whole thing comfortably back into Brown's limp hands. There was certainly plenty of talk in my local pub on the weekend of a feeling of an impending labour victory - not due to Brown's ability, but all hinging on Cameron's disasterous lack of conservative conviction.

Bada Bing

2010-03-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

It's done. After more than 5 years I have finally watched the final episode of the Sopranos. Since starting with the first episode back in January 2005 I have had 5 jobs, lived in 2 countries, 6 houses, and got married. Damn good stuff though, The Sopranos. I'm not really much of a TV watcher, but my god if they made more TV like that you wouldn't be able to tear me away from that cathode ray teat of wonderment.

Favourite episode was the one called 'Pine Barrens' where Pauly and Christopher nearly freeze to death in a van in the woods.

Gonna miss those guys.

Welcome Imposters

2010-03-30T03:12:00.000-07:00

One of the books I'm currently reading is the very pleasant Wildwood - A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin. It's a terrifically somnolent tome which means it's taken me longer to read than normal, but it's well recommended.

The chapter I read last night dealt with his journey to Kazakstan to find the source of the ur-apple. I had never known until then that apples are not indigenous to the British Isles and were in fact introduced by the Romans. It's jarring to discover something that is so throughly, quintessentially woven into the fabric of our landscape and Britishness is actually an imposter. Much like my initial surprise on discovering that the chillis used in virtually every single asian dish actually hail from South America, and only in the last 400 years.
What did asian people eat before they had chillis?

The proto-hipster

2010-03-29T02:07:00.000-07:00

There was an article in one of the weekend papers about Jamie Oliver's current American TV show, in which he troops around the States asking untermensch fat people why they don't think like him. Would we Brits like it up us if some unknown (to us) US TV chef turned up here and wandered around telling us how utterly ghastly our food is? Anyway, of course I can see where he's coming from in trying to educate people about healthier eating - as a bit of a libertarian, the thing that makes me twitchy is his insistance on trying to have laws put into effect regarding people's eating habits. The state shouldn't really be allowed to enter our homes and tell us what to eat. These nannyish laws will only get worse over time, probably leading to the banning of certain fatty foods, which will then deprive normally healthy people of the right to eat tasty naughty treats every now and again. So I feel Jamie is perhaps a little misguided in his crusade, although I don't suppose there's much we can do to stop him now, so large is his 'personal brand'.

It got me thinking about Jamie and how he burst on to our TV screens back in the late 90's. I was a young chap living in an amazing warehouse apartment in east london at the time, and his show did have a certain echo to how we lived (even though of course we scoffed at his tryhard coolness, his love of Kula Shaker, Dodgy and Toploader and stupid mockney accent from the outset).

I hadn't actually thought of it till now, but I think I may have identified Jamie Oliver as the proto-hipster. He was the first UK media representation of what we have come to see (and revile) as hipsters. The festishizing of the 'London lifestyle' in it's entirety, the ironic t-shirts, the bike (moped then, but would surely be a 'fixie' now) the mockney accent, the wonky haircut, the whole 'none of my mates seem to have real jobs, yet we can afford to swan around having really casual dinner parties in amazing apartments'. I don't begrudge his success, he's obviously a hard working family guy, but Jamie was the man who brought hipsterism to the masses for the first time, and for this he should be sent to an eternal purgatory of turkey twizzlers.

Foals - Spanish Sahara

2010-03-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

7 minutes of good new tunage check
moody high def video of angsty people check
man pulling bags of carcasses across frozen tundra and then setting fire to it for no reason check

looks even better if you biggify it up to full screen

Zzzzzzz

2010-03-25T04:57:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I have a deep-seated disdain for the entirely forgettable EM Forster, 'The cucumber sandwich of novelists'.

On reading this article, I have discovered these new tidbits of exciting Forster trivia:

Forster referred to his target middlebrow audience as 'Uncle Willie' for some weird reason - as in
'I just can't get Uncle Willie interested in my turgid pot-boilers'

He finds curiosity “one of the lowest of the human faculties” and humility “a quality for which I have only a limited admiration.”

