There are clues, if you can find them. And there are things to be found, if you can puzzle through the clues. And there are three Nokia phones to be won if you do well.

Are you a seeker?

Thanks to the Lolcat Generator.

So I went down to Kate's last weekend to play with glass and her kiln. it was nice to get out of London for a while, and even nicer to switch off and spend time making physical things.
My first attempt – a large bowl – failed horribly. Making it is a two step process. First you decorate the glass sheet with coloured bits of glass, fusing the two together; then you place it over a mould and, in a second firing, the glass melts, or slumps, to take the shape of that mould.
When you put stuff in a kiln, you have to coat the shelves with stuff called kiln wash to make sure your glass doesn't stick. Unfortunately, we think the kiln wash hadn't dried properly, so when we were fusing some moisture vaporised underneath the glass and caused huge bubbles. We then tried to slump the glass into the mould, in the hope that the bubbles would just slump out, but that didn't happen because it didn't get hot enough. The resulting bowl looked cool, but was too fragile to use.
We then played with making some coasters. The designed worked ok, but I think that they were too knobbly to actually put a cup on. Just before I left we tried a different tactic to try and even things out, but I didn't get to see if it worked. I also tried fusing two sheets of glass together, with frit, stringers and noodles (i.e. coloured crushed glass and glass powder; long thing straws of glass; and long flat strips of glass) inbetween. Didn't really get to see how they came out either. I'm sure Kate will Flickr photos as and when.
What did work, though, was a small bowl. I placed triangles of red glass on to a clear sheet, and fused them together. Then we slumped that into a small round mould, and the resulting bowl came out pretty well. Slightly wobbly, but lovely.

I laid out three more in a similar style for Kate to fuse and slump at her leisure. I really like the idea of making something that she can sell at one of her markets. We also did some jewellery, which comes out really very well. Very simple stuff, but fun to make, and I'm sure it will sell well.
It's so nice to be able to come away with a real, solid thing and say 'I made this!'. I don't get that normally. I don't get to walk away at the end of a hard day's replying to emails and say 'Look! This is what I did!'. I spent four and a half hours today replying to ORG emails, and at the end of it, there were just more queuing up, waiting for attention.
I wish I had more of making physical things in my life.

So T'Other and I had a shitty week last week – if you want to know why, then just read this post at Strange Attractor for an insight. We really needed a break by the time Friday came, so after a lovely dinner out with Michael Tippett from NowPublic (which apparently still gets people visiting via the link I gave 'em when they launched in February last year!), we packed to go down to Hampshire to see Kate.
Aaaaah, just what we needed. Walks in the bluebell woods. Tea at a nearby stately home. A nice gin and tonic in Kate and Steve's conservatory. A play with the neighbour's cat. Lovely.
But the most fun thing was that I got to play with the Vicar. Not a real vicar, you understand, but Kate's kiln, which she's named Vicar, after the Vicar of Dibley.

Here's me preparing to start making a glass bowl. What you can do, you see, is to arrange the glass in a cunning way and then heat it up until it melts, or 'slumps', and then it all fuses together and you have a… heap of fused glass.
My idea was to make like a little wall of glass, and put a sheet on top of it and the whole thing would slump and make a bowl. So this is what it looked like before we fired it.

I was a bit worried we'd end up with just a huge mess, but it worked. Not, perhaps, perfectly but well enough for a first try.

Unfortunately, it was mid-afternoon on Sunday by the time we put the kiln on, and it takes several hours to heat up to 1400F, and even longer to cool down again, so I didn't get to bring it home with me, but it does look rather cool, if a little misshapen.
I also use this stuff called 'frit', which is like chips of glass, or a glass powder, which you can use to decorate the glass you're fusing. I ended up doing this very rough sort of picture thing, which may make an interesting coaster. Or something.

Anyway, I can't wait to get back to Kate's so I can play more! This whole glass thing is fun. I could really get into it. Trouble is, now I want a kiln and there really isn't anywhere to put it. And I think T'Other would be a little perturbed if I went out and spent that much money on something so big before we get our nice new flatscreen monitor for watching DVDs on. Still… gives me an excuse to go down and play with the Vicar again.

