funkypancake

here is a dummy on some grass. i took two photos of it. one with legs in the background and one without.

i wasn't sure which one i liked best, so i thought i'd show you both. which do you prefer ? as usual, you can click photos for big versions.

with

or without

this is quite a common dog sign, but it's the positioning which we should note to be quite unusual. it's at the top of some stairs leading to a bridge over a small road.

kezia was very excited so stood and pointed

the girls and i went with andy, adam and luke to poleseden lacy for bank holiday fun.

as it traditional, it rained, but we were lucky with the weather as it also didn't rain.

here is an attempt to get luke, kezia, adam and esther in the same picture (note luke running off in the distance)

here is adam videoing esther on a maze

and here is esther on a ropey maze tangly thing

and here we are picnicking in what we thought was a little barn suitable for picknicking in (but was actually a nature hide).

on the way round we also bumped in to kezia and esther's best friends who were also visiting on the same day !

very strange hidden camera on a plant pot. it was pointed at a park bench. very mysterious.

here's a chap guarding 10 Downing Street. he looks very jovial, which is what you'd expect to see from a traditional british bobby in a tourist hot spot.

click to enjoy his jolly smile

remember tim westwood's mum-truck ? well, one day a few months back it had a flat tyre. and then it became a red one, with nearly the same number plate. but then the original one came back and this one remained.

so it looks like he's got two cars. i assume he lives somewhere near where these cars are regularly parked ?

jane and her guitar reflected in my bass guitar pickup

esther has recently developed a more subtle approach to painting. note the bold triangle surrounded by whispy blue bits.

she calls this piece "two clowns getting married".

this is the modern version of 'pin the tale on the donk'. it was very suspicious that the birthday boy scored a direct hit on the target ...

Total volume of music on my computer:
I use Napster To Go so only tend to rip my more obscure CDs on to my PC (about 4GB's worth).

If you've got Napster you can search my Library (member name funkypancake) which now has around 45,000 tracks in it.

i dump around 5GB of these at a time on to my Zen Micro and listen to them day and night.

Playing right now:
The Fall War Against Intelligence

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Mind Train, Yoko Ono
Sister Ray, Velvet Underground
I Think I'm In Love, Spiritualised
Rasputin, Boney M (our wedding first dance tune)
Gordoni Mix - Brakes on mix, Air

The last CD i bought

i'm just loving anything faust at the moment.

Radio Stations I listen to:
XFM
Radio 2 (Mark Radcliffe)
Resonance for potluck

where next ?
i'm working my way through the Record Collector 100 Greatest British Psychedelic Records. It's pleasantly surprising how many of these are on Napster !

thanks to russell davies for asking me to do this (i quite enjoyed it in the end)

i'm not going to pass this on specifically to 5 other people, but if any other readers have a blog and want to tell everything then let me know !

jane's still busy marking so i'm in charge of the girls at weekends. after sticky tape on their faces we went to Cliveden House again.

we decided that the blossom on the trees was so beautiful that we should give it a round of applause every time we saw some particular nice example.

unfortunately this made our walk quite slow, and quite noisey. but it was fun.

why don't you applaude nature out loud over the bank holiday weekend ?

i've thought about providing some links to a photo buying service via the website for people who might want to buy one of my photos. but then i think no-one would be interested anyway, so why depress myself by setting it up if it wouldn't be used.

but maybe if i sold cakes featuring my pictures, well that would be a different matter ! here's an example birthday cake (not featuring one of my pictures)

nice low hedges:

eery statues:

and some nice high hedges:

and nice topiary:

a couple of years ago you couldn't move in our house for sticky tape. esther took a shine to it and everything was covered in a small plastic layer. the remnants of this time still exist on door handles and table tops.

i was pleased to see the sticky tape returned this morning when i was looking after the girls.

they thought it fantastic fun to stick strips of blue paper to the face of their dolls so they could communicate with each other. they were making blue-tooth headsets for their toys !

here is one of kezia's babies with the blue communication device attached.

if they'd stopped there that would have been fine, but esther and kezia also decided they needed to stick blue paper to their own faces too. the design fault here was the sticky tape went over their lips so they couldn't speak !

esther went one step further and incorporated a dial pad in to her headset:

aha. the holy grail of street stuff is the lost photo. the lost passport photo is the king of the crop.

so imagine my excitement when i saw this on the floor. could it be a passport photo ?

i picked it up and yes !

a little along the street was this slightly burnt 'passport photo holster'.

i'll add this to davescollections when i get a chance

kids love slap stick comedy. i usually find this sort of antic anoying, but this chap was very excellent.

and it was great watching the kids concentrating on his show, and watch them watching him telling jokes that the grown ups had heard thousands of times before.

but for the kids it was the first time they'd heard them and they reacted accordingly

here's andy videoing everything/everyone that moved at his son's birthday party

here is a stormy weather picture inverted. as usual you can click it for a big version, or there a slightly zoomeder in one here

if i ever go back to the brussels art museum i'm going to track down this delightfully random painting and get a better picture of all of it (rather than just this man in a zimmer frame)

not quite cola but it'll do. this one looks quite nice big.

what do all these thing REALLY mean here ?

look at this great no dog fouling sign from my long lost flat mate jeremy.

i like how they've used the word 'refrain' in the sentence. it's usually 'please refrain from letting your dog ...'. here you've simply got to 'refrain your dog'

but the highlight of the sign is the accuracy of the fine formula. truely this sign was created by a mathematician
.

gloves, combs, nail brushes and pegs all used to lure us in to this shop.

why do they bother with such things ? if they'd just had a picture of a glove i'd have gone in.

we went to Cliveden House last weekend. it's famous for the profumo affair. it's also a national trust property

the sun shone a bit

and there's nice (though steep) walks down to the thames

and the views are nice (if you are tall enough)

from jeremy.

memorise these controls. you never know when you might have to rejig a cherry picker configuration in the dark.

ignore me at your peril.

these things are weird with their eyes looking and their mouth pursed.

here is a close up of the sign of the brussels modern art museum.

my long lost university flat mate jeremy (who isn't really long lost, i just haven't seen him for a while) sent me these pictures of things he found in Cornwall. lost and found.

dummy:

hat:

another hat ?

look at this dog. i've featured him before both here and here but not in such detail. the eyes are baaaad eyes. he's not happy about not being let in.

he's also had his head chopped off (note the red line which goes under the dog, but we can clearly see it through its gaping neck hole).

not a nice sign.

katie, kezia and esther put on a puppet show on a table. nothing much was happening from an audience point of view so i took this photo under the table.

we've reached the age of performances, but not quite reached the age of quality control

katie and esther