Time warp

At this time of year I feel as though anything I turn my back on for five minutes goes through some kind of time distortion effect where weeks of neglect happen to it in my short absence.

I spent two whole weekends recently doing nothing but weeding the allotment, and it now has dandelions in it that I couldn't possibly have missed only a couple of weeks ago - great big mature bloody trees have sprung up, with masses of seed heads crumbling gently into cracks in the soil all over the entire plot.

Slugs of course are well known for having the ability to warp time - this is why, for instance, courgette plants sometimes seem to disappear completely without leaving any remains at all. They apparently find it necessary to shred corn, so I'm growing a second batch of corn plants for them to eat when they've reduced the first ones to ribbons. At least the fox deli bar should prove cheaper this year, since a new plot-holder on my site works part time in a pub and can get us all beer dregs to use in the slug traps.

I have loads more seeds to sow, a strawberry patch full of buttercup, kit to repair before the festival season, a zillion things I'm supposed to have read by now and a flat that I can't even find the dirty laundry in any more. Socks, in particular, have been doing the time-distortion thing a lot recently. I've always found them to be prone to it.

I haven't posted here in over a month, and I have a huge backlog of things I wanted to ramble on about, some of which I'll try to get around to posting soon. In the meantime, you may like to amuse yourself with pie charts and Venn diagrams...






Back soon, perhaps with some more short and sweet ones until I've got RL a bit more under control.

Tinker's Bubble Photos

I've recently been for a working holiday at Tinker's Bubble, an intentional community in Somerset. I keep thinking I'll write something about it and then I keep changing my mind about exactly what I want to write - every time I've been I've had quite complicated feelings about it.

I've just put some photos up on Flickr so I thought I'd link to those first - they're not brilliant, but they might give a general idea of what some of it is like. Some text to follow probably at some point...

Bluebottle.com Is Crap

My STUPID e-mail account is TOTALLY inaccessible because NO bluebottle.com pages will load at all because bluebottle.com is so CRAP.

Apologies to anyone trying to contact me by e-mail - if it's urgent and you don't have my phone number then try leaving a comment here.

How to Sell Your Head

I was going to write about the lack of advertisements in Sao Paulo, Brazil. But then I saw this:

Free Tibet

The whole world is watching...


The Free Tibet Campaign is still updating its website with photos taken by protesters today. Here's another one:


They must be very, very scared.

There are reports of people protesting outside Chinese embassies around the world today. There is no embassy near me, so all I can think of to do for now is to copy these images here. If you happen to live in London though the embassy is at 49-51 Portland Place, and will probably be very busy tonight.

The editor of the Guardian has written to the embassy about media censorship, which might be a good basic letter for the rest of us to change a bit and also send - names, addresses and e-mails here to send to. I'd probably leave out the phrase "henceforth unfettered" if you don't want to sound like a Guardian editor.

Personally I think I might give them a ring tomorrow on 020 7299 4049, although if I had access to a fax machine I think it would also be quite good fun to repeatedly fax those photographs of dead protesters to all the embassy fax numbers...

COMMENTS

Real England

Hooray! Paul's new book Real England is out very soon, and small bits of it are readable now. They are currently unfortunately only available in the Daily Mail, which leaves me with a dilemma - can I really bring myself to link to the Daily bloody Mail?

I actually stole a copy yesterday before I realised I could read it online - if I'd been caught I wasn't sure if I'd be more embarrassed about shoplifting or about wanting a copy of the Daily Mail. Anyway, there will be more of it in the Mail on Monday, you really should read it and you really shouldn't buy the Daily Mail, so I'm just going to point you at it once.

That's it, I'm not going to do it again until it's in the Guardian, and then only if there aren't any "Fly to Prague for 20p" adverts next to it.


COMMENTS

Fallen Tree

I went for a walk the other day about half a mile up the road from my house, and saw this:


Down at my end of the road police tape usually means either a recent shooting or a massive car crash, but at the posh end in Roundhay the police apparently isolate the public from fallen trees, presumably in case anyone fails to notice a huge tree trunk of maybe two and a half feet diameter and bruises their knees by walking into it.
Both the tree and the wall are probably about 100 years old. Somehow that's an impressive but not completely unimaginable length of time, and I stood for ages just looking at this massive dying tree, wondering things like how much it weighed, what the place was like when it was a little sapling, and how terrifying it must have sounded when it fell.























Certainly puts a few other things into perspective, anyway.
























COMMENTS

The Scale of the Problem

I've just stumbled across pictures of an exhibition called "Running the Numbers - An American Self-Portrait" by Chris Jordan in which "Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use in the U.S.); 106,000 aluminium cans (thirty seconds of U.S. can consumption) and so on." I love it, although I take his point that "the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended."

Below is my favourite single image, although each print takes several images to get the scale unless you're there in person. It's a small detail from one of six huge panels in which each folded prison uniform represents one of the 2.3 million prisoners incarcerated in 2005.




"The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits." Chris Jordan

COMMENTS

Life Explained On Film

Half of Tescos up the road is now piled high with chocolate Easter eggs, and the other half is plastered with red plastic heart-shaped things. Thought I'd share "How to Survive Valentine's Day When You Are Single" from Video Jug - personally I'm quite looking forward to seeing lots of unsold chocolate go on sale at the weekend.

You can see such other useful things on Video Jug as "How to Get Out of a Car Without Showing Your Knickers," "How To Stop Leaving the Toilet Seat Up" and "What To Do If You Catch Your Parents Having Sex"*. Enjoy.

* Quality of advice may vary and is not necessarily endorsed by this blog.

Wake Up Cat