A quick sepia snap of the Silvermine skyline from the braai we were at last night. The clouds were pretty.
I’m not a big fan of sepia, but on this occasion, it just seemed right.
Nor am I a big fan of quota photos, but… y’know…
Category: flickr
Long weekend, part one
Ah. The opportunity of four days of rest & relaxation.
Ja, right.
Easter weekend used to be the time that spring started in the UK. Not this year, I hear. But while spring cleaning the garden was the norm there, I find myself doing the same here, despite the fact autumn is setting in – it was only 29°C today. While spray-painting some railings, I found time to grab some quick autumnal pics betweeen coats:
Now I find myself, tired and aching, with the only three of my sixteen jobs done. The only one that looks even vaguely like fun is “Buy Beer”. I might try and stretch that one out as long as possible, since the rest involve hard work and no beer.
Therefore, I’ll be doing a meet and greet session at Ultra Liquors in Wynberg from 8-6 tomorrow. If you’re coming along, please bring one of those KFC buckets.
Not only will the food be essential, the bucket will surely come in useful after sampling bottle store wares all day.
Ray Cooper is insane
Seriously.
We actually had a good time at the Elton John gig last night. No, I’m not a fan of his music, but I have huge respect for his musical ability and his understated showmanship. You don’t last in any business as long as he has without being damn good at it – and he is.
Slipping seamlessly from classical piano to honky-tonk and back again, he gave an impressive three hour show playing many (but notably, not all) of his big hits, plus some of his new material which I hadn’t heard before and won’t be hearing again.
Elton played piano and sang to us for about an hour before being joined on stage by Ray Cooper.
Because I’d never heard of Ray Cooper, for some reason, I had formed a mental image of a cross between Ray Charles and Tommy Cooper. But hopefully more alive.
What we got was a well-dressed (crisp white shirt, tie, braces) 68-year old percussionist.
My initial thoughts were that there was no fez. Also that, more importantly, I may have been mistaken on the “more alive” bit.
I was wrong. How very wrong.
Dear [chosen deity, if any]. For two hours, he hit drums, cymbals, more drums, more cymbals, a xylophone, tubular bells, more drums, a marimba and some more drums with more power and more energy than I could have managed for 2 minutes. And he got 37 different sounds out of single tambourine. Which – whichever way you look at it – is impressive. But the sheer energy and speed of his work was incredible, dancing between timpani and bongos and not putting a foot, hand or drumstick wrong all night. It was amazing.
I did grab some quick video of “Mr C” at work – please excuse the occasional shakiness. I only brought the camera along to take some pictures: I wasn’t planning to video, so I wasn’t well set up. Remember – this guy is 68 (sixty-eight) years old and he’s been banging away like this for almost two hours already. It really is worth a watch.
Incredible.
Because today is today…
And that day is National Cleavage Day in South Africa, as sponsored by Wonderbra, I thought I’d give you a couple of quota photos:
Here’s a pair of great tits (Parus major) as snapped by my dad in France earlier this year.
(sorry)…
A few years on
How time flies when you’re having fun. Or when you’re just getting older, since time is relative and every second makes up a smaller proportion of your lifespan. Which is why you have to get lucky to hit that fly on your Kalahari Kreef. To him, that hand is like watching an episode of Time Warp. There was a BBC documentary on it, so it must be true.
But I digress. Often.
It was Argus day today – that being the day of the biggest timed cycle race in the world – and we went to watch for as long as the kids were interested.
I took this photo (which actually I really like) of the boy watching the bikes going by:
and it wasn’t until I got home and began uploading stuff that I found a photo of the same boy in the same place doing the same thing:
The camera has changed, probably the cyclists too. The yellow line still needs repainting. But the (wholly unintentional) similarity between the pictures is striking, no?
The earlier photo was taken three years and three days ago, which would make Alex 10½ months old. Flickr tells me that young Alex was snapped on my 2MP Sony Ericsson W900i, which would go some way to explaining the (iffy) quality. As would the fact it was taken at 7:49 on a Sunday morning.
More Argus day pics in the March Things flickr set.