Forster was always calling for more sex. He said "bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world". Yet his first sexual encounter, in Alexandria with an Egyptian bus driver, ended in his breaking his own arm through sheer awkwardness. (Not sure how one can do this, but it sounds mightily unenjoyable)

In the end Forster’s chief contribution has been to that continuing project of reinforcing liberals’ feelings of self-virtue owing to their lovely imaginative sensitivity and courageous distaste for social injustice.

Twitter

2010-03-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

I've been using twitter for the last two weeks as part of something work related, and I have to say, I'm still left very underwhelmed. For those of you who have yet to feel the urge to join in, here's my verdict - don't bother! So far all that I've encountered is other businesses - who have all been sold the idea of twitter as a way of reaching customers, but who don't seem to have found any actual customers to deal with. My entire friends list so far consists of other businesses like mine, all frantically milling around in the twitter vacuum and all transmitting sales pitches rather than 'valuable insight'. Not impressed. I wonder how many other people have had a similar experience to mine and just given up? Makes me wonder if it will continue being seen as a useful way of reaching consumers, and will instead just become a way of various industries to connect with each other via an open forum.

The Delicious Miss Dahl

2010-03-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

Just watched the TV show. Very disappointed to see it was just the usual lifestyle-porn-by-numbers that we've all seen a hundred times before. I couldn't see how it differed in any way from Nigella. The usual cynical female fantasy stuff of shopping in Notting Hill and having effortless makeup and wonderfully casual flower arrangements. Pretty sure the kitchen was a set too. My claim to Sophie Dahl fame is that aged 19 I once worked as the assistant to the stylist on a naked photo shoot of Miss Dahl soon after she shot to fame. My job mostly entailed holding her dressing gown in between takes. It was tough, but I held in there and delivered a sterling performance.

Spooky stuff

2010-03-20T04:55:00.000-07:00

Why do previously 'fun' places become extra-creepy once they are abandoned? Why does the innocent charm of an icecream van tune on the breeze also have the capacity to sound scary and melancholy? Why is everyone suddenly so scared of clowns?
Here's an interesting collection of photos of a now disused themepark in New Orleans - left as Hurricane Katrina approached, it has only been lying dormant for 4 1/2 years, yet already it is reverting to nature and decay.

Curiouser and curiouser...

2010-03-19T01:55:00.000-07:00

got this via Russell Davies:

How do you follow your curiosity? I dunno — you just do. What’s a plan? A template? Maybe something like this:

Spend a year listening, reading, learning about a new practice. Find out who the thought leaders are and why. Ask everyone who is in the particular practice community three questions: (1) what’s your story? how’d you come to be who you are and do what you do? (2) who’s your hero in your field? (3) who else should I meet? Go to the trade conferences and dive deep. Listen to everything. Read everything. Filter by simple keywords. (I do design now. That’s my filter, design. If there is design in the title/abstract/conference, that’s my criteria for reading/attending/giving a talk.)

Spend the next year helping out and apprenticing. Be a humble servant, asking questions but also getting hands dirty and trousers scuffed. Be active, modest and become a learner. Move about, but focus on the nuances of the craft aspects of the practice community.

Another year making/creating/building on your own, whatever the field might be. Prepare to be a contributor in a more active way. Find a voice of your own. You would’ve created a network that knits you into the community by this time.

And subsequent years, refining and polishing that “voice.” Keep moving, refining, finding ways to continue to learn and bringing all the other bits of learning, the other “fields”, the other ways of knowing and seeing the world, all the other bounded disciplines — let them intrude and change things. Let things get rather undisciplined and a bit unruly. Disciplines are self-satisfied, with is akin to apathy, which never solved any problems.

Nice project

2010-03-19T01:51:00.000-07:00

Lovely idea for a coffee table - posted here for my own future DIY reference

Tales from the front line of the Drugs War

2010-03-18T01:34:00.000-07:00

What a ghastly palaver. All these newspaper headlines are quite depressing. There we all were, quietly having fun with our Meow Meow, bothering no one- and now, thanks to two blokes who took a cocktail of drugs that happened to include Meow Meow, and a stupid stupid news industry, it'll probably be banned by the summertime. Of course, what could be more logical than making a readily available (and 98% pure) drug illegal, and thus placing it straight into the hands of criminals who will cut it with other more dangerous and unknown substances and continue selling it to kids. Well done to our wonderful journalists.

