Blogging the oldies

If Daniel can put up an old photograph of a family member in response to Gareth's mouse feature then so can I:

The one on the right, at the bar, holding a smoke. If he had a Bollocks to Blair T-shirt I'm sure he would have worn it.

Take that Gareth. Your mice, though pretty and probably very useful given the right circumstances/laboratory, come with no provenance. And no turning the photos into black and white and posting them again.

Hmmm, ok, I wonder if we can kick off an Old Family Photo blogging style Mexican wave. The less politically correct the better but anything will do.

No mice. Dogs allowed.

New coinage competition entries

I understand from the Englishman that there is a competition running to redesign some of our coinage:

The redesign of coins was announced yesterday, prompting fresh speculation that the Government has ruled out joining the euro for the foreseeable future.

An open competition to find new designs for the reverse of the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p coin is to be held by the Royal Mint.
The designs are to be changed better to "reflect modern Britain, and will need final approval by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.

This is an excellent idea. I mean, what's the point of hanging on to old fashioned ideas and all that.

So, here are a couple of my designs which I am sure will stand a good chance of success.

Representing the commitment to a multicultural society of HM government

Representing HM treasury - 5 for me, 5 for you

Wandering star

(Yes, I know I've posted this image before)

Ahem, I say

ebay - click

The first in, possibly, a line of patriotic drawings etc from Oliver Cook, who I met (virtually) a little while back during an ebay transaction.

Windows background - American P-51 Mustang

I've modified one of the pictures I took at the RAF museum in Hendon, London so that it would be better suited as my Windows background and thought that I might as well share it.

Here is a small version of the image:

I've faded out the edges of the picture so that desktop icons are easier to see if, like me, you arrange them around the edges of the screen.

To use the full size image click on the link below and right-click then select "Set as wallpaper".

View image

Look, a castle!

To make up for the lack of any half way decent blogging today here is a picture I took of a castle:

It's Roch Castle in Wales and I took the picture the last time I stayed there. You can rent it out and it comes complete with its own dungeon, which we found quite useful.

Image of England

The Campaign for an English Parliament run a competition called a picture of England which I think is an excellent idea. If you have taken any photographs that you'd like to share I'm sure they'd be more than happy to receive them.

Not being one to enter competitions and the like (fear of failure) I thought I'd just put one up here. I took it last weekend when we paid a visit (walked the dog) to the Youth with a mission in our home town.

It's been slightly adjusted to fade the borders, but I'm like that.

Taken with a Canon S20.

Worlds of my own

Like the now defunct blog of Stephen Chapman (who pointed the software out some time back) I have been gleefully playing with the vista generation software Terragen. Here are a couple of vistas I made earlier (click on the images for the large versions which can be used as desktop backgrounds, if you so wish).

Mountain river



Snow vista

Some of my other images are offworld vistas, an aspect of the generation of these things that I rather enjoy. I may impose some of these on you at a later date.

Picture of the day

Here's a nice one from the cover of the latest copy of the BASC magazine Shooting & Conservation:

Let's stir things up a bit

Oh oh.

Big Blunkett and surveillance Britain

British Bulldog

Adjusted from an image found over at Sterling Times.

Much hotness

Sorry for the lack of blogging over the past couple of days. I've been unwell. To make up for it here's an absolutely superb photograph from the Rugby world cup:

Sorry, image deleted due to too much hot linking - leeching my bandwidth away.

Best record covers in the world - ever

Being, as I am, in a lazy mood today and prompted by recent "worst album covers in the world" posts doing the rounds in the blogosphere, I thought I'd post what are unarguably the two best record covers in the world ever:
Iron Maiden's, The Trooper We get so close near enough to fight When a Russian gets me in his sights He pulls the trigger and I feel the blow A burst of rounds take my horse below. And as I lay there gazing at the sky My body's numb and my throat is dry And as I lay forgotten and alone Without a tear I draw my parting groan From the title track, The Trooper	Magnum's, On a Story Tellers Night They dispatch their precious cargo Knock him back right off his feet And they pray may no one follow Better still to face the beast When the field has become a garden And the wall has stood the test Children play and the dogs run barking Who would think or who would guess From the track, Les Morts Dansant

Both bands were great to see live, though I feel Magnum lost their way after the Storyteller's album.

Some kind of flag thing

Here is a flag I created some time back for a samizdata competition. They were looking for an anti EU image:

To be honest I'm not really sure what the image really represents, I just kind of slipped myself in to neutral and this came out. Anyhow, rather then allowing it to languish on my hard drive I though I'd release it into the wild.

Cheese

The Group Captain runs a feature named Wanderings with my camera where he publishes a photograph that he's taken of an old bit of wood here and another of a throne there etc which seems like a jolly good idea to me. So I thought that I'd publish a photograph from one of my wanderings, this time from August 2002 taken with a Canon S20 digital camera.

Can you guess where this was taken? It's easy really.