It’s rediculously cold here in England. It’s so cold that they’re calling it ‘global cooling‘. Some parts of Britain are predicted to hit -10C! WHAT THE HELL? We have ground frost and snow here that hasn’t melted in 5 days now.  That means it hasn’t been above 1 or 2C in … 5 days! If it continues, we’ll be having the coldest winter since 1740. Brrr.

The other day, when I fell into that bog, I actually thought I might get frostbite and have to amputate before gangrene spread up my legs to my more important organ. Er, organs. To top it off, I have no heating in my bedroom (it’s an old house, and daddy just told me to ‘grow a pair’ back when I told him I was waking up, unable to find my penis (the irony was lost in the ‘growing a pair’, I guess)– so I promptly started wearing thermal underwear…), so I sit here in big furry slippers, a wooly jumper, and fingerless gloves. ‘Classy hobo chique’ I like to call it.

This is where I should probably rant about global warming, and how it doesn’t seem to be an issue, but I think it’s probably better if people draw their own conclusions on the matter. It’s just so abhorrently boring having one-sided arguments hammered into us by the media.

I’m trying to remember where I heard it (I think it was during Frost/Nixon, which I watched last night, and was very well realised and acted!), but there’s some phrase that goes like: There’s a difference between a democracy where everyone can be heard, and a democracy where everyone just gets a vote. Actually, I think it was in the book I’m reading (Nation still), but who cares. I’m not even sure of what my point is; I think it’s that no matter your level of education, or wisdom, or aptitude, everyone has a vote. Long gone are the times where people were really heard. Or perhaps people were granted more merit, given their education or repute. I guess that’s more a problem of a burgeoning population though… The best we could hope for is a population that is educated enough to vote correctly.  People should be educated enough to research and reach their own conclusions, with important matters at least.

Anyway, I caved and bought the Sigma 10-20mm. I figured the 17-40 covers the end of the range nicely, so really I am just paying £300 for the extra 7mm on the wide end. Not a bad price to pay, really. Amazon have a fantastic deal on it, if you’re also in the market for an ultra-wide-angle lens: Sigma 10-20mm.

While we’re on the topic of technology (OK, tenuous at best), I’ll leave you with Apple’s new revolutionary innovation.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Instead of gulping down my morning coffee in a valiant effort at blogging before 3pm each day (yes, my morning coffee can go on for some time, and include some refills…) I’ve decided to blog late at night. This way I have a whole day to experience weird and wonderful things that I can then relate to you in a lovely little blog post. Like this, in fact. I also figured it would then be ready for those of you that might read this over your morning coffee, at a far more sensible hour than I.

So today, this annoying (but cute) little Indonesian girl flirted incessantly until I finally capitulated and agreed to do some kind of audio blog. Now, I’m no fool. I know this is purely about the fact that I’m British. I speak fairly well (and thankfully I don’t sound too stuffy), and I do like talking, but I can tell when I’m used.

Let me give a little back-story. After being chain-assaulted on my multiple trips to the States, I figured something was going on. I’m not the best looking person in the world, and these were mighty cute girls that could’ve had their choice of men. It was around the 5th girl, on my second visit there, that I emerged briefly from under the proverbial duvet to take a breath and suss out what was actually going on. In a brief moment of post-coital clarity it was obvious: they were after my voice! It was confirmed when I said the wrong name into a girl’s ear during foreplay — and she just said ‘Talk to me some more, Sebastian!‘

I could bitch and whine about it, but really… why? Embrace the ability to seduce women simply by opening my mouth! I do like to think it has something about what I say, and not purely how I say it, though. I’ve seduced girls purely with the power of my voice — and I don’t mean bellowing out in a commanding tone: ‘KNEEL DOWN BEFORE ME, WITLESS WENCH’; they fell for my British accent.

I fear I’ve built it up a bit too much now, so… try to cool down a little before clicking ‘play’. And remember, not everyone in England sounds like Vinnie Jones (though part of me wishes I wish I did) or Prince William. There is a space between, which is where I stand.

 
Without lingering (if it was awful, please say so… otherwise, let’s just leave it unsaid), I have a bunch of gaming links that I need to share, because they’re just too awesome to sit here on my laptop.

First, the Sprite Stitch Board where a bunch of awesome sewing nerds (man, there are nerds of every description…) try their best to recreate various classic sprites (flat 2D images) in cross stitch, running stitch… all sorts of stitches! My favourite’s the Zelda map, which someone has obviously spent way too much time on.

