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Sunday, October 31, 2010

At the Park






The Ventures and The Atlantics - Great Surf Music from the US and Oz





With all the talk of Hawaii 5-0, a show I have never watched, I was interested in the similarities in style between American and Australian Surf Music. The Atlantics are still playing. I saw them at the Adelaide Guitar Festival a few years ago. It was a cool Election Night in 2007 and they played last after some very indifferent and average acts. They had the whole place rocking. Unbelievable drumming and guitar picking.

I think I prefer the Australian style.

Scary Halloween Tales - Famous Authors Reminisce

Alexander McCall Smith

As a child I was terrified out of my wits by some parts of that dreadful 19th-century German book, Der Struwwelpeter, with its grim illustrations and its threatening text. In particular, I remember being scared stiff of the tailor in the story of “Little Suck-a-Thumb”, an evil-looking character who sported a large pair of bloodstained scissors. He would creep up on children who sucked their thumbs and cut them off. I have a very clear and very early memory of one night being terrified that he was on his way, and being reassured by my parents that this was not the case.

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Saturday, October 30, 2010

Dame Edna Everage makes a splash at wet and soggy Flemington.

Her advice for wet glamour girls was gum boots and Dryzabone.

"I've got this wonderful coloured rain coat, I think my advice is to stay inside.

"You people at home are lucky. You can sit there and you won't be sinking in the mud as some of their ladies in their Jimmy Choos and their Manolo Blahniks."

She also praised the fashions at Flemington, despite the pouring rain.

"I think this is a marvellous opportunity for women to express themselves," she said.

"Aren't you sick of men in cargo pants with shaved heads and three day stubble? Or women in Crocs and tracksuits?"

Barry Humphries, you Sir are a genius.

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Photo Hunt: Dark


Experimenting with low light.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Joe Hockey clarifies his Banking Plan

 I just want to say the following.
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 Thank you.

And now over to Malcolm and Andrew to explain it all to you.

Is it safe to drink water from plastic bottles? - Hello! Depends where the water comes from.

This is such First World Wank. How about we go to Nepal and dip our bottle into the average stream, is it better to drink it out of a plastic bottle or a cup? In the scheme of things, this is pretty mild.

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Underneath the Trampoline





The kids are very creative with my digital camera. I never know what to expect when I download their sessions. A few days ago they decided to take pictures from under the trampoline.

Balloon Man Gets on the Bus



I mean how else are you supposed to transport balloons in the evening?

This guy got on the bus with all his balloons and got off again two stops down the road. Very surreal.

Leo Cullum Classic New Yorker Cartoonist

The cause was cancer, said his brother, Thomas.

Mr. Cullum, a TWA pilot for more than 30 years, was a classic gag cartoonist whose visual absurdities were underlined, in most cases, by a caption reeled in from deep left field. “I love the convenience, but the roaming charges are killing me,” a buffalo says, holding a cellphone up to its ear. “Your red and white blood cells are normal,” a doctor tells his patient. “I’m worried about your rosé cells.”

Mr. Cullum seemed to have a particular affinity for the animal kingdom. His comic sympathies extended well beyond dogs, cats and mice to embrace birds — “When I first met your mother, she was bathed in moonlight,” a father owl tells his children — and even extended to the humbler representatives of the fish family. “Some will love you, son, and some will hate you,” an anchovy tells his child. “It’s always been that way with anchovies.”

“There are many ways for a cartoon to be great, not the least of which is to be funny, and Leo was one of the most consistently funny cartoonists we ever had,” said Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker. “He was certainly one of the most popular — some of his cartoons were reprinted thousands of times.”

We used to have the New Yorker in the house where I lived in Washington DC. The cartoons were always read first.

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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

England robot World Cup star accused of sex with professional mobility scooter

England’s 2011 robot football world cup preparations are in disarray after several high-profile members of the playing squad found themselves embroiled in a series of sex scandals with ageing mechanical devices.

The tournament, in which robots play each other at football, is seen as an incredible feat of engineering in trying to find machines capable of behaving much like their human equivalents.

However the England team is already in chaos thanks to tabloid revelations involving star striker the Roonetron W3000, which is accused of paying a mobility scooter to carry out a sex act on him behind a night club in Southport.

Team manager Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University, has played down the alleged incident and insisted that the team is fully focused on the task ahead.

“Media attempts to unsettle the players prior to the tournament are not acceptable,” he insisted.

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Paul the octopus, 'psychic' World Cup predictor extraordinaire, passes away in Oberhausen | Mail Online

Onya Paul. You were much more interesting than most of the World Cup and more successful than Wayne Rooney.

Common Octopuses only live a couple of years. He had a more noteworthy life than most of them.

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A Cats View of the World.

This cat is hooked up to have photos taken every two minutes. I plan to hook up my dog. Unfortunately it will just be pictures of his basket.

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Charlie Brooker | All hail the human face of the coalition: Nick Clegg – sad-eyed defender of the new reality | Comment is free | The Guardian


In these uncertain, unsettling times, with unpopular policies being implemented by a patchwork coalition of the damned, Nick Clegg is proving to be perhaps the most useful tool in the government's shed. Not because he says or does anything particularly inspiring, but because he functions as a universal disappointment sponge for disenchanted voters. You stare at Nick Clegg and feel infinitely unhappy, scarcely noticing Cameron and co hiding behind him.
Governments around the world must be studying the coalition and working out how to get their own Clegg. He's the coalition's very own Pudsey Bear: a cuddly-but-tragic mascot representing the acceptable face of abuse. But unlike Pudsey, he actually speaks. Immediately following each unpleasant new announcement, Cleggsy Bear shuffles on stage to defend it, working his sad eyes and boyish face as he morosely explains why the decision was inevitable – and not just inevitable, but fair; in fact possibly the fairest, most reasonable decision to have been taken in our lifetimes, no matter how loudly people scream to the contrary.
It's hard not to detect an air of crushed self-delusion about all this. At times Clegg sounds like a once-respected stage actor who's taken the Hollywood dollar and now finds himself sitting at a press junket, patiently telling a reporter that while, yes, on the face of it, his role as the Fartmonster in Guff Ditch III: Fartmonster's Revenge may look like a cultural step down from his previous work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, if you look beyond all the scenes of topless women being dissolved by clouds of acrid methane, the Guff Ditch trilogy actually contains more intellectual sustenance than King Lear, and that all the critics who've seen the film and are loudly claiming otherwise are misguided, partisan naysayers hell- bent on cynically misleading the public – which is ethically wrong.
It's only a matter of time before the word "Clegg" enters the dictionary as a noun meaning "agonised, doe-eyed apologist". Or maybe it'll become a verb. Years from now, teachers will ask their pupils to stop "clegging on" about how the dog ate their homework and just bloody hand it in on time.
Clegg's most recent act of clegging was to explain to this newspaper that the Institute of Fiscal Studies was wrong to brand the spending review "unfair".
As an aside, a Clegg is a blood sucking horse fly. Nasty things. I don't think that Clegg himself is nasty, but he certainly has a nasty job.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Times Up Ari Up Not a Typical Girll

Ariane Daniele Forster was born in Munich on January 17 1962. Her grandfather was the wealthy proprietor of the news magazine Der Spiegel, but her mother Nora Forster was a music promoter, so Ariane spent her early years surrounded by rock royalty. "All the major rock and pop stars were sleeping at my mum's place," she said, adding (in the rebellious tone that apparently pre-destined her for punk): "I had a million stepfathers. I don't remember being overawed though. I was four years old so I didn't give a ----."

She moved to London with her mother aged eight, living in a car when at first they could not afford a place to live. "In Munich, the police were knocking at the door every night because of the loud acid parties," she said. "She [my mother] was fed up with it. You have to go to London to live that lifestyle."

When her mother started to date the guitarist Chris Spedding, Ari, after daytimes spent at Holland Park comprehensive, accompanied the couple to early punk gigs that featured the Sex Pistols and the Clash. It was at a concert by the latter that she met the drummer Palmolive, a Spanish émigré, who in 1976 asked her to front the Slits.

Though she was at the heart of the chaotic punk scene, Ari Up was single minded: "I always stuck to my own rules. I didn't do any drugs, or drink. I stuck to my age in my mind." The band was influenced by the reggae bass lines introduced to them by manager Don Letts, as much as punk. The Slits' bouncing, chaotic songs were then championed by the DJ John Peel, who described their live appearances on his radio show as "mesmerising". "Their inability to play, coupled with their determination to play," he said, "was magnificent."

