giant crabs and jellyfish the size of washing machines cause havoc in the oceans.

gollum snow globe, and i was worried that my bookends were a bit cheesy.

tracks from joni mitchell's new album. the songs sound good but the quality of the tracks is pretty poor, bit like a badly tuned in radio. one track of particular note is new recording of woodstock. i knew of a couple of covers of this but not all 13, discovered at the covers project.

i've only just come across the covers project, it's superb and should help resolve many a drunken debate about who sang what song first. my first aimless wander was to rem, (as their cover versions pointed me in some good directions when i was younger, top of the list being the velvet underground) i thought i'd found a mistake in the database when i saw that the royal philharmonic orchestra had done a cover of 'what's the frequency kenneth', sadly i'm wrong, the phil have in fact done a whole album of rem covers and here's the proof - soon to become hold music at a phone near you.

ow, that was painful to an rem fan's ears. must calm down with a chunk of daily zen - via hydragenic - and contemplate whether i have the twenty-something malaise.

hoaxers. the guardian ask why people make hoax calls to the fire brigade. while the numbers of hoax calls during the strike has been alarming firemen regularly deal with hoax calls. i do not understand what possesses people to do this.

a morning surfing round london

wake up, make cup of tea, turn the computer on and start to browse the news at ananova before i grab some breakfast...

on this day in 1434 the thames froze over, it happened on the same day 281 years later, frost fairs were held on the ice. i don't think the thames has frozen for over 100 years, it's been a good few years since it's even snowed properly in london. google's first result for 'thames frost fairs' is...

this page at the museum of london. also in the exhibitions section at mol was a page on 'protein man', just one photo and a small comment that one stanley green campaigned on the streets of london, for 25 years, against the dangers of eating protein, sounds like a scary sort of superhero to me. but back to google images and the frost fairs and on to...

the collections picture library. there's only low res available to look at but it's an interesting collection of pictures of britain and ireland (including the tupperware box that comes with a free cat). but bored of the gallery i went back to...

the museum of london homepage and straight into the lewisham voices project. this superb project is recording moments from the lives of people in the borough.

now back to breakfast lunch.

damn flu. it was brewing for a few days before the full-on cold kicked in and i've since had 3 miserable days with only olbas oil for company, not even feeling up to stringing a few words together for a post. it seems like everyone and their goldfish has a cold at the moment but according to olbas' chart we've actually had quite a good year for colds.

so here's a week of pent up blogging...

thanks to everyone for their comments on digital cameras. it was useful, but i'm still not decided yet and the canon powershot s30 has also entered the arena. we've had a fuji finepix 6900 on loan for a few days, it's very nice, but a bit too chunky (size and cost) for what i'm looking for, but i have no complaints about the pictures...

over the garden fence



once again knitting hits the news as a new zealand minister gets in trouble for knitting as her own bill was being put before parliament.

meanwhile the second celebrity (hmmm) big brother has started this week. a comment from the bbc talking boards:
'I've seen better people turning the Xmas lights on in Norwich'
given the bits of celebrity big brother that i've watched so far the christmas lights in norwich sound quite an exciting proposition.

from basil brush's guardian webchat:

q - Baz, As a concerned mammal, what are your thoughts regarding fox-hunting?
Are you satisfied with traditional dog-orientated methods, or would you prefer that we control fox numbers by shooting? (Boom! Boom!)

Basil Brush - I think foxes should be allowed to hunt whenever they want. The last time I was chased by men in red coats, I hadn’t paid my bill at Butlins. Ha ha ha! BOOM! BOOM!

if you remember basil brush you'll probably find this funny, if you've never heard of basil brush it might not be very funny at all. one thing basil does prove is that nostalgia is a lucrative business. bbc reports that soon mr spielberg will be asking us to pawn our childhood memories in exchange for tickets to his new tintin movie. i don't like the sound of these fantastic cartoons being messed with.

plouf. snowy goes splash in 25 languages (including the language of norwich - twice in a post and i've never even been there - which looks a little like norwegian to me).

yesterday i had good intentions of getting up at 4am this morning to go watch the meteor shower. now, with the prospect of less than 6 hours sleep till wake up time i've been saved by the cloud and fog, which doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

i was up by the river earlier this evening, just by hays galleria. it was incredible. the tide was out so the river was lapping on the rocks and debris on the tiny foreshore. looking over on to the north bank the larger buildings were half obscured by the fog, their lights barely glowing through the cold. the lloyds building disappeared into the night next to the shell of the gherkin, still half built. looking up and down the river double deckers were the only thing visible on london bridge and tower bridge looked like a picture cut from an old paper. seagulls were cawing over a boat on the far side of the river.

