Gnawing on the Jolly Egg

More East London street art today -- this time by a guy who calls himself Paul Insect.

Interesting red, white and blue color scheme, which of course could be a reference to either Britain or America. (Or both! Or neither!) Is he suggesting something about Big Brother always watching us?

Speaking of street art, when I was playing GeoGuessr yesterday, I came across this humorous bit of street art from Google Street View in a small town in central Brazil. How cool is it that I can sit in London and walk virtually down a street in Brazil, enjoying the sights? It blows my mind.

Our neighbor Chris came over for tea yesterday. As is always the case with Chris, we wound up talking about World War II. But his real reason for stopping by was to lend me a book on photography (he's also a photography enthusiast). It looks pretty interesting. We compared notes on our recent picture-taking adventures.

Olga got a new dog toy in the mail! You may remember that back in December, I posted a photo of my dad's dog, Maybelline, enthusiastically playing with a toy plastic egg. I ordered a similar "Jolly Egg" for Olga, and we tried it out yesterday. She didn't know what to make of it at first; she crouched down and barked at it. (Olga never barks.) But eventually she got the hang of it and had fun knocking it around the courtyard. She's already worn deep grooves in it with her teeth -- and this toy is supposed to be pretty durable. We'll see!

Ram and Magpie

I've been calling this sculpture the "Satanic Goat" ever since I took this photo a couple of weeks ago -- even though it's a ram, not merely a goat, and the red eyes are clearly a vandal's afterthought. Turns out the sculpture by Paula Haughny is called "Ram and Magpie," from 1996. According to the web site Exploring East London:

This was one of the works which was commissioned under the Bethnal Green City Challenge. The sculpture, at Allen Gardens Playground, Buxton Street, was inspired by a pub by this name which had stood on this site in the early twentieth century. The block of stone was installed on the site and the sculptress carved it where it now stands. Buxton Street is named after Thomas Buxton (1786-1845), of the brewers Truman, Hanbury and Buxton, who became an MP who campaigned for Prison Reform and abolition of the slave trade.

Pretty interesting, right?

More interesting than what's going on around here at the moment, anyway. I am still tired and it doesn't help that the dog woke me up at 5 a.m. squirming to go outside.

Yesterday Dave and I spent the afternoon watching "Cloud Atlas," which I really liked. I'm surprised it didn't get more traction in theaters. It was much easier to follow than I feared it would be, given the complexity of the storyline, and visually it's a beautiful movie.

If you're at all interested in geography, landscapes and cultures, try this online game called GeoGuessr. I am not a video game person at all, but a blog pal turned me on to this game, and it's actually really fun. You're given a random Google Street View image from somewhere in the world and you have to guess the location. There are five rounds in each game, with points awarded depending on how close you get. I can almost always get the continent right, at the very least, and often I can get within a few hundred kilometers. Once I was within a single kilometer -- when GeoGuessr showed me the start of the Seven Mile Bridge in Marathon, Fla. Now that's a spot I know by heart!

Chopping, Slicing and Washing Up

This morning I feel like I need to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks. (Or maybe something softer. Q-tips?)

I am exhausted.

The school where Dave and I work had a fundraising auction a couple of months ago. You may remember that Dave, while a teacher during the day, is also a trained chef, and he offered a catered dinner party as an auction prize. Yesterday he, his coworker Gordon and I spent the day working in the shiny white kitchen of an upscale Marylebone apartment to prepare a seven-course meal for six people.

First, the apartment: It was huge by my standards -- two living rooms, a large central foyer where at one point the children in the family were kicking a ball around, and bedrooms and bathrooms off to the side. (I didn't see those.) I felt like I could wave to Madonna across the courtyard -- she owns a house in Marylebone. It's that kind of a 'hood.

Dave prepared an amuse bouche of breakfast radish with anchovy compound butter, followed by vichyssoise, eggs en cocotte, sauteed scallops with pureed parsnips and an orange reduction sauce, leg of spring lamb with potatoes and asparagus, a small salad, a cheese course, and lavender-vanilla creme brulee.

Gordon and I helped prepare the food as sous chefs, though to be honest I mostly washed dishes. That's probably my real talent in the kitchen! I've always enjoyed dishwashing at home, but last night I got a glimpse of how frustrating it would be to be a commercial dishwasher. The damn things just kept coming. I'd wash something and before I knew it, it would be back in front of me again, having been used by Dave or Gordon for some other kitchen task.

In the middle of all this, I had to run back home yesterday evening and walk the dog -- who of course had eaten lots of sticks on her recent outings to Hyde Park and the Grand Union Canal, and was thus having more digestive issues.

Never a dull moment, I'm telling you. But the dinner party seemed to turn out great, despite an oven with complicated knobs that we didn't quite know how to work, a torch for the creme brulee that ran out of fuel at the critical moment, and a strange cooktop that Dave described as "a piece of sh*t." (Surprising in that house, but I take his word for it.) The diners seemed thrilled, and that's what matters.

(Photo: A postman and a flowering bush -- big enough to require a wide-angle setting on the camera -- in Notting Hill.)

