The National Maritime Museum joined flickr commons today. You can read more about it on the flickr blog.
These boots were made for walking
My 18 year-old Vasque Sundowners have finally given up the ghost. Three miles into a ten mile walk, the sole of the left boot came away from the rest of the boot, flopping about as I walked. I tied the sole back onto the boot with an old shoelace and finished the walk. Time for some new boots, I think.
In their time, these boots have:
- kept my feet warm and dry through a series of cold, cold Wisconsin winters.
- taken me to the top of the tallest mountain in the lower 48, and back down again.
- hiked a small part of the Appalachian Trail.
- carried me speedily away from a bear on the selfsame trail.
Air guitar!
Mark and Connor at the pub yesterday.
This is Lima Mike calling Delta Charlie
I love Fear is the Key.
Dreams of californication
Just messing about with the guitar and wondering how Movable Type handles mp3 uploads:
test.mp3
£11,700!
The total take from the Amnesty book sale is in and we raised £11,700! Our highest total ever. Many thanks to everyone who gave up their time, over the last five weeks, to get the sale together.
The leftover books, of which there were plenty, will go on sale again in November.
Fly to Mars, travel halfway to the stars
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 not a photograph
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!
- staffy cross jack russell
- tits too small
- facebook tits
- my tits site:flickr.com
- stardust cover
- jack russell cross staffy
Does this mean more people are searching for pictures of Patrick Lauke than pictures of ladies’ breasts?
opus mixtum
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.
34th Annual Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty Book Sale
34th annual Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty book sale
Saturday 21st June 2008
9am until 5pm
Church of the Ascension
Dartmouth Row
Blackheath SE10 8BF
20,000 new and used books at bargain prices. Last year we raised a record-breaking £9,500 for Amnesty International UK. Can we beat our personal best this year?
This sale is dependent entirely on the hard work of a small team of volunteers and generous donations of books. Work starts around about Monday 19th May and continues up until the day of the sale.
If you would like to help with preparing for the sale, or would like to donate books, please leave a comment using the form below.
You can also find us on Upcoming and Facebook. Flyers can be downloaded from flickr.
PS. No <abbr> tags were harmed during the making of this blog post.