Wow. Amazing pictures. (Via Euan.)

Me an' t'other created a tour de force jack o' lantern for Hallowe'en – my first effort, but surely t'will not be my last. Was an absolute scream though.

There are some really impressive efforts at Extreme Pumpkins. I wanted to try the kerosene-soaked rag, for effect, but t'other wouldn't let me.

So, last Sunday evening me an' t'other went to Kew to see the glass by Dale Chihuly. Due to a fuck-up with the underground, it took us a lot longer to get there than we'd anticipated, but it was well worth it.
Chihuly's glass is amazing. Just amazing. I had a hard time knowing quite what my reaction was. I tended to oscillate between 'Wow, that's beautiful' and 'How the hell did he do that?' with the occasional 'That must have taken forever to do!'. There are some amazing photos of it on Flickr – look out particularly for the night photos.
Made me wish I had a decent camera, instead of the old Ixus v3 I have, which is losing its ability to focus in low light conditions (where low light = anything inside). Have a few more pressing expenses to cover first, though, before I start looking at new cameras. Like rent.
Anyway, if you haven't been to see Chihuly, you really should go. In fact, I need to go back in daylight and take a look at all the glass we missed because we got there late. It's a bit weird – I used to go to Richmond and Kew all the time, and never seemed to find the time to go to Kew Gardens. Guess it was too much on my doorstep.
chihuly, dale chihuly, kew gardens, glass, art, sculpture

Gotta love it. (Thx James.)

Kate and I have finally taken some photos of the jewellery I made (with her assistance) on the weekend. They don't really do the glass justice, so when I get back to Dorset I might well have a stab at doing some more.

Kate's jewellery really is gorgeous – if you want to buy some from her (and it's all for sale) then drop her a line. She'll even do you a custom-made piece if you'd like.

Couldn't believe it when I saw rare footage of Banksy on the news tonight, his identity cleverly disguised by having his back to the camera and a hat on. He's been doing is usual stuff on a nice, big, brand new canvas – the Palestinian 'security' wall that the Israelis are building. And it's amazing stuff too.

One of Banksy's finest!

I'm always wary of waxing too lyrical about the cool stuff my friends do, primarily because it always seems a bit trite and annoying, but I have to point you at Kate's final project. Kate's only just starting out on a career in artistic glass, and but she's already making things I love.
I wish I had the money to commission her to make cool stuff for me, although that would also require that I have somewhere to put all that cool stuff. One day, maybe.
Oh, and her blog is cool.

Came across the most fantastic set of pictures on Flickr today of Macs with 'transparent screens'. Some of them just look amazing, particularly this gorgeous one of a cat:

So, me being me, I had to have a stab at doing my own. It's not brilliant, because I was running out of battery on my camera and I have those nasty lines on my Tibook screen to contend with, but it's mine and I did it:

Quite.

It is with no little delight that I would like to introduce you all to Kate, who has started blogging over at StainedBeauty. Kate's been a very good friend of mine for quite a few years now and I'm feeling very smug that I have finally managed to find a good reason for her to start blogging. Intelligent, funny, articulate, kind and generous, she's a boon to the blogosphere.
StainedBeauty is primarily going to be about Kate's passion for stained glass – making it, conserving it, or just looking at how wonderful it is. I had a look for other stained glass blogs (one of my selling points was that she'd be able to join an online community!) and I couldn't find very many, so if any of you happen to find any could you possibly leave a comment for Kate on her blog?

Best online comic I've seen in ages and ages. I suggest you start with the first one, and work your way through, rofling and loling as you go. Then, when you get to the latest one, you can suffer like the rest of us, waiting for the next.
I do wish that Jeph Jacques would get an RSS feed set up though – I'm crap at remembering to go and see if a new strip is up.

Every now and again I see an ad, or series of ads, that are just wonderful. The Observer Music Magazine's From Abba to Zappa campaign was one such series, with fantastically stylistic depictions of famous bands. It's only now I learn that these were the work of one Craig Robinson, whose blog is just, whew, something else! (Via A Gentleman's Commonplace. Again.)

