Monthly Archives: January 2010

10:23 in Brum

A group of homeopathy sceptics spent the morning outside Boots in town, attempting to overdose on the fake remedies sold therein. They all look line to me, well as well as they did before.

Lots Of Things To See And Do In The West Midlands – February 2010 with Russ L

Russ picks out "lots of things", although nothing's striking me a brilliant — have a look and see if you think differently.

Paradise Circus – public info on development

A "public information exhibition on potential redevelopment options for Paradise Circus" at Paradise Forum Tuesday 9th February 2010 12pm – 7pm Wednesday 10th February 2010 7.30am – 2pm not to be confused with paradisecircus.com Paradise Forum ■ Birmingham B3 3HJ

Danny Smith: Tag nuts

So I spoke to the Editor* about what to write about this week and he gave me this, probably to wind me up, which suggests that ten people are responsible for most of the graffiti in Brum. I knew my feelings on graff have been documented ad nauseum in other places. Also I find the weary ‘is it art?’ argument nonsensical and unhelpful and am at loathe to drag it out one more time. So, for once, I thought it would be good to give someone active in that world a chance to reply. The guy I spoke to didn’t want to be named so I haven’t. What do you think of the thought that there only ten people responsible for the graffiti in Birmingham? I doubt the council see it like this to be honest, I can imagine they have a wanted list a lot longer. But who knows. They will have probably whittled it down to their top ten targets who they have literally charted as the top ten. However what they don’t realise is that if your a “tagger” part of that concept is to get up. As many times as possible. More than anyone else....

Moseley Road Baths – Lottery Funding success

Not to save or refurbish, but a step in the right direction: "The Friends of Moseley Road Baths has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund Your Heritage grant of almost £48,000 to undertake a three-year project researching the history of the Edwardian Grade II* Listed swimming baths"

wevee is a site that a tempts to do something with the vast amount of old film — and there’s a lot of stuff of the Midlands on there. The interface is very slick — you can trim the ends of the clip and place them together on a timeline (very much like simple video editors such as iMovie) and there’s some audio to use too. I was quite disappointed that you couldn’t use the audio from one clip with the pictures from another — meaning you can’t do cut-aways, and that does mean that you can either swap from speech to music (a bit jarring) or drop to silence (or have music over everything). I was enjoying cutting the “modern city” stuff with shots of riots and demolition, and wanted to mix it up that little bit more than the site would let me. At the moment it’s difficult to see how just uploading the archive films to YouTube wouldn’t achieve wider exposure — the editing isn’t really enough, however well the interface is designed, to drag people in. Maybe people sharing stuff might help — but apart from encouraging a little bit of creativity alongside the viewing,...

'Tweet potholes' appeal launched

The council have got a wee bit of publicity for announcing that they're going to take reports of potholes via Twitter (to the press office account, oddly) – "It just makes sense to use it," said Council spokesman Geoff Coleman. Have to say it would make a lot more sense to use fixymystreet.com which is built of the purpose, and would be great to endorse.

Danny Smith: Surge Domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua*

Anglo-Saxon England was a horrible violent place with different kings and fiefdoms slaughtering for land, old gods, and, when the Danes landed, shits and giggles. Not unlike Newtown (except the bit about the Danes – I’ve never seen a Dane in North Birmingham). Another thing worth stabbing your neighbouring villagers up the arsehole for, was gold. Not the tatty mass produced Elizabeth Duke crap the third generation crack-babies are killing each other for at present. Beautiful, hand crafted gold unique items; normally it was used for decorating the weapons you yourself used to rob people for their gold, thus making you more attractive to rob. You can see why it escalated. To keep it safe they buried it, and The Staffordshire Hoard was discovered last year in the West Midlands; if you mean the ‘West Midlands Region‘ which pretty much covers everything with buildings between London and Manchester. Folks, we already live in a world where pirates in Somalia fight off big corporations dumping waste into the ocean. Now it seems that buried treasure is not just storybook fantasy but a possibility if you plough deep enough. The world is slipping into fiction; trust me it’ll be mermaids next....

A History of the Birmingham

A BBC/BMAG project to identify ten items that tell the history of the World with some Brum connection.

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