Category: my life

A Brit a Day [#362]


One of my favorite Brits is Nic Roberson, the foreign correspondent who finds himself in war zones plying his trade for CNN. I’m sure he’s heard so many jokes about being the real Nick Danger that he isn’t even polite anymore. Nic’s Wikipedia article includes this wonderful description:

He has won numerous awards, including two Overseas Press Club Awards, a Peabody, a duPont, and several Emmy Awards for his work in war zones and disaster areas around the world. People magazine voted him Sexiest News Correspondent in 2001 but he is better known as a fearless veteran of the world’s conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Bosnia,Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, the Darfur region of Sudan, Northern Ireland and both the Gulf War and the Iraq War. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 CNN sent Robertson to report fromNew Orleans.
I found a picture of Nic in one of his assignments that I wanted to post. But as the photographer who took it has disabled download capabilities of the photo–that never stopped me–I will honor his wishes and only post enough bits of the photo to make you want to see it in its entirety on Flickr. You can do that here:
I love pictures of actors acting, painters painting, writers writing, even thinkers thinking–so of course, I love this photo of a great reporter reporting. And in addition to that, I really like the looks of Nic in that fine coat.

A Brit a Day [#398]


My teenage daughter plays a game with her friends that goes roughly like this–they each have their laptops and start on a webpage with headlines like Yahoo! News. The game is to see who can get from that page to a reference to Hitler in the least clicks. They can’t use a search engine, just mouse clicks. It’s a tasteless premise, but kind of amazing because it never takes very long.

I bring this up because, as one of my friends says, I need you to walk with me here. The lyrics of a passage from ‘3rd Planet’ on Modest Mouse’s the moon and antarctica are the only words that will speak for me today, but Modest Mouse is a thoroughly American indie band. ‘3rd Planet’ was written by Isaac Brock, portions of whose life sound like a Thomas Hardy novel…..
When his mother’s house flooded she was forced to move in to her new husband’s trailer where there was no room for Brock, so he stayed behind. He lived on the second floor of the flooded home until he was evicted by the police. After a period of living in a friend’s basement, he moved into a shed he built on the land next to his mother and stepfather’s trailer. [wikipedia]
…..but otherwise, there’s no British connection.
That’s Isaac Brock the living. Major General Isaac Brock, who died from a bullet to the heart in upper Canada in the War of 1812, was born in Guernsey and died a hero of the British Army. You can read more about him here:
THAT Isaac Brock is our Brit of the Day. The rest is just a device for me to be able to make you read this bit of [American indie] poetry by the other Isaac Brock–
Your heart felt good.
It was drippin’ pitch and made of wood.
And your hands and knees,
Felt cold and wet on the grass beneath,
While outside naked, shiverin’, looking blue,
From the cold sunlight that’s reflected off the moon
And baby cum angels fly around you,
Reminding you that we used to be three and not two,
And that’s how the world began.
And that’s how the world will end.
Why is this verse speaking my heart’s song today? You won’t learn that just by walking with me, for I can’t quite explain it. I can tell you this–The daughter I mentioned above is leaving home on Thursday for her first major adventure away from us. She’s going to Europe for 9 days. I’m excited for her, I’m scared for her, I’m in denial that I’m scared or that she might be scared. I just want everything to be great. I want her to be there and be totally in the moment, and at the same time, I want her to be back home, safe, with the trip as just a fantastic memory. I want to stop worrying about Libya and remembering Pan Am Flight 103. ‘3rd Planet’ is one of those songs that just hurts so good, and it’s good to hurt a little, just for today.

A Brit a Day [#1245]

Rather than being decisive about the end or move of ABAD, I’m going to just say that ABAD is on a hiatus of undetermined length. I have enjoyed doing it, and I’m proud of my own commitment to posting almost every day for almost three and a half years, but my passion for it is touching the low water mark at the moment.  There’s no excuse for doing a bad job of it, so I’m going to let it go for now.

So…this isn’t good-bye, just an exceptionally mushy post.

If I have to leave a parting thought here for a while, though, it would be this:

A few years back, I developed a crush on the charming and charismatic frontman of a British band called Art Brut.  His lyrics blew me away. They were funny and ironic and seemed to expose every fear a 20-something young man could have–which are not that different from the fears a 40-something old woman has. I reached out to him as a friend on Myspace, that antique social medium that revolutionized my six-degrees-of-separation world.  Now there could be one degree.  To make a long story short, over the years I have met Eddie, hung out with Eddie, drunk vodka-and-apple-juice cocktails and bad wine with him.  I have met [through email] Eddie’s mom in England [she’s exactly 2 months older than I am].  Two of Eddie’s paintings hang in my house. He says that the story I’ve told him of how my preschooler misconstrued the words to one of his songs has become a part of his patter onstage.

Friday was Eddie’s birthday.  I emailed him my good wishes.  He emailed me back his thanks.  My point is–never doubt your heart.  You can feel a connection through pictures, music, video….to someone you would never have met in your ‘normal’ life or perhaps will never meet outside of the internet.  But the connection is no less real.

So…if you’re reading this–I’m connecting with you.  And isn’t that cool?

A Brit a Day [#1244]

James May, what am I going to do with almost 500 pictures of you saved?  That really is the question.

I’m struggling to take my next step.  ABAD evolved from a fiction writing blog to justify my love affair with the ease of clicking and saving anything and everything pictured online.  It hasn’t exactly taken on a life of its own–I get about 3 hits a day, I think.  I’ve thought about moving the ops over to Tumblr where the ease of access might give me more viewers and thus more reason to continue, but most of these images come from Tumblr in the first place.  So that would be pretty pointless.

If you really are out there, and you have an opinion, comment or email your thoughts.  I think I’ll take another week to think about it.

A Brit a Day [#1235]

I’m tooting my own decidedly non-British horn in ABAD today because I am so excited that my Etsy digital download shop is finally open!

I’d love to sell a bunch of downloads of the big 10MB jpegs I have for sale there, but mainly, I’m just happy for everyone to be able to look at samples of the pictures.  Go here to check it out–

http://www.etsy.com/shop/OurKodachromeYears

I only have about 2 dozen images up now, and I have a looooong way to go.  I think I’ve mentioned this before–the images are from the slides I inherited from my dad, and a few of my own from Europe in the 80s. Eventually, I’ll be concentrating on the ones my dad took for his personal use during his travels with the USDA.  Some of them [mainly ones I haven’t posted yet] have historical significance, IMO. I’ll try to add 3-4 items a week to the shop.

A Brit a Day [#1230]

This is for Thursday.
I could use a look back at Desmond Hume from LOST in the worst possible way today.  The dog [and I mean literally the dog, not my husband] has already gotten so excited that he tried to rip my jeans off.  And it’s only 0900.

A Brit a Day [#1229]

Today’s Brit is my mother’s stepfather, my Daddy Rex [far right], a native of Dunstable, England.  He came to the US as a college student before the First World War and fought in that war for the US Army.  In 1960, he married my grandmother, a month or two after I was born, and then became a delightful fixture in my life.
Rex is in many of the family pictures I have recently had converted to digital files.  I’m opening a shop on Etsy to display my favorites and sell digital copies.  My Etsy shop is going to be called Our Kodachrome Years–in the next few days I’ll be posting a link here so you can check it out!

A Brit a Day [#1225]

AMC has put me on a forced hiatus from the ‘Breaking Bad’ marathon–Season 5 reruns don’s begin until late tonight. So in the meantime, I’ll tell you that Wikipedia has once again given me an insight into an actor and his character with comments that Bryan Cranston has made about his childhood–

 “My mom and dad were both broken people, and because of that, they were incapacitated as far as parenting. They weren’t capable, and we lost the house in a foreclosure. We were kicked out.“

Bryan Cranston is partly English on his father’s side, so he qualifies as today’s Brit.  He is a huge inspiration to me since he got this ‘role of a lifetime’ when he was about my age.  I can’t wait for tomorrow night’s finale. I really wish him well in his life after BB–can’t hope for the same where Walter White is concerned.

Bryan Cranston in Wikipedia is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cranston#Early_life

A Brit a Day [#1204]

I know way too much about James May’s personal garage–it has become sort of a fetish with me to find pictures of him in it on the internet.  I haven’t resorted to Google Street View yet, though.  I’m not that bad.