Next up we have a horrifyingly awesome school play (I think?) of … Live Action Monkey Island (not to be confused with Super Monkey Ball, gaming newbies!) I wish I was kidding. These kids act their hearts out in a re-make of the 1990 LucasArts classic The Secret of Monkey Island. It runs for 10 minutes, and you probably don’t want to watch past the first minute or two.

Penultimately, we have a cute story of two Danish kids that had their gaming session interrupted by the Danish equivalent of SWAT. You probably turn the volume down a little on any of your modern warfare games, if you live in a built-up area. And you have paranoid neighbours that think the youth of today carry automatic machine guns — and grenades.

And I leave you with (apparently, according to my friend Darryl), the worst commercial ever made (I quite like it, but I am into musical theatre, which is sometimes just as atrocious) — Microsoft Songsmith.

On the dingy, grey streets of Birmingham the Queen’s English is now… the Queens English. You heard me. A recent ruling by the Birmingham City Council has ruled that apostrophe’s will be outlawed on all new signs. St Paul’s Square? Its now St Pauls Square.

The president of the Apostrophe Protection Society (no, I’m not making it up, it was formed in 2001, in Boston) described it as ‘absolute defeatism’. I’d describe it as apathetical abject horror. Complete dissolution of everything that our imperialistic forefathers stood for! They didn’t fight back the French time and time again or push the Vikings from our lands so that we could… give up the fight and give in to illiteracy and pedanticism. If you’re a pedant wondering if I just made up that word — maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

Apparently people have actually been sending in letters to the council to ask if Druid’s Grove once belonged to a Druid. Now there’ll be no ambiguity: it’s a grove for lots of druids. Birmingham City Council has decreed it, and thus it shall forever be. Wonderful.

Apostrophe’s have long been a bone of contention all over the English-speaking world (do other languages use them to denote possession like us? Or just elision? Wiki knows all!) The problem is: they require a certain level of literacy to be used correctly — not a vast level, but certainly some literacy. Grocery store owners, market sellers and other workers that are unlikely to be school-educated are notoriously bad at placing the apostrophe correctly — check these out:

The last one is all kind’s of wrong — it features extraneous and sorely lacking apostrophes AND misuse of quotation marks (there’s a gallery for misused quotation marks, if that’s your kind of thing).

This rampant militarism for and against the apostrophe is nothing new though. While taking it a bit too far, there’s even a site dedicated to killing the apostrophe. On the other, slightly more moderate hand, fighting the cause of the noble and functional apostrophe there’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a book which all of you should read (especially the bloggers out there that like to really nail their grammar use). Also on our side — and I assume you are all on my side –  are the lovely AAAA — Americans Against Apostrophe Abuse — although it looks like their site hasn’t been updated since 2005. Maybe I should pick up the battle standard, sound my horn and beat the drum’s of waaaar!

Sadly this is just one more nail in the coffin for our lovely language. If English teachers in Birmingham thought they had it bad with the increase in illiteracy caused by ‘netspeak’ (incidentally, by far the easiest way to tell if the person you’re talking to has a sub-100 IQ is to see if they ask ‘howz r u 2day lol??’), it’s going to get a lot harder with the abolition of apostrophes.

But perhaps, and I feel we’ll probably have to admit defeat in the grand scale of things, this is just the natural progression of our language. It’s sad though: part of the reason Shakespeare’s 500 year old scripts are still readable today is because our language has slowly evolved, taking on new words and nuances as necessity dictates, rather than revolutionary overhauls (like the removal of the apostrophe) that have afflicted other languages around the world. LOL, I really hope it isnt time to embrace our new, simplified possession-free world.

Everyone loves a bit of the Rat Pack… or failing that, some Bobby Darin!

You don’t have to listen to it, I just thought it was apt, as I’m going down to the coast for the weekend. To Southampton! It’s only about 60 miles away, but this being England, that’s a considerable distance. We’re not like the Americans where a 6 hour journey is ‘just down the road’. 6 hours is the length of England…

I’m heading there for the consummation (and consumption!) of my yearly Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday) obligation. Every year I head down to see my university friends that are currently there studying for their PhDs; occasionally, if we’re lucky, other friends from university also turn up. If we’re unlucky, aforementioned bonus friends turn up with their loved ones. We don’t like it when that happens. It’s always a bit of a bitter/sweet thing when someone unexpected turns up — on the one hand I get to catch up with someone that I haven’t seen for years. On the other, shiny-with-grease-and-dripping-with-syrup hand, it means less pancakes for me.

