gnimmel

Christmas cards

2009-12-21T10:55:40Z

I didn't make Christmas cards this year, for the first time in many years; I recycled last year's designs. Part lack of inspiration, part having a big sekrit project I need to get on with, I guess. So instead, I'm going to post 2007's (blurrily photographed) cards. They form a sort of a story cycle, and are somewhat influenced by The Connection by Daniil Kharms, Edward Gorey, the Russian far North, the solstice and, um, probably the Moomins. And also the general idea of stories shaped like Catharine wheels.

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, have a good one.

Singers!

2009-12-08T22:21:54Z

[Apologies to people of the geographically distant, non-singing or disinterested variety]

A group of lovely people who I sing with are doing carols in the craft market opposite Trinity College in Cambridge on Saturday lunchtime, probably 11:30-13:00-ish. This year we are very short on people, particularly sopranos and altos. Anyone feel like coming along and helping out? It would be mostly pretty standard green book stuff. It is for charidee and all, too.

There will definitely be Away in a manger with the lesser-known spooky tune, if that helps to sway anyone's decision.

Birds

2009-11-19T12:45:45Z

White-tailed tropicbirds. These are pelagic birds, having as little to do with land as possible (digression: I'm fascinated by the sort of creatures that live in the ocean and can go through life without ever touching a solid surface, living on things that have fallen from above, letting their own detritus fall lower down. Open-ocean fish which live near the surface are incredibly curious about floating things, to the extent that leaving something floating is used as a fishing method. In fact, this is one way of catching dolphin-friendly tuna and it is not a good idea. End digression.)

I think this is a Fairy or White Tern.

I think this is a Bald Eagle. Location: above Anchorage Train Station car park. There were gulls swooping round it from the nearby river (Ship Creek: enunciation minefield!). It looked like the gulls were trying to get it to go away without killing anything. Eventually it flew off over the local air base, so I suppose they were successful.

Rocks

2009-11-18T12:33:02Z

I has a bukkit... but I eated it.

2009-11-17T09:31:18Z

When mango-detection algorithms go wrong

2009-11-16T10:26:01Z

Spiderweb and Snail Trails

2009-10-13T10:25:31Z

Heigh-ho, more photographs. I fear these ones are a little geeky (not in a 'wow, awesome, whizzo-cool' geek sort of way; I'm thinking of the sort of geek who traps you in the corner at a party and says 'I think you'll find...' a lot). Offered without much in the way of apology or explanation.

Navi Mumbai, India, October 2007

Although, if you want an explanation of why I'm posting a bunch of photos of overhead cables, one reason might be that it's one of the things that's different in an easy, first-impressions way around the world. Pylons and streetlights and toilets[1] and breakfast and whatnot. And some of those things are easier and less embarrassing to photograph than others. Also, I find them strangely visually appealing, both as patterns of lines and as physical manifestations of invisible networks laid like a tangle of spiderweb over the globe, house to house and city to city; as if one could only hitch in a strong enough finger, pull and the whole world would unravel.

Seward Highway, Alaska, September 2008

Praslin, Seychelles, September 2006

Savannah, Georgia, September 2009

Badaling, China, July 2009

Bucharest, Romania, July 2009

Bucharest, Romania, July 2009

Beijing, China, July 2009

I'm kind of fascinated by freight. Part of that is that I'm supposed to be modelling freight movements at work, and it's a bit of a bugger. Part of it is that nearly everything in this house has some sort of silent freight past; wrapped in plastic, traversing the shipping lanes or the motorways or the skies of the world. I often wonder what's in the shipping containers we pass on the road. Once I was at a conference where an Indian entrepreneur announced that it was economic to fly a cargo plane full of mangoes across the country regularly. That plane might be full of mangoes, I find myself thinking. When I see freighter aircraft that is. Not all the time.
I passed two transshipment ports on my travels, so here they are.

Malta Freeport, July 2009.

Port of Savannah, Georgia, September 2009.

[1] I'm a bit perplexed by the global variation in toilets, because some designs seem so much better than others. I suspect people like what they know; it was interesting to see a group of Chinese tourists in Beijing queueing for the toilets at the Summer Palace turning down empty cubicles containing Western-style loos with obvious disgust.

