Pig Sty Avenue

Baby Jack O'Lantern , originally uploaded by hampshiregirl . "Baby Jack O'Lantern and PigStyAve. I carved PSA's head into a pumpkin. I hope you like how it came out... Happy Halloween my beloved DMU friends!" Mind you, she's been taking an interest in me for a while: here I am , the subject of some troubled fantasy. Hampshiregirl's a marvellous example of America's leading the world in cosmetic pharmacology. She looks like a schoolgirl, but is actually a former girlfriend of Richard Nixon . Maybe there's a family resemblance? Or something.

I was going to write about this bastard Government's education policy, in a really rather clever macro/micro way. But the evening's worn on, so it'll have to wait. Meanwhile, here's some Stan and Ollie:

foolish spider , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . The sort of photo you take when you're not getting out much.

There are often rows about American politics in DMU on Flickr. One thing that these arguments show is a very clear liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican divide; unlike Britain, where all three major parties differ only in detail, and the whole business has become a postmodern fandango. American politics seems like much more fun, perhaps because it's all so far away, like Dallas . As usual, HST was on the money . Anyhow, I loved these behind the scenes photos from Time magazine .

10 inch Salvia Divinorum , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . The latest plant to hit eBay. They seem to be going down a storm.

Sickbay , originally uploaded by hoskarsson . Memories of Holy Loch, 1985. Rust buckets, these!

I was going to blog about some extremely distressing news , but instead here's an animation for My Pal Foot Foot . Worrying about your prospects doesn't improve them one iota.

I notice that the wee shite's gone beta. Always copying me, he is...

Clare and Molly BW , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . That's my oldest and my youngest baby.

Clare's here for a visit. We went out to collect hawthorn berries . I'll eat the flesh, it's good for the heart ; the seeds'll be stratified and sown in the spring. Part of a vague, long term plan to reconstruct traditional English hedgerows . My phone takes 10 second videos. I had a few random ones on the 'phone. Maybe a low res 10 second video could be a digital haiku ? Or something.

YouTube . It's what lots of people are talking about. "The Flickr of Video", though it's shaping up to be more than that. Different , anyhow. Another phenemenon that we can watch develop whilst we participate in it, entirely unaware of where it's going. I'll certainly blog more about this another time, but meanwhile here's an interesting article from the Guardian this morning.

PILOTS: PSA's 1000th photo , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . A thousand photos on Flickr! And that's not a vast amount, relatively speaking. Uninspired lately, mind.

This is hilarious. Poor quality video, I know... My nephew showed this to me on his phone in the pub, and I was laughing so much people nearby were muttering "drugs" "ecstacy" "his age"...

Johnny-Boy "I am the enforcer" Reid has emerged from his cellar again. Our prisons are overflowing, so the police stations are going to be utilised to keep people locked up. Furthermore, he's been advertising for ships to turn into prisons. A Home Office spokeswoman tells us that her boss: "has said he wants us to explore innovative solutions to the prison capacity issue." Innovative ? Our prisons are full because too many people get sent to them . Some people are public hazards and need to be kept out of the way, but most prisoners are social inadequates, and locking them up won't help them become adequate anytime soon. Intelligent community sentences might. But The Enforcer can't be seen to be a decent human being, can he? The trouble is, even within his own sad, quasi-macho terms, he's failed... He promised root and branch reform of the Home Office. But the absence of forward thinking on prisons has pushed him into reverting to ancient ...

...can be found here .

I blogged this photo late last night after a few drinks, and, my keyboard skills being a trifle below par, promised an explanation. Never let it be said the Pig Sty Avenue gives empty promises when he's half cut. The reason I liked that photo so much was that it took me back to the WOMAD festivals at Morecambe in the 90s. What larks! Great music, great atmos., herbal cigarettes, happy days and nights... We camped by a cricket pitch. The main venue was in a disused railway station. That photo of Salif Keita 's backing singer brought it all back.

Salif Keita - backing singer , originally uploaded by Robby Garbett . WOMAD! I'll explain later...

Being a "distance student", you get to use something called UK Libraries Plus . To cut a long story short, this means I went today to join the library at Northumbria University , where I was an undergraduate in the early 80s. In those days, it was called Newcastle Polytechnic, of course. It was the spookiest thing, this 20 year time lapse. There are some trees, near the entrance to the Art Gallery, and facing the library's administration area. Lovely silver birches , forty foot high. But I remembered when one of them, the biggest, was about fifteen foot... Some wanker, God knows why, had cut a ring around its bark - that should've have killed it. Someone else wrapped thick sellotape around the wound, and wrapped into that bandage a note which said, so far as I recall: "If I find out who is trying to kill this tree I will break their fucking legs". Perhaps the sellotapist was also a botanist and knew what they were doing. The tree has flourished. As I ...

phonepic.jpg , originally uploaded by shveckle . Shveckle's a street photographer who lives in New York. She uses mostly point-and-shoots, but this is with a camera phone. Ace, eh? 2006, but with all the look of the 50s. It's an inspiring photo because it make one realise what ever more sophisticated, everyday technology can do to illuminate our everyday lives. Anoraks with Holgas: take note.

This song kept my sanity during the long lonely days and nights in Libya.