Anyway, to cut to the chase: I’ll be eating pancakes until I burst for the next 2 days. If I don’t update within 2 days, I’ve probably died of pancake poisoning, if such a thing exists. Or perhaps I just can’t find anyone to roll me within range of a computer with an internet connection. Either way, I’ll try my best to take a few photos, and maybe bash out a couple of mid-scoff entries. I’ll get my keyboard all sticky and icecreamy just for you.

… We would’ve watched the tide roll away, but it was just too frackin’ cold (this week’s BSG was pretty weak, by the way… but apparently we’re in for a 3-hour season finale, which better be as good as season 1, and give us the conclusion of all the straggling, dangling plots…)

This is just a sneak preview of what’s to come, when I get back home and I have software to at least rotate my images a little…

It needs a lot doing to it, but it has promise!

After we’d regained sensation in our fingers (and other extremities, in the case of Adam and I), we headed to a lovely Indian restaurant… which was completely purple! Outside had a full-width neon-purple sign; inside it was bathed in purple lights. Luckily I was wearing my pink t-shirt so I fit rather well and looked rather… mauve.

Tomorrow we’re off to the ‘highest point in South England’. Probably at least 200 meters above sea level! I’ll be able to see all the way to… the horizon! Green as far as the eye can see; awesome…!

(There are photos in this entry, scroll down to see them! Or if you want to see them all, without reading any of my ranting, view the Surrey gallery)

If anyone ever tells you that England is hilly, or mountainous, or in any way a fine example of Mother Nature’s extremities don’t believe them. We have hills, yes. We even have 2 mountains! We had a hurricane once, and the occasional ‘Did you feel that?’ tremor.

That’s fine though, as we don’t deal very well with the rest of the world’s idea of extremes. As we saw a few weeks ago, more than a few inches of snow and we become house-bound, fearing for our survival, and wondering when the roads will be clear enough to get food, or fresh water.

Our positively dull geography isn’t necessarily ugly however! You just have to scale down your expectations a little. We don’t have any 2-mile deep holes, like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. We don’t have beautiful, snowy peaks like France. We do have grass. And trees. And sunsets… and cows…You know, those things every temperate nation has by default!

So today, we went for a ramble around the hills — Leith Hill and Box Hill — of Surrey. Well, we rambled a little, and drove most of the way. We also picked our way over Headley Heath, where for some reason or another there was a small herd of Highland Cows roaming the prickled pastures. 15 matted long-haired, orange cows just happened to also be there — from what I gathered, they were touring the country, going from heath to pasture to grove. Words can’t really describe how big these guys are (at least if you’re British, because they’re by far the biggest native creatures we have — no elephants here!), so the term BRUTE will have to do. They’re about 10 feet long (3 meters), and 6 foot tall. They are BIG. Like two Pavarottis. Vast.

Anyway… we didn’t get too close, but I did manage to get two rather nice pictures of our very own wooly mammoths:

And then a few steps closer…

He looked pleased to see me…

I won’t spam your screen with photos, so if you want to see more, they’re over here in the Surrey collection.

BUT, here is my favourite landscape photo of the day, taken from the ‘highest point in South England’, a gothic tower atop Leith Hill. It really is a lot better when you see it full-size… buy a print, and I’ll prove it to you!

We rarely get sunsets worth mentioning in Sussex — our atmospheric conditions are mediocre at best. However, with a little bit of fun (HDR), I created a landscape that has an awful lot to look at  — the tree in the foreground, the line of trees in the background, the details of the grass. And of course, quite a spectacular sunset!

This is a post for Skywatch Friday.

This is another sunset picture from Sussex, my home county, in England. This one is early on though, with there still being plenty of daylight to bring out the detail in the foreground.

While the sky has a creamy and dreamy quality to it, I love the texture of the frozen pond — and the ducks that are huddling for warmth! Poor things. This is an ‘original’ photo with only minimal cropping, and no colour correction.

This is a post for Skywatch Friday.

(Dear Lord, how’s that for an alliteration BONANZA?)

This is a shared photographic assignment with Brigid. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with later today! (It’s Monday here in England, but it’s not in America… so I’m cheating a little!)

The brief was “It can be of a car, or a study of a certain part of transportation.”

I give you… the Mazda RX-8, under a rather lovely Sussex clear sky and full moon.

This is a recent photo of mine, taken on some heathland in Surrey. For some reason (which I still don’t know!) a herd of Highland Cattle had been transplanted to this heathland in the South of England — some 600 miles away from where they’re meant to be.

Anyway, the focus of the photo is undoubtedly the cow, but it just so happened that the sky decided to spoil me at the same time. It may not look very real, but I assure you it is!

This is a post for Skywatch Friday.