Planarchy Archive - October 2003


 

Passive Overeating

Is such a perfect term! 

Love it.  I came across it here.

20031031   16:53

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And it was all..... Orange?

Well, we're back from an absolutely gorgeous weekend in the Alps.  It was colder and snowier than we were expecting and also very orange.  Somehow it seemed to work with the white and the blue to fill up my camera even faster than usual.  A selection of thumbnails here.   Click to enlarge as usual. 

And the full story of the weekend will be around any month soon....

20031028   21:56

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Byeee

Right, Zee's whisking me orf to my brother's Fench Alpine retreat to celebrate my the end of my 42nd year.  See you all nest week sometime....be good now!

20031022   21:33

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P'Igeon?

It is, as Freddie or maybe Christopher Lambert might say, a kind of magic. For 'twas only yesterday that BW was entertaining how some White D'Oves might fit in down at the Planarchy Seed Kitchen (thanks to e) and today what should whave lurking 'neath the main feeder picking up the Blue T*ts scraps but this rather bestraggled Pigeon.... Coincidence,  I think not.

20031021   20:08

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Cross Dressing

It's cold at 6:20am.  So it's probably not too surpising that I began to hunt for my hooded sweatshirt, the green one that I wear underneath my denim jacket on such days.  It wasn't on it's hook.  Or on the chair in the bedroom... or in the sitting room.  Then I remembered Zee had "borrowed" it at the weekend.  It was eventually located with other clothes neatly folded on the dining room table.  So, snugly wrapped for the chill of the morning I set off to work.  I thought no more of it until 7:35am when an irate Zee phoned to ask if I had the temerity to wear my own clothes to work.  "But my earings are in the pockets!" she protested, as though it was my fault.

Note to self: "Check pockets of one's clothes for other peoples jewellery before leaving the house with them."

20031021   7:56

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Cockernee

Finally digitally captured one of our diminishing population of sparrows today which means, you'll be glad to hear, that I've nearly completed my snap collection of our E10 garden birds.

20031019   19:27

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Shrinking Houses

"The average house in Britain is a third smaller than it was 80 years ago, claims a study out yesterday.".... claims the Daily Record, without quoting the source of this research.  I heard a similar story of the Beeb this morning, though, so it must be true. 

Terraced houses such as ours are, presumably, particularly at risk.  What happens is someone starts off with a garden shed at the end of the terrace and then secretes a hydraulic ram inside.  Then they slowly start pushing until there's room for a leetle house in their side alley.  Before you know it there's an extra house in the terrace.  Tell tale signs include bunched up furniture (on the inside) and a plethora of As, Bs and Cs on the house numbers in the street.  Don't say I didn't warn you!

20031018   13:17

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Teenager

Dee, our eldest, is thirteen tomorrow.  She is SO excited... not  just the normal excitement of a birthday but the fact that she will officially be a teenager seems to fill her with unbridled antici----pation.  I'm not sure how she thinks it will be different to being twelve but at the moment being a teenager is all that matters.  I don't remember any significance in going from 12 to 13 at all.....Oh, well, I just hope that her teenage years are better for her and me than mine were for me and my father.

Her present wish list was as ever, she hides the big items (Laptop, Horse) between smaller items, presumably in some vain hope that we'll not realise the £1,000 price difference and buy them before we've realised her trick!

20031016   19:53

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Full Circle

As I'm sure you're all aware by now, the Grauni Best British Bloggers Competition is back.  As one who arrived in the Blogosphere (sorry) with last year's competition it makes me feel strangely old in an area where I had previously felt still young.  The competition has been changed following criticism recieved (mostly unjustly IMHO) so that there is no overall "Best Blog" (a competition with no winners, right on maan..) but instead a strange selection of categories..... Best Design, Best Specialist, Best Use of Photography, Best Under 18 (so a best Blog for the young-uns!) and Best Written.  Now, while I'm sure we all hope to have some thought about the design of our Blog (Blogger template users excluded) and I use a lot of photographs and write as well as I can I don't really feel I would be happy entering any of the categories..... so maybe a Best BLogger category would have been preferable after-all..... IMHO the most important part of last year's competition was the way in which we got to see lots of new blogs as they entered the competiton. If the categories rule us out then we all loose, don't we?

20031016   7:43

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Amnesty

42 years old today, happy birthday Amnesty International.  It's strange how anti- Amnesty some folk are...

But I've always liked their "It's better to light a candle than stand and deny the dark" approach.

If there is one way I found them lacking. however, it was on a visit to their London office at some time in the late 1980's.  They may have changed since but at the time seemed to be staffed by well meaning but totally ineffectual persons.  Why does good cause sometimes come to mean "So you don't have to be any good at the job"?

