Go Gladys!

This is Gladys Tejeda, who was born to a family of subsistence farmers, two and a half miles above sea level in the Andes of Peru. Today she completed the Olympic Marathon.

Gladys Tejeda with the Museum of London in the background

She finished in 43rd place, in a personal best time of 2:32:07, nine minutes behind the winner and totally unnoticed by the cameras. I was standing at 33.7km when I took this picture. I wanted to know what would happen to her when I saw her carrying the flag in the opening ceremony.

The crowd all around me cheered every single runner. If they couldn't pronounce her name and didn't know the name of her country, they just shouted "Go Oooonn!! Keep Goinnnng!". And quite a lot of them, including me, stayed to cheer on the runner in 107th and last place, making as much noise for her as we could. The men in the clear-up van applauded us right back.

Chinese bus mystery answers!

Awesome comments today! The Chinese bus, pictured again below, is explained.

Iain gives the following two links:

Joanna Scarratt UA Brands: Chinese Happy Backpacker

"With a bit of digging, I discovered that Ogilvy’s Beijing arm created a campaign earlier this year for Yili, the leading Chinese dairy brand and official sponsor of the Olympic Chinese Sports Delegation. It’s called “Let’s Olympic Together,” and aims to uncover ordinary Chinese people’s extraordinary stories. There are outdoor print ads, short films, TV commercials and digital engagement initiatives inspiring viewers to realise their own “Olympic” dreams by embracing a healthy lifestyle"

At ChinaSMACK, Yili lauches new campaign to coincide with Olympic hysteria includes a video of the runner shown on the bus, which is also here. He is apparently Li, a 62 year old marathon runner.

Louis independently gives the pinyin and a rough translation which agrees with the above:

"ping(2) fan(2) zhong(1) guo(2) ren(2), bu(4) ping(2) fan(2) de gu(4) shi(4). A bit rusty with my pinyin so I wasn't sure of the correct way of indicating the tone. A rough translation is: An ordinary (or common?) Chinese, an extradordinary story."

Thanks guys! It doesn't entirely explain why the ad is on a London bus outside the umbrella shop. My best guess is that it's directed mainly at a TV audience back home, via a carefully-planned campaign to get the ads on TV and talked about, partly by that very oddity. Worked on me!

O London Bus, thou art translated ...

Today, for the first time, I saw a London bus advertisement (apparently for drinking milk, or something) written entirely in a language I cannot read at all, let alone translate.

Don't misunderstand me - advertisements in languages other than English without a translation are very common in London and not at all remarkable, but they're usually small in scale, the largest being shop names saying obvious things like "POLISH FOODS" in Polish. As far as I remember, this is the first time I've seen a foreign-language ad on a bus.

O London Bus, thou art translated! Click to embiggen.

Although the shapes of the characters are of course vaguely familiar, the only one that means anything specific to me is the fifth one which I know as "rèn", a human being. Now, there are numerous languages written in Chinese characters, and I have no reliable way of knowing even which one this is, although under the circumstances Modern Standard Mandarin seems the most likely candidate, with Cantonese perhaps second favourite.

I am curious to know if the man in running shirt and glasses is 'just a man,' or someone the target audience would recognise.

I can't use Google Translate for this because I don't know how to write the characters on my computer. Can any of my readers (a) confirm the language, (b) make a pinyin transcription (c) translate the text? [Edit: Answers here]

The location, incidentally, is the corner of New Oxford Street, where the umbrella shop is.

Spring and Summer

I'm working a lot of extra hours at work for a couple of weeks. I don't usually do this even for project work because it's usually not worth it, but in this case it makes a reasonable amount of sense. So I'll probably be a bit quiet (as I blog mainly in the evenings when I'm not dancing).

In the meantime here's a lovely view from outside my accommodation at Abrazos Devon, the festivalito I went to in the first week of May.

The view at Abrazos Devon - it was a bit chilly, but some marvellous cloudscapes.

I reviewed the first one last year; this year the average standard of dancing was quite a bit higher in my opinion. The floor was sometimes extremely full and slow-moving, which some people find very stimulating, but even if that wasn't your thing (and it isn't everyone's) in three days of dancing there were also lots of hours when there was plenty of space. They used the long thin daylit room for all the milongas, which had advantages and disadvantages that more or less balanced out, for me. I had a fantastic time, anyway. There was also a helium-filled remote-controlled shark about 4 feet long, at one point. It was a present for Andreas.

And here are some flowers, back at my place, that need no particular excuse. They have a wonderful sweet scent.

Flowers in the communal garden of some very boring, cold 80's flats.

Carole's Dance Photography Blog

Upside-Down Isaac and the Dreamers are Carole's copyright,
used with permission for this post alone.

My friend Carole the Photographer, who quite a few of you know, has started a new blog with new and back-catalogue photographs of all kinds of dance. She's adding some words in each case about the photo - what the technical challenges were, what she was trying to achieve, anything relevant about the dance, whether she was happy with it, what the event was - the kind of thing that would be interesting to photographers and artists as well as dancers.

At the moment she's working through a series on tango, with words about how her attempts to capture it in pictures have evolved with her perception of the dance itself.

She specialises in dance, and is one of the best out there. For just the tango click here, or the home page is here. But I recommend going right from the start and just clicking "Newer Post" a lot, or clicking the classifications on the right. All images currently works better than Archive.

