Sunday, August 16, 2009

Robot plays guitar (WN0022)



Been a little too busy to post much of late, but it's always worth throwing an arbitrary something up from time to time - just to keep the blog ticking over.

I came across this rather fine video on YouTube recently of a robot playing guitar. Not an android unfortunately, but a rather fine piece of music all the same. Guitarbot comes courtesy of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, who also have a pretty dandy array of other musical machines on display at their website.

Last day of being 37, with a birthday coming up tomorrow. Edging ever closer to 40, and still alive!

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Proud to be on parade...



My wife and I took her mother along to Pride this weekend, Brighton's annual parade of gay abandon and probably one of Britain's biggest LGBT events. The slideshow above showcases some of the delightful outfits and colourful characters taking part in the the parade.

According to Brighton Pride's official website, the event goes back to 1992 - the year that I first returned to the city. The funny thing about coming back here to live again is that all these moments and crossovers from my past (in this case, just the date of 1992!) keep reappearing.

The event has grown to quite some scale these days and is probably much more of a family-oriented thing than it started out as. It was also the first one I'd been to, and in keeping with this year's spirit of checking out plenty of the things going on in the city to make up for lost time.

There was stacks of joy and exuberance on display, along with some outrageous costumes and curious characters that went past on the parade. We tagged on to the end of it as it passed us and trooped towards the park. However, it started to rain once we arrived and there wasn't a great deal else to keep a Japanese mother-in-law hanging around for, so we headed back home again.

All-in-all though, quite a day...