Free For All

Free For All, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

Anti Capitalist campaigners in the early Autumn sun. Current events have proved it to be a great career choice; these days they don't have to do much but sit back and watch it all crumble into dust.

Not everything they had was rubbish so maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch. I did not take any of them but some of the books were quite interesting. There was a 1932 edition of the Wellington Book of Photography (the first one not to have tipped in plates) which admittedly the binding was poor but still a good reading copy. There was a 1935 edition of The Camera Book in good to very good condition, tightly bound. As well as descriptions of pre war processes it has some nice line illustration of contemporary cameras. Neither of great value (in capitalist terms the first is worth about a quid, the second about three or four quid in the right place), both of great interest to camera collectors. There were some Collins cleartype hardbound reprints of great "Classics" (Lorna Doone and The Three Musketeers if I remember correctly) Some odd Edwardian editions of Dickens and some Airport paperbacks. There were also some how to do it books on crafts. As I say I did not take any.

One of the drawbacks of once having owned a second hand bookshop is that whenever these guys are out with their stall, people come up to me with books they have snaffled and want a free valuation: two such did on Wednesday.

The Green Party And The Lib-Dems Stole Our Post Office

The Green Party And The Lib-Dems Stole Our Post Office, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

After over a hundred years, from tomorrow there will be no Post Office on Rosary Road. There was a local campaign to keep it open which looked as if might succeed: the grounds for closing it were not that it was running at a loss (it wasn't) or that it was not fulfilling a social need but that it was within two miles of the Central Post Office in the Castle Mall. A petition was started, various members of the great and the good were lobbied, it was publicised in the press.

What happened next beggar's belief. In the run up to the local elections the two main contenders, the Green Party and the Lib Dems decided they would take over the campaign. They each started their own petitions -hence diluting the original. They each ran rival campaigns to save Rosary Road Post Office. Quite simply they muscled in. Party officials and volunteers announced they would handle it and there was no room for the non alligned. In the two weeks before the election we would recieve seperate newsletters from both parties every day boasting about their individual efforts to save the Office. The last one arrived at midday through my letterbox on election day.

Promises were made. Both parties proposed to lobby Lord this, Lady that, etc. Both were going to travel up to London to see this committee, that quango.

And then nothing. The election was won by the Greens and the Lib Dems withdrew their campaign. There was a line in the paper two weeks later that if anyone wanted the Lib Dem petition they should contact them. No one is sure what happened to the Green one. After a fortnight of Green representitives banging on our doors and putting leaflets through our letterboxes none of us have heard a word from the victorious party about anything. No letters, no meetings and definitely nothing about the Post Office campaign.

In the meantime the totally sidelined Friends Of The Rosary Road Post Office campaign had lost all momentum and the branch was earmarked for closure.

Bevan famously described the Conservative Party as "Less Than Vermin", I think we are justified in adding the Greens and the Lib Dems to this.

It is not all bad news. Thursday has been designated "Kick a Green Party member in the bollocks day" and I live in hope that I will live to hear Fidel radio his secret orders to start the revolution in Thorpe Hamlet. I know who I will be stringing up from the lamp posts outside the Old Post Office on that glorious dawn.

These are my views and no one else's

Elvis has entered The Walk

Elvis impersonator on The Walk, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

I don't normally comment on the buskers and street performers I photograph.

I have to say about this guy that he was completely wrapped up in a world of his own making. As far as he was concerned he was on the stage at Vegas. He wasn't bothered at all with what was going on around him. He hadn't put out a hat to collect money, a card to advertise his services or a pile of tapes for sale. The only time he seemed to notice the passers by was when in his athletic performance he bounced into them. It was a bravura performance that I watched with a mixture of awe and embarrassment.

I just wish I liked the Vegas period Elvis more.

On The Thorpe Hamlet Crime Beat

Unfinished, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

It is only just a week or so since the calm of Thorpe Hamlet was rocked by the Go! Cow incident and was the scene of the first intervention by Norfolk Constabulary's crack Cattle Squad. It appears now we are in the middle of a crime wave. Residents woke up this week in Lollards Road to find this mural.

