One month…

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This time next month, I’ll be boarding a large jet-engined aircraft – vuvuzela in hand – for my trip to Europe on The Last Hurrah 2010 tour. It therefore seems fitting that we should indulge ourselves with a little more a-ha goodness. This one is from their 1990 album East of the Sun, West of the Moon and it’s called I Call Your Name.

A great song that made it to number 45 in the French singles chart. Because they have no taste.

I should be at Grand West watching Crowded House tonight, but I’m not feeling great and the kids are still recovering from ear and sinus infections respectively, so I’ve stayed home to look after them. And me.
In an ironic twist of fate, Mrs 6000 took the babysitter along to the concert.

Nothing, however, will stop me from making an appearance at the Oslo Spektrum in a few weeks time. I could be oozing blood from every orifice (very African) and I’d still be there singing along.
It would be nice to just be healthy that night, though.

Better by tomorrow

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After a weekend wracked by Mrs 6000’s tonsillitis and the consequent increased demands on my fathering abilities, I find myself concerningly nursing a sore throat of my own this morning. Both the kids have also been coughing and thus we’re off on another family outing to the doctor this morning. Oh joy.

Sore throats are never good, but this one is especially bad because tomorrow evening, we have plans (and tickets) to go and see (and hear) Crowded House at the Grand West Arena. Of course, laryngitis (I haven’t had any tonsils since a well-planned surgical intervention in 1979) will have no bearing on my eyesight or ear…sight(?), but it will make me feel generally crap and prevent me from singing along with the band in question.

Hits such as Four Seasons In One Day (written by Neil Finn after a particularly heavy 24 hours playing Championship Manager on the Playstation) and the much misheard Don’t Dream You’re Sober – an alcoholic’s worst nightmare – will have to be performed solely by the guys on stage and that would be a bad thing for the audience generally. Believe it, because it’s true.

Anyway, it would be foolish of me to strain my currently delicate vocal cords any further chatting to you good people. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with arepeejee’s stunning Warp Speed Winter Gardens:

Straight out of Sheffield, via Betelgeuse.

Make it so.

A Grand Design

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One of my favourite shows back in the UK was Grand Designs and I was therefore delighted to see that it’s made it over here as well – we get it on the BBC Lifestyle channel. OK, so we’re (at least) a couple of years behind the UK, but what we do know doesn’t hurt us and watching people building homes isn’t exactly time sensitive and neither is Kevin McCloud’s insightful and detailed commentary.
We’re in the middle of a Grand Designs Revisited series here at the moment and tonight was one of my favourite episodes from way back when.

The guy building his own house was Ben Law, who works as a woodsman in Sussex. But this was different from most situations in that Ben wasn’t moving from a house to his new-build – he was living in the woods in a tent and a leaky caravan and had been doing so for 10 years. No hot water, no heating. It was – perhaps unsuspectingly – a solitary life. But he was happy with it, which is surely the most important thing.

But time came to build his own place. And being a woodsman and a craftsman, he did most of it himself – from the woods that surrounded him. The basic plan was a timber A-frame and the gaps between the wood was filled in with bales of straw. Add homemade lime mortar and locally-sourced clay and suddenly, a low-tech, green, but very liveable house came together.

But it was a house for one. Which is why I was amazed when they went back and found that not only did he have a wife, he also had a 19 day old son. And then they went back again a few years later and they’d had another kid. The mudbath in front of the newly-built cottage in the photo above had been replaced with a beautiful garden, complete with homemade wooden toys for the kids. Also, a workshop whereby Ben could do stuff with the wood that he harvested from the woods around them.

I was impressed with Ben’s choice of lifestyle. Not because I’d want to live that way, but I had a certain admiration for his abilities, skill and dedication to living his sustainable green life. And I love the way that he connected with the woodland and lived off the land. And I don’t think I was the only one intrigued by the way he did things: now he has books out, he runs courses on woodland management, he sells his products and he even does tours of his house.

All in all, it’s an amazing turnaround for the guy who was living under canvas in all weathers. And there are messages there for everyone. To the big consumers – an example that you actually can live off the land; that traditional methods can still have a place in our modern life. And to the the greenies, a lesson that you can combine being eco-friendly with living in the real world.

Persistent Pyramids

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Dreadfully busy, but found this somewhere and quite liked it.

Anatoly Zenkov – Persistent Pyramids

No explanation as to how this effect is achieved, but I’m guessing it is probably something to do with a temporal distortion in the space-time continuum. If you adapt your flash to fire high energy protons at the breaking waves, you will create a small wormhole which gives this interesting reflective effect. On the downside, you could create a black hole and KILL US ALL, but as long as Anatoly gets his photo, everything’s alright.

Anatoly has also risked KILLING US ALL by producing strangelets (a form of matter that some think might exist at the centre of neutron stars, which could bring about an ‘ice-9’-type transition, wherein all surrounding matter could be instantaneously converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish) by using this technique on trees, landscapes and even a person.

You can see the beautiful results here.