Pig Sty Avenue

A Hasselblad C/M. And colour developing. And home enlarging, (Number One Daughter told me yesterday that she'd bought a load of darkroom equipment, including a good enlarger, from someone who went digital. She's never used it and will pass it on to me). This is the way to go: serious, high quality portraits, indoors with the Hasselblad, outdoors with the Leica. Make the prints, get them framed, put them on the wall or give them to family and friends as presents. Voila! Everything I've ever blogged or even thought about photography has been leading to this conclusion: unique images hanging on a wall. All of the online photo-sharing fandango is so much frivolity.

Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical assemblies (LOC) , originally uploaded by The Library of Congress . From the Library of Congress photo collection on Flickr. Try getting that colour with a digital sensor. But click on it and read the comments and remember the maxim: If you don't have anything useful to say, shut the fuck up.

I notice that the Albert Kahn account on Flickr has been shut down, which means that this post looks somewhat bereft, (broken links: internet alzheimer's). So here are some other autochromes from Flickr to make up for the loss. And here's a post at a blog called The Blue Lantern, all about the Mademoiselles Mespoulet and Mignon.

Wenger's probably the PL's best whinger . However, one does live in a fucking glass house and shouldn't perhaps throw too many stones...

To all the Avenue's readers. And to the crew of The Antarctic , which has been at anchor in Irvine Bay since Christmas Eve.

, originally uploaded by beebo wallace . In a pub in London.

This was quite something into the early 80s. So far as I know, it dated back to the times of full employment and when most working class men on Tyneside were employed in shipbuilding or other heavy industry. It was a kind of party for men who "balled up", left work at midday, on Christmas Eve. It became institutionalized a bit when working men's clubs started to put on a buffet, a blue comedian and a couple of strippers. Looking back, it was part of an oral culture - you'd never see a sign advertising a ballers' balls. Instead, you'd arrange it with your mates and male relatives a day or two before, and it was always dependent on your being able to get away from work, which in those days depended on the system of the "pass out" and an amenable foreman. I'm not sure about the etymology, or even, frankly, the spelling. It could be bowlers' , I seem to remember some people pronouncing it that way. According to the OED, a baller is one who a...

Just in case I ever get time to do it, here's a free media storage thingummy .

Talking of whinging managers, as we were , here's some of Ms Taylor's deathless reporting tagged onto this article about Michael Owen staying on. "Gareth Southgate, Viduka's former manager at Middlesbrough, was in rather more downbeat mood yesterday when he expressed annoyance towards rival clubs for behaviour aimed at unsettling some of his key players." One senses the start of a whole new collection.

hill's cold tablets , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . The Avenue's virtual fame knows no bounds. I got a request today to use this photo , and naturally I gave it. I don't know how old this tin is, exactly, but Hill's Cold Tablets were part of the sponsorship for The Adventures of Ellery Queen on NBC in the 1940s . So you can imagine one of the characters in Godfather I, say, having them in his topcoat pocket to combat his cold on a freezing New York night. Luca Brasi, perhaps, or would he be too hard to be arsed with Hill's Cold Tablets? There's a thought. And swimming with the fishes, that time of year, would do his cold no good at all. Luca Brasi image from here.

According to Redknapp: "We didn't deserve to get beaten, that's for sure. I couldn't foresee any problems after half-time. I just thought it would be a case of waiting for the goal and taking all three points." Well, you thought wrong, eh? Twat. It's a matter of perspective on discourse. What could have been reported as a famous victory for one side, becomes instead an irritating setback for another. You could read the whole thing from London based AFP bastards here .

Source: http://students.umf.maine.edu/mccormka/public.www/history/frontpage.html

And furthermore... I was crap at football as a kid so I never played it with pleasure, and never learned the technicalities. I still don't get it. What I see on a football pitch is 11 blokes trying to kick a ball into a goal despite 11 other blokes trying to stop them and do the same thing into another goal... I can't ever detect any particular differences in their overall methodology for doing so. It's obviously the case that a manager can make a big difference to a team. But that's surely more to do with his power to select the team, and improve the players' confidence, than in giving them actual strategy and tactics to use on the playing field? Or something? In the end, it's the big drama of it that's got me hooked. If you choose a league to focus on, say the English Premier, you can get to know the characters involved: add up all the players, the managers, owners, pundits, journalists, and your mates who talk about football, and you've got a...

Although I had a Newcastle-mad phase in my mid teens, going to matches home and away, (this was in the era from Wyn Davies to Malcolm McDonald, with Bobby Moncur the captain and Iam McFaul in goal), after I realised that, (a) being with a like minded young woman with both your clothes off is about the best fun you've ever had; and, (b), football does absolutely nothing to enhance your ability to get you involved with a young woman or women in this way, and can also be an aggravating drain on your cash and time, well, I stopped going to matches and eventually rarely watched them on telly. At one time in the early nineties, I seem to recall, braggging that I couldn't name a single player. Nowadays, although I still find it far from better-than-sex, I'm begining to retake an interest. Funny how things happen, I seem to remember that this started during my first spell in Libya in 2004, because all of my students were fascinated by the English Premier League, and dismayed to r...