Revenge of the Raccoons

I watched the most peculiar movie yesterday. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind Hayao Miyazaki movies like "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro." Well, one of the TV channels here recently aired a bunch of the Studio Ghibli films, and I recorded several I'd never seen. Yesterday I watched "Pom Poko."

A hallmark of Studio Ghibli, and particularly Miyazaki, is a reverence for the past. The movies seldom depict plastic and video games and modern technology, and never favorably. Instead they're inhabited by magical characters and creatures from Japanese folk tales, often in forest or agrarian settings. As a result, they can seem a little strange to those of us with a Western sensibility and no familiarity with Japanese mythology.

"Pom Poko," directed not by Miyazaki but by Isao Takahata, is a cautionary tale about preserving the wilderness. The main characters are raccoons (or more specifically, raccoon dogs, the creatures being surreptitiously turned into clothing in China). The gist of the story is that suburban development in Tokyo is paving all the forests where animals like the raccoons live. So they decide to do what they can to fight back against human intrusion.

Some of the raccoons can shape-shift, and present themselves as other animals or monsters or even humans. Shape-shifting takes a lot of energy, so they fuel themselves with high-energy foods. There's a humorous scene in the movie where two raccoons pretending to be human spot each other while guzzling energy drinks. (Now I understand why some people drink that stuff.)

I can't even begin to describe the strangeness of the scene where male raccoons fly into battle. Each one pulls his scrotum over his head and uses it first as a parachute, and then as a weapon. I am not making this up. (I was going to post a video so you could watch, but of course someone's already done that.)

Yes, it is all deeply odd, yet beautiful and touching in the end -- a film about a culture mourning its past and its connection to the earth. I hesitate to recommend it, because it is not everyone's cup of tea. But I found it fascinating and kind of mind-blowing.

(Photo: Cell-phone charms (I think?) for sale at the Portobello Road market.)

Off-Leash, On The Canal

I've found a great exercise spot for Olga -- the Grand Union Canal.

It's not new to us. I've taken her there many times. But only lately have I been letting her off-leash, which she loves, and she's been great. She plays with sticks and chases ducks and eats grass and rolls around and runs, runs, runs. And she happily comes back when I call her.

What a relief. I love setting her free. She has a lot more fun that way, and so do I.

She has a very good sense of what to do and not to do, and she plays well with the other dogs we encounter. Not to mention people -- she doesn't chase bicyclists or small children.

So while she zippers up and down the towpath, I can take pictures!

But here's the best thing about the canal, at least from Olga's point of view...

PIGEONS!

Short Items

-- I did give serious consideration to posting my unedited Dr. Joyce Brothers article, as one reader requested. I looked yesterday to see if I still have it, and of course I do, tucked away in a yellowed manila folder. (I saved a printout along with the published clip.) But on rereading it I decided putting it on the blog is just a step too far. It reads well but it's a little long for this format and it quotes people who for all I know aren't even alive anymore. (Like Dr. Joyce Brothers!) Sometimes it's best to let old battles fade away, you know?

-- Anyone who reads my blog knows I am an Obama fan. But I'm disappointed by the recent revelations of the Justice Department investigations into reporters' phone records. Benghazi is not a legitimate scandal and the monkey business at the IRS seems clearly the result of some clueless lower-level person misapplying the rules. But Obama's administration has fostered a hostility towards internal news leaks that seems uncharacteristic of this president and his goals. (I disagreed with someone on Facebook about whether these latest issues are "Nixonian." I don't think they're as severe as anything Nixon did, certainly, but I think they stem from the same fears and concerns about criticism, and contribute to a "Nixonian" climate.) News leaks are an essential part of the checks and balances of Democracy.

-- I have been meaning to link to my photo sets on Flickr from Paris and Bucharest. It took me a while to get all the pictures uploaded, but they're there now, in case you want to browse beyond what I posted here.

-- I learned something new about collard greens. (Or simply greens, as they're known in England. Somehow the collard got lost on its way across the Atlantic.) They can be stir-fried! I guess this shouldn't be surprising, but I'd suspected they might be too leathery. Having grown up in the South, I always resorted to boiling them; in fact they're probably the only green vegetable I ever boil. I bought some the other day at Tesco, though, and the package advised stir-frying. I tried it, and it's yummy. Recommended!

-- I have not seen any of Pat's children in a week or so, especially after the windy rainstorms that passed through several days ago. I wonder if they've all been blown to the four corners of our housing estate? (I suppose that's what's supposed to happen, right?)

(Photo: Wisteria on Portobello Road, on Tuesday.)

Portobello People

Our nice spring weather has subsided, at least for the moment. It's 45º F out there right now, and windy as all get-out. Our plants have been taking a beating on the balcony.

I bet these folks are glad they got their Portobello Road shopping done a day or two ago, when it was relatively balmy.

I wish I had more to say, but yesterday Olga and I basically stayed inside while it rained and blew. I did venture out in the afternoon to buy copy paper so I could print some Eurostar tickets -- I'm going back to Paris later this month on a day trip to meet with my friend Katherine, who's visiting there from New York. Should be fun!