Author: basgallop

having lurked in the bathroom cabinet for a month or so, our pet hyacinth has bloomed miracously.
What a wonderful pong!
only a smellovision internet would do it justice

… actually what was that John Waters/ Divine film, where you got handed a scratch and sniff card as you entered the cinema?

… in response to:

Anyone know how to get cheap calls to overseas mobile numbers?

………..

Metaphor! I mean Semaphore! wow, the things people did before the internet
back to the future
near where i grew up there was disused Semaphore tower up on the ridge of the North Downs, a brill place to go and play. I think it’s a tall skinny house now. lots and lots and lots of stairs.

It must have been quite fun standing up there hurrah, hurl, waving a few flags about and looking down on the treetops below.

The tower was part of a chain that stretched all the way from Greenwich to Portsmouth, for sending messages rapidly to and from the fleet ‘Matty Taylor scores a scorcher’
I want to say the fantastic Samuel Pepys set it up, an everyman visionary, but i’m not remotely sure if thats true?

Inspector morse code

.. | .-.. — …- . | -.– — ..-

always the first words to learn in any new language!

a lo fi, but useful site

http://users.scoutnet.nl/~inter/morse/morseform.html

when wallow hippo in the bath i turn the hot tap on with my toes.

what else are toes good for?

….. on being told, that the big toe affects balance and that those affected with frostbite can’t stand upright ……..

yeuchh big lebowski, captain oates i give you tepid bath water, and you respond with tales of toe mutilation!

Did you know that the foreleg and hooves of a horse are actually, a horses fingers and toes and that horses are really tip toeing about? Or something like that?

…….. when i was young, we were told that cavemen had wider spaced, gripping toes (prehensile!) and that that was because they didn’t wear shoes. As a result we didn’t wear shoes for an entire week, running around the garden, waving fire hardened cave man spears, hurling them into the bushes, stig of the dump stylee. Much fun, yet sadly with no palpable toe spacing improvement whatsoever!

All true galloopiis have a misshapen little toe. By the claw shall you know them!

………..

I’ve just thought of my friend David in prague, he was American, very New York and most Woody Allen, when younger he claimed to have been an amphetamine fuelled Chess Hustler in Washington square, Greenwich Village.

When I knew him he was a very pleasant ineffectual intellectual, but also the best News photographer i ever met! I’ll have to put up some of his piccies one day, awesome!

Whilst lamenting his lack of success with women, he was always doing an impersonation of his Grandma ‘No Huppi, No Stuppi’, which apparently is some reference to them getting married under a special canopy?! and basically means, no sex before marriage

Anyway back to the toes, David’s seduction plan with young american tourists, was to persuade them to take off their shoes and socks and walk with him about the city. He’d always spin some line about mystical prague of the dreaming spires, about how you could only really absorb the spirit of the stones, through the souls of your feet!

basically he thought that if you can get them to hobble across cobble stones, if you could get them to have abn adventure, if you could get them to take their shoes off, you might have more luck with further garments of their clothing.

Bless him, he was totally un cynical about the whole ruse!

Not sure if the ploy ever worked, but often meet him in the heart of old town, with a girl, both of them clutching shoes in their hands. I’d just wink and tip toe past myself

..and he’s got his own lego character!
too cool to mention

for lf

I once helped a friend of mine move his stuff to Amsterdam, we piled a Futon and the whole kit kaboodle into a car and away on the Ferry. He was moving into a room on the Waterlooplein, or Nieumarket, or one of those other wonderful Dutch squares
a beautiful if not slightly decrepit 17th Century house. Like the Dutch themselves it was very tall, about 4 floors high and extremely skinny.
It had one of those warehouse doors on the top floor, and a hook and pulley, for hauling stuff on a rope up up and away to the upper floors. sadly this was now broken, as we discovered why they perfected such a system.
trying to get the Futon around and around the narrow staircase was nigh on impossible.
PG Tips Chimps with a Grand Piano!
A Shove, a squeeze and a push, we hurly burly, willed it all the way up. pure exhaustion. made it in the end.
Once the work was down, we spent the rest of the day just sitting, gawping out the window.
A beautiful picture window, with a traditional Dutch view, a tree lined canal, a large square and a seeming dream of a Fairytale castle opposite.
We just sat there contendly for hours, a bottle of duty free whiskey, the occasional spliff.
Making up stories for all the things happening below.
A woman would come cycling across the square, she’d meet someone she knew, stop have a chat, then they’d make off in a new direction.
Not linear stories, but more like all these things happening at once, just as in the way, ‘Wheres Wally’ is not a linear book, but a hodge podge, smorgasboard of just stuff happening and… obviously owes a huge debt to Breughel!
Oh you know what i mean…
then we saw someone fall into a canal…. oh no that was in Auden Breughel

Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940

from Ed
I organised a trip to the Science Museum last weekend and I had a brilliant time, although it was a little smaller than I remember it being as a kid.

….. un posted by me

Thats a very good idea Ed, like a school trip
we always used to go to the Natural History museum when i was young, packed lunch would be womble sandwiches. which are jam, banana and crisps!
what was that film ‘one of our dinosaurs is missing?’
I was at the Natural History a few months ago, it’s looking a bit tatty, needs a spruce up and a revamp.
I prefer the V&A. When i was young i thought ‘Victoria and Albert, thats just full of boring girls dresses’.
nowadays being a big girls blouse i think, ‘the history of fashion, how fascinating’
but theres so much more in it than that! Some groovy Buddhist statues, but my fave is ‘the hall of fakes’
Those totally bonkers victorians roamed the world plundering what ever they could and bringing it home, then stuck it in a museum, for the edification of it all.
The stuff they couldn’t loot, too big, too nailed down? Well they some how made huge wax casts of it all,
then back in the Victoria and Albert, made life size plaster cast cement models of them.
It’s a very baffling, odd, juxtaposition of artefacts, times and cultures.
Theres the enormous Trajans column from ancient rome, sitting right up against the portico of a medieval french cathedral
I love it!

Does the British museum still have sleep over nights, when you can sleep in the room with the egyptian mummies? The inspiration for Night at the Museum!
I went to see that Film with Finn the other week. On the saturday we’d gone to see Flushed Away, which was great, but Finn woulkd only come if I promised to take him to ‘Night at the Museum’ the next day. In the end i succumbed, acceded to his demands and indulged in good old fashionned bribery.
The film? well, it’s alright i guess, i liked Attilla the Hun. It’s a good film for 10 year old boys, having a 10 year old boy in it and a divorced dad, so just about right.

has anyone seen the skeletons in the Boothe museum?

ooh now i wish to witter about the Sir John Soanes museum in Lincolns Inns Field!
another day

…. the one day in years it snowed in Brighton, that morn

Amazing! Hope it lasts till the kids get out of school
anyone for a snowball fight by the fountain at lunch?
programmers take on the rest of the world! as ever.
I made a snowman in the middle of a snow spiral this morn, prob knocked over by now, but hugely satisfying
…
In Prague when it’d snow, people would cross country ski through the heart of the old town!
First sniff of snow and we’d all tumble out of the squat cafe for a snow battle on Karlov Most (Charles Bridge), hurrah, then i built a snowman just next to the statue of the lion with the wobbly nervous smile
… a friend of mine singing all alone, late at night in the old town square, snow glow like daylight.
she was a busker , but just doing it for fun this time. Snow has incredible acoustic properties, the sound deaden muffled, but bound resound of the buildings. ethereal

and heres a piccie Joe took of the snow, good isn’t it