Spent Saturday dealing with bugs in a web site that is going live in September October November. As a result I got to South Park just in time to see the first of the fireworks being launched—as a result totally failing to rendezvous with friends to see the display together. Climbing a hill in the dark with fireworks erupting in front of you is a slightly different way to appreciate the pyrotechnician’s art. To took a few video clips (the best bits of which I have also uploaded to Flickr) from behind a couple of tall people. After the fireworks I was able to get closer to the front and see the gigantic wicker man that graced this year’s bonfire. It was really impressive. They have to light it with a match on a very long pole.
I mentioned earlier that I have switched to using a Tumbler to do picture links to stuff. Thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cleanskies you can also subscribe to it in LiveJournal using this: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
pdc_tumblr.
I think Jeremy’s camera has the edge when it comes to taking photos of art in the dark. Here are some snaps from here photostream on Flickr—and a few from mine:
I also made a film of the braziers making crackling popping noises in the rain.
This weekend the water lily in our little pond produced its first flower, which opened thins morning during a light misty rain. Click through for some more pictures of the flower looking pretty.
- Mood:
pleased
Jo and Alex had a barbecue whose theme was inspired by a coat Alex bought: Doctor Who-niverse. Jeremy made Lady Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17 from a peach-coloured top stretched over a picture frame and a small plastic brain in a pint mug; I made cardboard Judoon heads; Angharad and Ruth came as Weeping Angels, a costume idea that is fun until you realize it entails spending most of the party not being allowed to move.
I managed to bring my little pocket camera with me to the wedding. This is one time when women have an advantage over the men—you can fit a larger camera in a handbag than in an evening suit’s trouser pockets!
An exhibition of local-ish comics creators in the Jam Factory café-gallery just off the Frideswide Square (the triangle of roads outside the train station) in Oxford. Main photo by Matt Brooker of David Baillie, Jeremy Dennis, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Deidre Ruane, Andrew Luke, D’Israeli (Matt Brooker). Not present: Sally-Ann Hickman, Ellen Lindner, Jessica Bradley.
I took a few photos of the gallery at the official opening on Thursday evening, and also of the inaugural sketchs in the miniature scribble pads left on the table to give the exhibition that essential CAPTION flavour.
31 July–30 August 2008 • The Jam Factory, Hollybush Row, Oxford OX1 1HU.
A longer clip of the finale is on YouTube:
Secondary objectives were to visit the British Museum and Gosh comics. Alas! by the time I got to Great Russell Street the museum and Gosh were closed. As it turns out, if I had walked to Gt Russell St from the Hayward I could have visited Gosh and still had time to deliver my PowerBook to Regent Street, since the Apple Store closes at 21:00. Live and learn, eh?
- Mood:
tired
This weekend we built a tiny pond in the back garden. Well, actually we started on Sunday evening (after the heat of the afternoon) and finished it off on Monday evening after work. We even had time to have oxfordslacker and tinyjo come around to inspect the pond and the visiting cat and have cocktails on the patio in the fading twilight.
There are several shots of filling of the pond which are probably best appreciated as a slideshow as opposed to individual pictures.
- Mood: accomplished
Watched a bit of Nasa TV, live streaming footage of astronauts attaching the Kibo module to the International Space Shed, astronauts working or bobbing about inside the various modules of the station, and astronauts being interviewed by local TV stations, one after another. They had the entire combined crew all lined up together—the Kibo module finally provides the station with a room large enough to do this. It is large enough to get ‘lost’ in—meaning you can end up drifting in the middle of the room unable to reach any of the walls.
Watched Doctor Who ‘Forest of the Dead’ which was brilliant! Jeremy arrived home from spending Saturday being soaked in Bristol, and we watched ‘Forest of the Dead’ again. It was still brilliant!
Today I lost a certain amount of time from following a link to an online graphic novel Rosewll, Texas. This is an alternate-history story where Texas never joins the USA. Set in 1947, it starts when ‘Lieutenant Gene Roddenberry, a young Texas Air Militia pilot, shoots down an unidentified flying disk near Roswell, western-most city in the Federated States of Texas. Agents from the United States, the California Republic, the Franco-Mexican Empire, and the Third-and-a-Half Reich all want to learn the flying disk's secrets.’ A fun romp, if you can overlook a certain amount of chauvinism.
Once things had cooled down a but, Jeremy and I made a start on digging a pond to give the frogs we keep disturbing somewhere nice to live. So far we have a hole, and some carpet and liner that will have to deploy tomorrow. The new cat in the neighbourhood continues to amuse us with her antics.
Went in the London yesterday with a shopping list of things to try to do and see and in the end managed to do none of them properly. Managed to find the No Barcodes mini-con at Camden Lock Market and chatted to some of the table-runners and then scuttled off to try to get to the British Museum before my reservation at the Apple Store Genius Bar at 17:40. ended up grabbing a couple of books at Gosh and then trundled down Oxford Street to the Apple Store to have my dead hard drive diagnosed by the nice Genius (the web site claims they are trained in Cupertino, but I suspect that only applies to the Geniuses in the American stores). The plan is for me to make one last attempt to extract data from the ailing disc before sending it in to get it replaced. Afterwards I had all the time in the world but the shops were now shutting to wander up Oxford Street and goggle at the window displays in Selfridges and get on the bus home. Ended the evening having a late supper in Oxford’s Red Star noodle bar.
