Mum sent me some packs of seeds- flowers, because it’s a little too late to sow food plants this year- and I’m off to do some geurilla planting. Consider it a way of fighting back. Manchester doesn’t seem as bad as some of the examples in this article, but because of the compensation culture, CCTV and the basic antipathy of the urbs to greenery, councils all over the place are destroying parks and wild areas within the city.
While doing the Story of O post yesterday I remembered that there was a comic adaptation of the story, but was lost for the name of the artist. It came back to me earlier (roasting coffee is good for the memory?). Guido Crepax, architect turned smut doodler, did the Story of O graphic novel. I don’t have this one, but I do possess some of his Emmanuelle adaptations and his take on Jekyll & Hyde, where Mr. Hyde turns out to be a perverse sex dwarf. The style’s very early 70’s, with scratchy lines, strange layouts, minimal shading and stretched, skinny bodies. Still very hot, though.
Engineers are planning to use a plastic tube to create a surfable wave on the River Spree in Berlin.
It’s coming up to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Story of O. The Observer finds out more about its author and the scandals surrounding it.
The start of the Mersey, where the Tame and the Goyt converge, is under Stockport, more or less. I didn’t know it would be so easy to find when I chose to track it down. I guess I could track those two rivers as far upstream as possible to find the farthest point from which water flows into the estuary.
Update I think this is the source of the Tame. And the Goyt starts here.
Spinneyhead’s Amazon stats for 24th June to 24th July. Yes, I am bored.
Traffic by Item – Click Throughs Report For spinneyhead
You let cows loose in the city, you’re going to have to clean up after them.
Just to confuse matters. Two Belgian cows that Damian caught when he happened to be in Brussels during an earlier CowParade–
I’ve spent the last three days re-reading Akira. I think it’s the first time I’ve worked through all six albums back to back. I may be suffering from speed line overdose. I’m going to round out the whole experience by watching the film again.
I don’t know how long the original Japanese version took to be published, but the planning must have been meticulous, because there are incidents in the first volume that are only fully explained right at the end. I also noticed the decompression more this time. The story could be told in half the pages, but it wouldn’t be any where near as good. Destruction on the level depicted needs to be shown from several viewpoints to let it all sink in.
Akira Volume One, Volume Two, Volume Three, Volume Four, Volume Five, Volume Six. Akira Ultimate Collection DVD
William Shatner does Common People.
via Emily’s friend Marnanel
Got a good thirty miles or so of cycling done yesterday. It’s quite a good mood stabiliser- for me anyway- I was beginning to feel a bit crap after a week of small disappointments.
I went out to Harpurhey, Crumpsall and Heaton Park, but I could only find the Crumpsall cow. Ickle has managed to get a picture of Freda, the Harpurhey bovine, maybe I’ll just nick it from him. I also found Veera the Volunteera, who isn’t listed on the Cow Map.
Then I went off for a potter with Damian in the evening, discovering hidden parts of Manchester along a cycle path laid along old railway lines. Given that this city is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and criss-crossed by these wonderful routes. We came up with a plan for a sort of Top Gear for cycling, which I shall expand upon later.
This week’s subject is Mother.
Apparently the ladies are all so much better dressed up here in Manchester.
Another first draft chapter from Post & Publish has gone up in Cycling on the Pavement. This one, provisionally, is the first chapter, setting up stuff for the first half of the book, but I’ve tried to keep the conversation from being a complete info dump.
American bomber crews can’t even find targets in friendly countries. To be fair, they only missed Farnborough by five miles, and it’s not as if they flew over a wedding party or anything.
John called me yesterday to say that BT’s in-house censorware was blocking Spinneyhead. I must have said naked once too often. Or perhaps it was upset by the gratuitous use of the word fuck in serious web posts. Either way, and as the damage is done, I’m not about to change. Apologies in advance if there becomes one less thing to do in your lunch hour.
And, just to hurt my case further, some Mary Tales stuff. Posts have been sparse for the last few days because I’ve been experimenting with a new way to do art. I’m still using Poser to set up the image (when I get a life model I might start sketching the originals) then using Photoshop and Illustrator to get a clear line style I like a lot. (Insert mandatory work safety notice regarding the presence of naked people in images here.)
There’s a progression and improvement between these two images, and something of a leap from my original Illustrator experiments.
In future all lettering, for Mary and DEx, is going to be done in Illustrator. Speech bubbles etc. are so much easier. I also reckon I can streamline the work required for the Mary art even further. Another couple of images and I can send samples off to Domai to see if they’re interested and/ or have a large buffer of ready art for when webcomicsnation goes live.
Fragments of moon rock brought back by the Appolo missions were handed out as goodwill gifts. Some of these flecks have gone missing, leading to a black market in moon dust. One man at NASA is trying to track the pieces down.
You know, the one that repeated all the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The provisional new addition to the 100 Things list is- Find the source of the Mersey. It was going to be find the source of the Thames, but this version can be done from home.
The pilot of Bock’s Car, the plane that dropped the Fat Man atomic bomb on Nagasaki, has died aged 84.