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By TheSupercargo
 The book was stuck in the mud, I was still feeling sorry for myself after a bout with the flu and suspicious the germs were coming back for another round, and my good lady wife was determined to give the flat a major dusting.
“Why don’t you go out to the cottage?”
Why not? The cottage is actually owned by my sister-in-law, but it’s been my wife’s family’s seaside retreat for decades. Mostly used in the summer, though I’ve had writing retreats there before when the snow has been piled high. Now it was cold and raw and rainy.
I packed my (non-Internet connected) laptop, a change of clothes, my sleeping-bag, some food and set off.
So that’s where I’ve been, with no Internet, no TV or radio, no other people. Just the sound of the sea breaking on the beach, the rain on the roof and the wind in the trees. Me, a computer, two electric heaters and a disturbingly large number of dead woodlice.
The afternoon after I arrived and early on the morning of the second, I took the camera and went for a couple of walks in the rain. Otherwise I worked. Wrote about 3500 words, so I was pleased.
The pictures were not terribly good. Not really enough light and the rain kept spotting the lense, but I think they’ll do at this resolution. I liked especially the blue light in earliest of the early morning pictures. I hope you do too!
By TheSupercargo
If you once post a sequence of seasonal banners to rotate on your homepage, you are sooner or later going to have to update them with a new batch for a new season. And so I present my Autumn Banners for 2010!
The banners are set to rotate randomly everytime you refresh the page so you may not see them all for a while, but here they are below in miniature and if you click on one of them, you should be able to see them all full size in a slide-show.
They are mostly taken in September or October, though not necessarily this year. in fact, I think only five are from 2010. I’ve doctored a few of them in Photoshop to bring out the colours more vividly.
This first I took last year or the year before in the Botanical Gardens here in Gothenburg. The tree is a Japanese acer.
This is a recent picture at the time of writing. A duck framed by ripples on the pond in Hisingspark near where I live.
Taken at more or less the same time as the duck photo. I love the almost abstract quality of the rippled reflected birch trunks and turning leaves.
In London this September, walking around the city, my wife and I were surprised to find this bus stop. And there, we thought it was a fictional place in a TV comedy show!
These hands are picking up flower petals someone has thrown as confetti at a wedding. The owner of the hands intends to recycle the petals. Over her mother’s head.
I took the photo in November 2007, I think. Autumn frosts have already bitten this year.
At the Globe theatre on London’s south Bank. Taking pictures of the interior and the audience before a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor in September 2010. When I came to look at the pictures I found this face. I wonder who she’s waiting for.
I’ve used this picture before. It’s a sun-spot-lit lighthouse on one of the skerries off the Swedish west coast. It’s an autumn picture because I took it on a photo safari with my photo-friend Lena sometime in September or October a couple of years ago.
My most abstract banner. This is from a photo taken in the receptiona rea of a hotel in Sundsvall a few autumns ago. It was a bit blurred. I have used one of Photoshop’s “artistic” treatments on it.
Which one do you like best?
Write me a comment!
By TheSupercargo
You may be King Arthur, sir, and that may be Excalibur, but the law still doesn’t permit you to carry it down the High Street.
A submission for Artwiculate (WOTD: Ignominious) and Loqwacious (WOTD: Excalibur)
By TheSupercargo
The 12th September there were clouds in the sky and sometimes the weather seemed threatening, but mostly the sun shone. In London for my sister’s wedding and to house-sit, my wife and I took this opportunity to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Here are some of the photos I took that day – and one of me that Agneta took, standing up on Kew’s treetop walkway.
By TheSupercargo
I just got back from London where my wife and I spent two very full weeks. This was the first photo I took while I was there. The idea of a pigeon dressing up as a parrot for the carnival tickled my fancy — and I thought of a couple of Twitter friends (tWordBird and Squawkingalah). The poster was still up on the wall on several Underground stations, though we’d just missed the reason for it.
The caption read:
Get ready for the Notting Hill Carnival.
29-30 August.
We arrived on 1st September.
More from London is likely over the next few days …
By TheSupercargo
These photos were taken over the summer of 2010. The oldest (the Balloon and clouds photo) I took on 26th June and the most recent, the group portrait of Taiga, the Gothenburg Balalaika Group, I took this morning (29th August). The Soapstone Inuits are on the mantlepiece of my brother- and sister-in-law, who have paddled kayaks off Greenland. The reflected clock is in the tower of Högalid’s Church in Stockholm and the Styr-o-ställ bicycles-for-hire are a new feature of the Gothenburg cityscape.
By TheSupercargo
 There are some great lines in Fantastic Voyage (some of them cited below), but I ended up going for a cheap joke at the expense of Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence. I was inspired by the strip in the middle of the postcard above here, which is a still from the DVD. (What she’s actually doing is zipping her wetsuit closed preparatory to leaving the submarine to help unclog intake filters.) In my defence, the film-makers blatantly included Ms Welch in the cast only for her well-endowed chest – she has minimal acting duties.
I don’t know when I first saw Fantastic Voyage. I’d like it to have been at a matinée performance when it was released in Britain in the autumn of 1966, but I suppose that’s unlikely. (I would only have been 8 years old.) In all probability I saw it first on television sometime in the early 70s. The puzzling thing is, though, I think I remember the colours, but I don’t think we had a colour TV at the time.
