A Tudor Lunch Hour

I was thinking of a subject for this blog entry as I was walking to the Coffee machine. I have decided to make it a Tudor day which now I come to write it sounds a bit silly but there you go. It could be worse. My colleague Geoffrey has just pointed out the Geographical stupidity of Jade from Big Brother (I know I said I wouldn't mention it). East Angular is where they grow sparry Grass I suppose. Lets ask her about Elizabeth I. The picture of Elizabeth on the front of Richard Starkey's book is wonderful. His book seems to cast aside all the old images of religious infighting in the Royal Family and creates a rich mix of extreme intelligence not only on the part of Elizabeth, but also for her Sister and Step mother. Of course we have to forget about all the burnings of "Heretics" though I get the impression that Elizabeth was a bit more restrained in this respect and I think that she actually only had one person executed at the tower. I don;t know what her record on the common people was. This is for certain just the local opinion of the author and should in no way be taken as fact.

Local wildlife gets cheeky



I have lost my desire for a historical entry. The above picture is one I mocked up for a Christmas Card for my dad when he was considering getting a computer. He is a mad keen birder (NEVER a bird watcher) and I wanted to show him what you could do with the image editing. The bird was actually photographed inside the tropical house at the Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust and I am quite pleased that it matches very well for a first attempt. Without the bird, this is a pretty standard shot of my dad. He goes to the same place every weekend to watch the birds. I think that now he has retired, he also goes every Wednesday as well. He also carries out far more work on his computer than I do basically because he has the time.

Last image posted today



This is called Riley1 in homage to Bridget Riley. It is simply random noise filtered back and forth until the matrix of the filter begins to manifest itself. No artistic talent required at all. I used to do the same with the sequencer. I just pressed random notes very fast (all in the same key - I'm not a fan of achromatic music) and then quantised them to the nearest quarter or eighth note. The result was often quite exciting. Maybe you could get a machine to mix the quantising of sound with that of images. I expect it's already available. In fact, I have a piece of software (I didn't write it) which moves organic forms on the computer screen in time to the music on the CD in the drive. If you look at the above picture on a really good screen, it seems to become 3 dimensional. No! It's not one of those magic eye paintings - you will give yourself a headache if you try to "see" it. It looks like oil paint to me. I will have to try some more.

Tudor Hour is over. Come in James I (VI).