Easter Egg Hunt!

I keep finding things! Yesterday I discovered a Lindt Lindor chocolate hidden behind the glass yard of ale on the shelf in the kitchen. A few moments later I discovered another hidden in the bottom of the fridge. After that I really started looking and have since found another 5 chocolates hidden around the house. OK - I shouldn't be looking as it isn't Easter Sunday just yet but I guess Lando C planted an Easter Egg hunt for me to keep me entertained while he is away. I can't stop smiling.

At the moment I am resisting the urge to go mad looking for chocolate but tomorrow I am going to tear this place apart!

In the meantime, feast your eyes on this chocolate crazyness courtesy of the Time Passages Nostalgia Company.



They have hundreds of wee things for sale as small items or job lots and searching their site is like an Easter Egg hunt of its own. My favourite finds include Action Jackson Surfing and Scuba Outfit, Different Beatles Toy Picture Rings and Restaurant/Diner Menu Special Advertising Cards.

Perfect Timing. Mix-Tapes RIP. Long Live the Digital Age

I miss making Mix-Tapes. Trying to decide whether side A would have a different theme to side B and dropping your needle on the vinyl at that precise moment just before the safety tape ended and real recording began. Nothing felt more rewarding on a Saturday afternoon than rushing home from town after a visit to WHSmith with some TDK blank cassettes in tow. A packet of three had a different meaning to teenagers back then and pleasure could last for as long as 90 minutes.

Whilst there is no denying the convenience of the digital age for all amateur home-pirates, I wonder if any of the sentiment I felt as a teenager is now lost. These days you don't have to worry about timing your tracks to make sure they fit a 45 minute side (in fact, I struggle to think of enough tracks that sit well enough together to fill a 650mb CD). And that feeling of nervousness as you hovered over the pause button to avoid the stop-play-and-record clunk sound in between tracks is now confined to same cardboard box in the same junk room that I store my cassettes in.

Mix-Tapes took endless hours of dedication and patience and the results were thoroughly rewarding. And any taping session could be so easily spoiled by mistimed tracks, jumping vinyl, re-recorded moments and dirty tape heads. Good Mix-Tapes were a skill. Perfect Mix-Tapes were an art.

Do Mix-CD's require any of the labour or dedication we used to invest as teenagers? I am not sure, but where Mix-CD's do give me the warm and fuzzy's is why we still make them. Mix-Tapes we made for ourselves and made for our friends. They were a way of changing the format of an LP to fit inside our walkmans, or satisfy our constant need for a soundtrack to our lives. And we wanted to share them with our friends.

With the invention of MP3 players, iPods and computer file sharing, there are few reasons to cut CD's for ourselves anymore. The soundtrack to my life plays from my PC while I work and dropping a CD into my PC automatically produces every format I may possibly need. But I still make Mix-CDs and I love receiving them. They are a truly personal gift, they are made to be shared and can tell you so much about your friends without having to ask them a thing.



Last weekend I made a Mix-CD for Lando C to thank him for taking me to Las Vegas. It's called Welcome to Sushi in Las Vegas and covers everything I enjoy listening to right now. Here is the track listing:

Sashimi

1. The Von Blondies - c'mon c'mon
2. The Bravery - honest mistake
3. Interpol - evil
4. And you will know us by the trail of the dead -and the rest will follow
5. Brendan Benson - spit it out
6. Idlewild - love steals us from loneliness
7. Kasabian - cutt off
8. The Wedding Present - interstate 5
9. Arcade Fire - neighborhood #2 (laika)
10. Razorlight - the city

Sushi

1. I am Kloot - over my shoulder
2. kings of convenience - misread
3. Phantom Planet - california
4. Maximo Park - the coast is always changing
5. Rufus Wainwright - the one you love
6. Ambulance Ltd - stay where you are
7. Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - spanish dance troupe
8. Elliot Smith - st. ides heaven
9. Devendra Banhart - at the hop
10. 4Hero - les fleurs

Photo Friday Challenge - Glow

This is my submission for Photo Friday. Even indoors Vegas has to Glow.

Taken inside the Monte Carlo Brew Pub. We sat at the bar for hours, drinking their in-house brews and eating buckets of shrimp. It doesn't get better than that does it?



This is what I call the real Monte Carlo Wheel of Fortune. Every one's a winner.

Reminiscing Will Have to Do...

Today I feel pretty burnt out already and it's not been five minutes since our last holiday. I'm just going to have to get away with closing my eyes and drifting off to better places.

Whilst in Vegas, we stopped a couple of times at a convenience store just off the strip with a bar and casino tacked on to it - to pick up a few supplies and go for halfway-home pees. This was the kind of place that only the locals go to - a bit like Cheers meets Channel 4 Racing at the Kwik-Mart. The neon was moderate, it was dark and musty inside and had just one toilet for women. I liked it.

It was also the only place where I heard the Boss instead of the King.

In the corner of the women's toilet cubicle I spied this bin with a warning.



Imagine how close I had to get to take this picture! And I had to kneel on the cubicle floor too which thankfully you could have eaten your dinner off by comparison.

They say that repulsion is a learned behaviour that children develop over time and this bin signifies that be the truth. There is no way I would get closer to that bin than I had to and it wasn't the red warning sign putting me off. Lead a toddler to it though and you wouldn't have any trouble getting them to drink.

Chaved Out - Buy This!

At the weekend, my neighbour lent me the coolest book. It's called Fruits by Shoichi Aoki and it depicts with vivid colour and vibrancy a dying art in style on the streets of Tokyo. Started from a fanzine created by Shoichi Aoki to document local street fashion, the photographs in this book are as humorous as the characters are inventive.

You can see some of the pictures at the Powerhouse Museum website. I wish I could pull off some of this stuff, although admittedly I'm far too old and not anywhere near svelte enough to dress up like any EGL (Elegant Gothic Lolita). It is inspiring though. I look forward to this:



Compare these bright young things to the dull baseball-cap and tracksuited up teenagers you see everywhere on the streets of every city in Britian these days. I guess the eighties shell-suit generation didn't waste any time producing their equally uninventive offspring did they? Seems like they have plenty to write about though.

Movie Mahem

The films on the plane to Vegas were pretty poor - darn NWA. However, they did show Finding Neverland - the story of J.M. Barrie's friendship with a family who inspired him to create Peter Pan. It was wonderful and childlike and filled with adult sadness all at the same time. Just marvy.

This weekend has been a film-fest all in the name of relaxation. On Friday, we watched both the Bourne Supremacy and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the first film having the best car chases, the latter having the best lines ("I'm gonna smash your face on that windshield, then I'm gonna call your mom, take her out for a nice seafood dinner and never call her again").

Last night we watched The Village which had an unusual concept and was creepy in places. I was marginally disappointed but did like it for its non-commercial horror flick elements. And apparently it had a $60 million budget! Man, that film was like a leaky bucket.

February 2005 Highlights

Quality, not quantity.

tunes to remember feb '05

Still addicted to January's stuff. Just add this.


The Invitation - 13 Senses

flicks to remember feb '05

Dodgeball

The Lady Killers

America's Sweethearts

Viva Las Vegas

books to remember feb '05

Again, still making my way through the John Peel book (darn hardbacks - you can't take them anywhere).

As I can't go on vacation without a novel, I grabbed that book which is said to be so terrible as to be "left on underground tube carriages everywhere."

Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Code

I read this addictive book cover to cover in a matter of days and I loved it. I don't care what other people say, I was actually worried about accidentally leaving this on public transport.

In February, I was also into:

Streetart and Stencil Graffiti

Rummaging through other people's unwanted items

Going to Vegas

In February, I hated being into (and since realise was a complete waste of time):

Cereal Diets

Kings of Collecting

I am really enjoying being part of Flickr at the moment especially viewing people's collections. As mentioned on the group - and alongside Mark Dion and Swaptorium, there seems to be another King of Collecting and that's Tony.

I mean, how many Kinder Eggs does a man have to eat?

I am really loving Mark Dion's work at the moment. He did something similar to the Thames dig in New England. There are some wonderful finds there too. This is alongside John Pfahl's Extreme Horticulture exhibit at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, displaying some vibrant and well-manicured garden photographs. A lot of his images can be seen here.

Mushiono Win at Women's All-Star Event

Also - forgot to mention that my women's Ultimate team Mushiono won the Women's All-Star event last Saturday. It rained, it hailed, it snowed and boy, was it windy? Despite being the most unpractised team there, we managed to win all four games. My handling was all over the place, as was the disc when I let go each time but hey ho! fun nonetheless. Go Mushiono Go!

Trumpets From Montparnasse

I was recently shocked (although it a totally good way) to hear The Lilac Time's - Trumpets from Montparnasse instrumental featured on the new Flora advertisements. I wonder how that all came about? After playing it to Lando C who hadn't heard it before, I checked the sleeve notes on The Lilac Time's first album where the track is from and discovered it is over 16 years old! It sounds as great now as it did then. Just wonderful.

Stephen Duffy has been busy lately that's for sure. Checked out The Devils website - a musical collaboration with Nick Rhodes. It seems Duffy does two styles of music which sit uncomfortably together, most likely because they are poles apart. I can leave the eighties-style electro-synth back where it belongs but his accoustic folk with The Lilac Time is timeless.

I'm slack on the blogging since coming back from Vegas. Work is so busy right now, I dare not get involved trawling t'internet because it all may just get out of hand. Maybe this weekend I'll get some me-time, although I also fancy getting some creative work done on the biz before the season starts.

Lando C started his new job this week and commented how 5 out of the 9 people who work there all have the same name as him. I mentioned that I always get a strange feeling when two people with the same name are in a room together. It's like my mind is telling me that those two people should feel a bond between each other by sharing the same name. It's weird because every so often, when I meet people with the same name as me, I don't feel any cosmic energy towards them whatsoever. They seem to suit their name and in my mind I feel totally nameless. He said that was something he felt too. I wonder if everyone does this?

Viva Las Vegas!

I was hoping to get some bloggin' in while I was away but hey ho...the roulette table called. Las Vegas was amazing. What a great trip! It took 20 hours to get there and it's taking about 20 days to get over the jet lag but it was totally worth it. The best pictures from the trip are now on flickr including one from Lando C who should really get a flickr account of his own seeing as his pics are marvy.

Before we headed out west, Lando C and I took a brief trip to London to visit the Tate Modern gallery and visited our friend Gordon. Highlights of the Tate included the Mark Dion: Tate Thames Dig which was like rummaging through lost & found, and also drinking a delicious glass of Little Creatures whilst taking in a view over the Thames.



After gorging myself on a sushi platter at a little restaurant in Finsbury that night, Lando C, Gordon and I went to see retro-rock bandits Mountain where the drummer gave me his stick and I nicked a guitar pick. In the morning I taught Gordon's highly articulate three year old Oscar the word "slush".

Highlights of Las Vegas included even more sushi (sushi buffets for birthday girls are free!), gargling oyster shooters (not for the faint hearted), accumulating $300.00 worth of wins at various roulette tables, a great performance from Penn and Teller, getting freaked out by the Borg at the Star Trek Experience (geek that I am) and getting thrown upside down on a breath-taking roller-coaster around New York New York. There were a million other things that happened too but I can't remember right now. All I can remember is that it was good.

This was the most retro-vintage-vegas I could find: