Category: Uncategorized

Day 291: Pink Flowers

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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These are some flowers from our garden. I think they’re quite a striking colour. I think it’s called Lichness but I could be wrong on that one.

Day 289: Shiny Guitar

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Make a photograph of something smooth". Well this is a picture of (part of) my guitar, light reflections shown to indicate the smoothness.

Day 288: Tick Tock

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Illustrate time in a photograph today." I am sorry to whoever did a similar photograph for the last Daily Shoot challenge like this, but I sort of nicked the idea. Not that it comes over as well.

The watch is also a bit old and you can tell… still, c’est la vie!

Day 287: Shiny Leaf

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Make a photograph of something shiny today".

This is a leaf which was spraypainted recently. I don’t think it was spraypainted on purpose, but someone was graffitting the side of an old WWII pillbox and this leaf kind of got in the way. At least it makes for an interesting picture, I think!

Day 286: Amplifier Grille

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Make a photograph that features a grid of some sort today."

This is the grille on the front of my guitar amplifier. I quite like how it tunred out – quite abstract!

This was the weekend of Colchester Summer Beer Festival 2011 – but more on that story in a moment! Just a quick round-up of the weekend’s events.

On Friday night, as there was no 21, we had AJ and Jen round for dinner. As always it was a pleasure to see them both, we showed them some ‘Yes Prime Minister’ which AJ really enjoyed. Whenever we watch it I’m always amazed at just how topical it is!

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping in the morning. I went looking for a new watch as my old one broke recently, unfortunately I couldn’t find one which was somewhere between ‘cheap and nasty’ and ‘expensive and designer’. I couldn’t believe how many watches seem to have plastic straps which feel like they won’t last (Swatch, I’m looking at you).

Anyway. In the afternoon we headed down to Colchester Arts Centre for the beer festival. After a while we were joined by Dan, Alison, Alex, Tom, Clif, and a couple of other friends / relatives of the aforementioned people. It was a great afternoon – beautiful sunny weather, just perfect for sitting out in the graveyard drinking and chatting with friends! Alex wanted me to try and 11% Belgian beer, although I think after having had a few drinks already that would probably have not been a great idea! After that we went to the Ashiana for a curry, which was up to their usual high standards. Then we went back to Tom’s place for a bit and played random games involving chocolate chilli Russian roulette (the hot chilli was very hot…) and then just listening to random YouTube music for a while.

So that was a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon / evening! On Sunday we went to church in the morning, which was a confirmation service. It was two hours long, which is very long for a morning service, but it was really encouraging to see nine young people getting baptised / confirmed (three of them were being baptised). Next Sunday we are having a believer’s baptism service in the afternoon which I’m sure will also be encouraging.

Anyway, after the morning service we just about had time to come back home for lunch and chill for a bit (mainly by catching up with Doctor Who – it was great but I need to go back and watch the whole series again!), before heading out again to Sunday@6. We gave George (as in Phil and George) a lift there and back and I think she enjoyed the service as well. So… there you have it. A summary of the weekend.

Oh, I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday but I will expand a little bit here too: yesterday afternoon I listened to an MP3 from the Sovereign Grace Story (it’s free – if you contact me I’ll sort you out with a link; haven’t got the link at work) called “From Notes to Chord Charts: Where are the notes?” It was a seminar on playing music in a worship context, particularly playing from chord charts rather than playing from sheet music. As a “classically trained” pianist – someone who isn’t used to playing from chord charts, not on piano anyway – this was really useful. I gave it a go after listening, and I think I started to get the hang of it. It’s definitely something I want to do more of in the future anyway.

Day 283: Knife and Apple

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Focus on an edge today and make a photograph"

Here the edge is a knife edge. I’m not sure it’s very clear that’s what the focus is, but still!

Day 282: Symmetric Leaves

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Illustrate symmetry in a photograph today." Well these leaves are reasonably symmetrical at several levels (both within the leaf and as part of the branch). Symmetry in nature.

I read an interesting article the other day: ‘The Hangover’ and the age of the jokeless comedy.

This is a subject I’ve been wondering about for a while. When we first watched The Hangover, what I originally said about it back then was “I’m not sure whether it’s a difference between British and American humour, there just didn’t really seem to be any jokes in it!”. Well I’m glad someone else has picked up on this!

Now there are some points in the article which I disagree on. For example, it cites ‘Zoolander’ as one of the inaugural jokeless comedies. I love Zoolander and I think it’s a great film, but it’s definitely not a jokeless comedy. It’s true that the comedy is probably more based on character rather than gags, but there are still jokes in it. And the characters are genuinely funny, rather than … well, weird.

But it did get me thinking – when was the last time I saw a genuinely funny Hollywood film? And, you know, I actually can’t remember. We watched “The Other Guys” at the weekend, which is a light-hearted funny film… but at the same time, it suffers from what I call “Anchorman syndrome”: the characters were so bizarre some of the time it was difficult to identify with them. There were some funny moments but most of the time I was just left staring at characters doing something really bizarre and / or stupid that was clearly meant to be funny, but just… well, wasn’t.

The strange thing is, there have been “jokeless comedies” around for years. For example, The Ladykillers – classic Ealing film – hilarious. But the humour, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, all comes from a group of criminals trying to kill a little old lady. There’s even a tea party they have to attend and chat to the little old ladies’ friends… it’s genius.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I agree with the conclusion of that article: we need some more actual comedies, with proper gags. It’s been far too long since Hollywood did anything really funny.

Day 281: VW

Originally uploaded by phillsacre

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Daily Shoot assignment: "Make a photograph of a symbol today."

I wasn’t sure whether company logos counted exactly but still! This is a Volkswagen logo from a wheel hub.