More remixed Popular comments. Neither song was particularly meaningful to me, but the memories they invoke are the real point.
More photographic orphans, and more playing around with black-and-white and selective desaturation. I like the way they ended up looking like old book plates. This is Cairnholy II, one of two neighbouring chambered cairns in Galloway, taken on a rainy day in June last year. Click for the full images.
More of my comments from Popular, lightly remixed for the archives. I’m leaving my own blog comments off to encourage people to go there instead.
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22 May 2009 · 
x2 · Music
Last week I joined an online community I’ve been following from the sidelines for a while: Freaky Trigger’s Popular, where Tom Ewing has been reviewing every UK number one in chronological order. I remember seeing it back when it was new, thinking “hmm, that could be interesting if he keeps it up”, but not really following along because the ’50s hits meant little to me; and then being seriously impressed when I checked back at around the 1973 mark. It’s one of the highlights of the personal-blog-community-web-o-sphere, though I should have expected no less from someone who wrote one of my favourite things ever about same.
I’ve been dithering over what to do with this photo for months. It’s a one-off, because it doesn’t really go with any of the others I’m gradually turning into galleries, and I can’t decide whether I prefer the colour version or the black-and-white. So here’s one, and if you click on it you’ll get the other. It’s Ailsa Craig off the Ayrshire coast, taken in June last year.
18 May 2009 · x1 · Travel
Tweet Nothings, Part 1
I’m acutely aware how ephemeral my past few entries must seem, but Old Father Time isn’t kind to fathers, at least when it comes to having time for old blogging pursuits. The weighty essays and extended comic riffs will have to wait. In the meantime, most of my ephemera hasn’t even ended up here: it’s at Twitter, despite my boring misgivings about same. I can do something about at least one misgiving, though, by giving those tweets a home here as well as there. They may be ephemeral, but they’re my ephemera, and I don’t want to lose them to some future corporate whim. So here’s an archive of the year to date in 140-character instalments (tidied up a bit), minus the ones that are too ephemeral even for me. Feel free not to click through.
This has been our alarm clock for the past week:
Twingkoo TWINGKOO LITTUL STAHHH
HA wa WONDAH WHAT-choo ahh
UP ah-BUV the WHIRR so HIGHHH
LIKE a LIIIE-ka IN the SKYYYYY
Twingkoo TWINGKOO LITT-ul stah
HA wa WON-dah whatchoo ahhh.
I think he’s onto something. “Like a Laika in the sky” is a much better line.
16 May 2009 · x2 · Journal
The Two-Year-Old at Breakfast
He munches solemnly
His bowl of Cheerios
’Cos eating cereal
Is deadly serios.
Nursery Swine
To market, to market,
To buy a fat pig,
Atishoo, atishoo,
We all fall down.
April 2009