Topical Post (a couple of days late)

Pictures of Guy Fawkes in Knaresborough, Yorkshire.

As part of Knaresborough's "FEVA" arts festival, somebody had the bright idea of reinstating various bricked-up windows and doorways with trompe l'oeuil paintings.

Seen above are the windows alluding to Guy Fawkes, who was born in York and lived for some time at Scotton, a village close to Knaresborough.

For those readers who are not british, Guy Fawkes was the man of whom it it said "He was the only man with honest intent to ever enter parliament"

In fact, he was one of a group of plotters who sought to overthrow the king and parliament by blowing them all to pieces with a huge bomb made of 36 barrels of gunpowder. The plot was discovered, Fawkes was apprehended in the cellars below parliament, in the early hours of the morning when the king was due to open the year's sessions. 

In Britain, every year since, on the fifth of november, people hold bonfires, let off fireworks, and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes.

The country was ruled by a protestant king, which catholics such as Fawkes believed was unlawful. 

It was held that a king ruled by the will of god and was placed in his reign by god. However, to a catholic, a king who did not acknowledge the pope as god's representative on earth, was a heretic, and therefore could not be ruling by god's will...

Fawkes was the man who was to set a torch to the fuse. He and his co-conspirators were all arrested or killed whilst attempting to escape.

They were hung, drawn, and quartered, Fawkes is the only one widely remembered.

The next pair of pictures are of  "Ginger" Lacey . Lacey went to King James Grammar School, Knaresborough, before the second world war, when he became an R.A.F. pilot,  and during the Battle of Britain became one of the top fighter aces.

One of the paintings depicts the artist at work. I might be wrong, but I think this one's Julie Cope.  I found her postcards and prints of some of these windows at an excellent gallery,  Art in the Mill in the evocatively named "Green Dragon Yard", off Castlegate, betwixt the castle and the market-square. Theres a nice little cafe in the yard too.

Green Dragon Yard

Market Place, Knaresborough.

Harry who?

Whatever they're buying tickets for, it must be good.

Zombie theatre?

I've lost the leaflet from the tourist office, so I'm not sure of the other artists involved, and the various involved websites, FEVA, and Yorkshire Forward, which between them commissioned and sponsored the project are surprisingly uninformative on the subject, which is, I think, a shameful way to treat artists.

Dark Room

The Who?

Ol' 55

A Lot to Think About.

And a fascinating animation. Watch it, as an antidote to all that crap on TV.



via

24 Hours Later

Well, I'm still here.

I tore my bed-sheet. I was dreaming that the bad guys had wrapped me in canvas, and set fire to the warehouse, and I was struggling to get free before I burned up.
I got free, but the sheet's dead. Got another sheet and went back to sleep in the cave but I had to keep the fire roaring because I could hear the wolves. I sweated and shivered and roasted all night.  Slept most of the day.
Didn't go to work, sounds like my boss is coming down with the same symptoms...
I'll be there tomorrow. I think it's over. Might even eat something soon. maybe.

Pathetic Moaning Continues

I ache all over, and I'm shivering. Struggling to  stay awake. No interest in eating anything today. 9 in the evening and I'm going to drag my poor unco-operative body to bed, and hope tomorrow will be a better day.
Argh moan mope.
Moan mope argh.
Writing this is a triumph of the mind over the dumb insolence of the body.

Garghhhh! maybe I've got zombie-itis for halloween.
Not flu, can't be, I've been jabbed by a pointy needle against that.
Sleeping sickness? Malaria?

Wash hands after visiting blog, it might be contagious.
Urk.

A thing that makes no sense.

I was in the supermarket, hungry, which is a bad thing to be when pushing a trolley, because all sorts of things you'd never normally buy suddenly seem like a good idea.
And no, ladies, I'm a man, of course i don't have a list. Nor am I absolutely sure what's already in my kitchen... So I'm going to get amounts of stuff I have already, but hey, I like it, so it'll get eaten... Well, maybe not, maybe it will go mouldy and I'll chuck it out, like the grapes that were such a bargain.....

Anyway, the point of this was... I was looking at frozen pizzas, no, I didn't buy any, I was just ogling them... And- there's a whole genre of "stonebaked" pizzas.
But the damn things are frozen, pasty things with unmelted cheese atop them.  Stonebaked? If I had a stone oven, they might be. Otherwise they're going to be electrically steelbaked pizzas.
Do they make the pizza dough, sling it onto a hot stone for ten seconds, then chuck some toppings on, bag it and freeze it? Because it seems to me that I'd be  the pizza baker, not Goodfellas.