Eat your greens!

Saturn, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

Just got home from work, having set up the Observatory’s LX10 telescope for some visitors in the courtyard tonight, right next to the Prime Meridian of the World. We spent a couple of hours watching Saturn, which looks amazing at the moment. I think we saw its largest moon, Titan, too. As Darren notes, over on the Royal Observatory blog, this month is a good month for planet-gazing. We have Mercury, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter all visible at some point during the night.

No photos from tonight, so I’m making do from an older photo taken with the 28-inch Great Equatorial telescope.

This is geeky navel gazing, but, courtesy of flickr stats, here’s what people have typed into google in order to find my flickr photos, by order of popularity. Note that Daisy is more popular than tits!

1. staffy cross jack russell
2. tits too small
3. facebook tits
4. my tits site:flickr.com
5. stardust cover
6. jack russell cross staffy

Does this mean more people are searching for pictures of Patrick Lauke than pictures of ladies’ breasts?

Photo credit: Dawn Sutter Madell

A couple of you (mr g. and k.r.) might remember my first venture into writing HTML – a few pages about the band Antietam, written in 1994 or 95 and hosted on geocities. Those pages moved to a home on demon internet in 1996 and lasted, more or less unchanged, until around 2005, when I bought eatyourgreens.org.uk. Well, the pages themselves still exist and you can nose around on them here. My favourites are the first appearance of the phrase ‘eat your greens!’ and a Guitar Player interview where Tara Key gets technical about amps and effects pedals. What’s not to love about a librarian who plays guitar like Neil Young and waxes lyrical about Les Pauls?

Anyway, enough nostalgia. Antietam have a myspace page now and a new album, Opus Mixtum, which I just got hold of and have been playing pretty constantly for the last 3 days. 26 songs (11 of them instrumentals) sprawling over 2 CDs, it takes a while to sink in but first impressions are that this is a great record. It’s an eclectic range of sounds, but no less powerful for it. There’s Crazy Horse style rock, reminiscent of Rope A Dope or Burgoo, mixed with gentle acoustic guitar and piano that could have come from Tara’s solo albums, Bourbon County and Ear and Echo. I think this is going to be one of my favourite records of 2008.

If you’re in New York, Antietam are playing outside the Brooklyn Public Library on 31st May. More info on myspace.