The Best Laid Plans etc.

Upload 2000 aka Oh B*gg*r I've dropped the thing, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

This is the 2000th photograph uploaded to Colonel Blink on flickr. I left the house this morning intending to take a snap of something really special to mark the event. Instead I dropped my camera face down onto the pavement. Happily the UV filter took the brunt of any damage.

I was left however with a smashed filter whose rim was hammered hard onto the camera. Nothing would budge it. I tried a filter spanner loaned by Pat Woods in Capricorn Cameras, I tried putting the lens in the fridge for half an hour or so (wrapped safely in cling film) to see if that would help. In the end I had to use a hack saw blade to gently cut the rim off. Happily that was successful and my Canon resplendent with a new UV filter is up and running again.

Out For A Duck.

Upper Salhouse Duckpond, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

Anyone else notice how these roadside ponds where the ducks spill out onto the road are gradually being filled in. Along with unbridged fords they are becoming threatened with extinction.

Help The Age Discrimination

The Gentle Art Of British Hypocrisy, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

There is always something going on in London Street number 410: A chugger (a name achieved by amalgamating the words charity and mugger) caught in the act of raising funds for Help The Aged. Amusingly despite that Charity's claim on its website that it stands four square in the fight against ageism in the workplace ("Age discrimination should not be tolerated") I have never seen one of their street fund-raisers over the age of twenty five.

I would imagine that the arguments why this should be so are much the same as the arguments put forward in the sixties and seventies when observers asked why only white males and never women or people from racial minorities became foremen in factories; "They don't want to do it, the work is not suited to them, they have the wrong temperment etc. etc."

Their website also claims that "Age discrimination is hard to spot" - No its not (see photo).

I woke up this morning

Borderland, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

I want an empty room in an empty house in an empty land with an empty sky.