there are times i love london, this was one of them.

the gherkin is something that i've come to like, i couldn't see the point of it at first, 'curved cos we can build curvy buildings', but as i've seen it grow i've come to like the structure and it seems right in it's place, looking across the river towards ken's pad. theres some good pictures of the construction in progress that i came across.

regular readers will know that i've been harping on for some time now about wanting a digital camera. well santa promised he'd be chucking one down the chimney this year so i've spent a bit of time this weekend narrowing down the list of possible contenders.

the basic criteria i have are:
- minimum 3 mega-pixels
- at least 3x optical zoom
- movie capture (which is pretty standard anyway)
- webcam (would be nice but not an absloute prerequisite)
- something around 350 quid

the two fore-runners at the moment are the sony dsc p7 and the fuji finepix s304.

or

i've been researching the two (steve's digicams proving particularly useful) and both come highly recommended but the sony seems to be edging into the lead. counting against the fuji is the fact it munches 4aa batteries, compared to the sony lithium rechargable. also one of the reasons i want a camera is to carry round with me in my day to day life (not just out for special occasions) and take pictures of things in life that appeal and the fuji seems neither pocked sized or discreet. but the fuji does look like the slightly better camera and fantastically reduced all over the place taking it into santa's price range.

so you can see where i am at the moment, if anyone has anything to say on either of the above, or other cameras fulfilling the criteria, it would be much appreciated.

britain's embarrasing broadband non-situation laid bare in the guardian online.

i came across an interesting site just now, via red pepper, by the name of london 21 'the community website for a green and equitable london' sustainability network. lots of interesting stuff that makes me think i should drag myself away from a screen a bit more.

also found what could be an interesting holiday for next year, a week walking round la gomera. buoyed up by nearly weekly walks in coutryside not far from london i think i could manage a week of something a bit more strenuous.

surprises are nice on cold november mornings.
first surprise: arrival of special edition lord of the rings dvd super deluxe all singing all dancing boxed set, ordered in august.
second surprise: the heavy package also contained two rather nice argonath book ends, i hadn't read enough of the small print to know they'd be there.

not that i read other people's papers over their shoulder on the train, but i couldn't help notice billy bragg's face on the front of the indy supplement today. the profile on him is nothing to insightful and a little bit patronising, the quotes are written in dialect: 'fink' gets a bit irritating after a while.

and from billy bragg to maggie thatcher, in a jelly bean portrait.

r.i.p. ezra



my parents dog has died, which is sad, he was a lovely dog.

bonfires, fireworks, the smell of bonfires and fireworks, toffee apples, baked potatoes, soup from a plastic cup, parkin (which i've not eaten for years but have a sudden hankering for) and burning the effigy of a man in celebration of thwarted his attempt to blow up the monarch and parliament 399 years ago. yes, 5th november beats halloween hands down.

i live fairly near the top of a hill and standing on a chair on the patio i can see fireworks going off in all directions for a few miles around and it's fantastic (apart from the damage to the environment of course).

indoor fireworks (can still burn your fingers, but not when seen through the safety of your monitor), thanks to gert.

life on the blog plains...
- get well wishes to owen who has put his back out - straining over a new template?
- gert has started a photoblog
- zeli has disappeared, hope to see her blog back soon
- gblogs disappeared last week, but this is permanent (big shame, it was useful, thanks to lots of hard work by jen)
- and there are two new additions to my blogroll, hydragenic and rincewind.

now, back to november.

saw some of the evidence of last weekend storms on our latest jaunt (another from the most fantastic book for anyone who lives in london and doesn't own a car). we were up in bucks walking from princes risborough to great missenden, it was nice round there being surrounded by autumn colours. it rained all day, but rain is ok when i'm fully waterproofed and it isn't like we weren't expecting it.

but back to the storm debris, there were a lot of big trees that had come down. yes it's all part of nature, you get big winds, old trees fall down and the rotting trees play their part in the circle of life on the forest floor, but i find it sad to see massive trees that have been growning for decades torn down to the ground with their roots shooing up.

9m walking in the rain was ok, but i couldn't face 1 hour of standing still in it, so we wimped out of the fireworks. instead i knitted a hat.



just read my horror-scope at scary duck and it was strangely true:

you will travel to mysterious places and work hard. And I bet you’d thought that slavery had been abolished. Kylie Minogue wants to kill you.

well i'm swopping 'mysterious' for 'new' but i'm as near as dammit there, apart from the bit about kylie, so far.

thanks to wannabegirl i just found out that blogdex is back - looking quite swoosh.

and if blogdex hadn't returned i wouldn't have come across stand down, the no war blog, well not tonight anyway.