"I don't think it's right for politicians to start making moral judgements about people. That's the last thing I would want to do. What I think the question is, is what are my political views and as a politician those are the ones I'm accountable for to the public. As a politician I think anybody should be free from discrimination and I'll fight to the absolute end to make sure that is the case." Indeed. But now, we read about divisions within the government , which suggests that Ruth Kelly 's dedication to freedom from discrimination isn't being fought quite to the absolute end. It's ok to be gay, but not if you want to stay in a B&B, apparently. Or if, say, the local Gay Pride Rally organising committee ask to hold their meetings of an evening in a church hall. Ms Kelly's refused to confirm , or indeed to deny, that she's a member of Opus Dei . Why's that then? If it's an innocent organisation, like the WI, why not b...

molly hand sunlight , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . This morning, the sun was flowing in through the venetian blinds, and I clicked away whilst Molly played on the sitting room floor. It was a lovely morning. I've boxed-off time in the week for studying, to keep the weekends free for Us. It was great today to just have some time to ourselves. I love the way the light's caught her wee hand here. And the hand-ear gesture is a Molly characteristic.

Mind-fingers-keyboard-windows-print: hooray! The first bit of actual "work" this term.

crushing some tiny trucks with my enormous butt , originally uploaded by buildingcrusher . You've got to watch out for him - he's like any big star, he doesn't need the publicity now that he's in the stratosphere. This photo is post-ironically entitled: "crushing some tiny trucks with my enormous butt". It's a remarkable new departure.

I was asking myself, if I won the Lottery, or otherwise had a dramatic upturn in cashflow, would I get a Leica M8 ? Or would I go with the Nikon D2X ? Hmm? Well, of course, a lot of the technical matters are way over my bald head. But the Leica's more expensive by £500, and then the cost of the lenses! OMG! And it's smaller, but not that much smaller. And no autofocus? I should cocoa. It's the great thing about blogging, eh? The subjects that make your wife's eyes glaze over, or even cause her to leave the room, you can share with the world instead.

Molly and dead snake , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . She simply has no interest whatsoever in cuddly toys. Indeed, I'm proud to say that she consistently turns her back on The World of Numpty. We wish she'd sleep a bit more, though. After a year, a single whole night's unbroken sleep is something we can't recall.

We can be proud that the Venerable Bede , the first English historian, lived, studied, and wrote his books here. Coming from Jarrow, I've grown up with an image of him in my mind, as if he were as close as a beloved relation who died shortly before I was born. I don't think it is so now, but Bede was a common Christian name amongst Jarrow boys - I think the name's unusual everywhere else. My sincere hope, is that the next generation will connect us with the March and Bede, and not Catherine Bloody Cookson. Don't even get me started about her and the thorough nastiness and literary impoverishment of her so-called novels.

taking off , originally uploaded by timojazz . Timo's got an eye like no other.

Molly's First Birthday , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . Hooray! I was having too much fun to take many photos - this was the best of them. The time's flown in , eh? She's had a lovely time today. We all have.

Flag , originally uploaded by Dshalock the Libertarian . In a shameless move to liven this blog's traffic up, I'm hustling on DMU. Dshalock was the first to step up. (And I solved the Flickr problem by removing the Avenue from the blog list there, and reinstalling it...)

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

You'll see that the Avenue's gone beta, which is mostly cool, except that some bug means I can't blog photos direct from Flickr now.

She'll be one year old tomorrow. In a reassertion of ethnic identity, Herself's for making a cloutie dumpling . Molly and I went for a walk this afternoon, and gathered acorns. I'll sow them next week. They might grow for a thousand years.

My first SLR camera, twenty-something years ago, was a Nikon EM . When my interest in photography was re-awakened, I started with an Olympus compact, and did a lot of research and thinking before buying a dSLR - the best deal brought me back to Nikon with the d50. I'm cynical enough about big-business to avoid foolishness like "brand loyalty". But I will stick with Nikon for the foreseeable future because of the fact that I can use almost any Nikkor (or Sigma) lens on any Nikon camera body. So I was quite intrigued when my friend Elinesca raised the question the fishiness (or otherwise) of Nikon's marketing of their new d80 in a DMU thread . I then googled to jill/txt , who gave some food for thought, (and who is, coincidentally, a chum of Elinesca). It's very clever. The very fact that I'm blogging this is evidence of the success of the campaign. Whoever dreamed that one up has earned their Columbian Marching Powder this month. Not that I'd dream o...

Peter in the Long Bar , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . Peter, the man in this photo, was telling us a story about a bar, a horse, and a punk rocker when I snapped this in July with a new cameraphone. Now, the story's made the BBC , and UPI . None of those newshounds got the Angelic Upstart angle, though.

Unknown Dahlia 2 , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . Looks nice with the raindrops, doesn't it? Not enough time for the allotment. The old man has taken down the tomato plants, and we need to get the greenhouses tidied for the winter. We're going to grow some winter lettuces in one of them, and there' a type of potato called swift which can be planted in the greenhouse in February and it'll be ready to eat by easter. The most irksome thing about being short of time is that blackberries, apples and plums are falling to the ground, rather than going to make jam, cider or wine. Sometimes, I daydream about winning the National Lottery and being a full time allotmenteer.

Great North Run 2006 (26) , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . I went with Molly this morning to watch the Great North Run go through Jarrow. It's a half marathon from Newcastle to South Shields. It was really interesting photographically, trying to snap runners as they went by, in focus. I got to use the "sport" mode on the camera for the first time. These two lads came out really well. My son-in-law, Martin, was in the run with his Dad, and I was hoping to get a photo, but missed them.

In my 20s, moving in left wing circles, people were always fascinated if they learned I came from Jarrow. The March was one of those milestones of working class history in Britain: the Peterloo Massacre, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Jarrow March, the Great Miners' Strike... Now, I suspect that anybody under 40, even people from Jarrow, will have only the vaguest notions of what happened, and why. One of these harmonica players is my great uncle, I'm told. It says something that this 30kb jpeg was the best quality picture of the March I could get on Google Image.