altercola

It's difficult to buy Coke or Pepsi in the local supermarket at Pont Croix. They like to offer Breizh Cola instead. The 'cola of Brittany', as it's called, is the local alternative. It is one of many types of alternate cola, or 'altercola', competing with the more established and widespread brands. These colas are currently produced in small volumes and are generally readily available in local markets only. I like their smaller glass bottles and I must say that it tastes good (if you like cola, that is).

quick trip

So to Brittany again recently. What fun!
Ryanair couldn't land at Brest because it was raining so they diverted to Dinard. S was due to collect me at the airport and, as this had also happened to friends last week and it took them hours to get back to Brest, she decided to drive to Dinard. After two hours sitting in the plane on the runway at Dinard we were informed that the staff there were not prepared to accept us so we would be flying off to Nantes. Quick call to S who was almost at Dinard by now. She said it would take just as long to go back to Brest as it would to follow me to Nantes so she would drive on and pick me up. An hour and a half after landing at Nantes S arrived with a very sick car. Just outside the airport we stopped and discovered there was no water in the engine. Several calls to the insurance company, a tow by a very nice man to his Citroen garage, a wait in the bus shelter outside his garage, a taxi back to the airport, a hire car to get us the 270kms to Pont Croix and we were back by 1.00 in the morning - a total journey time of only 16 hours.
Back to work now for a rest.

singapore mosque

It's been some time since the last posting. Have been sorting lots of stuff for Dad (maybe more of this later).
I happened to be looking on his book shelf and found an album of old postcards that I have not seen before. This one caught my eye because a friend has a love of Ovaltine images. Odd to see this sign beside a mosque in Singapore.

tomb with a view

A view from the churchyard at Barrowden in Rutland.

dan and dan

These two are clever.

Indulge us this brief 'experiment'... This sketch is a palindrome - i.e., it's the same backwards as it is forwards. It's arguably not the funniest sketch on Youtube, but it's almost certainly one of the only ones that was written using a spreadsheet. This is something we had to get out of our system. Normal service will resume shortly.

When you've watched this see some more of them here. (Sorry about the ads.)

blackout

Found this strange object in my Dad's loft the other day. Apparently it was developed during the second world war and is called a blackout bulb. It's remarkable property is that when turned on, it emits only darkness.

You can imagine how important this device could be, useful for concealing virtually anything in darkness.

The first picture below shows it when it's turned off.

The second picture was taken by a high-speed camera in the split-second before it is fully deluminated.

The third picture is a photograph of the bulb when it is working.





Thanks to Robert for the information.

ordered 3

Modern life is an ever-accelerating barrage of people, buildings, vehicles, creatures, and things. How much can a curious mind take in? And what can it do with all the data? Gregory L. Blackstock, a retired Seattle pot washer, draws order out of all the chaos with a pencil, a black marker, and some crayons.

Blackstock is autistic and an artistic savant. He creates visual lists of everything from wasps to hats to emergency vehicles to noisemakers. In the spirit of the Outsider art of Henry Darger and Howard Finster, Blackstock makes art that is stirring in its profusion and detail and inspiring in its simple beauty. He has never received formal artistic training, yet his renderings clearly and beguilingly show subtle differences and similarities — enabling the viewer to see, for example, the distinctive features of a dolly varden, a Pacific Coast steelhead cutthroat, and fourteen other types of trout.

Each collection is lovingly captioned in Blackstock's unique hand with texts that reflect facts from his research as well as his passions and preferences. Blackstock's Collections contains over 100 extraordinary examples of his splendidly original taxonomy, offering a unique look inside the mind of a man making sense of life through art.

Check out his book here, and more about him here.

ordered 2

A group of German matchbox labels from the 70s and 80s on flickr - along with more from India, Russia, Japan and Czechoslovakia. Some nice labels on show but also the grouped thumbnails look great! Thanks Shailesh Chavda.

ordered 1

There's a bit of me that likes organising. It's not universal. Some things have to be arranged others can be left to their own devices. I do like things that are visually organised - collected, grouped, arranged, ordered.

A collection a day is a blog project showing different grouped objects every day for a year. What's the point of that? you might ask. This is for those of you who don't need to ask.

shed 2

Some more sheds for Sue. From an American company called Modern Shed based, I think, in Seattle. Sharp, modern styling but a bit pricey. They make larger ones as spare rooms or offices and even multi-sheds as community buildings.

dark events

Ana Maria Pacheco is a sculptor, painter and printmaker. She was born in Brazil in 1943. After obtaining degrees in both art and music and teaching for several years in Goias, she came to England in 1973 to study at the Slade and has lived and worked here ever since. She makes wonderful prints.

snow 3

Had more snow on Thursday afternoon and evening although it started to melt pretty quickly in the morning sun on Friday. It was the really soft, sticky stuff, ideal for snowballs. It's frozen again tonight though - so not a good time to be out and about.

puddle

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking,"This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"

This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to watch out for.

- Douglas Adams -

tree house

Sue has decided that we have to live in a tree house, especially if it's one like these. Designed and built by Baumraum in Germany they are quite stunning and look to be incredibly well built. More pics can be seen on the slide show here.

valentine 2

Henri Cartier Bresson: View from the Cathedrale Notre-Dame, 1952

For Sue too.

stuck up

A nice little ad from Spain.

valentine

1892 - Spooning by the sea at Yarmouth, England

Happy Valentine's day Sue.

robin hood tax

Nearly 50 organisations, including charities such as Oxfam, unions and green lobby groups, have joined forces to urge the government to push for what it calls a Robin Hood Tax. They argue that a tax of just 0.05 per cent on global transactions between financial institutions - five pence for every £1,000 traded - would be enough to raise hundreds of billions of pounds to help fight poverty, protect public services and tackle climate change.

Although it might leave 0.05 per cent less for bonus payments!

schools kill creativity

Have been meaning for some time to pass this short film on for more people to see. We currently seem to be more obsessed with league tables, exam results and getting more and more people to university than we we are with giving children an education. See what you think.

You can find out more about Ken Robinson here.

There's some great stuff on the TED site.

ipad

All this hype surrounding the new iPad, whatever happened to the 1983 Apple iPad?