20031015   21:02

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Memories

We have a small garden so everything must justify it's place. This lovely orange/red foliage lasts for a few weeks before the leaves drop. But the tree also has a lovely white blossom in springtime. Sadly I can't,at this moment, remember what it's called. BW will know I'm sure. I like to think it begins with an "A".... most of our plants do.

20031014   18:10

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Parental Texting

A new campaign to enable parents to know their teenagers are safe without cramping their style (too much) involves teaching us to text.  The theory, I believe, is that t'agers spend their lives texting one another, so an occasional message to and from mum or dad can be slipped in without their mates knowing they're being sensible and letting their parents know where they are.  The main problem as I see see it is that it might require one's offspring to break the Golden rule of mobile phones.... don't use them in the street.

20031013   21:08

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Greenfinch

Maybe it'll be safer if I stick to Greenfinches, no double entendres there at all.  They're not so cute as the BTs but rather striking in their own way. We only seem to have one at the moment.... and only one very shy sparrow too... I'd previously thought the disappearing sparrow population phenomenon was one we'd avoided as we had a couple of broods at least this year... but they seem to have vanished. 

20031012   17:47

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Alternative Title

Yep it's another picture of some t*ts in my garden...sadly I can't caption this logically.. or, apparently, we'd get hits from the wrong sort.  So instead we'll just call it a pair of BTs. And gawd knows how many hits I'd have got if it had been a pair of GTs. 

20031011   19:38

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Stereo Telephony

Sometimes I wish I had two fully functional ears..... I've just walked in to find our eldest with a mobile phone pressed to one ear and land line to the other, quite happily engaged in deep conversations with her two best friends.  I'm just wondering whether they were also engaged in stereo so that the whole of Dee's coterie was in some way connected.  Welcome to the hive!

20031008   19:57

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Don't Mention the Floyd

According to my ever reliable work diary it's 44 years today since the first photograph was taken of the dark side of the moon.  Why it took until 1959 for this to happen is anybody's guess..... I tried taking one of my own the other night but,as you can see, could only see (or rather not see) half of the dark side.

Anyway, happy birthday dark side!

20031007   21:31

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Single

My first was "Rubber Bullets" by 10cc, 47 New Pence, more than two week's pocket money..... asking around for memories of other's first singles showed less emotional attachment.  Zee thought her first was probably David Soul's "Silver Lady" whilst Are, my able assistant at work, thought hers was Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer".  Poor young Ess, our Lab Temp, had the 1997 re-mix of Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing".  Our eldest Dee was unsure as to hers whilst young Kay, after discussion decided that it was probably a cassete single of "Tragedy" by Steps.  This was certainly the song she poignaintly played to death when she first came to live with us.  I'm doubly happy that we don't hear it anymore.

Anyway, that the Golden Age of the single has gone is pretty obvious and I now sadly wonder what my last single will be..... at the moment I think it 's Billy Braggs "Take Down Your Union Jack" though I suspect I shall be buying the excellent "Coma Girl" released today from the sadly missed Joe Strummer.  But it would be a tragedy to think that even that was to be the last one I ever bought.

It would be like admitting the end of my yoof!

20031006   20:09

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Yearlings

I don't know if this years Blue Tits are really prettier than previous years or it's just that I've never spent so much time trying to take pictures of them before.  But I just can't resist.  Here's today's favourite.

20031005   20:25

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Soapbox Update

I've been a bit lazy on the old Soapbox front recently.... I've just added "G is for GM" and will try and add at least one new entry per week from now on. 

Notice I only said try.

20031004   18:11

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The Holy Grail of Queuing

Is, of course, the "new queue".  We're all looking for it as we stand in line with our weekly shopping.  Particularly when we're an hour later than usual and hence the shop is crowded with later shoppers.  But today before I could even spot the new queue, a nice young man came up to me and said:

"I'm opening up #31 if you want to come with me."

This sort of thing doesn't happen in real life so I guess I'm starring in their latest advert.  I'll let you know when it starts screening.

20031004   13:14

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Zoo Blues

So, animals whose natural environment is a wide open space find zoos more depressing than those that have evolved to live in shoe boxes.  Well, I hope someone enjoyed that research grant, presumably at the Universality of the Patently Fecking Obvious.

Polar bears not overly happy en Londres?  But why? Average polar bear enclosure only a million times smaller than their natural domain.  One and six noughts.

I remember visiting London Zoo whilst at school... so probably sometime in the mid 1970's.  The polar bear would walk the length of it's enclosure, look left and right then dive into its pool.  It would swim from one end to the other, climb out and then walk back to it's starting point.  And do it over again.

I next visited the Zoo whilst living in nearby Camden... sometime from 1980-82 I guess.

The polar bear was still doing the same thing.  Now maybe it just recognised me and chose to do the same routine.  Or maybe it had been doing the same thing every day in between.  Don't know do I?

Of course this wasn't as detailed research as that mentioned in today's Grauni but it was the final thing that put me off zoos. 

20031002   20:14

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