Introducing Marley Jay Dugard

Born 6:45am, Friday 24th July 2009, to Ben and Jenny Dugard

(No this is not our baby - not yet!)

Danger danger!

Rule Brittany!

I have become lightly obsessed with the Tour De France, last night even staying up to the exciting end (just).

Admiring the cyclists' stamina is fascinating, as I'm puffed going up a gutter on my bike. Then there's the beautiful French countryside and towns, espsecially from the helipcopters.

And the finaly thing to enjoy is watching the loony European spectators who apparently camp beside the road for up to a week for w good position.

Amongst the all-orange Dutch fans, and the sunburnt fat Germans, and the occaisonal boxing Kangaroo, I have noticed this weird black and white flag. It kinda looked like the American flag, but bad-ass. I wondered if it was actually some kind of marketing thing and half expected to hear Nike had infiltrated.

In fact, the commentators mentioned the flag last night, and it's actually the flag of Brittany, also called the Gwenn-ha-du in Breton. There are some riders int he Tour from that region of France. So it all makes sense.

Allez! The coolest flag in the world.

Baby time!

Great news - Gen is 12 weeks pregnant! Due late January 2009. We just has our first ultrasound - all things are good!

Wow. Deep breaths....

Full circle

OK so I have come full circle in my musical tastes. I now officially like (almost) everything. My recent guilty pleasure has been the hokey country love duets by Skeeter Davis and Bobby Bare.

They're full of banjo, slide guitar and corny lyrics. But there's something about these two that's just real. They had screwed up lives, and they came together with music, and then they sang about it.

I haven't seen Walk the Line, but from what I understand of Johnny Cash and June Carter's life, there are some similarities. And their best-known duet Jackson was also recorded by the duo (it wasn't written by Cash and Carter), two years later in 1970. I actually prefer the Cash-Carter version, but some of their other duets are brilliant; heart-felt and a little creepy.

For example, Your Husband, My Wife is about them being in love, but both having other partners and families. I can't think of many other songs that explore this impossibly difficult situation.

Then there's There Never Was A Time We Didn't Love, about a tragic, hard, poor, but happy marriage. It's totally corny, but so heart-felt I totally love it. If only we could have played it at our wedding. But people would really have thought we weird (even more so that Sigur Ros down the aisle).

The of course, there are the fantastic album covers...

Skeeter Davis is a fascinating musician, born in a cabin in Kentucky in the 1930s, one of 7 children. She almost died in a car accident, and her singing partner did die, the dead girl's mother forcing Davis' sister to join the group.

She was a bit of a rebel in her own deep south Christian country music way. You can her influence on people like Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline and more lately, Gillian Welch.

iPose

I got an iPhone.

To quote Fergus: snazzy.

Bam Bam

Came across the , an editor of Vanity Fair, and a writer. Amongsthttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif other things he takes photos of television. Love it.

The postcard project has begun!

I've just started a harebrained idea - and one that I keep doing every day for the next year.

I'm going to write and send a postcard every day for 356 days. I've made a while new blog for it, over at 365postcards.blogspot.com

I hope to re-connect to people I have seen in a long time, to communicate in a new way to the people I do see, and use it as a daily creative outlet. I always do my best work when I'm making FOR someone I care about, so I hope I turn up some gold.

There are other reasons - everyone loves getting postcards, especially these days when we used snailmail post less and less. And for me it will be like keeping a journal; along with scanning the pretty pictures on the fronts of the postcards and posting them up, I am also scanning the back, what I write. These won't be up for public consumption, just for my record.

I am also using some of the nifty things this simple blog allows. Like I am including a Google Maps link with every post to show where the card goes.

And I am hoping that the recipients will log in and post comments in response to what they receive. This way it's not just a one way communication. And if anyone has ideas on where this idea could expand, I'd love to hear it.

It's also a big test of discipline - can I really find the time to write something interesting every day, along with scan and blog it? Who knows, and who know what crazy stuff will happen in the next year.

It's all going to be documented...

PS thanks to Gen's friend Beth Sometimes, who did this exact thing recently, just without all the fancy interweb stuff.

PPS if you want to receive a card, message me your address!

One sad zebra

Sometimes even odd-toed ungulates get the blues.

Starry night

Doing some more image searching and came across this fantastic photo. It is again from a NASA 'Astronomy picture of the day' website. Click on it to see the high-rez version in all its glory.

Lost it

Discovered this little movie I shot with Rose and Taylor and Dibbs last year (?) when I was doing some cleaning up. Cute!

Moon bridge

I came across this interesting photo today when searching for Bridge/Opera House pics for a pitch for the opening night of 'Australia'.