London Pride

London Pride

London Pride

Originally uploaded by GinnyRED57.

Last night I enjoyed a tasty glass of Fuller’s London Pride, as planned, and then photographed it and uploaded it to Flickr. Then this morning I was listening to a radio essay by Scott Simon on NPR called “The Resilience of London — and Londoners.” It was one of Simon’s best ever, right up there with his dispatches from Sarajevo.

The piece ended with an old song by Noel Coward called “London Pride.” It was scratchy sounding and creaky in the joints, but it had something to say about the strength Londoners found to cope with the Blitz and defy the bombs. It would be interesting to hear what might result if someone took this song and mashed it up into something punk/rap/skatalicious.

I’m wondering – what came first, the song or the beer?

There’s a version of it with soprano Catherine Bott that was performed at a Spitalfields Hospital concert available as an MP3 here.

‘Catherine Bott, totally unexpected in lighter twentieth century repertoire, divulges new facets of her talents … Noel Coward’s London Pride closes the album on a subdued but heroic note, leaving us in admiration of singer and pianist in one of this year’s most enjoyable discs to have come my way’ (Fanfare, USA)

Very nice and a complete triumph. Duly snagged for my www.iTunes.com collection.

Too Close To “Home”

And St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington is treating 10 people, two of which are in a critical condition.

Three of St Mary’s patients have been transferred to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s specialist burns unit, bringing the number there to four.

A spokeswoman for Chelsea and Westminster said they were being assessed by a team of plastic surgeons.

That’s a little disturbing. Paddington was “our” station and St Mary’s was just up the street from the Indian restaurant (Indus Delta) where we had our first dinner in London… when we felt we’d been welcomed by the city, and were totally ready to succumb to its grubby charms.

That was also the morning when we had our first taste of Fuller‘s. It goes without saying that last night on my way home I had to stop at Binny’s Bevvy Depot for some London Pride.

Tower Bridge

Flickr

towerbridge-thumb

Originally uploaded by GinnyRED57.

Another photo from the 2004 trip to Britain. I have to remember, until I figure out how to get the text to flow properly on photos posted from Flickr, that I need to write enough text to clear the bottom of the image, or the problem posed by having a floated image within a floated center column will keep screwing things up. I keep fiddling with the customized CSS at Flickr; images blogged from Flickr look great over at the Blogspot photoblog, but they’re are handled differently there (no CSS drop shadow) and the layout is a simpler 2 column one. Picasa/Hello, another photoblogging tool, had some clearing divs in their markup that I tried over at Flickr, which looks fine on Razzberry but like hammered poo on Blogula.

There, is that enough text to wrap around the image? If not, I can blather on about using both Flickr and Picasa/Hello. One is by Yahoo and the other is by Google. One is used to build communities around photos, and the other one is more person-to-person, while both have decent “send to blog” tools. Both are easy to use, in totally different ways. Both have organizer capabilities. Picasa’s raaawks, because as soon as you load a flash card full of images, Picasa detects them and loads them up in a way that makes it really, really easy to flip through them, cull the crap, put them in a folder, rename them in a batch, and even add some effects. The only thing I can’t seem to figure out how to do is resizing, because that happens “automatically” if the image is sent to a Blogspot blog. I seem to have to fire up Photoshop Elements to do a little custom resizing if I want to put an image up on MT.

Anyway. Photos. There you have it.

London: You Can’t Beat The System

Flickr

We’re all Londoners today. I’m taking my London Underground mug to work today just to remember the marvel that is the Tube, and to be in solidarity with the people of London. I asked my husband David if he was going to wear his beloved “Mind the Gap” T-shirt to work, but he thought that would be too flippant.

I imagine things at work are going to be somewhat hairy until we figure out if we have many travelers in London – I just ran a report of all the international records we currently have yesterday, and from what I recall there might not be that many actually affected by the complete shutdown of transport in and around London. I suspect that the problems will continue for some days, making travel between London and the airports and the outlying suburbs and regions incredibly difficult. As it is the phone systems are overwhelmed, and the authorities are asking people to stay off the phones and try to stay where they are and not go rushing down to the nearest Tube station to see what’s going on.

Blair made his statement, and now Bush has made his; the G8 meetings will go on and I was pleasantly surprised that Bush actually mentioned that the most important issues of poverty and the environment will still be addressed. At least they aren’t all cutting and running back to their countries – they’re staying to get the work done. Good for them, and I hope there are no more “followup” attacks that might change their minds.

I suppose we should be thankful that this didn’t happen as thousands of people were using the system to get to and from the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, or when people were gathering in Trafalgar Square to listen to the Olympic bid announcement (and celebrate afterwards).

Bastards. I hope this erodes support for the extremists amongst British Moslems and others around the world.

Link

Original upload: GinnyRED57.

