Beatle Bones 'n Smoking Stones.

From "Strictly Personal", 1968.

Beatle bones and smokin' Stones
The dry sand falls
The strawberry mouth; strawberry moth; strawberry caterpillar
Strawberry butterfly; strawberry fields
The winged eel slither on the heels of today's children
Strawberry fields forever

Yeah, roosters, ol' glass roosters, hymn to your age,
In a jazz-queen, white-red farmhouse
Tractors are crawlin’; people are calling,
Trees grow, I'm in a coach and I blow rich
Red, blue, yellow sunset
Where I set and you set; and I've loved and you've loved
And I've seen and you've seen

Chalk Man has just made his mark - and crumbled
The dark - the light - the dark - the day
Porcelain children see through white lights
Soft-cracker bats, Cheshire cats named
The Dark - the Light - the Dark - the Day

Blue veins through gray-filled tomorrows
Cellular sail-boat - ye ole feathered kind
Blow it into pond swayin’ in circles
Red, blue, yellow sunset.
Where I've set and you've set; and I’ve loved and you've loved
And I saw and you saw
Strawberry fields forever

(I've seen various versions of these lyrics elsewhere, these are as close as I can get them... The line after "Roosters, old glass roosters" eludes me. "pinned to your face"?, Hymn to your age...
This was one version I found:-

"yeah roosters ol glass roosters stick to your
race
in a drag queen live wood farmhouse
tractors are clawin people are crawlin
trees in a row climbin a coach and I blow rich
red blue yellow sunset "

Oh well....

Tile Panels, Michelin

In London there is a splendid building, designed by Francois Espinasse, and opened in 1911. It was built as Michelin, (the tyre company)'s headquarters in the Fulham Road, London.
Here were offices, stores, and of course, the Michelin tyre-fitting bay. Motor Cars were still a very recent phenomenon. Most of London remained horse-powered at the time. Many vehicles were shod with solid tyres, and of pneumatic tyres, Dunlop was the dominant name in the british (and empire) market. The french company of Michelin was determined to wrest a significant portion of the market from Dunlop. To that end, it built its palace of motoring, decorated with glazed tiles and stained glass windows. The building was richly decorated, and was the domain of Michelin's fiction character, a big, jolly man made of a stack of tyres. Monsieur Bibendum.
Michelin's advertising stressed their superior ability to "drink up" the sharp stones and nails that would puncture other tyre brands. -Their motto, Nunc est Bibendum, "now is the time to drink."

"Now is the time to drink, that's to say, to your very good health, The Michelin tyre drinks up obstacles!"

Tyre-Man, Monsieur Bibendum, making a meal of all those sharp things that puncture tyres. The Michelin tyre was, perhaps, slightly less-prone to puncture, but its other advantage was that it was much quicker to repair than its rivals which were glued to their wheel rims. Michelin made wheels and rims which required no glue, and were fast to detach and disassemble.

M. Bibendum shows off his new studded grip...

And what better way to prove your superiority than by crowing your successes in the new sport of motor racing, and 'reliability' trials?
To this end, the company commissioned a series of tile panels from the Parisian firm of Gilardoni, Fils et Cie, based on the art work of Ernest Montaut.
I first saw these panels in the early seventies, in 1985, Michelin left the building, and designer Terence Conran took it over, since when it has been turned into an up-market restaurant, called, appropriately enough, Bibendum. The panels and other decoration have been cleaned and restored, the place is out of my price bracket for a meal, sadly.
So the panels in my pictures? They're at the British Motor Industry Heritage Centre, at Gaydon in Warwickshire, (near Stratford on Avon), The museum is well worth a visit if machinery stirs your soul.

These are just a few of the 32 tile panels, -for further reading, others can be seen here.

Once, in another lifetime

.. I made things from clay.

People often think that those potters who normally make things upon the wheel, can only think in terms of "round".

Not quite so.

A customer was seeking a gift for her daughter and son-in-law, on moving into their newly built house. Could I make them a ceramic house with a light inside? Hmm. "Of course.", I say, rashly. Asking for the whereabouts of this house led me to a muddy building site where I photographed, drew, and measured....

Some time later, I made this:

Okay, I confess I couldn't resist adding a few wheel-thrown bits. In the hope, perhaps that they'd then have to buy some big garden pots from me.
It was a success, but a rod for my own back, as lots of other people then wanted their houses to sit for a portrait. And the time involved in making one was huuuuuge.
And of course, the longer it takes, the more there is at risk in drying and firing. Break one and then redo all those hours? Argh!
And the price? Sigh. I was never good at extorting realistic sums, so I'll confess, in terms of hours versus price... I made a loss. No wonder I say I was once a potter.
I really needed a good business manager, a third party who'd do all that distasteful haggling. Toward the end, I had such a creature, a lovely gallery owner who could sell my wares for prices I'd never dreamed possible, but then.... came the change of bank-manager, the taxman's demands, the tripling of the rent........
So instead of making teapots, which I'd have loved to be doing today, I was getting very wet, pumping out industrial buildings after a humongous downpour.
Had to get a wet-vac onto the job....... A BIG one.