St Patricks Day

2010-03-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

A while ago I posted about a fairly decent british sci-fi book, The Death of Grass, written by recently re-trendified John Christopher in the 1950's. Obviously things went down hill after that point, as I've just been reading about one of his later works, which must surely have one of the best pieces of cover art ever:

Nazi leprechauns? Could there honestly be a more terrifying premise?

Here's a brief plot synopsis from the website The Groovy Age of Horror:

Bridget Chauncey turns an Irish castle she inherits into a hotel. Her first guests are a bickering American couple with a nymphomaniac daughter; a German couple, he descended from pure Aryan Nazis and she a Jewess who lost her whole family in the Holocaust; the handsome alcoholic Irish soliciter who is not-so-secretly in love with Bridget; and the snooty English soliciter to whom she's engaged.

A few strange happenings quickly have this bunch talking about legends of the "little people" around the dinner table. Amazingly, a half-joking late-night vigil actually results in contact with the green-clad wee-folk. But there are also journals and boxes of files in the cellars--and they're written in German.

These little people, it turns out, aren't the supernatural creatures of Irish lore, but rather Jewish victims of Nazi experiments....

My own milk-related anecdote

2010-03-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

Seeing as the web is awash with people relating various milk-related anecdotes,
I thought I would relate my own...

At my boarding school we had little or no pocket money, and little or no access to food outside of school meals. We spent most of our lives in ravenous torment, with ever-growling hollow stomachs.

One summer night, aged 14 or so, I was out wandering the deserted town at the crack of dawn and smoking my umpteenth fag when I saw a milk float stop outside my elderly science teacher's house. I ducked behind a hedge, and when it had gone I sneaked over and helped myself to the bottle of orange juice that had been left along with the milk, before vanishing back to bed for a few snatched hours of sleep before being awoken for breakfast.

About a week later I hatched upon an excellent idea. That night I went back to the teacher's house and placed next to his milk order a list of various food items like bread, butter and eggs. Then I waited in the hedge until I saw the milkman come and go. The next night I returned once again and waited until the milkman made his new 'extra' delivery - which I then spirited away, returning to the dormitory as a food-laden hero. Of course the teacher was none the wiser, and soon I was placing ridiculously large 'orders' on the teacher's doorstep, and waiting nightly with a crowd of other boys in the bushes for the milk float to come whirring down the empty road. This continued to snowball until, inevitably, the teacher was horrified (and mystified) to receive his quarterly bill, totalling a few hundred pounds.

After this, the local police began escorting the milk float around in their panda car for a few weeks, and we moved on to more direct ways of obtaining extra food, such as simply breaking into our school kitchens.

The future?

2010-03-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Below is taken verbatim from American self-help person Seth Godin's blog, thought it had resonance with various discussions that have been going on in this wee corner of blogdom. Or is it just stating the bleedin' obvious? We've got one of these places nearby, but it's run by two very surly ladies who seem to resent their clientele openly. They dare you with their eyes not to buy their books.

Books you don't need in a place you can't find

David points us to the Montague Bookmill. This is the bookstore of the future, because it's not a business trying to maximize growth and ROI. No, it's a place, an attitude, an approach to an afternoon. They don't sell every book, they don't even pretend to.

Just as vinyl records persist, an object of joy for some listeners and a profitable cottage business for some sellers, bookstores are going to become like gift stores. The goal isn't a commodity transaction with maximum selection at minimum price, the goal is an experience worth seeking out and paying for.

We're going to see more and more of these newly archaic industries turn into lifestyle businesses, which is what they used to be before Wall Street showed up.

Survived!

2010-03-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Back again, and still alive after all the wedding palaver. It was all very lovely, with only one person passing out during my wedding speech. All credit to the man - it's the first time I've ever seen somebody turn up to a wedding blind drunk before it's even started.

Nevada

2010-03-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

Too busy with work and wedding stuff to post much right now! Got the german inlaws (including Granny) turning up this evening. Scary.

For Brit...

