kimbofo

Stairway to heaven

Place: Funchal, Madeira
Date: July 28, 2008.
Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ3.

It's been a month since our trip to Madeira -- where did the time go?? -- and I am still working my way through my photographs! It was never this time-consuming when I took print photographs, probably because I wouldn't take more than two or three rolls of 36 images over the space of a week. But give a girl a digital camera and she'll snap that many in a day!

Anyway, the above photograph was taken while we were strolling around Monte, a suburb of Funchal, on our first day wandering around the island. These steps lead to someone's house, which was hidden away behind a rather large stone wall. I liked the whole sense of mystery, of not knowing where these steps might take you...

Bits and bobs from the interweb

Here's a few links that have entertained, amused and enraged me this weekend:

• Madonna: A life in 10 songs, an interesting way to mark her 50th birthday. And I must say I agree with the choices, although I think Holiday should have been listed, perhaps instead of Into the Groove.

• Tesco has changed the wording in its checkout lanes, replacing "10 items or less" notices with signs saying "Up to 10 items". I care about language, but I wish the company was just as pedantic about changing its shameful (over) use of waste packaging and it's soooo 20th century policy on plastic bags.

• London from above, at night showcases the city at her absolute best. The images are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The city glitters like a rare jewel and makes me think, "wow, I live here!" [Thanks to Kinuk for the link]

• An Olympic swimmer refused to sign autographs in Melbourne last week unless it was merchandise from her sponsor. This "decision" says so much about the rampant commercialism that has infected sport. I successfully avoided watching any Olympics coverage, so I really couldn't care less about Australia's new golden girl, swimmer Stephanie Rice, but this infuriates me. Sure, she put in hard graft and deserves to be acknowledged, but how much taxpayers money went into funding her sporting achievement? Don't the fans deserve a little respect?

• New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham's slide show reveals what Park Avenue looks like when the street is taken over by bikes and other non-motorised wheeled traffic. Having gone on a bike tour of Manhattan myself last year, this looks like a lot of fun!

Weekend weather

Place: Bedroom window, West London
Date: Sunday August 30, 2008.
Time: About 4.30pm.
Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ3.

Weather-wise it's been one of those weird weekends here in old London town.

Yesterday was unbelievably sunny and gorgeous. One of those beautiful blue-sky days, with plenty of sunshine and a light breeze. We spent a couple of hours sitting out the front of our local enjoying cider over ice and it couldn't have been more lovely.

This morning dawned wet and wild, the perfect type of day for snuggling under the duvet and ploughing your way through a good book with a pot of freshly brewed coffee at the ready. Later the rain eased off and the sky brightened momentarily, but come 4.15pm the clouds threw down a spectacular amount of water while the thunder boomed and the lightning flashed. The torrential downpour lasted all of 20 minutes, over before it had begun.

Goodness knows what tomorrow will bring.

Throwback Thursday: 'No Say In It' by Machinations (1984)

I was never a Machinations fan, probably because the lead singer wasn't cute enough when I was a teenager! Shallow, huh?

Not having heard this song for at least 20 years, I rediscovered it on YouTube last week and found myself singing away to it. It seems to have stood the test of time quite well -- it's got an awesome bassline.

For those who are interested, Machinations were from Sydney. According to the Australian Rock Database, they were around between 1980-1989 and reformed briefly in 1997 -- probably to prop up the retirement fund.

How I fear that the most winnable election in US history is going to go down the pan

The more I watch the reports on Channel 4 News about the American presidential election, the more I become convinced that the Democrats are gonna lose it and McCain will be a shoe-in.

First, we had the former Hillary Clinton supporters -- some 30 per cent -- who reckon they won't support Barack Obama because he's a man! Yes, they'd rather vote for McCain.

And now we have some other Democrats claiming they won't vote for a man who's a Muslim because he has different values to them.

I really, really hope these people are in the minority. The last thing the world needs is more of the same style of 'presidency' to which we've been subjected for far too long.

Ones to watch: Angus and Julia Stone

I've seen a lot of live acts in my time, but Tuesday evening's performance at the Roundhouse was something rather special.

Brother and sister Angus and Julia Stone, from the northern beaches of Sydney, had the London crowd enthralled with their quirky folk-pop and melodic voices -- his is a slow, lazy, childish kind of drawl, she sounds like a cross between Bjork and Macey Gray.

They played an amazing set of songs -- sad, lonely, love songs, mainly -- and a dizzying array of instruments, especially Julia who flitted between guitar, piano, harmonica and trumpet.

She danced around stage like a little pixie, he sat there quietly plucking away at the guitar, hiding behind the world's biggest beard.

This review, first published in London Lite, is spot on: "Too tuneful and broad of scope for lo-fi, too twisted for indie and too idiosyncratic for the mainstream, they are both wilfully arty and artlessly unpretentious."

Definitely a duo to watch, me feels.

Links:
Official website
MySpace page

Spider forces family to move out of home

This family wouldn't last five minutes in Australia.

Or as Crocodile Dundee might say, "That's not a spider, this is a spider!" (Warning: if you have a spider phobia you may not wish to read the extended entry.)

Limescale woes

What no one ever tells you when you get your bathroom refurbished is that London's water is so hard, so calcium-enriched, that it will be impossible to keep chromeware and glass sparkling clean.

Within a day -- yes, one single day -- of having our glass showerscreen installed it became caked in a white chalky residue called limescale. This was before we'd used the shower proper and had resulted simply from the builders checking that the showerhead worked.

Obviously, when we started using our new bathroom, the limescale situation got worse. I have taken to wiping down the the showerscreen with window cleaner every day, to practically no effect, and polishing the taps with a microfibre cloth.

The situation has not been helped by the fact that you can't use ordinary cleaning products on Travertine tiles, so I've had to do a bit of internet research to find something that is safe to use on natural stone but strong enough to remove limescale.

Consequently, I have just spent an hour in the bathroom getting completely high on HG Shower Shield, which supposedly keeps dirt and limescale at bay for months at a time. I used quite a bit of it on the showerscreen, having first removed the limescale using another HG-branded product (it took five goes), and put a few dabs of it on the taps and chrome heated towel rail.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it works. The showerscreen looks amazing right now -- it's sparkling like refracted diamonds -- but goodness knows whether it will survive the twice-daily onslaught of calcium-rich water to which we subject it.

But the shower valve and tap is another story. Despite almost rubbing a hole through the wall, I simply cannot remove the limescale stains from the chromeware. Various products and two different types of microfibre cloths have simply not worked.

There goes any idea of having a stainless steel kitchen -- it'd look shite within a couple of days!

Good advice

Place: Oxford, England.
Date: Saturday August 23, 2008.
Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ3.

Seen scrawled on the wall of a college at Oxford.

Student radicalism. Don't you just love it? Hehe.

A day trip to Oxford

All photograhs: Oxford, England.
Date: August 23, 2008.
Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ3.

It's a Bank Holiday long weekend here in the UK and so, with an extra day to play with, we decided to take a train trip to Oxford for a bit of a look-see.

The last time I went to Oxford was in 1999, when I had to interview a scientist about her work on the Greenhouse Effect for a magazine I was working on at the time. Afterwards I had 30 minutes to fill in before my train whisked me back to London and so I really didn't get to appreciate the city of "dreaming spires". I'd seen enough, though, to make me want to come back.

So yesterday, with our £8 return train tickets in hand, we trundled out to Oxford on a beautiful blue-sky Saturday. We had no real plans other than to walk around and explore, cameras at the ready.

I took 130 photographs! Here's some of my favourites.