Monty shot up this silver birch tree after a bird today, jumping about 6ft in about half a second!!  Unfortunately for Monty, he is probably designed for the desert and sticks out like a carrot in an omelette (or a ginger cat in a creamy white tree).  The bird wasn’t fooled for a minute…

Yesterday as I drove through the snow, unable to see a thing and feeling a little small in our car, I thought to myself; “This is the one occasion where I could do with a nice 4×4″.  As I crossed the round-a-bout to the Bath Road I stopped at the lights behind this and laughed out loud:

I’ll stick to the Carina…

So one of my four deadlines for next week is under control… :-S  I have a very sore throat (current Uni lurgy) and have been staying up late, but at least the magazine is printed, courtesy of Print By Design.

For some reason youtube videos and my blog don’t mix too well, so the caption comes separately for the post below!

“Some great music and I must say that the filming ‘aint half bad either!  Ha ha, my camera is the one that looks straight on at the band….”

This morning I received a rubber chicken in the post from my printing company!!  As you do…  It made me laugh, they are running a treasure hunt competition where, based on some very cryptic clues, you have to guess the location of some ‘golden columps’ in order to win £500 of free printing.  You can have one guess per day.  I got a guess wrong and they sent me a letter saying ‘never mind, but I have been doing some digging and found this artifact… We are not sure if it is of archaeological or historical significance but ah well…  Finders keepers!’  Nutters!  Brought a smile to my morning though.

This is the essay question that I went for…  Silly me.

1) This patient process of nature was once imitated by men, miniatures, ivory carvings elaborated to the point of the greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of then transparent layers are placed one on top of the others – all of these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past where time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.
Paul Valery quoted in Walter Benjamin “The Storyteller”

Discuss in relationship to the production of imagery in graphic design and illustration comparing the use of handcrafted and computer generated imagery.

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

Daniel J. Boorstin, ‘’The Image: A guide to Pseudo-events in America’’ 1961

This is part of an essay question (or one of the options) that I have been set… Not sure if I will do this one though! Just thought that it was an interesting concept. Not sure I agree with it though, it seems to be one of those sweeping statements that sounds very profound until you actually unpick and translate it. I sort of agree with the second bit, that we can be haunted often not by an experience itself, but that the experience acts as a trigger for an illusion, fear or insecurity.

The first bit however, that states; ‘We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions’ is not really true. Yes, we may not suffer directly from the vice or weakness (say for example, the vice is alcoholic consumption or smoking), someone doesn’t suffer from drinking alcohol, they suffer the EFFECTS of drinking alcohol. This is not an illusion, it would be an illusion and a denial of self to call it so. It would be as if you are saying that the vice or weakness is not really real and therefore doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. A vice is called a vice because it is a trap, a cycle of behaviour, feelings or actions that destroy a person. I know it says we suffer primarily not from our vices…etc but I think that it is misleading.

Read in the correct context, the statement is probably true, but I don’t think that the best correlative is being drawn between the entities.

Well…  My dream car would be the convertible version but still, I was bored and wanted to doodle!

I only hope it is true….