A collection of miscellaneous thoughts, tales from true life and other bits and bobs; but don't compare me with Rhett Butler, because he couldn't be arsed, apparently.
I thought it was about time. Look what's in our garden.
I know it's a cucumber because of this:
I just managed to take the picture before the yellow alien attacked me.
There are also chillis:
And strawberries - there are (and have been) more than one, honest!
And lettuces:
And one or two nice flowers:
And today, I went geocaching to add two to my massive total of finds (36, now; don't mock, I've got a poorly leg). On the way, I saw this three-on-one action:
Haha, fooled you.
I found some pizza growing naturally on a tree near one of the caches:
Yesterday, I treated myself to something I've been meaning to for a while. A digital compact. I only had the DSLR and you need a wheelbarrow to take it with you to parties, weddings etc. The compact will slip nicely into my shirt pocket. All of the above were snapped with it and I'm quite pleased with it so far. It's a Canon PowerShot A1100 IS (for the uninitiated, that stands for Image Stabilisation) and it's got a 4x optical zoom, video, and everything!
Oh, sorry, I growled because, despite four attempts, I couldn't e-mail Stu my choice for last week's challenge in time. Apparently, the French internet was being crap when I tried and, when we reached Cherbourg, where we camped for a couple of nights at the end of our holiday, there wasn't even a mobile phone network available! Anyway, I would have submitted this one, which, I think, is the best of my mediocre bunch at the moment. Click for bigness.
#9 required the subject to be at least 30 feet below the camera. This is my entry, which was taken at Askerswell, Dorset, on the way back from Teignmouth on Sunday. Sorry to JG, because it is very similar to hers and I fiddled with lens blur etc. but the tilt shift effect isn't very good, I'm afraid.
After I retired from local government early in 2004, a couple of very nice people gave me a part-time job as Website Manager for the Association of Electoral Administrators, an organisation of which I had been a member whilst I was working full-time. Yawning already, Omally? Tut, I thought you had an open mind. Oh no, that was last week! All right, so I could keep mentally active by doing Brain Training on the Ninbongo DS but this is real life and involves real people and I interact with several of them every day and spend time with hundreds of them at Conference (including giving an after-dinner speech to over 400 of them one year concerning my vasectomy; I just tarted up this old blog and it seemed to go down fairly well). I promise I’ll come to the point quite soon.
I send out a newsletter every Friday to all 1,560 members and always include a final item under the heading “Weekly Ramblings”, intended to amuse and prove that there is humanity among the dry-as-dust trappings of electoral administration. I’ve actually pinched a good deal of material from this blog, adapting it as necessary, although I’ve used pretty much all I can and now have to write new stuff; something always seems to come up, though. Like yesterday. Do you know what Keeling Schedules are? If you are familiar with the law, you probably will. Put simply, they comprise the text of a bit of legislation with bits in bold showing any wording inserted by a subsequent bit of legislation and drawing a line through what’s been taken out. With me so far?
I thought I might find out a bit more about Keeling Schedules so I could pass on some interesting information to our members, especially since one had recently been issued which was of significant interest, what with the European elections looming.
I reckoned they must have been named in honour of the chap who came up with the idea and so, very early on Friday morning (about 10, I think), I commenced using the power of the intermanet to assist my investigations. I got quite excited when I came across the name of Dr. David Keeling linked to Schedules, only to be disappointed to discover that he is merely the head of the Department of Geography and Geology at West Kentucky University, and the Schedules are simply his term timetable; why they are not called that as opposed to “semester schedules” (pron. skedules) is beyond me.
I glossed over the flight schedule for the Jet Charter and Air Charter Service to and from Cocos Keeling Island (no, neither do I) as being irrelevant, as was the list of TV Schedules for Liise Keeling, who is, apparently, a stunt woman who has performed in many films and TV series from 2001 to date, including the memorable “Monk”; unfortunately, imdb.com fails to tell us what role she played in the episode “Mr Monk Meets Dale the Whale” (2002). Her listings reveal that she was mostly a “stunt double”, “stunt performer” or “stunt driver” but I did wonder what particular qualities were necessary to bring to the set of the 2008 film The Rocker as a “stunt waitress”. Perhaps, as most American waitresses are, she was adept at juggling with eggs over easy, pastrami on rye, bagels, cookies, and interminable steaming jugs of black coffee, all probably whilst wearing roller skates.
I was becoming a little dispirited by now and the only vaguely interesting information I could come up with was the schedule of rowing events in the 2008 Olympics, involving the South African, Shaun Keeling, all you would ever need to know about scheduling a conference call between the Cocos Keeling Islands and Luxembourg (bearing in mind the time difference) and the service schedule of the funeral for Jimmy Keeling in Allegre, Kentucky, in July 2008.
Finally, I had some success. Wikipedia tells us that Keeling was the MP for Twickenham between 1935 and 1954, the year of his death. I am unsure of the circumstances surrounding the development of his Schedule (pron. “shedule”) but I found one or two references, despite being riddled with mental fatigue by then. The well-known work Legislative Drafting by V. C. R. A. C. Crabbe explains (at p. 147) that the device is named after Mr E H Keeling (later Sir Edward Keeling) who, with Mr R P Croom‑Johnson (later Mr Justice Croom-Johnson) came up with the proposal. A bloke called Bennion who subsequently rubbished Keeling’s system in Statute Law (at pp. 278-9) came up with something called a Jamaica Schedule, but I reckon he was just jealous and I dismissed that out of hand as well as a summary of Montesquieu’s Principles, Thring’s Rules and Ilbert’s Questions and Advice. In my book, Keeling is a hero and anyone who can come up with something that can be used to demonstrate the practical effect of the Loan Relationships and Derivative Contracts (Disregard and Bringing Into Account of Profits and Losses) Regulations 2004 and the effect of the Deregulation (Weights & Measures) Order on the Weights and Measures Act 1985 has to be worthy of commemoration.