Her photos are all available for sale in various forms - magazines would be the usual market, but she does fine art exhibitions, too. She's working on a system for people to order prints, but for the next few weeks, if you're interested in that, just leave a comment (there, not here!). Her large-form photographs of an Australian Aboriginal dance festival that she was invited to photograph are still on display at Zero Sette near the ExCel exhibition centre. Have a look.

The one in this post (used with permission) is my personal favourite so far.

Acorns

There are millions of acorns, ripe and falling, making a noise as you walk through the forest, 'plop' - 'plop' - 'plop'.

I grieve a little less for summer

They crunch under your feet.

No hay tierra como la mia

Some music: Ian Bostridge – Semele HWV58: Where E're You Walk - George Fredrick Handel

Where'er you walk ...

... cool gales shall fan the glade ...

... Trees, where you sit ...

... shall crowd into a shade ...

... Where'er you tread ...

... the blushing flowers shall rise ...

... and all things flourish ...

... where'er you turn your eyes ...

... where'er you turn your eyes ...

I wish I could convey to you the velvet texture of these young oak leaves. Not very good pictures, as I don't practice this enough, but there are so many sorts of bluebells.

Cloudscapes

Ever since about when I went to Les Cigales I've been mainly trying to make the best of a mostly lovely summer, and haven't been that vocal on tango subjects. And before that I was upset about something. You can't waste a lovely summer, you don't know when there'll be another one. The cloudscape of Folkestone beach, shortly after rain:

It's nice being me.

And the same from some very pretty gardens, as I walked down the slope with a friend, holding her toddler by the hand. He is not quite conversable yet but he is tall enough that I can stand up straight if he holds me by two fingers. He still has a baby grip.

A Long-Tailed Tit without a tail

A pair of long-tailed tits ('tits' in general are similar to the small birds that Americans call 'chickadees' - the word used to be 'titmouse') in my parents' garden. This particular species generally feed in pairs. One of these has lost its tail, perhaps to some cat or fox or some accident. It doesn't seem to cause it any problems flying, that I can see.

Butterfly House

I was on holiday this week and got to do fun things like go to the butterfly house that's at the front of the Natural History Museum. It's hot in there.

This is a Lime Butterfly or Swallowtail, Papilio demoleus.



This one was too fast for me.


I didn't get its name but in my mind it's the Strobe Butterfly.

Floorcraft flyers

Sorry, it's a bit quiet around here, after a burst of posting. I see tangocommuter has got some photos from tango al fresco last Sunday and in July. I don't usually take my camera to milongas. But I've been looking for a picture that could serve as the background to a flyer.

Click to embiggen.


I don't know who this lady above is, as I was staring fixedly at her feet, but I like their sweet little pose. It would be nice if the message itself could raise a smile.

This second one is more dramatic and probably makes the point better, but there's less room for the message.

I think I need a better choice of font, too, but searching through fonts takes time, I'm not sure what criteria to use (except that I think sans-serif is easy to print, but hard to read) and I've got to go out and do something else now. Suggestions in the comments please.

Something is eating my trees

I took this picture on 30th May, and since then it seems they've been eating at the same rate.



Here's an oak we've met before, taken this evening.



Walking in the edges of Epping Forest, I looked up to find some trees with hardly a leaf unmunched. The canopy in places seems more transparent than it should be.



My parents' garden, about five minutes' walk from where these pictures were taken, has been buzzing with insects from early Spring. There seems to have been a bumper crop of caterpillars, so there ought to be a bumper crop of little birds - swifts, martens, tits, robins, blackbirds. Here are two blue jays, not such a little bird. They're corvidae, with a similar body plan to magpies and crows, but a bit smaller. The wood pigeons are much bigger, but mostly leave the jays alone. Not very clear, because this is at the limit of my camera's zoom, the only downside of this camera. I was inside the house.



Even the mighty horse-chestnuts have been ravaged by something that eats the leaves from within and leaves red spots. I looked it up, and it turns out to be the Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner, a sort of moth.



I was myself savagely and repeatedly munched by the carnivorous kinds.

It's time for bed. Here is a briar rose, at least that's what I call it, tucking itself up for the night.

Sunday Photo - Oak

“You can cut


the flower, but


you cannot stop


the coming


of Spring.”

A quotation, whatever its flaws, that has always appealed to me.

Green

On a day when the sky is perfectly grey, you have to look hard, even with eyes, to see the beauty of the world. In photographs, it dulls the colour. I wish that I could show you the infinite variety of green that occurs on a wet Easter Saturday in Windsor.

I think these cherry blossoms glow almost more than they would in sunlight. This might be a nice light for portraits. I think I read somewhere that Nicholas Hillard thought it was.



I tried dialling down the exposure to show you the richness of green.



Here is Windsor Castle, with two tourists and a silver sky.



Back home on the Monday, the oaks were almost ready.

April in the garden of the dead

The oaks are not ready to rumble.


Behind the church, the dryads' ballroom is well-lit.


The forest-floor churchyard is carpeted with flowers.


There are new leaves of ivy, paler than the old.


There are young stinging nettles.


I did get a little bit stung for that one, so let me show you the tiny new leaves and their tiny glass stings.


There's a diligent gardener in this garden of remembrance. Here are daffodils ...


... and magnificent flame tulips.


But the carpet doesn't seem to require much vacuuming ...


... and the wild edges blend into the forest.


But the floor will be dark soon. The canopy is coming.

The petals are dropping

The pink petals are already falling. It's been a windy few days.

But some of the hawthorns or may-trees, I think that's what these are ...

... are flowering in great profusion.

The little bit of bright blue is not a sliver of sky fallen to earth, but a plastic bag, abandoned on the common by some barbarian hand.