5 Things

So, Lisa tagged me with the "5 Things People Might Not Know About You" thingy. Which is quite exciting, as no-one ever asked me to do one before (just off to eat some worms now). Anyway, here's the list, which probably isn't very exciting...

1. I once bought a Ken Dodd CD. I didn't want to; my mother made me. I don't think she made me listen to it though, which is always something.

2. I once auditioned for Scottish Ballet, but they didn't want me as my feet were the wrong shape (or so they claimed). Since I was only eight at the time I was able to rethink my career plans and take up theorem proving instead. Which ended well.

3. I have synaesthesia: I 'see' letters and numbers as having colours. Or at least if I think of a 'T', for example, I think of it as being a sort of royal blue colour. If I'm looking at it on the page I know it's blue, in the same way that if I saw a black and white picture of an orange I would know it was orange. Apparently some people do actually see the colours, but I think it's as well that I don't. They're kind of clashy.

4. I once played at Ibrox (Glasgow Rangers' ground). Admittedly, it was as part of a string quartet at someone's wedding. I think we won though.

5. I was once voted onto Glasgow University's SRC by 26 votes. That wasn't a 26 vote majority, you realise, just 26 votes. I blame Alison for most of them...

Well, hopefully that was slightly entertaining. I think I'm supposed to suggest that 5 other people try it now, so: Alasdair, Jamie, Stuart, Shrig, and Nikki...

Snowflakes

Christmas photos

Some photos of Morag and Colin's elegant Christmas decorations...

A Very Potato Christmas...

pikipimp added some festive touches the photo of the Potatoes plus Lisa I took a few weeks ago...;-)

Magic Numbers

The Potatoes of the Night were so impressed by the Magic Numbers the other night, that we've all been growing our hair to look more like them (or possibly a crowd of Old Testament prophets). We just need to work on the playing, singing and songwriting bits now...(pic from pikipimp again).

(Red)emption

See here for details...

Almost forgot!

The tower - at this point it hadn't been switched on. Probably the swinish Principal trying to save money again. I fully expect him to sell it one day, like he did with Millie the Dinosaur.


Charing Cross again. The lens isn't really wide-angle enough to do this properly.

Glasgow by night

Yes, University Avenue really is this colourful and exciting looking.


The newly revamped Kelvingrove Museum complete with scary floodlighting.


Flyover offices.


The M8.


Charing Cross.

Paperweight

Over the top...

Christmas lights on a house on Paisley Road.

Another slightly fuzzy Christmas tree from round the corner.

The Christmas tree is quite dramatic this year...

A temporary cessation of the ongoing deluge.

Library of Fragrance

A truly bizarre collection of perfumes, including Rain, Snow, and Dirt. I'm not sure I fancy smelling of Scottish Shortbread or Holy Water though...

Paris

Not many photos at the moment as it's done nothing but rain here for about the past three weeks. Strangely, this has not made me all that happy, and my camera isn't all that waterproof. But Shrig has a link on her page to a man with a blog devoted to photos of Paris, including this one of the Eiffel Tower vanishing into the mist...

Through a glass Bachly...

On the way to a Madrigirls concert last night, the decorative hanging on one of the tenements near the tunnel seemed to be coming loose and going wrinkly.

Inside the tunnel.

View of Professors' Square from a room I shouldn't really have been in, but had stumbled across while wandering round the building. The concert was great though, and you can have a listen to the Madrigirls singing here

Burnt Offering

I spotted a very unfortunate turn of phrase the other day, in an article about a woman whose cat had died. Apparently she'd had it for 16 years and was therefore extremely upset when it passed on. So much so that she'd kept its body in the freezer in a linen bag full of flowers for several days before she could bear to dispose of it. However, she eventually brought herself to cremate the cat in her garden, where:

"My husband and I toasted him with champagne"

I wonder where she got that recipe...

0xCAFEBABE

Just back from seeing The Magic Numbers at the Barrowlands with Julie and Michael. We all really enjoyed it, although unfortunately Alison, Morag and Colin weren't able to make it as planned. Anyway, the Numbers were lovely - they seemed to be having a great time too. I was quite surprised at how loud and "rock-y" they came over, since they sound much more mellow on CD.

They played various songs from their original album plus several from their new one. This hasn't got great reviews so far but, apart from one slightly waily song near the end, I really liked the new ones. They also had a slow one that segued into Kate Bush's "Running up that hill" at one point and then back out again. I'm not sure if this was deliberate or whether they just got confused by the fact that they're also singers with lots of wild hair and had a temporary identity crisis...

They finished the main part of the set with "Love Me Like You", which is my favourite and, as Michael pointed out, the most raucous. Although they finished the concert with one that started out fairly quiet and slow and then ramped up into something that was causing isolated outbreaks of ceilidhing around the hall, finally ending up as a kind of rockstar Taize chant that just got wilder and wilder.

They were very keen on everyone singing along and we were even trained up in a couple of lines to make sure we joined in properly. A bit like graduation ceremonies only much less tedious and with more exciting lighting. Anyway, one of the audience-participation numbers was a song called "Anima Sola" which doesn't appear on either album, but you can download it from their myspace page. Go on, go on, go on, GO ON! (It's very pretty).

Susan Burnstine

Mysterious black and white Holga-style pictures

Holga

Here are some more Holga photos. I've cropped some and increased the saturation on most as they were a bit peely-wally looking.


The University tower (I take a lot of photos of it).

Triple exposure of stained glass windows in the chapel.

Tree in Kelvingrove Park.

At last! Proof that the tower loves me back...you can just see it sneaking into the bottom left hand corner of the shot in this photo of a war memorial in the Park.

More Holga

Double exposure of Starry Starry Night in Ruthven Lane

The (very) dark corners of the cloisters.

The tower again, double exposure with fallen leaves.

Modern Beethoven?

Well, according to Gramophone magazine.

Leaf caught in a bush.

Reflections in a pot. Not sure if you can really make it out here, but on the left hand side there's some fish frying. Apparently the comment of the Fish Man (who's from Fife) when selling them was "Them huddock are big as whales."

Sewing stuff

While looking for online patterns, I came across tackyliving.com which has some very cool patterns, but also some truly horrifying ones, such as the brain hat:



I was thinking of sewing something for Stuart and Pamela's new baby, Lachlan, but perhaps I won't try that particular pattern.

I also spotted a method for making a dressmaker's dummy of yourself using an old t-shirt and masking tape. Having something like that would certainly be easier than pinning stuff to yourself to see if it fits. Particularly as I often end up literally pinning things to myself rather than my underwear as I had intended...

Wimsey getting ready to pounce.


Hiding in the leaves.

Leaves

Blue angel

Smiley post

Fiddling around with LightRoom

"Ferry Nice Food" on Ferry Road. Although, since nobody can remember seeing it in operation, the food may not have been as nice as all that...

Old generators on King's Inch Road.

 

 

Glasgow Cathedral Not Quite New Shop. Or in this case, Glasgow Cathedral Not Quite In Focus Or Correctly Exposed Shop. This is one of the prints I made at the weekend darkroom course at Streetlevel Photoworks, (which is currently on the first floor due to renovations).

It was really good, apart from a mixup over ml's and cc's which led to only the bottom third of my film being properly developed (which rendered them kind of stripy). But better to make mistakes now than when I've taken a collection of staggeringly beautiful photos of a never-to-be-repeated event I suppose...

Anyway, hopefully I can now get some more practice in with developing and using my manual SLR (my focusing technique is woefully deteriorated).

(I really have to stop using so many brackets).