Tuesday 29 June 2010

Glastonbury 2010 by @Dwese

All photos and captions by my sister Louise, a diary post to follow soon...

Click on a photograph to see a larger version. Let her know if you enjoyed them with a comment on here, or through Twitter, she's @dwese


The field for The Other Stage


To give you some idea of the SIZE of Glastonbury


Gateway to the Stone Circle



The Greenpeace Field had excellent stuff for kids: pirate ship, skate ramp, climbing wall.

The Hula Hoop Tent - you worked that out, didn't you?

Fantastic costumes, and very brave in the heat

I like big butts...

Arcadia (you could not get near this a night)

Oh dear. The rubbish was phenomenal and all picked up by hand and sorted into cans/bottles/paper by the amazing army of 1500 litter pickers

 Pet Shop Boys finale, my favourite set, my era really!

Gormley's "Field" Glasto style


I know this is supposed to be portrait, but I liked it better this way!

Kids look so cute in their ear protectors

The essential crowd / stage shot

West (or East?) Dance Tent. Amazing lights, music... everything!

Rave Henge - the cubes changed with the music different colours

Don't go out tonight, 'cos it's bound to change your life

Enjoying a peach schnapps at sunset


Wednesday 23 June 2010

@Angpang's Twitter Follow Back Formula

Having been on Twitter for about two years now, I feel I can now unveil the... @Angpang TwitterFollowBack Formula™ ...which will reveal the new Followers you should Follow Back, and the new Followers you should ignore, with the might of science and logic on your side.

 Each new Follower starts with 50 points. If they have 50 points at the end of the process, I Follow them back. Fewer than 50 I don’t. A score of 10 or lower means they’re blocked. Below 0 and they’re being reported to @spam for the scum they are. 

So, starting with…

Your Username Yes, a username can make or break a Follow Back situation. If your username manages to be spammy and insulting - think @banishcellulite - lose 100 points.

Your Avatar Avatars of young ladies with cleavage taking up more space than their face lose 25 points immediately. If they then turn out to be bots with fatuous fake Tweets: “I'm just talking a shower… LOL, then off to the mall… OMG” ...punctuated by aggressive marketing ejaculations: “CLICK HERE TO MAKE $$$$$$$ WWW.YADAYADAYADA.COM” … lose another 100 points. Funnily enough, boobs and bots almost always go together. Feel free to mock them thus: booby bot booby bot booby bot...

Your Attractiveness Like any other human, I am attracted to attractive faces, male or female. Gain 10 points. Like most humans, I try not to be swayed by looks. Lose 10 points.

Your Follower/Follower ratio. If your Follower/Following numbers closely match, I suspect you’ve set up auto-follow account that demonstrates a cavalier attitude to this whole Twitter thing. Lose 10 points. If you are Following loads more people than are Following you, you’re a Twitter Trollop who’s putting it about a bit much. I do not feel special. Lose 30 points. As Bowie once said: Don't fake it baby, lay the real thing on me. If you have loads of Followers, but only Follow a few, I’m impressed. People don’t hang around with those that don’t Follow them back unless they’re dishing up something good. Gain 15 points. There are exceptions. Certain celebrities are as dull as dishwater yet Followed in droves. People with a gazillion Followers who only Follow ten - you look like your head is up your bottom. Lose 100 points.

My position in your Following Grid On the bottom right of your Twitter page, there’s a grid of avatars of people you are Following. This is in order, with the most recent Follows at the top. If my picture is on the first line, gain 25 points. You’ve picked me and a few others to Follow, I feel special. You gain fewer  points the further down the grid I am, as I begin to feel I'm in a herd, then a drag net. If I am not on the grid at all, lose 25 points, you click-crazed buffoon.

Your Bio No bio, lose 20 points, unless you're a Twitter Newbie, in which case I’ll assume you're about to create one. I appreciate this is a Big Moment that should not be rushed. A bio that mentions sport, lose 10 points. A bio with more than one exclamation mark, lose 5 points. Any suggestion that you can transform my life in any way, lose 55 points.

Your Tweets. How many @replies? Not a lot? Lose 10 points, you don’t seem very friendly.

Lots of RTs? Lose 10 points, you don’t seem very original.

How often are you Tweeting? Once a month? You’re taking the piss, aren’t you? Lose 20 points.

Tweeting all the time? Hello? Greedy and Needy. Lose 15 points.

Do your Tweets makey no sense? Lose 20 points.

What about your open Tweets? The ones you foist on all your Followers? Are they entertaining and / or informative? Do I want that kind of thing spewed into my stream? They are? Gain 45 points.

Is there much talk of sport or cars? Lose 23 points. Make that 33 if it's golf. It’s not that I don’t like people talking about sport, I just don’t want to listen. The only exception to this sports rule seems to be Arsenal fans, I find them very funny (you know who you are).

Do your Tweets reveal that you are kind? Gain 100 points.

Lots of @replies to celebrities? Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. Enjoy the Twitter equivalent of a High Five Fail do you? Actually, I do have sympathy. You see a Tweet go bobbing down your stream from a celebrity you admire and/or fancy. A reply that's relevant and entertaining pops into your head and in no time it's floating back to their @name, your heart in tow. You wait, and wait, and wait. You make a cup of tea. Still no reply. But that doesn't stop you trying again. And again. Then one day, many weeks later, the magic happens, they send you a smiley face. Stardust has fallen upon you. You immediately Favourite the reply and shoot back 10 more Tweets to the celeb. :) :) :). A year later you've enough celebrity LOLs and ROFLs to print off on a sheet of A4. Photo quality. Then you pop to W H Smiths for a stamp album... ...or perhaps that's just me. Anyway, back to the formula: too much sleb bothering, lose 35 points.

 Protected Tweets I don’t like the ‘I can see you but you can’t see me’ stance of the protected account. It makes me want to block, to even things up a bit. Lose 10 points. Having said that, several of the best Twitterati I follow are protected, for good reasons, so if the bits I can see impress me, gain 10 points; you're still in the game. Lists Lists are a lot more indicative of twinkly Twitter gold than the number of Followers. Auto Follow back and you’ll soon have loads of Followers, 95% of them bots and peddlers of the curse of modern life: shit you don’t need. A listing shows that a human has taken time to add you, this is much harder to manipulate than Follow counts. A highly listed account gains 30 points.

Introduce Yourself Have you spoken to me? I do really like people who Follow and then talk, to say hello, say why they've Followed. It proves you’re a real person, and that you’ve Followed for a reason. Follow and @reply me? Gain 50 points.

Spam We’re all on Twitter to sell something, even if we are only selling our personality in return for company, so I am not too sniffy about a bit of puff in my Twitter stream, providing it’s done in an entertaining way. If I want cold, hard sales talk I’ll walk into a double glazing sales room, try to throw that at me on Twitter and I’ll laugh with disdain and block you. Companies that Tweet with personality, offer interesting content and cool links gain 15 points. Unless they manufacture cars.

So that's the formula so far. Of course it needs a little tweaks, but it gives a 95% accurate result, or your money back. So how did you score? If you're feeling brave, Follow me now, I'm @angpang. And what’s your Follow Back Formula? Please comment, let me know…

Wordless Wednesday #22 by Angpang



Taken at Weston Park Museum, Sheffield UK.

Tuesday 22 June 2010

Email Subscriptions now Open...

My blog now has a new Email Subscription option (just put your email into the box on the right, it's the proverbial piece of cake).

This means my mum can now receive and read my posts, and maybe your mum too. Do you think your mum would be interested?

So I though I should make an announcement of some kind. I used to work in public relations, you know. Then I thought:

I really need to say what Incense and Peppermints is about, so people can decide if they want my stuff in their inbox.

Then I thought: I don't really know what this blog is about, there's no theme. 

Then I thought: Hey, I could do a round up of my most popular posts, to kinda say 'what this blog is about', and seamlessly push some old posts under the nose of my newer readers.

So here it is. A Blog Commercial Break...

In Which I Humiliate my Mother
"It’s 1951 and my seven-year-old mother is the new girl in school. She cannot speak the language. She cannot see the black board, because no one’s noticed she’s incredibly short sited. She knows her mother was hit with a cane across the knuckles for speaking Welsh in a Welsh school, so in this English school, she keeps her head down."



Bookshelves and Brick Dust
"...Without pausing for Lemsip, I stopped reading spines and started seeing colours. Aiming for contrast, I stacked greens over purples and reds, and blues over yellows and oranges. Blacks created a solid foundation on the bottom shelves, whites the top. So much easier than working out where you are in the alphabet. So much kinder than forcing books into clichéd genres. Grabbing and slotting by shade felt wonderfully liberating...."

This Twitter Thing
"...With its 140 character limit, Twitter’s a hostile environment to the boring, dominating or waffling. As it’s on the internet, it attracts the tech savvy. As a public space (anyone can read your updates) it also asks you to be a bit brave. So to be on Twitter you’re already my kind of person. But what do people on Twitter do?
Click here to read the full blog (this link goes to another blog)

The Honest Scrap Blogger Award OR Spot the Lie
"... I was once threatened by a knife wielding, junkie, lesbian who'd just been released from prison. Let's call her 'Karen'. That was her name anyway. She looked like a zombie version of Limahl. I escaped thanks to an extensive knowledge of the back gardens of Grimsby and the decision to wear baseball boots that night.



Awful Antique Shops
How do you get your thrills on Halloween? We just take a tour of our local ‘antique shop’. Owned by a house clearance company, it's the end of the road for dead people's stuff, and the sight of all those personal things piled-up high - as if a JCB was involved, not a human hand - is more chilling to me than any horror film.

Gormley's Field in a Shoe Box
Our first Gorms waiting to be put in the shoe box. Note Ruby's alien Gorms with several eyes, and Emelia's super tall ones with Dr Seuss wobbly grins. It does take a while to do all the Gorms, so the more hands you can get involved, the better.

 
Sharbat Gula and Me
 I first saw her in June 1985 when she appeared on the cover of National Geographic. I guessed she was about my age and I was fascinated, and envious, of her beauty. At that time, boys walked right by me to chat-up my friends, so attractiveness was something to be dissected and tentatively copied. This girl, without make-up or the enhancements of Photoshop, had a face that could launch a thousand ships. What was her secret? Click here to read the full blog

How to Build a Fairy Garden
"...You can see we are getting in the swing of things now. We have a glass table top, up-turned pinecone seating area, daisy garden, curtain ring tunnel, lantern summer house (in case it rains), rope bridge over the pond, razor shell railings to keep baby fairies out of the Deep Water, sea shell hidey hole, skeletal leaf fishing nets and pom pom street light. This photograph was taken after I removed a few hundred white petals (someone had got a bit carried away)."
 
Found: The Chantry, The Church and The Artist!
"...within 24 hours of my original post I know the exact location and history of the Chantry depicted in my junk-shop find, and I know the name of the artist, a little of her background, and that her work regularly comes up for auction. I cannot thank you enough. A picture I love anyway has gained a whole new level of enjoyment. And let this tale waggle its bare bum at anyone who thinks Twitter is just about broadcasting what you had for breakfast.




So that's the sort of thing I blog about. Plus lots and lots of photographs in my Wordless Wednesday posts.
Click here to see a round-up of the kind of photographs I post in this Wordless Wednesday Search

Hope you enjoyed the commercial break, and that your mum will be subscribing by email. 

Wednesday 16 June 2010

The Knitted Breasts




Yes, these really are knitted bosoms.

They were used in the 1940s as an educational tool to help women understand all about breast feeding.

How marvelous that one has stripes. I think a tea cosy pattern has been involved at some point.

I almost featured them on my other blog where I gush about gorgeous vintage finds. Almost. 

See them 'in the flesh' at Weston Park Museum's Food Glorious Food exhibition (in Sheffield, UK) from now until November 28, 2010, and at the V&A Museum of Childhood, London, in 2011.

The museum and this exhibition are both free and both fantastic.

Wordless Wednesday #21 by Angpang

Friday 11 June 2010

Balloonatic


One pack of bendy balloons meets one firecracker of a child and this is the result.

Yes, she made it all herself.

A perfect visual representation of the thoughts that go on inside that five year old brain.