Words at World's End

2009-09-29T10:04:17Z

To get this out of the way at the start: I work on the environmental effects of air transport. Since starting this work, I have gradually built up the sort of carbon footprint which in forensic terms might be used to identify a barbecued yeti. How? By flying. A lot. To many and varied conferences in many and varied places. I've just counted up the things I already know I will or might be doing next year and they include five trips to the Americas, so it ain't getting any better. On the plus side, I've been to many and varied places! Only without writing about them or doing anything with the copious pictures I've taken. There being a whole upcoming three months without international travel on the horizon, I thought I'd sit back, take stock, and post pictures.

This is set of pictures number one, containing various things to do with words, peculiar translations and found things, including a particularly fine example of garbled pseudoscience. It is mostly silly and flippant.

Malta, July 2009: Ghar Dalam cave. Whilst in this cave, we were completely safe from space bees! Thank goodness.

Malta, July 2009: church at Marsaxlokk. Possibly a creche? Admittedly the thought of no food or drink does make me quite sad.

Beijing, July 2009: hotel bedside table.

Make your choice, adventurous stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had - C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

Substitute button maked 'do not' for bell. Reader, I pressed it. A little red LED came on above the button. Nothing else happened[1]. As yet, calamitous retribution has not crashed down on my head, but it can only be a matter of time.

Beijing, July 2009: Olympic Park. For what it's worth, I'd do a great deal more than detour in such a situation. (In the interests of mocking bizarre translation in an equal-opportunities way, it is worth pointing out that both English from Chinese/Japanese and Chinese/Japanese from English can go very, very wrong.)

Beijing, July 2009: Forbidden City. Man. Um, this is kind of true.

Beijing, July 2009: Olympic Park. I kind of feel I have an emotional connection with this grass by now. There it was, baring its sensitive underbelly before me, and all I could think of doing was crushing it beneath my feet. No longer, I can assure you. Although I'm not sure how the people who cut it can live with themselves.

Beijing, July 2009: Dongzhimen Night Market.
It should be noted that this was the only stall with English labels on the foodstuffs and Chinese labels separately, as opposed to the other way round. Draw your own conclusions. One of my conclusions was 'ooh, curly!'[2]. Anyhow, we didn't eat at the market. Instead, we ate at a nearby restaurant where the vegetarian section of the menu proudly began with "fatty intestine slices".

Washington, December 2006: Smithsonian Museum. This was at the end of an illustrated line of panels discussing the Awesomeness of Spacesuits!! And how each layer of a Spacesuit did Really Cool Things!! I'm guessing from the expression on the poor astronaut dude's face that he's really wishing they'd concluded the discussion one layer above.

Anchorage, September 2008: cab of old steam locomotive, public park. An unconventional approach to the personal ad. Plus points: has not lost the power to dream. Minus points: leaves personal ad in an abandoned train, creepy, picky, lists address as local prison.

Anchorage, September 2008: W 5th Avenue and N St. For reference, this was in the brief period between Sarah Palin being unveiled as John McCain's running-mate and the global financial system going completely tits-up. This stencil was all over the place, as were the attendant devil-horns and altering of 'hope' to 'nope'. Interestingly, the Anchorage Daily News was strongly pro-Obama. My attempt to cycle to Wasilla was thwarted by a magic disappearing cycle path, but I can still hum the jingle of the Wasilla Mattress Ranch.

Cambridge MA, January 2008: Restaurant wall near MIT. Could this graffito be based on one of the London 2012 BBC user-submitted olympic logos? I detect a certain similarity in design.

Mumbai, October 2007: Sanjay Gandhi National Park. I mainly include this picture because it's rather blurred, in the sort of way that photos become a little blurred when it's getting dark of an evening, or the photo-taker is trying to move at a greater-than-anticipated velocity.

Savannah GA, September 2009: Fire Station. Um, I'm kind of unclear about whether the person in black is meant to be facing forwards or backwards. I feel it might be good to have the situation clarified before taking advantage of this Safe Place.

Bucharest, July 2009: Otopeni Airport, TAROM inflight magazine. The key to truly earth-shattering pseudoscience is to start, somewhere, somehow, with a tiny grain of truth. Maybe even more than one. Then mix those tiny grains of truth with fifteen hundred gallons of high-fructose corn syrup, strain through a dog's left bollock, add the heart of a pink unicorn and advertise them as whole-grain truth-containing wisdom. Bonus marks: derive the theory of relativity! Heck, it's not that hard.