Meanwhile, Mars Phoenix was sticking to doing one main task per sol, and hit the jackpot, discovering an ice sheet serendipitously while taking photos of its own feet for engineering purposes. The icy area is called Holy Cow because that’s what the engineers said when they worked out what it was. Luckily Nasa technicians are well-spoken people; if my friends were working there it would have ended up being called Mother Fuck or Wtf.
Yay! The cherry tree picnic worked. We had an afternoon being entertained by shrieking toddlers running around in the garden and playing in Jeremy’s rainbow hammock, picnic food under the tree (or at least next to the tree, which is not very wide). We had lots to eat, about fifty per cent of it being cherry cake or black forest gateau party cake. There was enough rain to give us an excuse to get the umbrellas out ☂, but not so much that anyone felt the need to retreat indoors.
As evening drew in and the children went home, we got out some olives and other non-child-friendly snacks and turned the fairly lights on in the greenhouse for the first time this year. Conversation turned to grown-up topics like lesbianism, motorcycle design, and the philosophical underpinnings of the mortgage market. All in all I think everybody had a fun time—even if a few people complained that the cucumber sandwiches hadn’t had their crusts cut off. I think it just makes them healthier ☺. Maybe next time. (I discovered I prefer Co-Op white bread to Hovis Guaranteed Square bread because Hovis Guaranteed Square bread is not square.)
Click the pictures to see more pictures of people picnicking and contemplating the very pretty cherry tree.
The problem is that the clips force all the bikes to be lined up with their handlebars overlapping, and the two levels means that, once all the floor-level spaces are take up, I end up with my bike positioned with my precious headlight right next to some other bike’s bar-end. If the owner of the other bike is the sort who likes to remove their bike with a dramatic flourish, then there is a real chance that they will end up breaking my brake cables or clobbering my light. The guy parking his bike further down mentioned that he had indeed lost a cable that way.
This contrasts with the rest of the car park, which allows cars a space a metre wider than the car. Why aren’t cars jammed together with just enough room for the wing mirrors to not quite touch? With the space saved they could fit in another half-dozen cars easily!
- Mood:
aggravated
Saturday night we congregated at Jo and Alex’s for Jo’s birthday cocktail party. Jo’s old obsession is cocktail dresses and her new obsession is the video game Guitar Hero so we ended up with a lot of our heroic guitaristas rocking out while dressed to the nines under a tiny mirror ball. Neatly also solves the problem of what music to play at your cocktail party.
- Mood: sleepy
Had Christmas lunch hosted by
squigglyruth and truecatachresis with oxfordslacker, mr_snips. Goose was eaten, we deployed the card tabke and sorted out the German postal system after a bout of Zombie Fluxx. Our hosts showed us the Wii version of Guitar Hero, and tonyjo discovered she seems to be a natural at this game (or perhaps the similarity of the instrument to a cello or violin helps). In the end the pudding had to be indefinitely postponed—none of us felt we could do it justice after stuffing ourselves at lunch.
Today I have been mostly assembling the robot kangaroo illustrated here. It comes in a box with little bags containing tiny, tiny screws and various other itty bitty bits and bobs. It comes with a small screwdriver, the world’s smallest Allen key, and a tube of grease, but you have to supply your own modelling knife and tweezers.
This year I shared a chalet with
oxfordslacker, motodraconis, badasstronaut, timscience, and cleanskies. I took some photos, but those attempts at taking pix of performances tend to suffer from the low light and my distance from the stage. Moto’s photos from her much more high-falutin’ camera have much better shots of people on stage. Debra’s photos have more of those intimate chalet scenes, including dreamy close-ups of Jeremy’s latest invention, the Champagne Screen Saver cocktail. Alex supplies capsule reviews of some of the bands via the magic of (Loud)Twitter: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning. These are especially amusing when read aloud by the Mac’s speech synthesiser. As well as the aforementioned cocktail, Jeremy has posted a clip of the Chrome Hoofs, a performance I tragically missed.- Mood: amused
- Music:Lemon Jelly, ‘’76 Aka Stay With You‘ (’64–’95)
- Mood: accomplished
- Music:Daft Punk, ‘Indo Silver Club’ (Homework)
Operation Cover Greenhouse with Horticultural Glass has proceeded to the general flavour of conclusion favoured by us all, and we even had a spare moment to toddle down to Messrs B and Q to wrap our mutton-goosers around a couple of tall slim water-gathering instruments manufactured, we are in formed here, of recycled materials and to plumb the aforementioned rain-conservators in the more backwardly situated corners of our bijou crystal palace.
Rejoice! as Jeremy operates her wireless telephone and thumbs through a nictitation-fixated fashion periodical, fearless of either rain or encroaching darkness.
- Mood: accomplished
- Music:Space Heroes of the People, ‘Barbie is a Robot’
In further news, Act 3 of Starship Exeter ‘The Tressaurian Intersection’ is now published, only 9 months after the previous episode! ARRR!!!!
- Mood: Piratical
Our eventual plans for this construction once it is constructed are a little vague at present: tomatoes, perhaps; somewhere to keep geraniums; select cocktail parties. The kit has actually been languishing on our concrete area for months, having arrived too late to be erected during the spring, it has had to wait for a weekend lacking music festivals.
- Location:Oxford, UK
- Mood: accomplished
