A nest with a view

 

"She never moves." "Are you sure?" "Never. It's shady." "Ok, build here."

Laugh till you cry

BBC iPlayer - Comedy Catch Up: Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show

"The showbiz legend gives a lecture to impress the Egyptology Society - but there's a strict dress code." (BBC Radio 7)

"Imagine if they mixed the syringes up and you ended up with Cliff Richards' buttocks in your face..." (Classic answer to sales phone call...) "Bob Monkhousen syndrome (by poxy)" Better than drugs.

Gladstone Park this afternoon

Approaching the walled garden









A very high kite





Sphagnum

Best of BBC poetry week

BBC iPlayer - Armando Iannucci in Milton's Heaven and Hell
(UK only, for a limited time)

Here is not somebody who can make exciting what is boring - which you may classify as evil, after listening to the first ten minutes of this - but rather a great advocate giving an undeniable argument to a jury. I got the tip-off from Newsnight Review, and sure enough this is an inspirational introduction to Paradise Lost, which I will now have to go and read, having ho-hummed through bits of it in school.

Ossian

North on Friday evening

Sphagnum

Air traffic control signature

"Wait a minute. Which way did I send you? Oh. And the other one? You don't know? Oh. Just a minute. Ok, here it is: Can you look out of your windows please?"

Maybe I'm paranoid but...Has the "Just For A Larf" team infiltrated Air Traffic Control or what? Why are the damn things always crossing paths - shouldn't they be travelling in parallel lanes?

Feargal

Mother bird brain

Bird uses body as dam to stop drainpipe soaking chicks

"The Mistle Thrush had built her nest on top of a downpipe, blocking the water's passage and causing the gutter to flood. But desperate to protect her young, she puffed herself up to twice her size and sat in the drainpipe to stop the tide of rain water swamping the nest." (Telegraph)

Fountain high

Trafalgar Square fountain spurts to new heights

"As Joel Schobs, the engineer in a chlorine-scented lair deep beneath the square's flagstones, cranked up the pressure and eased open valves that had been closed for a lifetime, the plume in the western fountain gradually and almost imperceptibly rose. Within a minute it was visibly taller than its twin. Within two it was high enough to splash the bronze cloak of General Charles Napier. Within five it was a spurting glory, 35 feet high..." (Guardian)

Britain's got bastards

I said before that child sang tonight on "Britain's Got Talent", I said to the wife, "This is totally unethical, they are destroying children's lives and making fools of people." It's like the Roman Coliseum of psychology. It is in keeping with the barking idea that it's okay to torture a small child psychologically but not to give a little slap when it's naughty. Instead of a brief natural and transient response we are expected to put kids into solitary confinement, starve them, make them stand or sit in corners, make them denounce themselves and apologise. Then we take kids and we throw them into a sort of bear pit in front of a thousand sadists and tell them to sing and dance. Now we are being sold children's nervous breakdowns like anti-LSD tabs to narrow our horizons and reduce us to whooping chimpanzees. Just say no.

Feargal

WGwg book launch

The Space, Willesden Library Centre, May 28 2009

Samuel Taradash
Originally uploaded by Willesden Herald

Sam Taradash intro-duced some of the authors from the new collection as well as a very funny writer and poet Joe Dun-thorne, who read to much laughter and followed with an excellent question and answer session. Wine and juice flowed, food crunched and music enveloped the beginning, middle and end of a very enjoyable occasion. The book is a good read, so please buy a copy and send it into the top 20 on Amazon for a day ;-).

Steve Moran

Street at dawn (Monday)

Sphagnum

Crescent moon tonight

Sphagnum

The view this evening

After a day of a sunshine and a few showers

Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 3: Amazon.co.uk

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way)

Amazon.co.uk has been displaying that message for a couple or three months now, since they sold one copy. They order them in two's, so they "still have 1 left in stock". The US Amazon.com store has sold no more than seven in three months. The book is outside the top one million books, according the the Amazon sales position. On the face of it, that means they have more than a million other books that sell more copies than New Short Stories 3, which contains the best short stories of the year (from 650 submitted to our competition). Why do we bother? The whole book publishing business is a dead loss. The books that people buy from W. H. Smith are not written, they are extruded from machines to satisfy the public's demand for vacuous pap.

Ossian

Salt sellers

Salt Modern Fiction – "Stories from the edge of now"

These are the best new short story collections around. Buy some, treat yourself and support Salt Publishing. After investing in the short story genre they have had their annual funding withdrawn and have announced that they are about £50,000 in the red.

Riding for a fall

Boris Johnson's 'near-death experience' with lorry caught on CCTV

"One of Boris Johnson's missions as Mayor of London is to get more people out of their cars and on to their bikes. But anyone who watches CCTV footage of the mayor's last outing on his own bicycle is likely to be put off for life." (Guardian)

This evening - park, stadium

Willesden stadium 1



Willesden stadium 2



Another path and trees



Kids playing cricket



Cloud line



Shooting contrails



Tree machine?

Possibly the greatest musician of our lives

BBC iPlayer - BBC Four Sessions: James Brown
(UK only. No longer available)

Can I scream? "Go ahead and scream." Can I scream, Cynthia? "Go ahead and scream." Can I scream? "Go ahead and scream." Waaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrr!

Jacintha

Gordon's twin

Harriet Harman (video interview by Polly Toynbee)

This is what Gordon Brown would have looked and sounded like if if he had been born a girl. If you believe any of Harriet Harman's waffle, you must be the most gullible person ever born.

Feargal

Song of the MP's

My Life Is Good - Randy Newman

The right honorable member for Beverley Hills

Latest newsletter from the great pretenders

Advertisement by Gombeen™
pretend genius [press] newsletter #3

Including: Details of a new book, new video from Café Hopeless, next week's Willesden event, Write This next theme link (£30 paid per submission accepted), new partner (donor) list, reviews and links.

Saint Sarah of Willesden

MPs' expenses: The saints (Part ii) - Telegraph

Name: Sarah Teather
Job: Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East

Salary: £64,766
Total second homes claims:
2004/5: £0
2005/6: £0
2006/7: £0
2007/8: £0

What about Glenda? The Telegraph hasn't listed anything on her. "You're next Goody Jackson!" cry the children in the street.

Interview with The War Diaries by Sartre

"I get the real story, unlike some of those other sham interviewers." This is very interesting, especially the interjections by the translator and the bar lady. There is a suspicion that the translator is deliberately mistranslating the questions and answers, or that the book is not answering the same questions.

Café Hopeless

Aung San Suu Kyi

Nobel peace prize winner

Burma Democratic Concern

A world leader who is very used to living in just one house, though she is now in prison, for no good reason. She is to be jailed again because a nutter from the US swam across a lake to get into her house and she couldn't get rid of him. Burma! Myanmar! It's a sick world.

______________


Gordon Brown wrote about Aung San Suu Kyi in his book about heroism. Compare the petty chisellers here who can't get enough houses, and can't make up their minds where they live, or where to have their expenses-paid furniture delivered to (ref. incidences where thousands of pounds worth of furniture allowed for second home are delivered to primary home - Telegraph). To MP's: "A plague on both your houses."

Zoz

Topiary cat

Local topiary, possibly inspired by the recent Divine Cat visit to Brent Museum?

Picture by Craig