Now the Oscar-winning special effects seem dated. The sea of arterial red corpuscles looks suspiciously like a back-projected close-up of a lava lamp. But lense flares (for example in the picture below) do hint at one of the effects JJ Abrams was trying to recreate in his recent ‘re-envisioning’ of Star Trek. (See here.)
A further source of memory confusion is that I almost certainly read Isaac Asimov’s novelisation of Fantastic Voyage (in which he corrected all the more gross scientific errors) before I saw the film.
Still, the scenes with the miniaturised submarine voyaging through a human body to deliver a surgical team to an otherwise inaccessible blood clot impressed me no end. It was one of the things that motivated me to achieve the high grade I did in my Biology O-level when I was 16. (Grade 2. I did better in Biology than in English Language. Which may not surprise any of my former students who have had the pleasure of studying English with me!)
Here are some of the great lines from the film I could have used but didn’t:
Arterial wall to the left!
They’ve crossed over into the jugular vein through an arterial veinous fistula!
That puts us right here which means we can head for the subarachnoid cavity.
The semilunar valve should be on our left any second now.
One other thought: In American films and TV series, 80% of the time, if one of the characters speaks in a British English accent, you know that’s the villain. Fantastic Voyage is no different. As soon as Donald Pleasence opens his mouth you know he’s the bad guy.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Fantastic Voyage (1966) here.
By TheSupercargo
 The second DVD out of the box as I work through my birthday present to myself, is JJ Abram’s Star Trek from last year (2009).
Taking this film as my subject here also gives me an opportunity to brush off and republish my original review. (‘Review’ doesn’t seem quite the right word, but judge for yourself here.)
Star Trek is a film with a wonderful flora of quotes, but so many of the good ones are in-jokes for fans of the original series. I choose to illustrate instead one of the most puzzling features of the future. The lack of development in prosthodontics.
Poor Leonard Nimmoy, the original Spock, reappears (through one of those handy wormholes in the time-space continuum that Science Fiction films thrive upon), sucked away from 24th century, and masticates his lines through what appear at times to be rather ill-fitting dentures.
In my imagination I hear him advising his younger self.
Live, floss and prosper.
Oral hygiene, young Spock, oral hygiene. Even in 2387 dentists still can’t make false teeth that actually fit.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Star Trek (2009) here.
The official site for Star Trek (2009) here.
By TheSupercargo
 As my own birthday present to myself, I bought a box of DVDs (mostly Science-Fiction related). I anticipate working my way through them bit by succulent bit (inclding, of course, all the Extra Material) and boning out some favourite quotes. Which I plan to share here in postcard form.
As chance would have it, the first film I watched was Tim Burton’s remake of The Planet of the Apes from 2001. It’s not a better film than the 1968 original, but it’s not nearly as poor as the reviews made out – those I read when it first came out and which put me off seeing it on the cinema screen.
Some of the actors behind the mask produced some really fine performances. Tim Roth and Paul Giamatti were outstanding, I thought, and Helena Bonham Carter was pretty damn good too, though her mask was less convincing.
Anyway, my nomination for the best line from the film has to be this one. Spoken by Paul Giamatti as the orangutan slaver, Limbo, who is selling humans as slaves:
The young ones make great pets. Just make sure you get rid of them before they mature. Believe me, the last thing you want is a human teenager running around your house.
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- The Internet Movie Database page for Tim Burton’s film here.
- The IMDb page for the original (1968) Planet of the Apes film here.
- Helena Bonham Carter’s makeup/mask at The Make-up Room
here. [Ah sad to say that link seems to be broken  ]
- Interview with  Helena Bonham Carter about her role in The Planet of the Apes at Cinema.com here.
By TheSupercargo
I was in leisurly process of assembling some new summer pictures to use in the title banners or headers for this site when my friend and fellow WordPress Wrangler Kristina S (aka Chefstomaten at Tomatsallad.nu) beat me to the draw. Her blog now has a fine new set of banners (I particularly like the jelly-fish.)
Spurred on by Kristina’s enterprise, I got my finger out and with this entry I present my own set. The banners are set to rotate randomly everytime you refresh the page so you may not see them all for a while, but here they are in miniature for your delictation and delight.
I came across this set of dolls in the window of a basement secondhand shop in Söderköping.
The son of a friend of a friend. He was drinking through a straw and watching me very seriously as I took the picture.
This whale advertises the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg and is usually a dull rust-red. A graffitti artist has given the whale a summer holiday – complete with a cone of ice cream.
Stepping-stones  in the Botanical Gardens. I took this picture at the beginning of June. [And now have removed it from circulation - see comments.]
The shadows of fern fronds cast by a strong summer sun.
More of a late spring picture, this one, but I like the lilac flowers and the little fists of the lilac buds.
This almost abstract picture is water reflections on the side of a boat, tricked about a little in photoshop. I took this picture last summer when I was visiting Waxholmen in the Stockholm archipelago.
This is the setting sun on (Swedish) Midsummer’s Day.
And finally … a snip of the brick and whitewash facade of  St Laurentii Church in Söderköping.
Which one do you like best?
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The book was stuck in the mud, I was still feeling sorry for myself after a bout with the flu and suspicious the germs were coming back for another round, and my good lady wife was determined to give the flat a major dusting. 
