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May 2005

the difference two legs make

here is a dummy on some grass. i took two photos of it. one with legs in the background and one without.
i wasn’t sure which one i liked best, so i thought i’d show you both. which do you prefer ? as usual, you can click photos for big versions.
with

or without

no dogs up the stairs

this is quite a common dog sign, but it’s the positioning which we should note to be quite unusual. it’s at the top of some stairs leading to a bridge over a small road.
kezia was very excited so stood and pointed
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friends at polesden lacy

the girls and i went with andy, adam and luke to poleseden lacy for bank holiday fun.
as it traditional, it rained, but we were lucky with the weather as it also didn’t rain.
here is an attempt to get luke, kezia, adam and esther in the same picture (note luke running off in the distance)
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here is adam videoing esther on a maze
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and here is esther on a ropey maze tangly thing
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and here we are picnicking in what we thought was a little barn suitable for picknicking in (but was actually a nature hide).
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on the way round we also bumped in to kezia and esther’s best friends who were also visiting on the same day !

hidden camera

very strange hidden camera on a plant pot. it was pointed at a park bench. very mysterious.

the laughing police man

here’s a chap guarding 10 Downing Street. he looks very jovial, which is what you’d expect to see from a traditional british bobby in a tourist hot spot.
click to enjoy his jolly smile

rap mobile

remember tim westwood’s mum-truck ? well, one day a few months back it had a flat tyre. and then it became a red one, with nearly the same number plate. but then the original one came back and this one remained.
so it looks like he’s got two cars. i assume he lives somewhere near where these cars are regularly parked ?

jane and guitar

jane and her guitar reflected in my bass guitar pickup

esther’s art

esther has recently developed a more subtle approach to painting. note the bold triangle surrounded by whispy blue bits.
she calls this piece “two clowns getting married”.

pin the spider on the spidey

this is the modern version of ‘pin the tale on the donk’. it was very suspicious that the birthday boy scored a direct hit on the target …

funkypancake music

Total volume of music on my computer:
I use Napster To Go so only tend to rip my more obscure CDs on to my PC (about 4GB’s worth).
If you’ve got Napster you can search my Library (member name funkypancake) which now has around 45,000 tracks in it.
i dump around 5GB of these at a time on to my Zen Micro and listen to them day and night.
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Playing right now:
The Fall War Against Intelligence

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

Mind Train, Yoko Ono
Sister Ray, Velvet Underground
I Think I’m In Love, Spiritualised
Rasputin, Boney M (our wedding first dance tune)
Gordoni Mix – Brakes on mix, Air
The last CD i bought
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i’m just loving anything faust at the moment.
Radio Stations I listen to:
XFM
Radio 2 (Mark Radcliffe)
Resonance for potluck
where next ?
i’m working my way through the Record Collector 100 Greatest British Psychedelic Records. It’s pleasantly surprising how many of these are on Napster !

thanks to russell davies for asking me to do this (i quite enjoyed it in the end)
i’m not going to pass this on specifically to 5 other people, but if any other readers have a blog and want to tell everything then let me know !

applauding nature

jane’s still busy marking so i’m in charge of the girls at weekends. after sticky tape on their faces we went to Cliveden House again.
we decided that the blossom on the trees was so beautiful that we should give it a round of applause every time we saw some particular nice example.
unfortunately this made our walk quite slow, and quite noisey. but it was fun.
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why don’t you applaude nature out loud over the bank holiday weekend ?

cake

i’ve thought about providing some links to a photo buying service via the website for people who might want to buy one of my photos. but then i think no-one would be interested anyway, so why depress myself by setting it up if it wouldn’t be used.
but maybe if i sold cakes featuring my pictures, well that would be a different matter ! here’s an example birthday cake (not featuring one of my pictures)

cliveden long garden

nice low hedges:

eery statues:

and some nice high hedges:

and nice topiary:

modern communication

a couple of years ago you couldn’t move in our house for sticky tape. esther took a shine to it and everything was covered in a small plastic layer. the remnants of this time still exist on door handles and table tops.
i was pleased to see the sticky tape returned this morning when i was looking after the girls.
they thought it fantastic fun to stick strips of blue paper to the face of their dolls so they could communicate with each other. they were making blue-tooth headsets for their toys !
here is one of kezia’s babies with the blue communication device attached.

if they’d stopped there that would have been fine, but esther and kezia also decided they needed to stick blue paper to their own faces too. the design fault here was the sticky tape went over their lips so they couldn’t speak !
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esther went one step further and incorporated a dial pad in to her headset:
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