This is my entry to Stu's Tuesday Challenge #7 ("This week, the subject is absent from the frame. This could be for various reasons - location: your subject is present but off to one side of the frame; temporal: your subject was present but has now gone.")
Hopefully, this bird-bath speaks for itself! It looks slightly less rubbish than the original colour version, by the way. I think I'm enjoying this and I'm hoping to come up with a real belter one day!
Well, after driving around forest roads for an hour yesterday with nothing blue leaping out at me, I returned home a little jaded. Then an idea hit me; I had the CD of that name by the great JM so I took a picture of the front cover and one of the back and, with a bit of twiddling with hue, saturation and rotation, I ended up with this. I hope taking a picture of a picture taken by someone else and all the post-production shenanigans won't render it invalid!
This is my entry to Stu's Tuesday Challenge #5, taken from my hotel window early Tuesday evening. I missed out on #4 - "Red", because I haven't seen anything red for - oh - days, now, plus, since Sunday, I've been a very busy boy in Brighton and, anyway, as you all know, there's nothing red there. The only post-production I did was to straighten the horizon (damn that little buoy).
Every Thursday, I meet some friends at the pub and we have a few games of pool, a foaming brew or two, and a laugh. My mate Roy gives me a lift. He duly arrived and, as I left the house, I saw a man wearing a luminous yellow jacket and a safety helmet. He came over to speak to me.
Man: ‘scuse me, mate (pointing to the grass verge next to our house), d’you know if there used to be a street lamp here?
Me: Well, I’ve lived here for 23 years and there’s never been one here during that time.
Man: Only, we’ve been told to replace it.
Me: See my previous remark above.
Roy: Perhaps someone nicked it.
Me: Haha.
Man: Haha. Look at my map – it’s definitely marked as being here. See? Number 5.
Me: So it is, but, as I say, to my knowledge, there’s never been one here.
He then wandered off down the road, looking for the elusive Number 5 lamp-post. We thought no more of it especially as he did not appear to have a replacement street light about his person and went to the pub. We related the incident to our friends with great merriment until, about five minutes later, we saw a lorry go past with a street lighting column on the back. I suggested that perhaps Yellowcoat had misunderstood his instructions and the order was for installation rather than replacement.
Ten minutes or so later, S phoned me to say that she had had a conversation with Yellowcoat after she noticed he was erecting a lamp-post. As far as I can tell, her conversation with him went something like this.
Wife: Would you mind telling me what you’re doing?
Yellowcoat: We’re replacing the street lighting column.
Wife: How can you replace it, there’s never been one here.
Yellowcoat: Well, it’s shown on the map and I’m sorry I’ve got no choice but to do what I’ve been instructed.
Wife: But I don’t particularly want a street light here; there’s one across the road, two behind us at the end of the Close, and one just along the road two properties away. Anyway, I don’t want a light shining into the house all night.
Yellowcoat: Oh, you needn’t worry about that – it only shines straight downwards. Anyway, there’s no electricity.
The whole thing was becoming quite farcical. Resigned to our enlightened fate, S went indoors and telephoned the County Council Highways Department, where a very helpful lady was, er, very helpful indeed and even rang back as promised. Apparently, the previous (non-existent) street lighting column had to be replaced for safety reasons as it was too close to the road. The new one is now closer than the old (non-existent) one was – or, rather, wasn’t. Apart from that, our drop kerb access will have to be dug up to have electrickery installed – we will only be inconvenienced for about a couple of hours and there won’t be any problem as long as we had been given authority to use the drop kerb access – ahem. Well, I spoke to a Highways Inspector yonks ago and he said he would come and inspect – well, that’s his job – and let me know if there was any problem. He never let me know any such thing, so that’s all right, then. I hope. Anyway, the Council are going to write to us with an explanation. They’ll probably just tell us they’ve installed a nice new street light. Let’s wait and see.
With our house as the centre, there are now five street lights within a radius of 150 yards. It’ll be like living in Blackpool.
This is my entry to Stu's Tuesday Challenge #3, "Front Page", and is intended to be for a magazine called, perhaps, "Gun Dogs Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly". Or maybe "Dangerous Toys"; take your pick.
As for post-production, I had great difficulty finding a suitable indoor location and had to, er, artificially enlarge (only slightly) the grey board behind the subject, plus cropping and faffing around with levels.
I've always been a keen photographist but have long suffered from apathy, followed by enforced inactivity. However, I have to thank Stu for the weekly (er, what else would it be?) Tuesday Challenge because it has galvanised me into action and, although I missed out on #1 (People at Work) through a bit of silliness, to be honest, I am going to try and put an entry in every week. #2 (Water) was a somewhat hurried effort and I've got an idea for #3 (Front page) for which I had several failed attempts this afternoon - better luck over the weekend, hopefully! Anyway, I've resurrected my Flickr account and uploaded some miscellaneous piccies which you can see here. I need to keep practising!
