Mister Magnesium (tm)

My wife has started telling me her dreams: 'Mister Magnesium had had his throat cut and the hole was 8" long and he was seven feet tall. I wasn't scared of him although I knew he was trying to kill me because he didn't know that I knew he was trying to kill me.'

'The one the night before had Graydon Carter ("Who?") and load of Vanity Fair parties,' she says.

Pulp Covers: Spillane

Trying to tidy up the house produced 5 black bags of rubbish and assorted boxes of things to go the charity shop. I can't throw books away so the whole process takes much longer - first, identify them as books I won't read or consult again in my life (or ones that can easily be obtained) then box them up, then wonder whether St Joseph's Hospice round the corner really needs a load of Derrida, Freud and Lacan. I probably should skip and burn them Nazi style.

The big thing is that the house looks as cluttered as ever.

Steve Bowbrick and me by Naomi Woddis circa 1988

Not much to say really - you're better off reading the notes by clicking on the image. I'm clearing rubbish out of the house on this beautiful bank holiday while my wife is at the seaside with Maria and Jim. I found this. It's nearly from 20 years ago. I'm so old.

Passed Out

This isn't me. It's from the blog of a guy on Flickr that I follow. It's called Los in Baghdad. The passed out guy is in the US Army in Iraq. He's on leave. It feels like it makes my musings on my new iPod/iBook/rain outside my window a wee bit shallow and insignificant.

Time to upgrade

I've been thinking about upgrading the OS on my iBook for oh, about 2 years now but will finally get around to it this weekend I hope. The big reason for not doing it before was the fact that I'd have to reformat the drive and I live in fear of erasing useful data or not being able to open it from the back up. Anyway, I've found this very handy site and am planning on losing all my passwords and data upgrading this weekend. Alternatively I could go down the traditional route and buy a new iBook with 10.4 already installed on it.

My Italian in Laws

I mentioned Channel 4's Insite project a few posts ago and here's the site that I built as part of it. It's old photos of my wife's family with a few words telling you something about the pictures. Full disclosure would involve me saying something like "PM is a freelance contractor currently employed by Channel 4 on the ORIGINATION INSITE project" but that's not really my style. Honesty I mean.

"When I rule the world..."

"It's a question of control," says my wife. At least once a day she'll start to say something like "In my production of 'Guys and Dolls' they won't sing that song because it's not very good' or "When I'm running a bed and breakfast we'll serve baked fruit (like peaches) for breakfast". It's hard to remember them all so I'm going to start writing them down here (for the good of humankind). I think they're Open Source and can be implemented freely as long as you retain the original credit.

Scotch Egg Picasso by Yol

The thing that has always struck me since I first encountered Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, about 25 years ago, was the relationships it posits between the fields of Western and African art and culture. While potentially the creation of the work could have raised all sorts of questions about the role and function of art in different societies and so on, Picasso's masterly PR and marketing machine meant that he remained the focus of the ensuing discussions in art history and criticim for the rest of the century.

This is Yol's interpretation using a Scotch egg, baked potato and baked beans. The willow pattern plate is a nice touch.

Insite Origination: Channel 4

There's this excellent website and project being run by Channel 4, the UK broadcaster. Basically they're encouraging people to tell the stories of incoming cultures to the UK by building a series of websites. To this end they're running a series of workshops across the UK. They've already been to Bradford, Bristol and are running some in Wolverhampton at the moment. I wish they'd had something like this when I was a kid.

These are some of the sites they've made that I liked:

Traditional Asian Drag Queens
Pickled Cabbage (Serbians in Bradford)
Turban - Harphuman Singh's story