flambingo

english heritage abandons west pier

the west pier it seems is finally beyond hope as a conservation project. i'm in two minds about it, its been heartbreaking these last few years watching the old thing sink and burn and fall apart. i was working from home when it was first set on fire and with much of brighton went to the front and stood in shocked silence and watched it burn. now of course theres so little of the fabric left to recover that any restoration would be a replica rather than a renovation.

several things must be done. we can leave the pier as a glorious ruin on the front or build a new pier. i've no idea when the last most recent pier in the UK was built, but there is no reason - provided it can be commerically distinct from the palace pier - why a new one can't be built. a perfect job for alsop i would have thought, and now the fourth grace is on hold in need of a waterfront project. given brighton council's long overdue commitment to commisioning new architecture of quality - gherys overblown towers, the ice rink for black rock and its commitment to replace the brighton centre; a competition for a replacement pier should be launched.

and of our victorian pier heritage? now we are a one pier town the palace pier must be forced to restore some architectrally important details removed some time ago to make room for more fun fair on a 'temporary' basis.

"Rebuilding of the pier remains technically possible, but it would no longer possess the historic credibility English Heritage would seek in the restoration of a Grade I listed building. Our review indicates that the project would cost in excess of £20 million and the pier could not be guaranteed to last for many years without an additional £5 million repair fund being set up. English Heritage has therefore concluded that it would have to advise any body considering funding a restoration of the West Pier that there is no longer a strong conservation case to support such a project."
english heritage

bungaroosh

deep in househunting hell. the only small consolation is learning what bungaroosh is. the horrors i've seen, most criminal are 'wet rooms', or as they appear to be, perfectly decent cupboard space turning into a pygmy shower. shudder.

Garrison Keillor: 'A Democrat knows that the leaf turns'

"The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. Men and women make love and have babies in the knowledge that if the baby should be born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or a hole in its heart and require heroic care, the people of Minnesota and of St. Paul will stand with you in your dark hour. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances."

garrison keillor sucessfully defines social democracy in a paragraph

new camera phone

heywards heath viaduct



midsummer on the beach



canteen



bookies window



bad cat



gay shame



pier

i love dan savage

i love dan savage (syndicated sex advice collumnist for the onion among others) but i especially love him when he gets all hoity-toity homo-er that thou.

"At the last meeting of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Subcommittee For Lesbian Grievances made a successful proposal: Straight women trolling for women who might be willing to fulfill their boyfriends' and husbands' girl-girl-guy three-way fantasies are now welcome in lesbian clubs—provided you clearly identify yourselves to the bartenders upon your arrival. So while you're in San Francisco, RTT, walk up to the bartender at any of the city's lesbian bars and say, "Hi, I'm here to find a third for me and my boyfriend." The bartender will introduce you to all the other straight women in the bar looking for pro-man lesbians."

ah, UKIP

well now, what exactly did people expect from these buffons.

"I am here to represent Yorkshire women who always have dinner on the table when you get home. I am going to promote men's rights," godfrey bloom UKIP, now on the EU parliment's womens' rights committee.

my long standing belife is that a referendum on the euro or the euro consitution is entirely winnable provided the tories and UKIP field enough union jack waistcoated braying arseholes from the shires.

taking a look at the eurosceptic bloc, europe of democracies and diversities reveals what an unsavoury lot they are. the election of the league of polish families (a UKIP ally and staunchly catholic anti-abortion anti-immigration party) caused President Kwasniewski to offer apologies on behalf of Poland to Brussels. UKIP is proving similally boorish and embarrassing.

hurrah for the bulwer-lytton fiction contest

"She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon."

2004 winners now out!
those nice people at sacredtexts have (bafflingly) made bulwer-lytton's masterpiece vril - the power of the comming race available. bovril was named after it.

sacred texts is full of wonders, Piri Re'is map (1500s, turkish), blavatsky's secret doctrine next to roger bacon and the egyptian book of the dead. fabulous treasure.

colaborative performance

now this is cool: cantina crawl VII. people from the star wars MMOG (or MOG as alice and i have now decided) getting together for costume design and a dance routine. footloose becomes it's own virtual world......
it reminds me of the plays people used to put on at thepalace many years ago, most famously when an avatar godot turned up.

pirate flags

historic pirate flags, though strangely not featuring the pirate flag of the anarchist pirates of madagascar (purple with 'liberty' written across). spending far too much time at the moment trying to get information on my illustrious ancestor black weston. i think he was a very D list pirate though.

i've been very quiet

ah yes, quiet again. a bad combination for far too much to do at work and my home computer falling victim to the dread ibook logic board fault...(incidently apple computer's help desk is perhaps the least helpful on earth).

while i dwell on this twin unfairness:

the nicest thing i've seen of late: the lartigue exhibition at the hayward, a whole life in photographs and the loveliest catalogue i've brought in a long time. theres this marvelous sense in his very early work (and it is very early, he was given a camera at the turn of the century at the age of about five) of someone involved in photograph before it was an art and before he himself had any idea that such an art might have rules.

the best thing i'm reading: i shall bear witness, victor klemperer's diaries 1933 - 1945. its astonishing the speed of the advancement of the nazis, the confidence with which they set about corrupting germany. the diaries start with hitlers 'election' and its only a few pages in before he says "we talked of politics but not much, as the windows were open". i've been reading the book he wrote from notes kempt in the diary 'the language of the third reich', it's both touching and chilling (and occasionally very funny) about the subversion of language by politics.

soon i shall have time and a working computer and the ability to get bad photography from nice new camera phone onto the site.