The band caught the ear of Island Records' boss Chris Blackwell, who signed them up and enlisted the help of reggae producer Dennis Bovell. The result was Cut, an album that is today regarded by critics as a post-punk classic, but which made little commercial impression at the time. Record shops refused to display it due to its confrontational cover that features the young band members, Tessa Pollitt, Viv Albertine and Ari Up bare-breasted and covered in mud.

Huge posters advertising the album were plastered around London. "There was a guy who actually crashed his car after seeing one," Ari Up recalled. But the cover was not part of any feminist stance: "We just did our own thing. If we wanted to be sexy we were, but not because we did what the magazines said."

Ari Up later claimed Madonna had taken a few tips from the band's attitude and clothing style after spotting her standing in the front row of gigs. "I'm pissed off she's never worn a T-shirt with THE SLITS written in sequins," she said. "She owes us."

Her mum is married to a member of the Sex Pistols.

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Who Knew Humpty Dumpty was a 15th Century Cannon?




Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses
and all the King’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again




Humpty Dumpty was a colloquial term used in 15th century England to describe someone who was fat or obese - giving rise to lots of theories pertaining to the identity of Humpty Dumpty. However, in this case the question should be not Who was Humpty Dumpty but What was Humpty Dumpty?

Humpty Dumpty was in fact an unusually large canon which was mounted on the protective wall of "St. Mary's Wall Church" in Colchester, England. It was intended to protect the Parliamentarian stronghold of Colchester which was in the temporarily in control of the Royalists during the period of English history, described as the English Civil War ( 1642 - 1649).

A shot from a Parliamentary canon succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty causing the canon to fall to the ground. The Royalists 'all the King's men' attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall but even with the help of ' all the King's horses' failed in their task and Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting eleven weeks.

"Let me Die a Youngman's Death" by Roger McGough

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death

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Thank you Thank you Thank you Bows

Paul McCartneys brother Mick leads the happiness.

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Grey Scale


IMG_1495, originally uploaded by theclutterbells.

These were a bright purple, but the camera opted to capture them this way. Interesting.

Things You Can and Cannot Do in Scotland




I'm a sky scraper wean, I live on the ninteenth floor
But I'm no goin' oot tae play any more.
'Cause since we moved to oor new house I'm wastin' away
For I'm getting one meal less every day.

Chorus:
Oh ye canna fling pieces oot a twenty story flat
Seven hundred hungry weans will testify to that
If it's butter, cheese or jeely, if the bread is plain or pan
The odds against it reaching us is ninety-nine to one

On the first day my Maw flung oot a daud o' hovis broon
It came skitin' oot the windae and went up instead o' doon
Noo ev'ry twenty seven hours it comes back into sight
Cause my piece went intae orbit and became a satellite

On the next day my Maw flung me oot a piece again
It went up and hit a pilot in a fast, low flying plane
He scrapped it off his goggles, shouting through the intercom
The Clydeside Reds have got me wi' a breid 'n jelly bomb

On the third day my Maw tho't she would try another throw
The Salvation Army band was standin' doon below
'Onward Christian Soldiers' was the tune they should've played
But the Oompah man was playing piece 'n marmalade

We've wrote awa' to Oxfam to try an' get some aid
We all joined together and have formed the Piece Brigade
We're gonna march to London tae demand our civil rights
Like nae more hooses over piece flinging height


Glossary
breid: bread
doon: down
hoose: house
jeely piece: bread and jelly sandwich
oor: our
oot: out
piece: sandwich
wean: child

And this is another no no.

Amazing Juggling

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chris-bliss-juggling-finale

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Saturday, October 23, 2010

Jane Austen's famous prose may not be hers after all - Telegraph

Jane Austen couldn't spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen's handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author.

Page after page was written without paragraphs, including the sparkling dialogue for which Austen is known. The manuscript for Persuasion, the only one of her novels to survive in its unedited form, looks very different from the finished product.

"The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.

"This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book," Prof Sutherland said.

The editor in question is believed to have been William Gifford, a poet and critic who worked for Austen's second publisher, John Murray.

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Zombies take over the Sears Catalogue

Wee Deoch an Doris Harry Lauder

Can you say its a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the night.

This is one of my favourite teuchter songs of all time.

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Grim Outlook in the UK (after Edward Munch)

Are you screaming yet?

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Photo Hunt: Orange


These guys are a sure sign of summer on the way in South Australia,

Friday, October 22, 2010

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Skywatch Friday



IMG_0908, originally uploaded by theclutterbells.
Sunrise at Noarlunga Downs.

More nice skies at Skywatch Friday.

Unlikely Headline of the Day - Barack Obama and Sarah Palin 'are distant cousins' - Telegraph

Ancestry.com found that the two politicians, who could face each other in the 2012 race for the White House, are both related to Mr Smith, a Protestant pastor who was an early settler in Massachusetts.

The website, based in Provo, Utah, also discovered that Mr Obama was a 10th cousin once removed from Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk radio host and one of the president's most virulent critics. Their common ancestor is Richmond Terrell, a Virginia settler who arrived in America in the mid-17th century.

Gives a new twist to inbreeding.

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Doing it tough Jornalism Aussie Style

Monday, October 11, 2010

Good bye Sir Norman Wisdom - Telegraph

When the two men met briefly in 1950 Chaplin told Wisdom: “You will follow in my footsteps,” and three years later Wisdom made his first major film, Trouble in Store. Although he was already established on stage and on television, reviews of the film were moderate, and Rank executives held out no great hopes for it. In the event, the film set records in 51 London cinemas, and Wisdom’s plaintive theme song, Don’t Laugh at Me, spent months in the Top 10.

An unbroken run of 15 successes followed until 1966, with the 5ft 4in tall Wisdom holding off even the challenge of James Bond to be Britain’s favourite box-office draw. In 1964 a record 18.5 million people watched his BBC pantomime Robinson Crusoe.

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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Shading Spotty

Nicole Richie bans dad Lionel from singing at her wedding

Nicole Richie has reportedly banned her dad, awesome 80s singer Lionel Richie, from singing at her upcoming wedding to far less awesome 00s singer Joel Madden.

Joel told E! News that he'd "love Lionel to play a song" at their bash, which is rumoured to be scheduled for December.

But appearing at a signing for her new book Priceless, 29-year-old Nicole ended his dream, telling E! "I'm not down with that!" Boring.

You get a gig in front of 90,000 and get banned from singing at your kids wedding.

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Official: Kim Jong Un is to be next King of N. Korea

They might as well have a monarchy.

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Friday, October 08, 2010

Photo Hunt: Stripes


An old photograph of Ryan in his soccer strip. Pretty stripey.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Skywatch Friday


Holding up the sky.

More nice skies at Skywatch Friday.

Jacko scarecrows get birds to beat it



A Taiwan rice farm is trying an off the wall way to get hungry birds to beat it at harvest time: scarecrows dressed like self-proclaimed King of Pop Michael Jackson.
One of the two scarecrows - made of wooden frames with sponges for faces - wears white sequined gloves, a black fedora hat and black brogues; the other is decked out in a red Thriller jacket and trousers.
They are set in the fields in different poses copied from the dead singer's signature dance moves.
The scarecrows are the idea of 30-year-old salesman and Jackson fan Lee Ping-hsing, who is now making a third for his father's farm in Changhua county, central Taiwan.
"During harvest, my dad would go to the fields every day and chase the birds away," Lee said.
"And I thought, since Michael is good at 'grabbing his bird', I'm inviting him to grab ours."
But not everyone in the family thinks the scarecrow idea is a thriller.
"I was yelled at by my grandfather, who said Jackson's spirit could come and haunt us," Lee said.
"But I think it would be nice if Michael could come over."


Ha Ha Ta @abclandline

Top Ten Worst Celebrity Hair Fails

These are worse than my wigs.

What about Rod Stewart?

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Jessica Simpson seeks help for her farting problem - Things you need to know.

Jessica Simpson is feeling pretty flatulent lately - and doesn't mind sharing it with the world!

Posting a link to a page advising people with gas problems "how to fart less", she remarked that "this link just made my morning!"

It's no secret that Jessica gets a bit gassy from time to time - in January, she apparently let one rip during a business meeting about her fashion line

"While one of the executives was speaking in a room full of five people, Jessica let out a very loud fart," a source told Us Weekly.

"Her mother [Tina Simpson] was there, and it prompted her to turn around and yell, 'Jessica!' The tension was extreme. No one knew what to say."

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