30 August 2010. Golddigga

30 August 2010, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

Presumably it's a fashion brand. I'm too old and far too unfashionable to know about such things.

It's no fun going back to work after a week off.

28 August 2010. Birthday Girl

28 August 2010_6, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

Well, her birthday was a few days ago, but the birthday drinks were last night. Most of the usual suspects were there (though one or two couldn't make it) and I think a good time was had by all. A good time was certainly had by me. Plenty more pics on Flickr.

In other news, I have finally signed up to Facebook. I had resisted for a long, long time, but the allure of having yet another way to fritter away my time proved impossible to resist any longer. If anyone who is reading this wants to apply to be my friend, I promise that all applications will be given due consideration :-)

25 August 2010. Oops! I'm terribly sorry!

25 August 2010_18, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

It's so ironic when people apologise for walking in front of the camera when I'm taking a photograph. This woman was particularly apologetic when she heard the big camera noise next to her ear. The chap below tried to take evasive action, but failed.



And this fellow was unaware of the fact that you can't out-stare my Nikon...



The guy to the right does look remarkably like someone familiar. He was promoting a show entitled Obama Mia! Having seen him and heard the name of the show, I expect that the rest would be an anticlimax.

While I was wandering up and down the High Street, snapping merrily away, Imp was being interviewed... and she got the job! HOORAY!!! It isn't the world's greatest job, as it's only part time with variable hours, but it's a job and it's doing something she really enjoys and it's in Edinburgh, so hooray for all that :-) We won't be celebrating tonight, though, cos the poor little Imp is sick. She has been coughing her guts up all week. Excuse me while I go and give her a hug...

18 August 2010. Looking the other way

18 August 2010, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

A couple of days ago, I posted a photograph of the Usher Hall extension taken from its "good" side. This shot is taken looking in the other direction, towards the spot from which I took the previous shot. It definitely doesn't look so good from this angle. The shapes, the angles, the textures, the colours (or lack thereof) - none of it works for me. I must take a look at it from the inside...

I do get frustrated at the shortage of good modern architecture in Edinburgh.

17 August 2010.

17 August 2010_1, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

An unremarkable day. Remarkably unremarkable. These three photographs were taken in quick succession: the data tells me that they were all taken within the space of one minute six seconds, the above one first, then the one immediately below, then the one at the bottom.

16 August 2010. Finished

16 August 2010, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

They seem to have finished the Usher Hall extension, so now we can see it in its full... er... glory... I reckon it looks best from this angle, where the reflective glassy roundness is, depending on how charitable I'm feeling, somewhere between inoffensive and attractive. The big advantage to seeing it from this angle is that you can't tell that it has been tacked on to the side of an old building. I shall save the front view for another time.

Hate Mondays.

15 August 2010. Warning! Nudity!

15 August 2010, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

When the sun comes out, the men of Glasgow take their shirts off. Then they turn pink. Not a pretty sight. There was probably a better shot to be had here, closer and from the front, but this chap looked rather scary so I chose life and said no to the photograph.

13 August 2010. No shit!

13 August 2010_2, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

It isn't difficult to take a striking photograph on the High Street during the Festival. I don't mean to belittle anyone by saying that - there are some fine photographs of street performers and such like taken by some fine photographers - but the simple fact is that if you go out with an SLR and a telephoto zoom, there are plenty of photogenic people who are quite happy for you to point your big camera at them. I find it more interesting to put a little 50mm lens on my big camera and see what I can come up with. I quite like this one. Another cluttered street shot. It'll do.

I've been hearing quite a bit about goings-on at another site recently. Like the friend of a friend who had to crop a photograph of his partner's driving school car because the logo constituted unacceptable advertising... Or the self portrait that was deleted because it showed the photographer sitting on the toilet reading a Harry Potter book... I didn't see that one, which is a shame: if the intention was to post an image which represented that guy's day, a self portrait on the toilet would seem to fit the bill nicely. I don't know whether it was unacceptable on the grounds of nudity (though presumably the guy wasn't waving his dick around...) or literary taste or impudence (evidently, he asked the moderators not to delete it, which pretty much made it a certainty that they would) or because people don't go to the toilet over there. A bit like the Queen. I've heard that she doesn't go to the toilet.

12 August 2010. Winehouse

12 August 2010, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

It's almost a year since the Victoria Wine/Threshers/Wine Rack/Haddows chain went bust. Now it is apparent that some of the branches are being revived as Winehouse. Presumably, this is somebody's idea of a joke. Personally, if I were a purveyor of alcoholic beverages, I wouldn't want any association with young Amy... But, as I was reminded by another event today, a "sense of humour" can have odd consequences...

I am SO glad that it's almost the weekend...

11 August 2010. Russian stuff

11 August 2010, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

My favourite poster of the Festival (so far).

We've been having some splendid Scottish summer weather recently. Sunshine this morning (as can be seen above), wind and rain later. I hope the tourists were paying attention to the bits of their guidebooks which said that the weather could be changeable.

10 August 2010. Urban clutter

10 August 2010_1, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

I like urban clutter. It would have been nice if they could have finished the Usher Hall/Lyceum Theatre works before the Festival started, but no...

I wish I had a pair of trousers like this guy's...

9 August 2010. Who is Diego Balinhas?

09 August 2010_1, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

Over the weekend, Diego Balinhas favourited some of my photos on Flickr. It's always nice when someone marks one of your pictures as a favourite. I had no idea who Diego Balinhas was, so I checked his profile... and amongst other things discovered that he has favourited quite a lot of photographs. As of now, 9 August 2010 at about 1936 British Summer Time, he has marked 419,005 photographs as favourites. Approaching half a million. This strikes me as perhaps a little indiscriminate. So I googled him. Most of the results were, perhaps unsurprisingly, links to Flickr, but I did find his blog. Which is in Spanish. Which is one of the many languages I cannot speak. Google offered to translate it into English, which was very nice of Google, but it didn't make much more sense to me in English than it did in Spanish. So Diego and his apparently insatiable appetite for photographs remain a mystery...

The Tattoo Queue sign amused me. I had visions of hundreds of people waiting in line for their butterflies and cherries and Celtic motifs. I'm easily amused.

I like these two posters together...

8 August 2010. This one's for Steve

08 August 2010_9. This one's for Steve, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

He's the latest to incur the ire of the owners over there. The purpose of this photograph is to demonstrate that there are people who can't take great wildlife shots (me) and there are people who can, like Steve...

This is more my style:



as is this:



It's a while since we have been to the pond. A great cheer went up when this boat flew through the air and capsized...



I hate to be a killjoy, but the model speedboats do bring out the grumpy old man in me. They make a hell of a racket, which isn't what you want if you're after a quiet Sunday afternoon by the pond. The cheer proved that I am not alone in this view :-)

7 August 2010. Love the Festival. Hate the Festival.

07 August 2010_3, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

Edinburgh is only a small city. There's a limit to the number of people you can squeeze in comfortably.

The face is a chair...

6 August 2010. Nobody Died

06 March 2010_8, originally uploaded by sleepyduck.

Continuing the theme of people who are subjected to attacks on the internet for doing harmless stuff...

My friend Griff (pictured above, earlier this year) is in a Status Quo tribute band. A while back, they played a gig which was attended by some "real Quo fans" who had left their senses of humour at home. Apparently this led to a load of online abuse, which got nasty.

The best comment was that Griff looked like "the fat one out of Laurel and Hardy." Note to any Quo fans who may be reading this: the fat one was Hardy.

Griff put together a musical response. Here's the vid: