Sultana Sandwich

My sister trying to cheer me up sent me to cuteoverload.com where I found this gem. Brilliant. Takes me back to my childhood where I had a golden retriever from the ages of four through eighteen.

When I was 16 I lived in Sweden on exchange for six months, and my parents would ask Smedley (my dog): Smedley.... where's james? where's james? to which he'd then get excited and go look for me out side, run around the back yard and after 20 minutes of utter confusion come back to lie on the doormat.

Alas I didn't come back for six months, but luckily dogs never forget a face... errr scent.

So a couple of fridays back I took the day off work to photograph portraits of Sophie Paterson, a bar tender from one of my favourite pubs in London, the sun in splendour, Notting Hill. I first saw Sophie a couple years back when my mum told me to go along to an open mike night where one of our family friends was scheduled to play. Soph was on a bar stool, strumming her acoustic guitar singing to a packed crowd.

A couple months back Soph was asked to audition to the Australian Idol judges, who were on a scouting expedition here in London looking for expat talent, she made it through to the top 100 selected and last week she flew back to compete.

Today she skipped the second round and has gone straight to the third. Top 40. Good luck Soph!

While I'm pretty sure most of you got my cynicism, I was quite drunk last night when I wrote my previous post on the grenadier guards hat.

Perhaps I should follow up with the stark reality of the situation. I think being male, and I know most of the other boys (I'd like to say men, but we really are boys) saw the cache of weapons and one word entered our simple minds coooooooool, only the reality was that the word was soon replaced with why.

I had some serious trouble relating to these guys, let's see I am 26 years old in less than a month, I haven't been in a relationship in over two years now, I work predominantly inside all day/week/month/year, the most expensive thing I touch on a regular basis would be either my camera or computer and although I have killed kangeroo's I now look back on it with remorse.
Conversely these guys are 21 at most, the majority of them are married with children! Are working/living outside at 90 days at a time, carry and use weapons literally worth more than houses in Chelsea, and in the case of the Sniper has more confirmed human kills than I have self-portraits posted on flickr (a lot).

The boys (and they really are) from the grenadier guards were there to raise funds for the fallen men from their battalion. Undoubtedly a worthy cause, these men are now dead and they have left behind their wives and children, I'm not going to ask why were they there to begin with (as that's quite the subjective topic), more so I'd like to know why the fuck are they still there?

Tonight I found myself amongst the vintners and grocers annual cricket matach, lovely wine and food as one would imagine and a lovely cache of weaponary due to her majesty's grenadiers who were on display to raise money for troops back from fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I picked up a 7.62mm sniper rifle... lovely! Then had a go behind a £3mil (I shit you not!) thermal targeting system attached to a rocket launcher (that fired £75k rockets!!!), simply awesome, then why not try on some night vision goggles brilliant! However all the weaponry could not top coming across a completely unguarded and 100% authentic grenadiers furry helmut thing in the mens changing room (this was at a cricket pitch).

Of course I debated in my mind whether I really should do this... but then it finally clicked... When in the world will you ever have a chance to wear one of these bad boys... that's right never!... and hence the photo!

Wooo, so the guys here at Default Limited have worked tirelessly over the past six weeks to give you 14tracks.com. It looks great and should really open up the boomkat catalogue to us normal people.

Oh and don't forget to delicious it, digg it!

My domain name expired the other day, hence the downtime for the past week. Unfortunately the contact email for the domain was no longer in use and thus I never received any notifications. Add changing registrars and it's been a nightmare for the past week.

If you did happen to send me an email and didn't get a reply, then it probably never made it through.

Some exciting news coming soon from London. Stay tuned!

Only just came across this (one of my friends told me about it drunk on friday night only for me to forget about it) Luckily (and coincidently) it popped up in my feed reader today. Brilliant, It's one of those few blogs out there where you start from the very beginning and read every post. Here's a snippet from my favourite post so far.

Dinner Parties

Hosts are expected to deliver a magical evening. The food must be home made with fresh, organic ingredients, the music must be just right (ambient, new, but not too loud), and the decorations inside the house should be subtle but elegant. The ultimate goal is to do a better job than the couple at the last dinner party while attempting to make everyone jealous and sort of dislike you.

The photo I posted earlier this week made it all the way to the front page of Flickr explore. Sweet.. thanks guys!