Sunday market

sunday market, originally uploaded by moclaydon.

A nice trip to the Sunday market with the firstborn (I bought 6 mouse-gnawed, water-stained books with an average age of 100 for a fiver, Sarah bought a vintage Ringtons coffee tin and a splendidly grotesque vase thingy in the shape of a hollowed-out siamese cat.....result!) followed by a cider-fuelled tapas lunch and an afternoon visit to Mum/Grandma to mull over old photos and eat shortbread.....not good for anything much now except the couch and a pair of loose trousers......

PS.....the truth isn't always out there, don't take no rubber nickels!

Ladies....the perfect excuse to overindulge

Found at ModernMechanix

One for Richard

Just think yourself lucky things have moved on a bit!
Picture from 1931 at ModernMechanix

Who do Hoodoo?

I remember telling Sarah about this collection of scans from The King Novelty Co "Curio Catalog No 81" at I'm Learning To Share ages ago, but I don't think I posted about it.....time to put that right!

The Hexham Wolves

A bit of local folklore, though I have to admit it was news to me.....found, accidently, while I was checking the weather for Hexham tomorrow (Ma and I didn't particularly want to get drenched when there were other, possibly more pleasant, wet-weather destinations on offer!)

"(about) One hundred years ago, a Northumberland town was gripped by panic when a mysterious wolf began attacking local livestock. Charles Fort recorded the case – and much other strangeness in Britain during the winter of 1904/1905"

The story at the BBC
The story at The Fortean Times

ps.....maybe if we make it that far west I'll pay a visit to the local library, check out their newspaper archives!

Not round here they don't!

Read the 6 page article at ModernMechanix

Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space

If you're in the mood for the ultimate in B movies (as in vampire grave robbers from outer space. Mainliner Vampira, pictured below with an unfeasibly small waist, looking a bit pensive)......

....watch it in all it's pixelated glory here....

If you're REALLY taken you should perhaps visit The Church of Ed Wood, maybe consider an online baptism....but then again, maybe not!

Watch the video, then check out what they're selling

The product

.....and you didn't even know you wanted one!

The Banana....an atheist's nightmare

....I particulary like the guy on the right with the glittery-teethed maniacal grin!

All is not what it seems

And there's a blog to prove it! Photoshop Disasters is always worth a visit.

Probably a good thing it never happened!

From ModernMechanix....

"Pleasure-Tower Half Mile High
Towering almost half a mile above the ground, dwarfing such gigantic structures as the Empire State Building and the Eiffel tower, a huge concrete tower 2300 feet high, surmounted with a beacon and built with a spiral ramp for autos to climb up its sides, stuns the imagination with its vastness. It is the design of the French engineer, M. Freyssinet, intended for the 1937 Paris Exhibition. He estimates the cost at less than half the Eiffel Tower, or in the neighborhood of $2,500,000. It will be called the “Phare du Monde,” or Lighthouse of the World- The project appears far removed from the visionary and a new all-time “high” in buildings seems in a fair way to being achieved."

Hmmm...so let's get this straight, you drive up to the top, turn round, then drive back down again? Wow...they certainly knew how to live!

Dynamic Architecture

I can see problems....let's say you live on the 13th floor and Mr Arbuthnot in the appartment next door decides he wants to face North while he paints a series of watercolours, meanwhile you, being a keen gardener and having a seed tray of prizewinning leek seedlings on your windowsill, favour the South..........

A mystery to be solved....or a hoax?

From Wikipedia....

"The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book written in an indecipherable text. It is thought to have been written between approximately 1450 and 1520. The author, script and language of the manuscript remain unknown.Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols."

Wikipedia entry

Scans of the book on Flickr

Late April Fools...or a good idea?

From the Metro today.....

"Food company Aunt Bessie's claims it is breathing new life into the fortunes of the ice cream van by replacing the 99 Flake with an all-weather alternative." Now, replace that ice cream cone with a crispy Yorkshire pudding look-alike and their "Mash Van" fleet might just make a killing!

Losing stuff.....

OK, so we've all done it.....can't find something vital when we had it in our hands a couple of minutes ago.....it happens to me at least twice a week. Listen to Tony Hawks on the subject (BBC Radio 4, Sunday April 6th 2008)...



But what to do about it?

Help is at hand....online, check out Professor Solomons 12 Principles for finding a lost object or you can download the whole book

Then, if you happen to believe in the dark arts, there's always "Finding lost objects with the aid of Numerology".....but when the first instruction is to "concentrate on the lost object and scribble down a nine digit number on a piece of paper" somehow, I'm not convinced!!!

Read this doc on Scribd: Finding Lost Objects with the Help of Numerology

Underwater

Modernmechanix has a great post "How to Drown Yourself DIY Style" pulling together past posts about vintage diving "developments". Go read.

Just in case you wondered....

.....scans of the whole (1971) book here

The downside of being French......apparently!

About this book Read this bookThe Popular Educator

By the way, a faubourg is a French suburb (Wikipedia).....and it's going to be my new "word of the week"!

Social comment from the natives?

Not sure whether this is Alston in Cumbria (former family stronghold of the Clementson branch of the family).....but it might well be!

Found on Bits and Pieces

North Pole Inner (as in Hollow) Earth Expedition.....

.....er, no comment!