2010-02-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

This one's for Brit, who is absolutely adamant that youth culture is as good and fun as ever (for young people). Please watch the short instructional video below (especially around the 25 second mark) - 20 years ago, that's what the atmosphere in clubs all over the country used to be like every night of the week. I haven't seen anything remotely like that since at least 2001.
Makes me want to go out and go mental

Gibbings

2010-02-28T01:42:00.000-08:00

A while back I posted about an author and illustrator, Robert Gibbings.
Here's some of his illustration work from the 1940's, I like the very clean graphic style and the use of negative space, it seems very fresh and modern.

Bah humbug

2010-02-26T01:15:00.000-08:00

The weather and other people have conspired to make me miserable today, and on a friday too - most unfair. So, in my newfound spirit of grouchiness, I have decided to make a list of things which are not cool. Feel free to add/ remove as applicable.

nb. before you get upset or anything, there are plenty of things that I like/do on this list - it's only about whether I think they are naff or not

coffee
absinthe
marijuana (especially if referred to as 'Ganja')
organic food
superdry/jack wills/fat face/white stuff/boden/any surf or skate clothing brand
motorbikes
rugby shirts with collars turned up
leather clothing
cream coloured chino shorts and deck shoes with no socks on a cornish beach
baseball caps with sunglasses on top of visor
superhero movies
comedian based panel shows
toy cameras
expensive watches
graffitti
male necklaces
Thailand
games consoles
radio 1
festivals
lady gaga
GQ magazine
Dubai
Audi
BMW
'audiophile' music systems that cost more than £5000
Banksy
the south of france
sex toys
combat/ cargo trousers
snowboarding
wearing courier bags to the office
men's shoes that look like pasties
'rugged' 'off road' style men's sandals
ironic or retro slogan t-shirts
smoothies
football
top gear
going to the gym
kate moss
televison
cycling, especially the whole 'fixie' nonsense
russell brand
VW beetles or camper vans
winter

Cold War

2010-02-24T06:46:00.001-08:00

From the excellent blog, ptaks's science books. There's interesting stuff on there almost every day. Yesterday's post discussed the sound that V1 doodlebugs made. I hadn't known up until now. I can really imagine it being very scary:

Newswipe

2010-02-24T02:08:00.000-08:00

I watched this last night and it made me laugh out loud, it's an absolutely perfect skewering of the utter pointlessness of 'having your say'. However, rest assured, I shall continue to 'have my say' in other people's blog comments sections, because I am a person in search of a point

More Bloomin' Ballard

2010-02-23T07:49:00.001-08:00

Bit of a Ballard round-up of sorts - turns out there's a Ballard themed 'Crash' exhibition on at the Gagosian Gallery in Bloomsbury. The Guardian has pictures here.

I finished reading Ballard's book Super-Cannes the other day, It started out, as all his books do, with an excellent (if well worn) premise. The story chuntered on for a while in an interesting fashion, but I found myself worrying whether he was going to end the book in the gob-smackingly obvious way I was foreseeing...aaaand of course he did, and I was left seriously underwhelmed and generally suspicious of his authorly skills!

One thought I did have whilst reading the book though, and one that I guess is contentious - is that if one looks at Ballards work, it mostly deals with a riff on the way that he believes that humans have an inbuilt propensity to strive for perfection, whilst also having an inbuilt propensity for boredom and dissatisfaction, and both sides of human nature increase exponentially until a society progresses to a point that comes close to 'perfection'. Once this future point is reached, the society will smash itself.

My (probably unoriginal) thought was:

Could the First World War be seen as a 'Ballardian' response of the european moneyed classes to the perfect inertia of late victorian/edwardian society?

Majority report

2010-02-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

Now, being the feckless type, I've not been working in an office environment for very long, so I am still learning the intricacies of office politics and machinations. One thing that has struck me recently is the strange phenomenon of the 'thick report syndrome'.

This syndrome is a bizarre aspect of office life that dictates that no matter what you put in a report, your superiors will only ever be impressed with the thickness of the report, rather than what it contains. If you slave your guts out to produce an amazingly concise and pinpoint accurate report that happens to be 4 pages long, they will quickly leaf through it - taking in the points, but all the time thinking 'this guy must have just churned this out in 15 minutes - he's obviously wasting his work time surfing the internet for unicorn porn.'