[1] In the interests of telling the whole story, we eventually worked out from comparing the Chinese characters with ones elsewhere that the button was meant to say 'do not disturb', and thus a great deal of nothing happening when it was pressed was perhaps not very surprising.
[2] I hear tell that Google has a big screen at Google headquarters which contains nothing but an endlessly scrolling list of the searches currently ongoing in the world[3]. I imagine that at least the publically-viewable screen is filtered somewhat. Only this is the sort of food-related experience that has one googling such things as 'sheep penis dildo', see, and I wouldn't want anyone at Google to get the, uh, wrong idea (for what it's worth, ducks definitely have curly penises, wheras the kangaroo has a most unnerving bend. FWIW, these sites are probably not safe for work, unless you work in a cock factory.)

[3] Which makes me wonder: what will the searches be like, when the rate starts to slow? What will the last Google search be?

Lagomorphic Bunnifications

2009-06-25T09:08:53Z

It is the season of silly travel once more. Which means, well, this sort of thing:

Now, I work in an office which is full of people who do silly travel all of the time, so I get to hear lots of jetlag anecdotes and rules-of-thumb; the idea that it takes about a day per hour of time difference to acclimatise, the idea that it's worst going East and best going West and so forth. One interesting suggestion was that, given a large enough time difference experienced in one lump, the body clock just goes 'waaah' and effectively reboots, rather than trying to adjust gradually. Of course there are all sorts of other factors, not least that experiencing a large time difference in one go generally involves having taken a very long and tiring journey. But the one experience I've had with large time differences (9 hours Westward) seemed to be in agreement with this notion.

I was going to systematically plot all my jetlag experiences on a totally non-scientific graph. In fact I sort of did[1].

But I've realised that I can't actually remember how long it took for most places I've been, unless they were in some way notable by being very bad or good. So if you want to add any data points [Edit: which I will plot in enticingly different colours], feel free to comment with your experiences!
DISCLAIMER: I'm counting only outward trips, no jetlag-reducing drugs were involved, everyone is a special snowflake, graph will be updated if I feel like it (but this requires ~3 commands and takes ~10 seconds).

[1] Yes, this does count as procrastination - I'm going to be working at the weekend so I figure I might as well get the procrastination in now.

Dawn Chorus

2009-05-29T11:31:07Z

This one brought to you by listening to wood pigeons. Seriously, it's not paranoia - that is what they sound like. Since purplepiano pointed it out, I've not been able to un-hear it.

It's a bit like the fish in the speed camera sign. I can't un-see that, either. Look, fish!

I've run out of cartoons now; I'd like to carry on doing drawing-stuff and posting-stuff (it is, on balance, good for the brain) but we shall see how it goes.

Cats

2009-05-28T11:17:44Z

This one brought to you by, um, having a cat.

The Dinosaurs of Night

2009-05-27T11:11:08Z

This one brought to you by the melancholy deaths of Chang and Eng Bunker, the sort of dinosaur book which proclaims "Brontosauruses had two brains"[1], and the notion that if you were to permit time travel to the past only for purposes that didn't dick around with the timeline too much, dinosaur hunting in the late Cretaceous might get a look-in. Just don't step on the rodents.

[1] The Internet informs me that
a) 'Brontosaurus' is an outmoded classification, and I probably meant 'Apatosaurus', and
b) It wasn't the Brontosaurus that was thought to have two brains anyway, it was the Stegosaurus, and
c) The two brains theory has been thoroughly disproved anyway.
But apart from that, all good, eh?

SSS.

2009-05-26T11:24:24Z

This post brought to you by the small child who used to sneak into the dining room at her grandparents' house every hour and eleven minutes during the long summer afternoons, to see the excitingly digital clock perform amazing conjunctions.

Upon juices, and the flowing thereof

2007-08-23T21:32:50Z

I've always been vaguely haunted by the notion that we humans have all our best ideas just before falling asleep; that is to say, in that happy and almost entirely un-recallable mental interstice between wakefulness and dream-awareness. Like many of the world's notions, the survival of this one depends crucially on the fact that it isn't proveable.
However, a few months' mornings ago, I was struck with a sudden thought. I had had an idea as I was drifting off to sleep the night before. A musical idea. A good musical idea. In fact, to judge from my half-remembered flush of drowsy enthusiasm, it was probably one of the better ideas in the history of recorded sound. And it had been witty, clever and yet subtly non-novelty. The words themselves suggested a catchy and entertaining tune. I still couldn't quite remember what it was, but -- crucially -- I'd had the presence of mind to grope in the dark for a pen and write it down. Breathless with anticipation, I opened up my bedside notebook. There, in a barely readable scrawl, was the phrase Give me back my fucking monkey.

From this I have concluded two things:
a) No, we do not have our best ideas when we are falling asleep and
b) my ideas duct is clogged and requires some maintainance.

