Pictures Of Passports Past
Images from mine and my wife’s past passports, featuring visa stamps and horrific passport photos of the two of us in our respective youths. Not as horrific as the photos in our current passports, though, so there is that. The image on the front of the old British passport in black. I once passed through Athens security with this passport upside down, back to front, and closed, and was still waved through because of the respect it held throughout the world. Or because of the indifference of the security person. I’d like to think it was the former as there had only recently been a terrorist activity – a bombing, I think – in Greece when I was travelling. As you can see, my passport was issued in Gwent. And that’s all you can see. Behold my youthful narrowness and lopsided, spiky hair! Rest assured that with age has come width and more evenly-dispersed, less spiky hair. It would be fair to say that I am more difficult to push off balance these days. My wife – she wasn’t back then – dressed in her arctic warfare uniform. At a guess. She was, apparently, very hungover when this passport photograph was taken. An immigration stamp from my wife’s passport when she visited family in the United States. A visa stamp from my wife’s passport, again for the United States. My wife made a border crossing from the United States into the wilds of Canada and all she got was this lousy customs stamp. From our first European-style passport and from our honeymoon where we jetted off to Asia for a cruise this is my Chinese visa stamp. Photos from that cruise can be found on my Flickr stream: Honeymoon – Far East Cruise. Stamps from our honeymoon: Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. More passport stamps from our honeymoon cruise on board the Diamond Princess: Vietnam and Japan. Final immigration stamps from the honeymoon cruise and that particular passport: Taiwan and Thailand. One of several almost identical stamps in the current passport because the only place we’ve been since renewing is the United States. It’s a real shame you can’t carry passport stamps over from one passport to the next, losing that stampy history every ten years when you renew. However, the next set of stamps we should be getting will all be from South America as that’s the next area of the world we’re heading to. Not for a little while yet but looking forward to getting a few more pages of the passport filled in with...
1970s Euro Porn Style – Lehrmädchen-Report
Satellite TV came to the UK in the late 1980s and it wasn’t long before my parents ponied up the subscription fees and got a dish attached to the back of the house. And with that came a world of simultaneously truly awful and truly amazing programming from the far reaches of the Earth. But mainly mainland Europe. Compared to what we’d had to contend with before – four entire channels of mostly far less than 24 hours of viewing per day each – this was an incredible experience. Now we could watch quiz shows from Italy where we didn’t understand the questions or answers but liked the fact that scantily-dressed women featured heavily. Or news programmes from Spain where we didn’t understand a thing anyone was saying but there was a gorgeous presenter. Or soaps from France that we couldn’t comprehend but which had a heavy mix of beautiful female characters. You may be spotting a trend here. Of course, the main thing was staying up late enough so that the porn from the German or Italian channels would broadcast. Pornography on the television! What a world we lived in! I didn’t really realise it at the time but the adult films they showed were old, even then, dating from the 1970s and very much softer when compared to the sort of thing you can find online these days. Nudity and flaccidity and simulated sex acts were all you ever got but back then it was the best thing in the world. For reasons of nostalgia and mild perversion I decided to see if any of the 1970s films I remembered watching in the late hours of the 1980s were available online, what with us living in this glorious digital age. And they were! Which is handy or this would have been a rather pointless introduction. I tried watching one or two and even allowing for the continued incomprehension as to the plot and dialogue they were, quite frankly, awful. Always the danger I suppose. Still, there was one element of these classic porn films that I did enjoy: the fashion! The clothes! The cars! The house decors! The hair! The shoes! That may be more than one element but I’m going to group them all together under the heading of style. 1970s style? Yeah, you know I love that. This is potentially the first of a series of style showcases and mini reviews of 1970s European soft porn movies. Lehrmädchen-Report (1972) This is actually a movie I never saw on satellite television but the number of films featuring “report” at the end that I do remember seeing...
Young Vladimir Putin
Astonishingly, future Russian president Vladimir Putin was even more conservative in his youth and would never dream of appearing topless in public.
Genetically Modified Organisms
Everyone knows that genetically modified foods are bad for you, right? I mean, they must be because non-governmental organisations such as Friends of the Earth say so and just look at their name! They’re “friends” of the Earth for flip’s sake and “friends” never get things wrong or lie, do they? It’s very easy to believe “friends” and other NGOs, and it’s very easy to disbelieve the government. However, just believing something doesn’t make it right. Putting beliefs aside for the moment if you want to actually know whether GM crops are safe to eat it’s best to consult scientific bodies as they won’t (generally) have any ulterior motive in disseminating falsehoods. An article titled Why NGOs Can’t Be Trusted On GMOs explains more, pointing out as well how some NGOs use wordplay to spin the message away from the facts and towards a biased, unscientific, unsupported standpoint. Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm wrote on the Just Label It website that “all the research conducted around the safety of genetically engineered crops has been funded by the GMO patent holders themselves.” […] Hirshberg’s claim is wrong. […] The European Commission spent more than 200m euros of public funds on GMO research between 2001 and 2010. The EU summarizes about 50 studies in this 264-page report, which is easily found online. The article is concise, balanced, and most likely will be completely ignored by those who have already made up their minds that genetically modified food is dangerous. But that’s probably a build up of pesticides on apples forming a knowledge shield around their brains if I had to hazard a...
Houses And Villas With Pools
If I ever win big on the lottery I’d like to have a house designed by an architect (well, designed by me and then adjusted by an architect to make sure it won’t all fall down because there’s no such thing as a load-bearing pit) and one of the features I’d really like is a swimming pool. The following pictures are the sorts of homes and villas that appeal to me, all coming from the HomeDSGN website (pronounced Homed Ess Gnnnn), and all featuring a swimming pool of some...
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