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Saturday night’s Actionettes club night at the Buffalo bar by Highbury and Islington was fantastic fun and well worth the tricky journey up north (the Victoria Line was out all day again).
Here’s some pics (unfortunately, I missed The Spivs, who everyone told me were splendid):
The Action Men were superb!
There was a huge turn out for this march today – here’s some hastily slapped up photos:
Loads more here: Put People First G20 Demonstration: ‘Jobs, Justice, Climate
We went along to KoKo in Camden tonight to see three members of the Algerian band Tinariwen, collaborating with twisted pop-folkies Tunng onstage.
It was a great show and it was nice to see the old Camden Palace (or Music Machine if you’re even older) in such fine condition – even if the drinks are well pricey.
The late Victorian theatre has been restored beautifully, with the dark red and gold interior looking immaculate.
Fact: the venue was the last place AC/DC’s Bon Scott was seen drinking before his death from alcohol poisoning in 1980
Fact! I played the Camden palace several times with several (failed) bands
Fact! I saw Prince do a secret gig there once. There were wall-to-wall music celebs inside and his gig was quite probably one of the best shows I’d ever seen. He was amazing!
Some more pics from the night. In an Offline first, both bands featured tuba players – and we’ve got another tuba player lined up for my birthday bash on April 3rd! Parp-tastic!
I’m still beastly hungover from last night’s immense Offline show – both bands were absolutely fantastic and the place was heaving again.
The crowd was, as ever, well up for a good time. Here’s a few pics from the night – more coming soon!
We’ve got some great Offline nights coming up – April 3rd is both Offline’s 5th birthday party and my own (slightly bigger) birthday, so we’re putting on something really special at the Albert.
The week after we’re celebrating our return to the Dogstar in Brixton with perhaps the biggest bill we’ve put on for years. Both events are free – see more details here: Offline Club
If you’ve run your own website for a while, you’ll be used to occasional techie problems with your server, so when I found that urban75.com was down, I figured it might be down to the thing needing a reboot, a swift elbow in the RAM or some command code wizardry.
What I didn’t expect to hear was that the entire server had been unplugged, removed and dumped in the bin – without anyone even telling me what was going on!
To be fair, the site had been hosted for free since 1997 and had carried on despite several takeovers of the original company, but it does leave me a bit in the doggy-do right now. urban75.com has vanished!
Happily, all the files were backed up on my own PC and the resident urban75 tech genius known as ‘Lazy Llama’ is on the case, so you should start seeing the site coming back in the next day or two.
Meanwhile, the far bigger urban75.net and urban75.org sites remain up and running so we’ve only lost part of the urban75 ‘empire.’
Apologies for the interruption.
We’ve just spent a lovely long weekend in the Netherlands, cycling along canals and checking out the sights.
I’ll do a full photo feature soon, but here’s a few shots from Utrecht, which was a delightful town:
Getting there was pretty easy too: Eurostar to Brussels, and then on to Helmond with one change on the way.
All the trains ran right on time, the connections were easy and the whole journey took us around 5 hours. Lovely!
You’d have to be mad to endure the skanky grime of RyanAir when you can sit down with a coffee and watch the countryside roll by.
Rushcroft Road is an attractive street of Edwardian mansion blocks running from Tate Gardens opposite Lambeth Town Hall to Coldharbour Lane.
The street has a long association with community squatting – read the full story here: Rushcroft Road and Clifton Mansions community.
On the 10th March, 2009, two long standing squats at Hereford House and Rosslyn House were evicted by a large number of police. These photos were taken a few hours after the squatters had been removed.
More here: Squats evicted, Rushcroft Road
You can see the two blocks in this Microsoft Virtual Earth gizmo – they’re the ones to the right of the circular tower.
I’ve had such a hideously unproductive day today, responding to a thread on urban75 asking for people to post up pictures of their desktops was just about the only thing I achieved.