Michael Paulus has drawn a most amazingly beautiful set of skeletons for cartoon characters. Really wonderful. (Via A Gentleman's Commonplace.)

I signed up for a Flickr account ages ago – before I'd even moved CnV from Blog-City to Blogware so it must have been early March – but although I've been signed up for months, it's taken me until now to start uploading photos. The impetus was wanting to post photos from last weekend's drinks with Joi, Cory, Tom and a raft of other lovely people, but not really wanting to blog about it all.
Anyway, I have to say that now I've used it, I really like Flickr. It's easy to upload and tag photos, it's fun when people leave comments on them, and because Flickr doesn't require any standard file size or anything, I don't have to resize in Photoshop. I just maybe crop and tweak.
It's also easy to see what other people are uploading and to explore their photo albums. Plus, you have an RSS and an Atom feed, and I think the pro version does even more than the free one. So yes, I'm a convert.
So, finally, I've started to upload my photos from Vienna and BlogTalk2 for your delight and pleasure. Enjoy!

If you can just slip behind a molecule… There it is. Just as Douglas Adams described it. St Pancras. The huge locomotive shed, fronted by The Midland Grand Hotel, empty now for years, sadly deserted and abandoned.

The first time I ever went to St Pancras I thought it was spelt St Pancreas and couldn't understand why a London railway station should be named after an organ. I also knew it before I stepped foot inside it, because Adams had written such a wonderfully accurate description of it in, I think, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul that it was already in my bones.
What Adams failed to prepare me for, however, was the majesty and wonderousness of The Midland Grand Hotel, all red brick, gargoyles and gothic flamboyance. He never warned me, the rotter, of how this oft-ignored building would seduce me and make me fall in love with it.

The Midland Grand is a building easy to pass by, tucked away in Kings Cross as it is, now hemmed in by the British Library on one side and soon to be overshadowed by what I fear will be a monstrous monument to a total lack of architectural sympathy – the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link that's being shoehorned in between St Pancras and Kings Cross.

I know nothing about architecture, but I know what I like. The proud columns, the red brick, terracotta and buff yellow stone. The iron lace. The gargoyles. Turrets and garrets and spandrels. Look at it! Fall in love with it.

Each window is a work of art in and of itself. Each one screams out, begging for an artist or a writer or passionate young lovers to look out from it upon a starbright London. A dreamer's London.

The sweeping curve of the frontage is enough to make your head spin, to make you dizzy. It envelops you, it takes up every corner of your world, it demands your attention. How can you possibly deny it?

I remember reading once a while a go that if you happen to be in the right place at the right time, if you can just twist reality that fraction of a degree, you can get a tour around the Midland Grand. (Actually, you just need to phone up, but it will feel as if you've twisted reality.) You can taste its majesty from the inside, you can feel the history and beauty of it seep through your feet as they tread the corridors. I have never had that chance.
Now it's being done up.
I hope this turns out to be a good thing. I hope they do a better job of restoring such a wonderful piece of Victorian ebullience than they have of maintaining the station itself, which is dirty, swathed in pigeon netting and ruined by rank idiocy.
Much of the stonework in the station thoroughfares has suffered, not just from knocks but from the bitter acids of pollution eating away at it, cruelly defacing the dragons. I don't know if they plan to restore the worst damage, but I hope they do. It deserves it. It's such a grand, beautiful, eloquent building, it deserves to be loved, nurtured, restored to its former glory.

I had hoped that maybe this restoration would result in The Midland Grand opening once again, but according to an old Guardian piece, it looks like at least some of it will be inaccessible to mere mortals such as I:

Swish flats for the very rich will gleam securely under the hotel's roofs. Below, the decorated hotel rooms will be restored to their full glory, while a four-storey hotel annexe by RHWL Architects will be added on a podium to the west of Barlow's train shed.

Still, maybe the rich and famous will own The Midland Grand, but they'll never stop me roaming its corridors. I don't need their permission. I just need to twist reality a little.