Blackpool

Silver Sea


Tides
Blackpool permanently enjoys a strange type of fame. There is the Blackpool that is made out of brick, concrete and rock that sits on the Lancashire coast. This Blackpool is run-down, often wet, cold, and full of desperate drunks and yet… is also surreal, beautiful and weirdly funny [10p Tea virtually demands to be heard in Peter Kay‘s voice].

Then there’s the Blackpool that is famous. It seems to have been created by replacing the ‘and yet’ of the previous sentence with an ‘addition’ sign, and turning all those words into a formula. The results of which are then put up in lights and announced by someone with a very forced smile and a dayglo pink
jumper. I’d say “if you can imagine that”, but then, if you’ve heard of Blackpool, you probably can…

So to the point. 1. BBC. New drama about Blackpool. It’s a musical, as if the formula didn’t see that coming… Although it’s supposed to be good. And 2. My photos, taken on Blackpool beach. Boththese photos were taken on the same afternoon, the same beach, and within five minutes of each other: Sometimes Blackpool can show its many sides very easily.

Ghosts in rooms with the lights out

With The Lights Out, the long overdue Nirvana box-set finally has a release date: November 22nd

3 CDs and a DVD, including versions of all the apocryphal songs that you can glimpse on the file sharing networks… This month’s Q magazine has a decent page-long review. There’s a lousy official site here, and this site here has a little pic of the insides and also lots of media stuff to download.

London: Secret Level Code


London is a secret city. The maps lie about it. The first time you
discover this – probably the way every first-time Londonder discovers
the maps are wrong – is when you abandon the tube map for the first time (like a tube failure forcing you to walk to the
next nearest station…) The Tube map is, in its way, a masterpiece of
computer gaming programming. It is perhaps the most convincing and
widely accepted virtual universe ever created. Areas of Zone 1 in
London are a lot closer than it implies, and the way the “stations” fit
together makes a surprising real-world jigsaw puzzle.


London takes
time to get to know, and there are few other places I’ve been – even
foreign cities – that feel as if they are as good at hiding things as
London is. Pubs, clubs, bars, roads, buildings, gardens, parks –
you can walk down the same road for years and never know they’re right
there. It takes quite a jolt to wake you up to it – for me, it was the
red foliage I saw from my bedroom the other day. All these hidden
autumn leaves lie behind a thundering main road. And you’d never
know… (Click for bigger image).

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Bibliography

I feel like a member of Greenpeace forced to drive to a Hummer
everywhere for a month, only it’s not the scarcity of fossil fuels
causing me concern… it’s time! The clock is ticking, and it’s not
quite as
much fun as it looked in 24. Although I don’t have terrorists after me,
but I don’t *think* they’re the missing ingredient in my life at the
moment. So any terrorists reading this and about to hit the e-mail
button… move along now.

Anyway. One thing helping me keep on top of
everything to do are Stickies
– post-its for Windows, basically. Very neat little application, and
perhaps the first decent thing I’ve seen built using Microsoft’s .NET
stuff. Certainly a lot better than ATi’s Control Center.

The Stickies link comes from Wonderland,
another excellent weblog that is well worth you checking out while the
Wired Jester dozes. She likes games, and how can anyone who likes games
be bad? (c.f. the Daily Mail….)

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Cut Out And Keep


Been another busy week – secret plans have been ticking over, plenty to
do at work, and my Japanese abilities are gaining critical mass… or
not. I have however, been learning to tell the time! Ima nan-ji desu
ka? (Incidentally, if you want to see some Japanese critical mass, have
a look at this lovely cartoon, which tells the story behind a new game
called Katamari Damacy in which you have to… gain critical mass, to
replace the stars, which your drunken father has broken. Cartoon is here, and there’s a video of the game here, both via the mighty Waxy)

Meanwhile, it’s come to my attention that I don’t link to a lot of other weblogs from this one – so, here’s The Blog Of Funk, also based in Islington, North London and, one recommended to me by a friend of mine: Autoblography.
Blog Of Funk is very odd and currently has an entertaining look at fish
and dreams. Autoblography is a bit of a contrast: it’s nice, and well
written. It’s the story of an
Englishman in New York (with no Sting references, fortunately), and
it’s
involving and evolving. Well worth your time.

And, one blog you should definitely check out is Flying Pig’s Workshop Diaries, here.
Flying Pig is a small UK based firm and they make paper automata: DIY
cardboard machines. They’re often very, very intricate, and incredibly
cleverly designed. They’re fascinating things – when you see one, you
realise how far away from machinery we live most of our lives.
Machinery now – like computers, or cars – is so complex that it becomes
sanitised, and  most people let this happen. Unless you’re very
technical, it’s easy to ignore how computers work, how cars work – what
makes things happen around us. And
it’s always a shame to lose curiosity.
Flying Pig’s main site is here, and you can order on-line.