Suddenly, Eighteen Months Later…

towerbridge.jpg

It’s about frickin’ time I got the last Britain travel journal entry done. Because of the fiddling back-dating I did, the earliest entry is at the bottom, but it’s all in September of 2003.

You can definitely see a progression in the way I handled images and blogging – the first 2 or 3 entries were written very early in my distinguished writing career. 🙄

Sorry about the ugly “photo corners” on some images. I stupidly put them on and now I can’t take them off. Lesson learned.

Anyway, it’s done. If you start here and keep clicking on the “next” link at the top of the page, you get it in the right order.

Now, I’ve been thinking about that Japan photo album, every lick of which would have to be uploaded from small-ish photographs. Worth it, or not?

Happy, Merry, Resolute New Year

Another year, another milestone, another period of hapless casting about for something interesting to blog about. When faced with this problem, many of us turn to our stats pages for a little navel-gazing. And what better time than on New Year's Day? Just who are the robots, spiders, and visitors who drop by? Naturally, any good stats page includes information about connections from other sites. This is usually where the spam hits the fan – a lot of the links turn out to be for C-list sleb porn and for hosting services and info-harvesters. Now and then, though, there's an honest link from an honest site, and it's fun to check a new one. Links from sites that blogroll this one show up there, and it's fun to find a link from someone whose site I visited havinng a reciprocal look round. Quite often, a completely new and unfamiliar link leads back to a site someone is trying to publicize; less often, it's a site that's worth a visit. I was happy to find a couple of new links in my stats log today; even better, when I visited them nobody tried to sell me anything. GSM-Bristol Elizabethan Military is a discussion forum for some Bristol Renaissance Faire folks who belong to a weapons and military history group. This next one is probably only for the delusional: Al Gore '08 but at least they're out there giving it a shot. Then there's this one, who've been showing up in the logs for a while: Postami.com They seem to be an aggregator/RSS feed finder. Finally, it's time I looked at the search phrases that bring people here. Some of them are old standbys, some of them are new for the first time. I'm amazed at the fact that people search on the phrase "newton westminster abbey tomb photo" at all, let alone almost every frickin' month. Why? Is it kids doing homework? People with a dead scientist fetish? Next order of business: New Year's resolutions. Rather than post a big-ass meme (the one with 40 questions shows up in my Bloglines feed about 10 times a day, gah) I'll just resolve to excercise 3 times a week and use my nifty new cookware more often. And be nicer. That's it. And now, I may actually finish up the September 2004 trip journal at last.

Again with the “well, finally”

At long last another entry has gone up for the September trip to Britain. It only needed some images and some tweaking but of course it had to lie around being a draft for more than a month.

Well, it’s there now, and there’s really only one big entry left, which will cover the rest of our time hiking in Yorkshire, and the 2 nights we spent in London at the end of the trip. And then the thing will be done, aside from a few things that come after our return home.

The Ducks Are Attacking! Aiiiyee!

ducksfood.jpgIt’s time to stop screwing around with the machanics of the stupid blog and make some entries already. So soon there’ll be some more entries covering the week David and I spent hiking, eating, and drinking in Grassington, Yorkshire Dales. But first this cautionary tale. Do not go anywhere with dry toast in your pockets, or They will attack you from the sea and from the air. Who are They? The shadowy evil figures that haunt your dreams and turn them to nightmare. They are… the massive continuity of ducks!! Mu-ahahahahaha!!

No, really, there are some really pretty canals in Britain – this is the one in Skipton, a few steps from the train station. You could conceivably arrive by train, step aboard a canal boat for a week, and putter along quite happily on the canal all week. Accompanied by a vigilant escort of ducks and geese. This lot evidently thought our pockets were stuffed with bread – wrong, they were stuffed with maps, bits and pieces of London guidebooks we hadn’t thrown away, and chicken tikka sandwich wrappers.

Maybe it was the chicken tikka? Bloodthirsty savages. That’s poultry.

There should be a new entry up in the September archive (with lots and lots of pictures) in a day or so. Category is the same as this post.

Image Makeovers

With the help of the latest entry at Learning Movable Type: Text Wrap, I’ve improved the way the images for the Scotland entry in the travel journal work with text wrapped around them (or under them, in the case of a short amount of text).

It’s noticeable when you scroll down from the Scotland entry – pretty neat and wrapping correctly – and then get to entries like York and London.

All of this is leading up to a boatload of images to be messed with. I ended up cancelling the Art Institute excursion with David’s parents and staying home today (shame, it’s beautiful out) because of the niggling, tickling, sore throat).

We were hoping to take some more photos tomorrow, but I’ll have to see how I’m feeling in the morning.

And in the meantime, there are a lot of photos to look at and cull from the recent Salt Lake trip.

David started putting my images in their own gallery and changed things around – some images may get deleted as they’re duplicated elsewhere in the blog. But for now, they’re all here.

And the gallery for both of us for the Salt Lake Trip is one level up.