This is where you lot come in. See, the coming week is a Week of No Work. I have made a list of things from my ill-fated notebook which sound like they might be a lark to have a go at were one to, say, have a completely free week with which to get the juices flowing again. It's much easier to choose which thing to do when you have someone else's opinion to ignore. So I intend to Ask The Audience.

I have various different media at my disposal, so I shall categorise them thusly:

Paint. Lest anyone should be worried or even remember for that matter, I have not forgotten about agreeing to do a) an illustration for Bardcamp and b) a pictorial prop for the Middlemarch readthrough. Bardcamp having asked first, I formulated a plan involving various items, including egg tempera, gold ink and a hacksaw. However, having utilised the hacksaw and applied the ink, I was seized with terrible misgivings that, egg tempera involving actual egg, I was going to end up accidentally making a big smelly paint cake or come home to find the cat licking it. So I ended up using oils instead. After happily slapping on a thick undercoat and waiting awhile, I consulted Wikipedia, which told me that experts do not consider an oil painting fully dry until it is 50-70 years old. By which I mean to say: don't worry, guys, of course it's going to be ready by the deadline :)
I will be doing some of this over the next week, but I could do more or less.

Inkscape: Bless its little cotton socks, I like Inkscape. It allows me to rip off real proper graphic designers. However, I've been doing a lot of things in Inkscape of late and so it might be fun to do summat else. Nevertheless, these are the Inkscape items currently on the Ideas List:
a) A pictorial Glastonbury writeup. This is half-finished and has a pig in it. It sort-of trailed off into snit-world when Michael Eavis claimed that my sort were entirely responsible for ruining Glastonbury (or summat like that); but, it having been otherwise ace, I suspect I'll get around to finishing it somewhens.
b) I've had a yen for a while now to try out a series of things based on people's submitted phrases, a la exploding dog. Previous efforts (with animation) resulted in a large number of three-quarters-finished animations. This is because multiple animations take approximately 30% longer than my art attention span. These wouldn't be animated, though.
c) Or I'm sure I've got a bit of a webcomic in me somewhere if I strain hard enough.

Blender, which is a free professional-level 3D animation tool. Blender is worth it just for the sense of vertiginous horror you get on first opening it up and being confronted with what looks like the control panel of the Starship Enterprise. In most software agreements the clause about not using the program to run a nuclear power station is faintly ridiculous. Blender not only looks like the sort of thing which one could operate a nuclear power station from, it manages to give the impression that actually, it is running a nuclear power station somewhere, and you'd better be darned careful about not clicking on the 'withdraw control rods' button when running in node mode. However, there are online tutorials, and I can now make a stick-human with arbitrarily-resizable breasts. Next stop is lesson 2: 'make a hat'.
The Ideas List has two things to say concerning Blender:
a) 'I have begun to dream in numbers', which would be a non-animated mix of blendered-3D and inkscaped-2D vector images, and
b) 'architectural/biological machines', which would consist of the sort of animation suggesting that I've been spending too much time reading BLDGBLOG.

Garageband. Gone are the days of tinkering with *cough* notstrictlylegal music software, for I have become a mac user! and with that comes Garageband, a program which I am informed is potentially the software of choice for people who want to make music in their bedrooms that sounds like it has real bagpipes in it. Now, admittedly I never used my past-pirated booty for anything other than making animation soundtracks. And *hem* see the introduction to this post. However, I like playing with music even if it doesn't like playing with me, so there is music in the list, thusly:
a) I have been making a list of Things Which Are Good in Songs. Now, if there were any justice in the world, one could combine these things and make the awsomest song in the world ever. And with so many fine, fine ingredients, even a complete musical illiterate would be able to do it. Say, someone who'd failed grade one piano and once won their school's musical award for 'trying hard'. Unfortunately the list itself is, um, mildly subjective, and contains a number of entries which are mutually exclusive, items therein including but not limited to: 3/4 or similar time signature; the word 'dirigible'; concerning a gay love affair; mention of giant robots/lizards/cthulhu; danceable-to (non-waltz); contains at least one London Underground station and the word 'brain' in the lyrics; involves squeaking, the higher the better; harpsichord; etc.
b) alternatively, whilst in the process of making the ill-fated Glastonbury writeup, I prepared a panel containing an imaginary CD: The OMG Ponies' 'Kitten Cuddler' EP. It occurs to me that this should exist, and might be slightly less constrained, would be rather silly, and would furthermore allow for a pseudo-Wagnerian Fusion of all the Arts Except Ballet by the happy virtue of requiring a cover design.
c) (if I may digress) One of the enduring features of the rather pleasing music-getting website emusic.com is that one pays the same amount per track, no matter whether that track lasts 20 seconds or over an hour. This is great for ambient soundscapes, which tend to err on the hour-long side. And, as it happens, I like falling asleep to the sound of rain. English rain, whilst of commendable variety and range, generally draws its sounds from a limited palette. However, emusic will happily sell me any number of hours of rain-noise recorded on the continent of my choice and interspersed with the sounds of exciting parrots. Furthermore Emusic would like to sell me desert-noise, waterfall-noise and dolphin-noise, preferably after some tye-died artiste has added some synthesizer noodling on top and retitled it 'Happy Druid Hugs the Universe'. Whilst idly browsing these listings (I think I'd got down to 'the Great Om') it occurred to me that, having grown up not far from the M27, I'd probably also find motorway noise rather relaxing to go to sleep to. Emusic does not seem to offer this option. However, it does take listings from vanity-publishers, so if one were to (say) record 'Soothing Sounds of the M25' there might be a way of actually getting it into the ambient section. Nyeeeess.

