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.

Steps

Steps, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

Blogged because this is a rare photo of mine that I like, looks how I wanted it to and (for me at least) says a lot about the Norfolk seaside town of Cromer where it was taken.

FINE CITY

You Gotta Move, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

You gotta move
You gotta move
You gotta move, child
You gotta move
Oh, when the Lor' gets ready
You gotta move

You may be high
You may be low
You may be rich, child
You may be poor
But when the Lor' gets ready
You gotta move

You see that woman
Who walks the street
You see that police
Upon his beat
But then the Lor' gets ready
You gotta move
You gotta move

Sign Of The (Church) Times

Sign Of The (Church) Times, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

St Andrews Trowse has just had its roof replaced after the lead was stripped off it before Christmas.

Another sign on the church announces the use of Smart Water to "fingerprint" the roof. All high flat surfaces on St Andrews have been covered with barbed wire. To my eye anti-climb paint has also been used at higher levels. The alarm system has been beefed up. A church that is sadly never left open* now has all the appearance of being under siege.

I cannot find more recent figures but between January and November 2007 twenty one insurance claims were made from Norfolk churches in respect of the theft of lead.


* In the parish's defence it is only a mile away from St Wandregesilius, Bixley that was the subject of an arson attack in 2005.