Socks And Sandals
Please be aware that legislation that comes into force today – the 16th of August, 2014 – now makes the wearing of socks with sandals a capital offence in this zone (Habitat Zone F). The Public Foot Attire Beautification Act (2014) outlines the minimum punishment for any single infringement to be disembowelment, beheading, then belegging. Belegging is defined within the Act as "the removal of the limbs below the waist using a sharpened spatula and/or emery board." Lesser offences within the Act include the wearing of socks pulled up greater than an inch above the shoe height. Punishment for this particular crime are discretionary depending on the level of public horror but can include up to 25 years of hard labour in Blackpool (Punishment Zone B). Please be further aware that legislation due to soon come into force in this zone (Habitat Zone F) will also prohibit men from wearing shorts that do not reach the knee and will carry a mandatory punishment of emasculation. Thank you for your attention. Your fellow citizens appreciate your adherence to the Act. Google+: View post on...
Starcrash: The Greatest Movie Of All Time?
Well, that’s the assertion of Stephen Romano in this article from 2012: All of these disparate elements come together in a film that is at once confounding and bizarre and campy-as-hell… and classy, too. I could go on and on about all that—high art versus low art, the value of pop culture as commercial entertainment, the collision of visuals carved from hunks of pure green...
Portsmouth In Colour, 1939
Film footage from 1939 of Portsmouth shot in colour. Interesting to see familiar and not-so-familiar parts of Portsmouth and quite amazing how much some of it has changed, some of it obviously lost to bombings during the war and other areas changed just as a matter of course. The film includes shots from the Brickwoods brewery, Clarence Pier amusements, the airport, one of the first festivals of the sea, a parade taking place in Southsea, and contestants in the Miss Portsmouth competition among other bits. Please note: some of the film is a little bit racy (quite surprising for the era) and may not be safe for...
Portsmouth, Alien Invasion – Defy Them Poster
We’ve already seen that one way in which the citizens of Portsmouth kept their spirits up during the alien invasion by the Squirmy Munge of the early part of the twentieth century was through comics, and in particular the well-received Commander Pompey publication. Another way, and one common with most of the greater wars in recent centuries, was through motivational posters, the most famous of which was the Defy Them poster that first started appearing on walls in and around the city in late 1919. Present day Portsmouth has a thriving local art scene and it can clearly be seen that this talent was alive and well in 1919 too. However, it’s not just the wonderful example of art deco design that made this particular war poster so famous. It happens to have a rather bizarre history to it too. A tale started circulating in the city of a young woman named Abigail Ball. Abigail – it was claimed – had been walking through the Baffins area of Portsmouth when a Squirmy Munge landing craft dropped onto the ground in front of her. As the hatch on the craft hissed open and too afraid to run or scream Abigail did the first thing she could think of and performed an interpretive dance routine. The hatch closed up, the craft lifted off, and Abigail lived to tell her tale. Quite a fanciful story but it proved popular among the locals. The posters started to appear not long after and dancing to defy became a regular pastime for the people of Portsmouth. It was believed that the elusive and mysterious Abigail herself had designed, printed, and put up the posters as each one had the signature “Ball, A” on the back in fine print. However, in 1927 – long after the alien invasion had been repelled – in an interview with the local newspaper a Mrs Jenny Smith of Buckland admitted that she had invented the Abigail story and had produced the posters not because of any fighting spirit but rather to drum up trade for her ballet school which had been on the verge of financial collapse owing to the war. As is the nature of these things most people decided to disbelieve this version of the events and the legend of Abigail Ball and the Defy Them poster lives on to this...
Lady Hester Stanhope
A short biography of Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839), someone I’d not actually heard of but who Wikipedia describes as “a British socialite, adventurer and traveler.” She sounds rather fantastic, if not a little bit eccentric. Lady Hester Stanhope, Queen of the Desert: As she traveled throughout the Middle East, Lady Hester was received royally whereever she and her party went. She was received in state by the Pasha, Mehmet Ali, in Cairo. She traveled to Jerusalem and Acre, and other little known citites. When she reached Damascus, Lady Hester refused to wear the veil or change out of her men’s clothes to enter the city, despite the warnings she received that it was an anti-Christian community. Instead she rode in, unveiled at midday. The people of Damascus didn’t know what hit them, but their amazement turned to enthusiasm and she was hailed as a Queen. An interesting, very headstrong woman and a very good read but one that only briefly touches on a part of her archaeological work. For more on that, though, another article on Lady Hester Stanhope well worth a read is this one: Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope: The First Modern Excavator of the Holy Land.. The start to Stanhope’s excavation began when she came into possession of a “curious document”, which was a supposed medieval Italian manuscript that described the location of a hidden treasure buried under mosque in Ashkelon by Christians. Apparently, the manuscript was very detailed and Ashkelon was well-known as the ruins of an ancient port city. Stanhope didn’t merely march into Ashkelon and begin ripping the place apart. She submitted a request to the Ottoman government for permission and was granted the right to excavate the...
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...
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