Before and even during arrival at school, she was excited and upbeat. I captured this as she lined up for the first time, ready to go into class and, I guess, as the reality of the situation suddenly hit home. But there were no tears. She’s a tough little thing and by Wednesday, we were dropping her off at the front gate and she was making her own way through to the school yard – albeit with her big brother by her side.

I imagine that there will be another little dip in confidence on Monday morning, but all things considered, she’s settled really quickly and we’re proud of them both.

One quick mention for Pammie-Jane who is (health willing) going to be playing with the sharks in the waters of East London (and more!) as she attempts another ridiculous Ironman. Good Luck!

Yes, it’s that time of year again when I ask for your assistance in promoting my blog in the annual South African Blog Awards, this time being the 2011 version of these wondrous, infamous and occasionally contentious accolades.

There will be other blogs out there vying for your vote, so why should you vote for me?

Here are some reasons you might feel are good enough for you to put cursor to that VOTE button and left-click:

The Sob Story

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, 6000 miles… has been a finalist for each of the last 26 years in various categories of the SABAs. It’s become such a big thing is our household that the first words that my little boy ever said were: “Dad, have you won a Blog Award yet?”. The first word that my daughter came out with was “Feck“, but soon afterwards she also asked about the Blog Award thing as well.
Admitting consistent failure to one’s children is the hardest thing a father can ever do and I have to do it (and here, I pay homage to my daughter’s vocabulary) every single fecking year.
Your vote can change this.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

For many years, the Roman Empire was built on the belief that Oregano was The Spice Of Life. Only upon Julius Caesar’s ascension in 49BC did it become apparent that Oregano was actually a herb and was therefore patently ineligible for the title “The Spice Of Life”. Variety, popular among the middle classes at the time, made a bid for the vacant post and – despite not being a spice either – took the label and has never relinquished it since.
In celebration of this fake historical fact, 6000 miles… has been offering you variety like it was going out of fashion.  So far in 2011′s 339 posts (this is 340), we’ve done gardening advice, passed comment on the London riots, infamously got mildly annoyed with Lewis Pugh, mourned the demise of a Cape Town pastime, noted the contents of fruit salad and helped save ickle baby turtles (sort of).
And that’s just a tiny snapshot (2%) of the vast array of variety we’ve brought you this year in honour of  Emperor Julius.
(My sources tell me that you’d best get used to that term, by the way, ok?)

I Pointed Out That Chris Von Ulmenstein Had Parked Illegally In The CTICC Car Park

This, I have been told, is the clincher for many of the food and tourism bloggers out there. But that is not why I did it. I did it because heinous behaviour such as this should be publicised and roundly ridiculed. Irrespective of the danger I was putting myself and my family into, I plunged deep into the truth and was singled out by Ms von Ulmenstein for a Sour Service award. I felt duty bound to respond. Rumour has it that she was going to start parking outside my house until I removed the disabled bay.
There will be, I have been told, bad blood.
A South African Blog Award is all that will take the bitter, bitter taste away.

If you can come up with any other reasons as to why readers should vote for 6000 miles… as their favourite blog of 2011, please feel free to let me know. In the meantime: Vote, Comrade! Vote! And share this post far and wide: twitter, facetube, even by iMessage if you know anyone else on it.

Spread the word.
Share the wealth.
Be the difference.

My internet connection is doing weird things, going on and off and on again and off again, for no apparent reason.  I fiddle about with the connections, which sometimes seems to work, but this could be coincidence.

All of which is of some small interest, but then he bangs in a line like this:

Times like these remind me of how much my life revolves around times like these not happening too often.

Brilliantly put.
Indeed, we’re all dependent on difficulties not befalling us too often, but we rarely think about it that way until they’ve well and truly befallen us.

TMWE started out on radio in the late 80′s and I can still remember listening to it late on a Friday night, having hit •RECORD on my cassette player in case I should fall asleep halfway through. I never did.
When it moved to TV in 1991, it became more mainstream and was perhaps generally funnier, but a whole lot less edgy. Still, it spawned characters like Ray – always getting into trouble because of his permanently sarcastic tone of voice – and Mr Strange who has an odd obsession with off milk. His catchphrase: “Milky Milky”, became the adjective applied to any social outcast throughout the 1990s.
However, History Today remained a personal favourite and I still recall it when watching or listening to any dull academic debates these days.

Anyway, as with all comedy, it’s never funny if you have to explain it, but you may enjoy clicking through some of the links.
Especially if you happen to be a teenager in the UK 20 years ago.

Which he describes thus:

Photograph taken on Signal Hill looking over the CBD. Sun setting behind Lions head and signal hill with the fog rolling in from the East. Taken 30mins before sun dissappeared. My first real attempt at HDR.
3 Exposure, Tonemapped.

Thanks to man himself for granting permission to use it.
Check out his other work here.

Secondly,  while we are on a photographic theme, manxscenes.com blog is back and is destined for the blogroll – it may already be there by the time you read this. Go check.
I have long been a fan of Peter Killey’s work. Nothing pretentious, nothing overly complicated, just well composed, good quality images of my “other” homeland.
I’m looking forward to seeing more of the same on his happily resurrected blog.