The GIMP. It's now kind of fashionable to diss GIMP, but I still like it (and indeed it gets used quite a lot for things incidental to the Inkscapery). A while back I was definitely intending to do something photomanipulationy in it called (something like) Five Portraits of America which had something to do with Hitler's bicycle (NO, not in any way you might be thinking... it's all the fault of rural Illinois, and having to collate all the towns with airports nearby, for work purposes) and the town of Chicken, Alaska.

View Poll: Ask the Audience

This are serious thread

2007-06-20T22:39:32Z

Dear Interwebs,
a) I have joined the Facebook and the Twitter. I believe this is what all the hep cats are doing these days. My Facebook data point is this: buoyed up with everyone's assertions that one just sets up an account and sits back, whereupon everybody in the known Universe finds your account and friends it, I set one up and sat back and something not particularly distinguishable from nothing happened. Rah!
b) However, I am unable to rectify this situation of dazzling popularity by, you know, actually adding people that I know for at least five days, since we are off to the Glastonbury, like. I am all virginal with regards to music festivals, and hence rather excited.
c) I'm really, really sorry about this.

Sometimes, one just has to do something to get the lolcats out of one's system....

A brief addendum...

2007-05-30T21:15:15Z

...in honour of master strongtrousers, who suggests that there should also exist a Shakespeare Cab in which one may ask the driver to perform a speech of your choice.

Death and Taxis

2007-05-29T07:39:30Z

(usual disclaimers apply; single large image behind the cut, the fluffhouse server is flaky at the moment (as was the case with the last post, now hopefully back up).

NB also: in between starting this and finishing it, it was established that:
a) Yes, there was a mouse in our kitchen, but
b) it went a little too close to the cat in our kitchen.
hence the whole matter is somewhat moot. :/

What has it got in its pocketses?

2007-05-03T07:37:52Z

What have you got in yours?

Beneath ur surface, boinking ur goldfish

2007-04-12T07:39:47Z

In other news: I did in the end make a rudimentary cafepress shop for Venn diagram postery goodness -- I was going to shiny it up a bit and look for a more UK-based solution as well, but OMG liek NO TIME.

The Internet is for meta-analysis

2007-03-05T08:35:13Z

As any fule kno, the internet is for porn. This fact has stood, like some whacking great monument of truth, in the back of the collective consciousness of the world since the webternet began. And then -- alas! -- it was held up the the harsh light of Science and fell over ungracefully into the mud. For a while the webternet was without form and meaning. Then, gradually, it began to pick up a new identity; here and there, now and then I would see people imputing that these days the internet is for cat pictures.

This set me to thinking: surely the webternet is for many things? Should we deny the validity of Harry Potter/Chalet School crossover fanfic merely because it is neither porn nor depicts cats? And, with the aid of Science[1], I have therefore prepared a Venn diagram of the interwebs which should sort the whole problem out.

[1] Science sat on my shoulder and implored me not to do it, but hey.

ETA: version with more readable, less voluptuous font here

The big pink book of fantastic facts

2007-02-12T08:35:33Z

This post brought to you by the realisation that inkscape, the gimp, comic life and having a camera with a timer and a tripod can work together happily to allow me to be even more up myself than usual for relatively little effort.:)

True Opinions from the Public

2007-02-03T13:05:11Z

Me: ...but the worst band name ever was Red Box. I mean, I can't even remember any of their songs. All I can remember about them is that they had such a shite name.
Chris: I think they were the sort of stuff that used to get played on Philip Schofield's radio show -- wet music for grown-up indie kids.
Me: You mean like Coldplay for the 1980's?
...
Me: So, what do you think about Fluffymark's going-to-Glastonbury plan? I'm still deciding if I want my very own wallowing-in-shit experience or not.