So here it is. Da-daa! My desk (looking unfeasibly tidy after a bit of a sort out over the weekend).
Sharp eyed readers will note the knackered blinds to the left (one of the pull strings broke so it now only goes up on one side) and a rather ancient Wacom art tablet.
The keyboard is the rather flash Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth which I got to review last year.
It’s a veritable smudgy finger magnet but is delightfully slim and space age looking with its glowing lights.
Another object your beady eyes may have clocked is the Pure Digital DMX-60 DAB radio/CD player on the shelf (I reviewed its predecessor the DMX-50 back in 2005).
The system lacks power big time, but the radio ‘rewind’ feature is indispensible – I only wish the feature was available on more mini music systems.
The phone to the right is a BT Verve, picked up from Amazon for just �13. The sound quality is OK but it’s one of the few landline phones that looks like it may have come from this century.
Next to the two four year old Viewsonic monitors is an Oregon Scientific Wireless Easy Weather System Pro, which sounds really posh, but is a basic barometer/thermometer that talks to a sensor outside my window.
It’s usually quite accurate and offers an inside/outside temperature readout – thanks to sitting in a room full of not-particularly efficient or new equipment, the weather inside is usually set to ‘Scorchio.’
And there you have it. My desktop. Send us a link to yours!
It seems like an eternity ago now but at the time it was a mighty important battle against the Tories’ mad, mad, mad plans to implement “The biggest road-building programme since the Romans.”
In December 1991 Twyford Down became the site of the UK’s first road protest camp when environmentalists, including members of Dongas and Earth First! gathered to hinder work. After a year this first camp was evicted on Yellow Wednesday, named after the uniforms of the Group4 security guards who performed the eviction in December 1992.
Resistance to the road intensified and Earth First! set up a new protest camp nearby in Plague Pits Valley, and continued to obstruct the work both on the water meadows and up on the Down itself. In addition to many actions there was a mass trespass when over 5000 people attended the protests and occupations, and six people were sent to prison for some weeks for defying an earlier injunction not to enter the site. (Wikipedia)
There was a defiant march by protesters along the completed motorway just before it opened, and it was an incredibly hot day. I’ve still got a ‘do not trespass’ sign from the site in my bathroom!
Join in the Twyford Down discussion on our bulletin boards.
I’m giving this free Microsoft blogging download a spin.
The good folks at Lifehacker raved about it, and it’s been recently updated so I’m hoping it’s going to be better than faffing around on the Blogger website.
So far, I’m liking what I’m seeing – it’s a lot more powerful than Blogger, provides nippy previews and has quite a few handy image editing tools too.
I’ll report back later!
Five minutes later: OK, it’s starting to piss me off big time. It’s converting apostrophes to question marks for no good reason. I found what looks like a fix here, but let’s see if it works….
Ten minutes later: This is frustrating. I turned off the “Replace” options under Tools | Options | Editing as instructed, but now just some of the apostrophes are coming out as question marks.
I hope this can be sorted out, because the editor is infinitely faster than using Blogger…
Here’s a few more photos from our recent visit to Philly.
South Street is a lot like a mini-Camden.
Lovely, lovely St Davids day!
Thanks to the lovely Em, I’ve enjoyed a delightful leek bake today, followed by a plateful of delicious Welsh cakes. Welsh cakes rock.
Here’s Eme holding a tin full of cakes she baked for last year’s Offline St David’s Day special.
Someone asked me a while ago what a Welsh accent sounded like. Here’s my reply:
What exactly does a Welsh accent sound like?? Like Richard Burton. Like the Treorchy Male Voice Choir. Like butter across a freshly baked Welsh cake. Like Slack Blodwyn from Tiger Bay after six pints of SA. Like a warm summer breeze on the slopes of Snowdon. Like Shirley on a Vegas encore. Like Tom’s Green Green Grass. Like the sound of the onion bag bulging as Cardiff surge into the FA Cup Final.
See lots of photos from Wales here.