(No! I am not in this pic, I'm behind you, and no, it wasn't just a little wetness as you see here, the water was about four inches deep to start with. and stretched some sixty feet behind me. Luckily there was a manhole cover which we could lift to send the flood mostly into the depths of the earth.)

Sigh.
I'd have preferred to be making teapots.

My Girl Loves Cheesecake!

Exploding Bulls? It's the Hedgehog I feel Saddest For

This story, just in from Auckland, New Zealand.

"Seven bulls ‘exploded’ and caught fire after power lines fell on a Dairy Flat farm, north of Auckland, on Tuesday. Three bulls were electrocuted when the lines fell at a 60.7ha Wilks Road farm and another four were killed when they walked into the live area. A hedgehog was also killed. Dave Taylor, who leases the farm, says he jumped the fence to see what was wrong but realised he was trapped when he heard the fences and gates were ‘fizzing and hissing’ because the fallen lines were still live. Mr Taylor says he was lucky because he and workmate Glen Johnson might have jumped the fence without touching the wire. - Rodney Times"

Via Metro

Stop Press! "Dave Mows Grass" escapes Blogworld!

An open message to Dave, a guy who, like many has seen a lot of changes in his life over the last year or so, some not so good, some for the better, I've been following his exploits in a kayak, on swirling waters, and felt not a little jealous... getting pangs, ya know, to go out in mine, but, after they sat unused behind the house for a year or several, I um... sorta gave 'em away. One had become a bit porous, that was the serious white water toy, me and it had crashed into many rocks, submerged trees, and ice floes, I'd dragged and carried it through forests and, roped it down cliffs, been smashed upside down onto the beach.... Ahh, happy times.
My neighbour, who I gave it to, thought the fact that this much-patched lightweight kevlar reinforced adventure-machine leaked a bit, so you got a little wet, was a fault, and unacceptable.
It was, in fact easily fixable, but fixing it would add a little weight... so I never bothered. Water never bothered me.
One day I came home and Dylan was cutting it up in his back yard. CUTTING IT UP! DAMN!
But, you give something away, you lose the right to be angry when the new owner treats it badly.

Here's my thoughts on Dave's announcement of closing his blog.

Oh how insidious, Dave Mows Grass escapes, how the hell do you think you'll get away from the keyboard?
Blogger enforcement techs are right now creeping up on you, like they did to me, with a great big net, which they throw over you, and use to subdue you, dragging you off into the van. The van takes you to a secret facility, many miles from anywhere any of us would wish to call "home", and you will there be deposited into an empty room. Yes, room, they call it, not cell. There will be sedatives, of course, for a few days... But the lights go on and off at times, and with no windows, no clocks, how do we know time, days? I think I've been here a few weeks, but it may be days or years...

After a while, you sleep most of the time. Then, after one waking, there is a desk, and a computer. "You know what to do", a note on it says. "Blog. Or else".

And after a while, blogworld? seems like reality. You envy those out there on the water, those travelling, those living lives... but hey, there's another picture to cut and paste, hit post... Every time you hit so many words and images posted, you get a reward. I once got a beer, that was for a two thousand word post on a blog about knitting... Oh no, you don't have your own blog! that's too funny, no, you just get assigned blogs to post on, in the style of, I've done blogs on everything from high-altitude cheese-weaving, to the migration habits of pigmy shrews.

Now they tell me I've got one on grass-mowing and kayaking to do.

It seems another blogger has escaped, slipped his chains sometime in the night and left the blogcentrum, I heard the alarms the guards shouting, vehicles starting up. What happened? I think one of the guards has a blog, I'll tell you when he updates.

Come visit, Dave, let us know you're okay?

A Discussion of Orgasms

Well, that seems to have got your attention......
I hit post, before I wrote the content, so... the feed readers popped the "O" word up, and some of you, regular readers, blogfriends.... you know who you are..... (and so do I), ohhh Pavlov would have loved this, Mary Roach would too... as soon as I hit post (almost), came visiting... Whilst there was nothing to visit, empty post.

Here it is.




Video, yes, I'm aware that youtube is an annoyance to some... is of writer Mary Roach, speaking at the T.E.D. conference (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. If you are interested in hearing inspirational people speak on all manner of subjects, then I heartily recommend you visit TED, click HERE.

Mary Roach. Ten Things You Did Not Know About Orgasm. Go visit Mary, after this I'll be looking out for her books, she really made me laugh.

This is via BoingBoing, which some say is the worlds most popular blog. website, online magazine. I read Boingboing pretty much every day. I get bored with some of it's obsessions, but hey, I get bored with mine too. Points ot of ten for Boingboing? eight and a bit. sometimes fewer, sometimes ten.....

Custom Bikes Seen in Skipton

They're rebuilds on old frames, registered as tax exempt/historic, there's a distinct similarity between them, but they're far from identical, I'd guess them to be the work of the same person or workshop. I like the red one more, with its open forks and (argh!) leaf spring front suspension.
Although the red bike's tank says "Ace", the only "Ace" bike I know was a straight, inline four, not a V-twin, the company became "Indian" far back in the mists of time. If any passing reader knows more about these two, I'd really be interested to know, If you're the maker, my hat is off to you.