Whereas if you take a few of the key points and string them out over 50 meaningless double spaced pages, full of totally pointless charts with lots of bright colours, they will make little purring noises and offer you the last chocolate biscuit.

Didn't expect that...

2010-02-21T02:19:00.000-08:00

One thing I hadn't bargained on was my upcoming wedding making people unhappy - but it turns out weddings are a massive potential minefield of hurt feelings and strange long-standing resentments. All these people who I haven't seen in years, and who didn't invite me to their weddings (which bothered me not a jot) are now relaying to me via various messengers how upset they are not to have been invited to our wedding. So I find myself on the phone to various hurt parties explaning myself to them and massaging their egos. In one way it's obviously very flattering as it means they must like us enough to be upset by not being invited, but at the same time I can't help feeling confused by the complexities of human nature!

Hipster Runoff

2010-02-18T01:29:00.000-08:00

Last week, there was a little discussion on Gaw's blog concerning Hipsters and their moustachioed brethren. For those of you that haven't heard of it, one of the best satirical blogs on the net is Hipster Runoff - a deadpan, 100% accurate skewering of the vacuousness and slavish technological brand-adherance of the modern young adult. It requires pretty good knowledge of new music and technology/internet memes, but I thoroughly recommend it, especially the recent look at the Haiti disaster

'It seems difficult for consumers to believe that artists are genuinely interested in helping a cause. Their role in the modern pop culture blogosphere is to evolve into trainwrecks + make questionable statements or life decisions..They are only really useful to consumers as people who make mp3s + newsbits for us to consume.

Wish ppl could understand that I’m not selfish, just trying to manage my emotional capital without getting all bummed out. Just wish more social media sharing + personal branding tools were around during 9-11 and Janet Jackson Nipplegate so that I would have had a modern outlet to talk about a critical moment in my social formation. Jealous of tweens for getting to grow up on high speed internet loaded with rich, streaming content.'

Comparisons

2010-02-18T00:41:00.000-08:00

I like this photo - its from a WW2 era Life magazine, and it's a picture of an exhibition put up in Central Station in New York, the purpose of which was to reassure commuters by showing, using airfix models, the mighty number of planes that the Americans had at their disposal, ready to blow the Japs to smithereens. If the government wanted to reassure us about the war in Afghanistan, they could try putting a new one up at Paddington, although i'm not sure anyone would be that confident after seeing a few rusty landrovers and a couple of broken helicopters dangling from the ceiling.

Spiderman

2010-02-17T00:41:00.000-08:00

My childhood was marked by a series of obsessional devotions to various cartoon characters. First, I demanded to be renamed Mighty Mouse. This was then followed by Superman (who didn't last long), then Dangermouse, and then Spiderman. I was so obsessed with being called Spiderman that the teachers at my primary school eventually humoured me, and when they used to read out the roll-call in the mornings, they would call out my name simply as 'Spiderman'. If they didn't call out Spiderman, I would refuse to answer my real name. This is of course on top of the outfit that I wore every evening for hours on end, in which I followed my mother around the town clinging to walls and shuffling between shop doorways.
Frankly, I'm amazed they didn't kill me.

Imagine my joy then to discover that somebody has worked out how to pretend to be Peter Parker for the day, and on a kid's show too. If I had seen this as a child I think I may have exploded with excitement, and I most certainly would have broken the vaccum cleaner trying to build one of my own

The Horror...

2010-02-16T00:42:00.000-08:00

I have been rather quiet over the last few days as I have been recovering from my stag weekend. Those of you with a taste for schadenfreude will be pleased to know that my Saturday involved me being forced to dress as Bruno in tiny lederhosen before being made to run around a freezing field in the Cotswolds being shot by my friends with high powered, very painful paintballs. After that I had to parade around a succesion of pubs still dressed in my hotpant/lederhosen combo and engage girls in conversation whilst my friends threw glasses of water in my face. It was lovely.