This is a photograph of the end wall to Lollards Road overlooking Pull's Ferry. (Rosary Road is on the other side of the wall)

Did the painter(s?) run out of paint and because Godfrey DIY supermarket was closed go home leaving his work unfinished or did he plummet the thirty feet to the ground? Did the baby's bottle, clearly shown discarded in a drainpipe, belong to the painter? Should the police be looking for a baby hopelessly sucking on a can of aerosol paint in the mistaken belief that its a feeding bottle? These are just some of the questions currently furrowing the brows of C.S.I. Thorpe Hamlet

Whatever the answer, the Norwich City Council Swat team, we have been told, is going to clean it off. The cost of this operation will be met by closing the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Accident and Emergency Unit for a week. Seems fair to me.

Ride Of The....

Valkyrie, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

Honda Valkyrie seen in Norwich City Centre.
Six cylinders, liquid cooled, 1520cc. The Harley in the background looks puny by comparison. Because (in layman's terms) it sticks out a lot on both sides cornering at speed can be tricky according to the owner but he also said it is better at the fast corners than Harleys.

Not as bad as the pre-war BMW with their sideways fitted cylinder which meant you could knock off the spark plug if there was a kerb on a corner

It's still not a Triumph Rocket though.

I must point out I am a strictly armchair motorcyclist these days and hence do not really know what I am talking about.

Wikipedia on the Valkyrie

Go! Cow

Go! Cow, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

Breaking news: outside Godfrey's on Rosary Road. It was herded down Thorpe Road by motorists, who instead of stopping and calling the police, hooted at it. It has been corralled in the car park.

Oh God It's Southwold

Oh God It's Southwold, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

This photo was the cause of my receiving an extraordinary email written in the finest New Age techno gobbledy gook. The sender seemed to think
a)I would know who Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris are and
b) that I would care.
(it turns out that they are students of "human feelings from a large number of weblogs" who construct "playful interfaces" out of "art").
The message read

Hi, I'm contacting you today because I'm working with Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris on a book about feelings on the web. We found an image on your blog that we found beautiful, and we wanted to get your permission to use it in the book. The book is based on the website We Feel Fine (http://www.wefeelfine.org). In return, we will give you a free copy of the book, signed by the authors, and an invitation to the book launch when the book comes out. A description of the site is below. I'd love to hear back from you and if you provide a mailing address, we can send you a permissions form.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been studying human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.
Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20’s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Thank you very much for your time,

Sincerely,

Matt
matt@wefeelfine.org


Privacy Notice:

We Feel Fine only collects and displays data that was already posted publicly on the World Wide Web. We Feel Fine never associates individual human names with the feelings it displays, though it always provides a link to the blog from which any displayed sentence or picture was collected. Also, bloggers may make a blog post invisible to the We Feel Fine crawler by including the following code somewhere in the post: nofeelings. Finally, you may request for an image to be taken down from the site by e-mailing someone@wefeelfine.org.
We Feel Fine is an independent project conceived and created by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar. It bears no affiliation to any company or organization.

As if anyone in their right mind wants to "make the world seem a little smaller".

I have always felt it is best if no one knows what is in my heart and my mind (for one thing it puts off girls).

I replied, as follows, to this meaningless waffle. I could not bring myself to start with a hi in the style of the original sender

Thank you for your enquiry about the image
www.flickr.com/photos/thorpehamlet/1142777196/

You are mistaken it is not a beautiful image. It was not meant to be. I am sorry but I cannot allow you to use any image of mine that you so misconstrue. Any attempts to do so will result in contact with my solicitors and also my horse whip.

YOU MAY NOT USE THE IMAGE.

The cheekiest part of the letter was the part that explained that it was up to me to put code into my webpage to prevent their webcrawler hijacking my images.

I recommend that as many people as possible put the following sentences into their blog "I feel nauseous at the whole concept of wefeelfine.org . I feel horrified at the usage of the English Language by Matt@wefeelfine.org . I feel threatened by the attempts to deify the previously unknown Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar." Hopefully the webcrawler will get the message.