N SKY C

Today is the summer solstice, which is a perfect day to announce my latest internet “art” project.

I wrote a program that takes a picture outside of my office window every 5 minutes. It uploads the photo to a server and then analyzes the sky portion to figure out what the average sky color is at that time. The site is a constantly updating mosaic and record of the sky over New York City, and I think it looks pretty awesome.

I’m looking to expand this project across the globe. If you have a cool view and wouldn’t mind running the program hooked up to a webcam all day, get in touch.

As you may have heard, I’m not too big on art, but this is rather cool. Hover over any bit of the mosaic and the image from Mike’s window appears:

Surely someone from Cape Town must have a decent enough office view to warrant giving this a go?

Brahms did not torture and murder cats for sport. Wagner, who had musical differences with Brahms, and who was an utter shit, made the story up.

From here, which links to here and the all important evidence for the quote above, here, stating:

Author’s research reveals calumny that for 100 years defamed German composer was the malicious gossip of ‘notoriously bitchy’ Wagner.

If there had been a Hello or an OK magazine back in the mid-19th century, one can only imagine that these allegations of cat torture and notorious bitchiness would have been regular front page news.

Amazing. I’ve certainly learnt some stuff this morning already.

Brian says:

That is a sign which I think I would have noticed even if I had not been noticing signs generally at all.

It’s as if its creator was, while creating it, thinking and feeling something rather unusual. He actually cared about people reading his sign and about people doing what he said. He really wanted to communicate something.

He thought about it. How can I word it, he said to himself, to make sure that people pay attention, refrain from swimming in these truly dangerous waters, in which, I know for a fact, in 1995, no fewer than seven - seven – people were drowned?
How can I get that across? Lives are at stake here. Before I die, I want to make the world a slightly better place. This is my chance.

You can see the scene in his office, in 1999 or whenever it was.
“I’m stuck,” said he.

Stuck? Relax, said his less committed colleagues. It’s only a sign. Nobody reads signs. They’re only there to avoid legal liability when some idiot does whatever it is.

“But I really want people to read it! What can I put?”

I like to think that at this point, a wise and experienced sign writer said: “Put your pen down, and tell me what you are trying to say? Say it it out loud.”

“Say it out loud?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what I want to say is that during 1995 there were seven deaths in docklands waters due to people ignoring these signs! These waters are dangerous! No swimming!”

“Well, why don’t you put that?”

“Eh?”

“Put what you just said. That’ll get their attention. Your sincerity will shine through.”

Seriously, there is a real problem with all these signs, not unlike the problem of too many laws. People just switch off. They screen them out. Call it: sign inflation. So many warnings add up to … no warning at all.

The narrative simplicity invokes Douglas Adams for me. Brilliant.
But that last line does make a very good point. Do we really need to be told that there is a danger of drowning in water? Of course there is and of course we don’t – or rather, we shouldn’t. But because someone decides that we do need that reminder along with many, many others, we find ourselves overloaded with information, to the point that we stop listening and we drown.

I would love to know whether the work of our sincere signwriter had any effect on the water-based fatalities in and around the Royal Victoria Dock. Perhaps sincere signwriting is actually the only way of saving lives, but even that would only work in the short-term before we become blasé to the statistics of 1995 and since.

Photo: Brian Micklethwait/Samizdata

Bigger here.

Borrowed (without permission, nogal) from these guys (who do plenty of stuff without permission too, it seems) and who have some spectacular examples of long exposure photography of London (and elsewhere) along with some amazing tales of derring do (and in some cases, some of derring don’t).

I must say, I’ve never really though of trespass as a hobby before and I can’t bring myself to agree with it. I can, however, appreciate some of the fantastic photographic results and the images of otherwise secret history that their naughtiness generates.

On a personal note, I was much touched by this pic, from this post, which reminded me of this place, which used to be here.

Today, Brian gave us a collage of Anthony Gormley’s exhibit(s?) in London during the summer of 2007. But it wasn’t the pictures that piqued my interest so much as Brian’s commentary:

For some damn fool artistic type reason that need not concern us unless we want it to, Gormley called these Men “Event Horizon”.  (Artists who make nice things but talk bollocks about them are a characteristic type of our time, I think.  I don’t blame them.  If they didn’t talk bollocks they’d never get their careers cranked up.  Anyway, it makes a change from a generation ago, when the things they made were almost entirely bollocks also.) The Gormley Men are all based on Gormley himself.

Critic Howard Halle (see here) out-Gormleyed Gormley by saying this:

“Using distance and attendant shifts of scale within the very fabric of the city, [Event Horizon] creates a metaphor for urban life and all the contradictory associations – alienation, ambition, anonymity, fame – it entails.”

Whatever.  In other words, you see in these metal Men whatever you want to see, much as you see whatever you want to see when confronting actual men.

I can’t agree with Brian that what artists produce these days is any better than what artists produced a generation ago. Lest we forget that during this year’s (at least partially) publicly-funded “Infecting The City” arts “festival” in Cape Town:

City “treasures”, including King Edward’s statue on the Grand Parade, were covered in clingwrap and trees on the station forecourt were draped in toilet paper.

Which, to me, almost entirely indicates that things in the art world really haven’t moved on at all in the last 30 years.