Pocahontas

2010-02-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Gaw's post last weekend set me thinking about some of the more bizarre statues I have seen in my time, in his comments section we even discussed the very sad and moving Postman's Park, (as featured in the film 'Closer') - a small garden in London containing plaques honouring people who died saving the lives of others. I used to work in the soulless japanese bank next door and must say I felt priviledged to eat my lunch there on warm dappled summer days.

The most depressing statue I think I've ever seen though has to be the statue of Pocahontas, located in Gravesend, in the blighted part of Kent. If you've never been to Gravesend it's actually not a bad place, and whilst it is rough around the edges, it does have some nice old buildings, the benefit of loads of interesting history, and the fascinating, ever changing Thames backdrop - a vista of enormous cargo ships that loom past, seeming almost close enough to touch.

Squirreled away in the town park is the statue of Pocahontas, a person who i'm pretty sure most people regard as a fictional Disney character. But she was real, she was an indian princess who lived a life of adventure, but who ended up dying of disease on a ship in Gravesend, just before she was about to embark on her journey back to America. The poignancy lies in the mundanity of her death so far from her home - finding her statue (as I did by chance on passing through the town one day) was like finding out that Princess Diana is buried in the foyer of a Little Chef in Hatfield.

On a spaniel, called Beau

2010-02-10T05:03:00.000-08:00

One of our staff brought their springer spaniel into work this morning. I really like springers,they have a lovely charming guilessness, always looking to you with their big brown eyes for reassurance, and they seem so eager to join in and help out. Another reason why I like spaniels so much is because of a poem my father showed me long ago. Whilst growing up around hunting pursuits all my life, I have never really enjoyed it as a pastime myself, because of the death required to make the sport, and I think this poem has some resonance with that.
It's a second rate Cowper ditty, but I have always found it very charming

ON A SPANIEL, CALLED BEAU, KILLING A YOUNG BIRD. 1793

A spaniel, Beau, that fares like you,
Well fed, and at his ease.
Should wiser be than to pursue
Each trifle that he sees.

But you have kill'd a tiny bird,
Which flew not till to-day,
Against my orders, whom you heard
Forbidding you the prey.

Nor did you kill that you might eat
And ease a doggish pain.
For him, though chased with furious heat,
You left where he was slain.

Nor was he of the thievish sort.
Or one whom blood allures,
But innocent was all his sport
Whom you have torn for yours.

My dog! what remedy remains.
Since, teach you all I can,
I see you, after all my pains
So much resemble Man.

Westway

2010-02-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

Is this post-post modernism? Here somebody out-Ballards Ballard by taking the time to perform cryptoarcheology on the fictional site of one of his better known stories, a traffic island on the Westway. Pretty interesting stuff eked out of meagre ingredients.

In deep space. Abandoned.

2010-02-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

Sculpture by Hiroyuki Hamada Title: Arthur C. Clarke

I wouldn't want it on my wall because its kind of ugly, but I still like it.

A piece of space junk, a forgotten object of our 1960's space race, a bomb, an entombed space monkey. The future as history and fetishistic artifact.

Shirts

2010-02-09T03:44:00.000-08:00

What with my nuptials coming up and all, it transpires that I have had to purchase a bespoke suit (that is colour co-ordinated with the flowers my bride is carrying or something). I also have been instructed, on pain of death, to get a shirt & tie that match her flowers. Seeing as I have never really had to wear a suit/shirt/tie in my life before, I had assumed that I could just walk into a branch of TM Lewin and buy one I wanted. Unfortunately the people in the shop told me that I am too tall for 'off the shelf' shirts, and so have to get a bespoke one too - but I don't know which places I should be looking in - so I was hoping that one of my dear and valued readers may be able to suggest to me a good place (online) to buy a bespoke shirt, that isn't too expensive? Or just a shop that sells larger sized, good quality shirts?

Springheeled Jack

2010-02-07T14:13:00.001-08:00

Geophagy (again)

2010-02-05T03:03:00.000-08:00

It is mightily strange how the internet can lead one down utterly random cul-de-sacs. A couple of weeks ago I had never really given the topic of 'people who eat soil' a moments thought. Now I have made a couple of blog posts on the subject and even read a good book, Everyman's Rules For Scientific Living
(as recommended by the seriously stylish Susan)

Soon I should be able to set up shop as some kind of authority on the subject of Geophagy... - here's another story from today's news: (I like the idea of taking the soil of your birthplace with you and eating it as a literal taste of home)

"A Cape Town woman addicted to eating soil says she is scared her craving will kill her chances of having children one day. Serial soil eater Thuli Malindzi, 22, has been eating earth for 10 years. She says the longer she eats it, the harder it becomes for her to stop.