Pics: Flying Pig

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The world through someone else’s eyes

Just a quick post today – life contains to be busy, and I’ve still not got a new camera, as the Optio S4i has been phased out, while its successor, the 5 megapixel S5i, has yet to show up as available. However, a couple of photo related links, both from excellent gadget weblog Engadget. Click here for the first one – it’s a very neat Google trick:

“Most Sony digital cameras start saving photos with the following name �DSC00001.JPG� and a lot of people take these photos and upload them to the web, where the all-knowing, all-seeing Google later catalogs all of them. So by clicking
this link you can see the first photo taken by someone with their new camera”

They’ve also got links for other types of cameras, so you can quite literally, see life exactly through someone else’s eyes. Fascinatingly mundane, if there is such a thing. The second link, right here, is an article called “How To Upgrade Your Organic Dog,” complete with outfititng Poochkin with a digital camera.

The Ossuary at Sedlec: Gone but never forgotten

06 Chandelier Close Up 02

Back in the Spring I visited Prague. As everyone says, it is wonderful. It’s an incredibly popular place to go for one of these sexy “city break” holidays (strangely sexy when you consider it’s just saying “a holiday that’s shorter than you’d like and tries to cram in as much as usual). One of the problems I’ve always had with city breaks is how hard it can be to feel like you’ve really made any contact with the place you’ve gone to. The pressure is perhaps higher than a standard two-week holiday, and yet the more you run around seeing everything the guidebook says, the more you feel like you’re looking at the place through glass. What I like most about travelling is making a real contact with the place you’ve gone to: a sort of feeling that it’s drawn some blood and you’ve also drawn some of its… So Prague. Determined to find something off the beaten track. Enter Sedlec and its unique Church.

Sedlec is a small suburb of Kutna Hora, which you can get to in about an hour on the train from Prague. Just off the main road into Kutna Hora, there’s a small chapel, set in a very green graveyard. There is a statue of a Saint outside, with a halo of stars made from gold metal. There’s a low-key, local restaurant opposite. The church-yard is quiet. The church itself has spires, and at the top are skull and crossbone motifs.

Sedlec is not actually a church – it’s an Ossuary: a tomb. Inside, it contains the remains of about 40,000 people. They have been used to decorate the building: their skulls cover the walls, their limbs hang from the ceiling as a massive chandelier and their bones form a huge coat of arms on one wall.

The Ossuary has an official website here which tells you the story in full. Basically, in the Middle Ages, the Abbott of Sedlec went to the Holy Land. He took soil from Golgotha and brought it back to Sedlec, where he sprinkled it on the graveyard. It became known as a good place to be buried, and by the 1500s, there were too many bones in the ground already, so the Ossuary was constructed. For some reason, in the 17 and 1800s, they decided to decorate the Ossuary…

We live with religion from a very small age, and it’s easy to feel a certain bored disdain for it. Perhaps respect for certain religious individuals, but it’s easy to feel that overall, religion is a known quantity. Those who don’t believe it don’t see the mystery; or we think we don’t need it anyway. Sedlec proves, I think, that religion – and the way we use it (and are used by it?) – is endlessly surprising. It’s
a very strange place, because you realise that for all its solid, concrete, righteous appearance, belief
and faith are fervent, mutable ideas, impossible to constrain by rules. It is both chilling and amusing to imagine what fundamentalists – be they Dubya and Ashcroft, or Iraqi terrorists – would make of Sedlec.

The pictures are now all available in this Flickr set.

CHE: Infamy, Infamy, They’ve… ALL… got it in for… me

I’m
posting this because of some vague sense of completism that is probably
a left over from my brief infatuation with Panini stickers. Because
this comes via the ever-marvellous Boing Boing,
so everyone in the world ever has seen it already. But it is a very good t-shirt, so
I shouldn’t exclude it for simply for being popular. That would be reverting back
to my teenage angsty stage. And I have Green Day MP3s for that. And I have a fondness for comedy Che
revolutionaryness (crap_verb_alert!!) that stretches back to my student
days. Fight the Power, with Urban Medium. Link.

Pic: Urban Medium

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The Only Cubist Lampost In The World(TM)

Having problems getting hold of a camera at the moment (deceitful internet sites claiming to have stock and then turning out to be mistaken…) So I’ve been sorting through some slightly older photos. I took this when I went to Prague in the spring. It is exactly what the title suggests. There are some more, very special Prague photos to come, too, later this week…