ok, i spent the morning putting together a little photo book for y’all. if you go here, on the projects page, you can see pictures of me and skye and martin and various euro/uk pals. including this fellow here.
in other news, i’ve been working all week with matthew mcfarlane at the cbc, putting together a pilot radio show. a simple idea really. me talking, songs playing. we have a great playlist. john southworth, el perro del mar, shaun driver, tom ze, the bittersweets, destroyer, neutral milk hotel, a little brecht of course, and a track off of the new calexico/iron + wine album. if i wasn’t so tired i’d link all those for you. but you’re all old enough to do google searches i’m sure.
also, the fits have a coupla gigs coming up. dec 2 with the wizards in Bob’s Lounge, at montmartre (not the one in france, the one in vancouver) and dec 10 at the theatre replacement christmas party. must get that christmas medley on the go….
Yay, photos! Nice work. Much fun can be had with taxidermy … I stayed in this nice place in Mexico last year where the owner had taxidermy in every room:
http://flickr.com/photos/thermistor/tags/taxidermy.
Taxidermy, it’s a very special thing, and worthy of the many museums you visited. If I had a dog or a guinea pig or maybe a relation I was particularly fond of I’d like to preserve them for all eternity in a familiar pose and keep them on an easily accessible wall or maybe a big glass case next to the television. Next year, you really must travel North West, even past Lancaster and into Cumbria. In Keswick you will find a pencil museum (cunningly disguised as a big old green shed). In it, there is the world’s biggest pencil. And exhibits which describe the history of pencil making. An an area where you can use real pencils to do colouring on bits of paper. And there’s a shop. You can buy pencils there. The world’s biggest pencil really is very big indeed. I wonder if there’s a world’s biggest pencil case.
Hille, are you levitating that kabob with the power of your mind? You are amazing!
The Amazing Hille!
I’ve been wracked with worry ever since I posted the above. This has now turned to guilt because I may have unwittingly misled you. The one in Keswick is strictly the world’s biggest COLOUR pencil. It’s yellow. There are at least 2 bigger pencils and both of them are outside the immediate Keswick metropolitan area. It’s not all bad news though, because the world’s second largest pencil is in Germany, owned by Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, who keeps it in the garden in front of the family castle at Stein near Nuremberg. So assuming your next tour is broadly similar to this year’s, you’ll still be able to see two very, very impressive pencils but not the actual Daddy of them all which is in Malaysia and is GIGANTIC! It’s still worth a visit to Keswick though, they have a 65 year old heroic undercover pencil which contains a tiny compass and a very small and tightly rolled up map of Germany, stuffed into it like a long thin taxidermied wooden beaver.
well, we have some very impressive big things here in canada too. the world’s largest ukranian easter egg. the world’s largest nickel. a pretty darn big apple, which you can go inside and eat apple pie out of. i do think you’ve got us beat on pencils though, keswick.
i’ve also seen a picture of about 20 taxidermied rabbits set up as if they are at school. it’s called The Rabbits Village School, and it was made by walter potter. apparently there’s something called Potter’s Museum at the jamaica inn in cornwall. anyone ever been there?
Indeed yes, the Ukrainian Easter Egg. And your sky. My recollection of Canada is that you have a very big and impressive, all-enveloping version of the sky.
I am an infrequent visitor to Cornwall. I have never imbibed scrumpy at the Jamaica Inn, nor visited the Potter museum. There are other museums called Potter and featuring rabbits which I’ve never been to, including one a day’s fellwalk (30 minutes by charabanc) from Keswick. It’s dedicated to renowned pencil exponent and owner of a prodigious flock of sheep, Beatrix Potter. I’d be most surprised if there weren’t loads of rabbits there. And probably a couple of red squirrels. Frogs. A hedgehog. Smallish pencil, maybe.
I can’t believe you visited the Royal Albert Memorial Museum when you were in Exeter ( I hope you realise that you missed out on ‘Barometer World’ just up the road). If I had known I could have coincided my school trip to meet up with you in there. We were looking at the African artefacts (that may have spoiled your whole trip)
Loved your show up at Halden. One word to describe it, ‘moving!’ Thanks a lot
barometer world? dang. i should direct all you museum enthusiasts to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in los angeles. go ahead, google it. worth a trip from anywhere.
and on the weekend, i’m finally going to the vancouver police museum, which has been on my list for many years. it was apparently started in the 1970s by some cops who surreptitiously lifted some random evidence and set it up as exhibits. unchanged, people! wish me luck.