"I started eating the soil when I was in primary school and I don't really remember how it started," said Malindzi. "Since I moved to Cape Town, it has been difficult to get the precise type of soil that I love. My sister and I usually bring it with us from the Eastern Cape."

Malindzi said the hard bits of clay-like earth, which resembles fudge, was delicious. "The soil tastes sweet and has a hint of sourness," she said. "The ones I find here don't taste like that." Malindzi, from Du Noon, said she always has a fix nearby. "When I crave the clay my mouth fills with saliva and my jaws give off a tingling sensation. "It is really intense and if I don't have the soil with me, I eat a chocolate but I would still need to eat the soil when I get home. "I make sure that I never run out because it would drive me crazy. I eat a block of soil every day."

The Sound of Saturn

2010-02-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

After yesterday's spooky Aeolian harp, I've managed to find something even more industrially ambient - the sound produced by the solar winds that pulse through the rings of Saturn.

Tomorrow: Les Dawson plays the Kazoo

Sonic weapons

2010-02-03T03:58:00.000-08:00

Stumbling across this image on the web I was initially drawn in by the aggressive, bristling militaristic alien-ness. It turned out to be a new sound sculpture touring the country, plonked about by earnest arts foundations in various windswept beauty spots. It's not just the object itself that is spooky. Each of the tubes works as an Aoelian harp. Here's the artist preparing his sculpture by experimenting with some soothing Aoelian chords:

Now I know where Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop got her spooky noises from... I imagine sitting inside this thing would be akin to having a group of Cybermen raping your ears repeatedly. I still like it though - it all reminds me somewhat of probably my favourite ever sci-fi show - Quatermass and the Pit

The Chagos Archipelago

2010-02-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

Previously (here) I have discussed the ecological irony that the creation of scorched no man's land areas of destruction and war around the planet have, over time, led to the counter-intuitive effect of a blossoming of wildlife. (As has Gaw here.) It would appear there are other even more contentious places than Chernobyl where this 're-naturing' effect has become evident.

Nearly 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the people of
The Chagos Archipelago were forcibly removed from their Indian Ocean paradise by the UK government, and repatriated to the slums of Mauritius in order to make way for the US airforce base of Diego Garcia. A group of Chagossians and their supporters have long clamoured for the right to return back to their island way of life, but have been blocked at every opportunity by a British government eager to assuage their US overlords. This has always seemed an unfair situation, and a situation that one could easily compartmentalize in one's head as being of a cold hearted technological superpower laying waste to a simple agrarian way of life, for the purposes of power and war.

But now it turns out that a new argument has been raised to bar them from returning to the islands. Scientists have been amazed to discover that the highly secure militarized zone around Diego Garcia has become an incredible haven for wildlife in the otherwise dangerously overfished and polluted Indian Ocean. Government scientists are now saying that the Chagossians (who are not indiginous to the islands, but copra plantation workers only a few generations old) would systematically ruin this marine reserve with pollution and overfishing should they be allowed to return. How much of this is true, and how much is a cunning ruse dreamt up by the British government to keep the Chagossians from returning is unclear. Certainly the Chagossians have a powerful new opponent in the current ecological lobby. It's a strange irony that people who were seen as the protectors of their land can now be seen as the despoilers, but it remains a fact that once again it would seem that one act of industrialisation and development has inadvertantly and almost perversely led to a protection and nurturing of a pristine ecosystem.

quod me nutrit me distruit

David Maisel II

2010-02-01T03:12:00.000-08:00

A little while back I posted some pictures by David Maisel. As I'm too busy to post anything else today, here's some more, this time of poisoned mining lakes in the californian desert. I love the geometry of the bisecting lines (very Nazca) and the luminous malachite greens are real purdy too. How he gets the colours to zing like this is beyond me