Shortly after this, our conversation was interrupted by the arrival on stage of the Arcade Fire, who proceeded to play an stupendously rocking set of rockingness which I'm not smug at all about having a ticket for, despite radio 6 going on repeatedly about how hard they were to get hold of. Who else was at this small, intimate gig? Apparently, the lead singer of Coldplay and the organiser of Glastonbury.
...I bet the tall bloke I kept elbowing was in Red Box.

Mince Pyes

2006-12-25T15:27:08Z

At approximately 11:50 last night, we decided it would be a good idea to make mince pies. We didn't have a recipe -- but then again, we had some mincemeat, and who needs a recipe for mince pies? And so now we have a little tray of pies shaped variously like sausage rolls, triangles, whales, dinosaurs without heads, &c., which probably proves that one shouldn't bake mince pies at midnight on Christmas Day.
Afterwards, we looked up recipes. To which all I can say is, that I now have a burning desire to cook a mince pie for next christmas, because it turns out that four hundred-odd years ago, the mince pye:
a) could be up to 100kg in size,
b) could contain rabbits, partridges, legs of beef, pigeons, capons, hares, liver, eggs, pickled mushrooms or indeed all of the above plus everything from a modern-day mince pie,
c) was often held together by iron clamps (see point a),
d) was banned by Oliver Cromwell, and
e) had a pastry model of the baby Jesus on the top.
But enough of pye! the main intention of this entry is to wish you all merriment and joy and suchlike, and to thank you again for being a superb friendslist over the year, and to mention that since I've not really got individual people hereon presents this year, I have instead bought you all some trees -- about a third of a tree each, as it happens. And I'll now return to my scheduled sherry and a surprisingly-circular pie. :)

HOUSEWARMING - absolutely the final missive (probably)

2006-11-30T21:09:30Z

It has not failed to escape my attention that some of you would like to know where we live, seeing as we've, um, invited you to our house on Saturday. See, what I neglected to mention is that our little gathering on the 2nd is intended for telepaths only[1].

...um, what I mean to say is Disorganised, me? and that you may find our address in the original entry here (friendslocked to my f'list) or here (friendslocked to Chris's f'list, or if you're on neither or not on LJ then email me (address in user info) and I'll (probably) tell you. The postcode is CB1 2LL for users of interweb mappingthingumbobs -- this only identifies which side of the road it's on, though. It's a straightforward and short walk from the train station and only a little longer from the bus station ('turn right and carry straight on' just about covers both). Coming by car is trickier: there are a couple of short-stay pay and display car parks nearby (one is at the beginning of Gwydir Street) but the local roads are strictly residents parking only and there are usually no spaces anyway. Saturday the second is also the date of the Mill Road Winter Fair, which may mean that in fact cars can't get into Gwydir Street anyway. So I'd give Mill Road a miss, park centrally or elsewhere, and walk in.

The intention is to begin the Beggar's Opera singthrough at about 2:30 (so maybe turning up from 2?) It will be rather disorganised. I suspect the Farce of Sodom will begin at around 9:00. We have some spare copies of both scripts but as yet no spare copies of the score (but there are pdfs online). It will be rather disorganised. In between at some point there will be some food (a large fish and a Rice Thing, we are thinking); as I don't know how many people there willl be I'm making no guarantees to feed everyone, but there are astonishing quantities of takeaway food available locally.

Bring things, if you want to bring things. Wear things, if you want to wear things. Etc.

[1] Actually, I can imagine few worse things than a room full of drunken telepaths - can we cancel?

So, er...

2006-11-22T22:36:17Z

MEN WHO SING!

...our housewarming Beggar's Opera (Saturday December 2, afternoon (probably 2:30ish),in Cambridge, music is not difficult and is all online as pdfs and mp3s here, is also v. good & has choruses of ruffians & whores) is a little short of you at the moment.
Chance to partake of a Very Large Fish included. And Gin. More Women who Sing also a thoroughly good thing. Also small furry beasties from Alpha Centuri who sing. Does anyone have any amiable singers hiding under the bed?

In order for this not to be the spammiest entry in spammytown ever, here is a work-related image.