The stock Perceptol's running low, so the time has come for buying chemicals and making up my own developer and fixer. I've already priced up the developer . There's a formula for Kodak F-24 at digital truth : Water, 125F/52C 500 ml Sodium Thiosulfate (Hypo) 240 g Sodium Sulfite (anhydrous) 10 g Sodium Bisulfite (anhydrous) 25 g Cold water to make 1L Which compares with the contents of my Ilford Rapid Fixer as follows: Ammonium thiosulfate Sodium acetate Sodium sulfite Sodium bisulfite So the Ilford differs in that it has Ammonium thiosulfite as opposed to Sodium , and it also contains Sodium acetate. I'm going to seek the advice of the nice people at DIY Black & White afore I commit the numbers on an increasingly beleaguered credit card to the less disinterested people at Retrophotographic . Or something.

Here's an email I got out of the blue yesterday from the DoS at MSU: Hi Garry – you indicated (very emphatically) at the meeting here last month that you didn’t want any more McEnglish teaching in January, and there has been no word to say you’ve changed your mind, so I have removed you from the list. Thanks for all you did and I hope your next job is more to your liking. Best wishes Somehow, removal from a list manages to sound almost as dangerous as being put on one. And then I got another email today from a colleague at MSU who told me that one of the wee cheeses there had said that I didn't want to do any pre-entry teaching at MSU, whereas I thought I'd told him a few weeks ago that I was desperate not to have to go back to McEnglish in the winter term, and would be up for any hours he had to offer me at MSU. So it would seem that I've been, kind of, sacked at McEnglish and told indirectly that I'm not going to find any work at MSU, either. The bastar...

I encountered this word this morning for the first time, reading The Cutting Room (Welsh, 2002, 226), where valuable books were being retained by the dealer, and not destroyed as he'd promised, he regarding them as "legitimate pochle". An online illustrated Scots dictionary gives the meaning here . The OED is less certain, giving it as a variation on packald, which is a bundle, a package, (with the subsidiary meaning, the postal service). Welsh, 2002. The Cutting Room . Canongate. Edinburgh.

Sorted. The problem is now that, in my general state of anxiety I've gotten rolls of film exposed and unexposed all mixed up... What a numpty.

...As a comical cat blogged in October 2005 , which I'm pleased he overcame his paranoia and did because a lot has happened in the intervening 3 and a bit years. Anyway, I've been chatting to Little Gwion this evening, and he told me some interesting stuff about these plants. He was wrong, he says, that you wait for the plants to produce "babies" before you harvest them: he's read up about this and you just wait until they're the right size: ping-pong ball-ish. He bothered to go through this and get some excellent information on growing medium. He confirms what's said on one of those links about plastic v. clay pots: he has two (of seven) plants in clay pots, and the five in plastic are all doing much better. He's looking at a harvest in just over three years time, seven years after planting. So that would mean seven plants after seven years. These things appeal to Little Gwion.

Here's the problem. And here's the advice about repairs in Glasgow . I don't know if I'll get to Glasgow before the year's out now, it being the Christmas Vac and all that. I dusted off the spare FED2, the one with the light leak, but I don't think I can get the necessary paint for the curtains without going into Glasgow, too. Bugger.

n00bs , originally uploaded by 01101001 01100001 01101110 .

beebo wallace and pig sty avenue , originally uploaded by zombizi . That's me and Beebo, in the pub.

evidence. , originally uploaded by °๋§ ợ§ღєηŧ . ...And Zombizi on the left.

I've had a splendid weekend in London. Flew from Glasgow Friday afternoon, and spent the night at the Thistle Barbican, (fifteeen minutes walk from the Barbican, and I'm not sure about the thistle). It was as if the entire Euro-zone had decamped there. I noticed coaches, so clearly some enterprising tour operator(s) have cottoned on to the weak pound as an attraction to a do-your-xmas-shopping-in-oxford-street "holiday" to the French, Italian, Spanish and Irish. Only the last of that list were going for the Full English, I noticed. Perhaps that's why Britons distrust most Europeans: they actually prefer a "continental breakfast". Saturday, I was on an exam-writing training course. I won't say who my newest quasi-employer is, but their head quarters are a simultaneous stone's throw from the Old Bailey, Smithfield and St Bartholomew's Hospital. And there's a lane nearby called Cock Lane there, which once sited a knocking-shop, I wa...

Just when I'd cleaned out the notes to self cupboard, here's another note to self: check out spEak You’re bRanes .

Hooray for labels! Going through some notes-to-self. The In Our Time link I posted last week is to a patchy and not up to date Wiki. Even so, it has a lot to recommend it, not least this discussion on the Language Instinct between Pinker and Jonathon Miller. I did some funny notes-t0-self whilst I was coming to the end of my tether in Libya, mind. The World Beach project ? Things which must have once been intriguing, like nowpublic.com , now look almost completely uninteresting. The post and note-to-self about Jackie Brown from January this year give me an interesting dilemma. The song I really liked was Across 110th St., by Bobby Womack. Here it is, with the brilliant opening scene from that movie. But, dig a little deeper, and I find that Across 110th St was itself a movie. Which begs the question, should I buy the soundtrack from the original blaxploitation movie, or from the later blaxploitation tribute ? I suspect I'm going to have to go with the original, on...

Which is forever in the blogsphere. A handful of regular readers, but I've posted several times a week, and usually every day, since late November 2004. And our 4th Wedding Anniversary, too, yesterday. What larks!

She's at anchor . And has been for several weeks now.