I went out and took more kitey pictures: my Spirit of Air Scimitar, this time, photos taken from the ground. There were a few other people out today, too – some stackers and one guy with a big 4-line traction thing. Hey, my kite might not lift me off the ground, but it was far nippier than the others. Which is nice.
When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.
Shame he’s going to BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY then.
(this post may contain traces of sarcasm/irony/nuts)
Actual jokes found inside the wrappers of some sweets we got at work today, translated into English by your esteemed host:
Q: Which animal goes “miaou”?
A cat, or a dog that does impressions.
3 good reasons to go to the zoo:
1. To go to show your parents the monkeys
2. To go and monkey about in front of your parents
3. So that the monkeys see you monkey about in front of your parents
True or False: The Red Sea is so named because one can find tomato sauce in its depths.
False, but it is, however, the hottest sea in the world.
I can’t help feeling I must have missed something.
So, inspired by this, I attached my old cameraphone to one of my ever-increasing collection of kites (a little diamond-shaped single line thing), set it to timer mode and snapped some pictures, and this is what came out:
For those who are interested in mechanics and things like that, I spent about 15 minutes buggering around trying to figure out how to attach the camera to the kite such that it would still fly: the problem turned out to be that I was hanging it off the bottom, which is wrong. Hanging stuff off the bottom means that the kite is being pulled vertical – and in order to take off, the kite has to be angled into the wind, like a wing. Ideally, you want the phone suspended such that the force due to the weight of the phone is directly inline with the piece of string between you and the kite, as this will have no effect on the angle of the kite. My kite has a line between the centre of the kite to the base, and you attach the handle-line to the middle of that – suspending the camera from that point seemed to work best.
Anyway, considering the considerable lack of high-tech equipment involved, I’m quite pleased with the results.
Yes, I know the dates on the posts are wrong. There’s a reason for this, but I can’t be bothered to fix it right now as it involves going through a few thousand database entries and updating them all.
For about half an hour or so this afternoon, Britain had no government. No Prime Minister, or any ministers of any kind at all, for the time in between Tony told Liz he didn’t want to be PM any more (lying basticle that he is), and Liz asking Gordy if he fancies moving next door. Now, assuming Gordy doesn’t come to his senses and tell Liz to stick the job up her arse, we’ve got a PM again now, but for a while there, we didn’t, and the country conspicuously failed to collapse into a screaming burning heap of anarchic rubble. So, I reckon it’s time to give anarchy a proper chance – Gordy can go on holiday now, and form a government in September or so, and in the meantime we, the people, can run things ourselves for a bit. I reckon we’d do alright.
Right, let’s get this out the way straight up front. Yes, they sound like Daft Punk. They sound a lot like Daft Punk. But they are also clearly not Daft Punk, because Daft Punk’s last album was, well, a bit rubbish, whereas this is probably the best album of the year so far. It’s the best album Daft Punk never made.
Describing Justice’s sound invariably requires use of phrases like “if robots made music” and “the sound of a factory, in the future, set to a drumbeat” and “heavy metal disco funk music from the future”. It’s dirty and noisy and loud and funky and designed from the ground up to make you grin from ear-to-ear and fight an overwhelming urge to get up out of your chair and dance around like a big spazz.
Okay, it’s not perfect – “The Party”, featuring guest vocals from labelmate Uffie, is a bit of a letdown, mainly, in fact, because of said guest vocals – Uffie’s talking-chav stylings don’t really mesh terribly well with Justice’s backing and for me the track would work better without them.
But that aside, this is easily the finest dance album of recent years, and if this isn’t in every top-ten at the end of the year, I’ll eat my infamous bread-shoes, again. You need this album in your life.
This is rather fabulous. I especially like the dinosaur with the saddle. And I want their t-shirts.