Monthly Archives: July 2006

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Oh dear. I’ve just discovered there’s a country called the Republic of Dagestan. That explains where my little brother came from.
It would be wrong to want to visit there just because of the name, wouldn’t it? (Says the woman who’s trying to get to Moldova to find the ‘real’ Molvania).

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I’ve finally gotten around to adding a better rss feed.
And I’ve taken a look at the only version I still have of the first page, and that suggests the first entry was written in December 1996. I think I bowdlerised it at some point because it was really ranty about people we knew as well as randoms yelling things out in the street outside Kirsty and Fraser’s flat.

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Terry Lane: Sorry mate, no such thing as a fair go
“But one has had reason to take another look at Mr Howard’s words these past few days and one has spotted a semantic error in the juxtaposed qualities a dinkum Aussie must keep in tension. We understand that excellence and fairness are euphemisms for profit on the one hand and a damn good thrashing if you ask for a decent wage on the other. And we understand that independence and mateship are code words for well-deserved wealth over dole bludging.
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The essence of mateship, as a universal virtue, is that it is an impulse to help strangers, assuming the best of them until they prove themselves unworthy of an altruistic helping hand. Mateship is a shorthand way of describing a system of social organisation based on the moral imperative of doing one for others without calculating that one day you may need them to do one for you. It is a sort of bucolic golden rule that even affects social interaction in the cities.”

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King’s Cross on July 7

Photo of media setting up across the road from London's King's Cross station, 30 bus passing in the background


King’s Cross

Originally uploaded by mia!.

I don’t know why, but of all the things I’d expected to see at King’s Cross on July 7, it wasn’t lots of media units.
I’m never usually there that early but there seemed to be as many commuters as ever. The mood was generally determined and a bit sombre, but maybe everyone always looks that way that early in the morning. Lots of police and transport police everywhere.
More comments on the photos themselves on flickr.
There was a really cute sniffer dog who clearly saw more interesting things to be sniffing than a bicycle chained to a fence between King’s Cross and St Pancras, but I didn’t think the police would appreciate me taking a photo of it.

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You could browse archive.org for a long time. If the 36,796 live music concerts don’t grab you, the 30,009 texts or 37,506 movies might.
“The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.”

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Time passes

I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for about ten years. My late-birthday, pre-trip drinks tomorrow night will also be to celebrate ten years of this blog, in its various incarnations. I wonder if Kirsty can remember the month I first put our whinges online. “But Kelly, I am a designer!”
I can’t believe I’ve been in the UK for almost exactly four years.
Finally, I can’t believe I’m going away for nearly seven weeks – I’m so not ready. I’m popping off to Marrakech for four days first, and my plan is basically to relax, maybe buy a purse to replace the one that was stolen last week, and then relax a bit more. Then one day to pack, panic, triple-check the flat, triple-check I’ve got my passports, then I’m off to Turkey.
Still no Moldovan visa, it’s all a bit painful. They really don’t want many tourists.