The Musings of Chris Samuel

The ever fantastic “How to be a Retronaut” website has posted a brilliant collection of colour images of modern Leningrad which have been matched to, and partially overlaid with, black & white photos of the Siege of Leningrad during World War 2.

The collection has been put together by Segei Larenkov.

I’ve been doing photography for over half my life now¹ and after having my first ever exhibition jointly with Donna recently I’ve now ended up with my first solo exhibition!

I’ve got 5 large prints and 7 small ones (all framed limited editions) on view at the “Cafe Have Ya Bean” in Upwey, so please do come and see it. It’s a lovely place run by Terry and Liz, nice food and they do a great cappuccino!

1. there’s a scary thought! [back]

Having just watched the first showing of the Time Team Friars Wash dig on the ABC I went searching for any post excavation reports and managed to find one on Scribd written by Wessex Archaeology (where W.A. seem to be putting up a number of reports) which has some interesting follow ups to what’s seen in the program, for instance:

• It now appears there were likely three temples and an ancillary building, not the four temples talked about (and even then they’re not sure whether the circular building was a temple or a shrine).
• The lead items thought to be “curses” (lead sheets with writing folded up and deposited at temples) turned out to be, sadly, more likely fishing weights as they were not comparable with previously found “curses”.
• Whilst they found a lot of coins in Trench 4 (22 all up) calling them a hoard is apparently “tentative”.
• There are apparently no “direct parallels” of the enamelled broach they found, and it could be 2nd century CE.
• They found 7 (fragmented) pig jawbones in the sondage through the floor in Trench 1!
• The closest parallel to the dual temple structure is at Mont de Sene in Burgundy

You can download the PDF of the report if you login to Scribd (they support OpenID, but not OpenID redirections like WP-Yaddis can do to Wordpress.com, etc).

Google is running a photography competition to develop themes for iGoogle in conjunction with the Saatchi Gallery London for higher education students around the world. You’ll need to submit 5 photos to make up a theme.

36 shortlisted students will get their photos turned into iGoogle themes, 6 finalists will get exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and the winner will get a GBP 5,000 bursary and a day with the documentary photographer Martin Parr. Entries close 31st May so if you’re interested (and eligible) you’d better get your skates on!

Donna convinced me that I we should do a joint art exhibition with her paintings and sculptures and my photography and ceramic work, and so in my usual timely manner (not) our “Wonderment” exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) at the Jarmbi Gallery, Burrinja Cultural Center, 352 Glenfern Rd, Upwey here in Victoria and runs until the 10th May.

Tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) is our opening event running from 1pm to 3pm – if you can make it we’d love to see you!

My wife Donna has been painting and sculpting for years (not to mention writing and composing), and has sold almost 100 of her originals worldwide so far. Problem is that she paints far faster than people buy them so she’s doing a bit of a clearance sale on eBay at the moment as we’ve run out of room in the house!

The 13 pieces are both figurative and abstract pieces of autistic art; some in oils, some in acrylics and some in mixed media. The starting bids on these pieces are just $10-$15 and have 4 days to go. You too can be a budget collector of outsider art!

Congratulations to Terry Pratchett for getting a knighthood!

Here’s a timely User Friendly cartoon on the subject..

Finally I’ve stumbled across packages of the KDE4 version of Digikam (0.10) which is currently in beta.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

They’re part of the Digikam Experimental Personal Package Archive (PPA) and so track the latest development releases (0.10.0-rc1 as I write this) and work for me on Ubuntu Intrepid with KDE 4.2 (at the moment) – remember to install Marble!

Note

Many thanks to Maarten Fonville who previously provided packages that this story originally pointed to, and who commented with the above alternative archive.

This is really rather cool, this chap designed a commemorative coin for the Netherlands using just Free Software for an invitation only competition and won!

(Via)

Donna and I were driving up the west coast of Scotland on the 16th September listening to BBC Radio 4 when we heard that Rick Wright of Pink Floyd had died the day before of cancer. That was quite a shock to me as (silly as it might sound) I never thought I’d hear about one of the Floyd shuffling of this moral coil, well not yet at least..

Now back in Australia I’ve just had the opportunity to watch the TV programme “Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon” I recorded before going to the UK for that trip and it was bittersweet to see Rick talking about The Great Gig in the Sky with its theme of dying knowing that he was now gone.

His beautiful music alongside the great vocals by Clare Torry make a very fitting and timeless epitaph for someone famously unwilling to talk about himself.