The Ministry Of Truth

Two things.

First, Google has announced a deal under which it is hosting and making available the millions of photographs from the past 150+ years that comprise the Time-Life archive.  Special landing page here, or or add “source:life” to any Google Image search to search only the Time-Life archive (eg “computer source:life”).  Be prepared to lose the next hour of your life.

Second, I think we’ve all known what to expect from the forthcoming Guns n’ Roses album.  Yet in one gorgeous opening paragraph Popdose’s Jeff Vrabel shoves Chinese Democracy even further up Axl’s hole than the Minister ever imagined possible…

Unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the company of William Shatner, Chinese Democracy will likely be one of the most ridiculous audio recordings you ever come across. It is sprawling and stupid and ludicrous and hilarious and will make you shoot milk out of your nose and cringe and it is not very good and sometimes extremely terrible, and just when you think things cannot possibly get any more extraordinarily strange, that’s when Axl Rose drops the MLK sample on you.

Glorious.

Being a Thoughtcriminal used to make you more distinctive…

Before certain of my hypercritical friends tear it apart, I would just like to say that I am actually rather pleased with this, my first effort at digitally stitching together a series of photographs to create a panoramic scene:

This is the new Wembley Stadium, for the uninitiated.

The larger photograph can be found here.

Er…

Hi, I’m [...] from the Futbol Club Barcelona Documentation Centre. The reason of this e-mail is that this next September the Futbol Club Barcelona will celebrate the fiftieth Anniversary of the Camp Nou Stadium with the inauguration of an exposition on the second floor of the Futbol Club Barcelona Museum. One of the resources that we have planned to show are pictures about the most important stadiums in the world.

We’ve have found one of your photos and wondered whether you might allow us to use this on the exposition. We would be happy to credit you as the photographer on the image.

If you could let me know if this would be ok we’d be very greatful.

Best regards,

[...]
Futbol Club Barcelona Documentation Centre

Astonishingly, it actually seems to be kosher.

Located on the second floor of the Club Museum, (in the Camp Nou Grandstand), the Documentation Centre is dedicated to the history of FC Barcelona and is divided into a Press Archive, Library, Historic Archive and Photography Archive. It was inaugurated in 1994 and is free to anybody with an interest in learning more about our club’s past.

How bizarre.

May I be the first to observe that the photo - a snatched snap - is not actually all that good.

I’m a bit late to the party - even the naffing Daily Express has found this before me - but OHMIGODTHISISFANTASTIC!

Snow Patrol have apparently nicked this 1976 short - C’etait un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch - for their latest video.

My favourite bits are the woman shitting herself at 5:22, the bloke staining his white suit at 5:49 and the pigeons just after the 7 mins mark.

It seems it’s now three years ago this month since I went on a sojourn around Nevada, Arizona and northern California.

A propos nothing more than showing off some of my photography, which has not appeared on the blog to date, here is a snap of a winter Vegas sunset (yes, that is snow on the mountain tops) I took from my hotel room.

If you click on it, I think you should be taken to my Flickr account and be able to explore more of my snaps. I may eventually be shamed into uploading some more photos during this little spell of “down time”.