NOT THE BLAIR INTERVIEW SHOWN ON THE BBC ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

but my altered version, inserting a different view from those spectacular windows and a more appropriate soundtrack. Unfortunatley the sound doesn't come up on my video below but it's working fine on the main Blaugustine and also at blip.tv

If you didn't see that BBC interview it's available at this link for another five days. Try watching it while playing Leonard Cohen's The Future.

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POST-ELECTION BLUES and a PORTRAIT PARTY

Very disappointed that the Lib Dems didn't get more votes after all the enthusiasm they generated during the campaign. Most of all I'm shocked by the outrageous excuses given for voters being turned away from many polling stations on election night: why isn't more fuss made about this in the media and everywhere? Supposedly, 'an inquiry is under way' but that just isn't good enough. If this were a third world country, there would be world-wide rumblings about ineptitude and conspiracies. But we're a civilised, sophisticated, efficient democracy, aren't we? 

PORTRAIT PARTY 

Some of us prefer art to politics and pay more attention to art than to reality and would rather play than work and can find hundreds of good reasons not to do the things we should be doing in favour of things that have no agenda other than fun. So when I saw on Walt's always fun-supporting blog a mention of Julia Kay's Portrait Party, of course I immediately had to go there and now I'm completely hooked. Here are my first three portraits of artist members of that vibrant ongoing all-day all-night party. I drew these digitally on a graphic tablet, using Artrage software for Wally and Blue Sky Day and Photoshop brushes for Allan. 

SIGNS AND WONDERS?

If the ancients who saw archers, twins, lions, virgins and so forth in the random alignment of stars could have had our technology, what would they have made of this picture (from BBC news) of the volcanic ash cloud travelling across northern skies?

Depending on your point of view, it's either a Disney cartoon dragon, one of the monsters described in the Apocalypse or, well, um, a volcanic ash cloud moving across Europe and beyond.