Google now does baby portraits!
This has just got to be the most amazing “Street View” capture in the GoogleCam’s history! *Click on the picture to see the full image. (More Street View fun here)
Don’t worry – we’ll take your baby portraits in the comfort of your own home or at our studio. Details
Update:
Google were quick to take it down. Perhaps they wanted to sell her some ten-by-eights before she had a chance to grab them off the screen!
(Click image for full size)
…or could there be some truth to the speculation that the whole thing was set up as a hoax?
Hmm… We’ll see!
Rod Stewart at the Echo Arena
Click to enlarge then use your keyboard’s arrow keys to scroll the images…
What a great surprise! An early birthday present from my very thoughtful wife.
I’d always wanted to see Rod Stewart in concert. Jayne bought the tickets months ago and kept it secret until the day of the show. I didn’t even know he was due to appear at the Echo Arena in Liverpool.
The concert was great. Rod Stewart truly deserves the much misused term “Superstar”. At 8pm on the dot the curtain went up and we were launched into two and a half hours of Stewart classics. No second rate support act. Just the man himself with his fantastic band of accomplished musicians and backing singers.
Best of all, we managed to sneak a camera past the Nikon Police!
The lady who searched Jayne’s bag told us we’d have to “leave the camera with that man over there” in one of the locked cages. Yea right!
We were jostled in the crowd. Jayne headed for the loo and no one chased after us.
It really annoys me that because a camera looks like professional equipment, you are not allowed to take it into these venues. Yet they never enforce the ‘No Photography’ rule. People were firing off their built-in flashes left, right and centre with no intervention from the security personnel.
All in all it was a good gig and we were lucky enough to have good seat right alongside the stage.
Hope you enjoy the pictures.
Four Girls in a Caravan
Next time you feel smug at having nabbed the last space in a Merseyside car park, you’d better hope the other person who had her eye on that space wasn’t Sylvie Gatrill, or you could get back to find your car’s been cut in two with a chain-saw!
You see, Sylvie ‘knows people’ - mainly stage hands and scenery builders in the region’s theatre-land – who are quite adept at the art of vehicle dissection!
And if proof were needed, Read the rest of this entry »
Taxi!
Just ignore the date of this post - it’s nearly Christmas!
Well at least it was last night in Liverpool’s theatre-land where Night Collar was enjoying its second airing in eighteen months.
A second but much shorter airing, running for just two instead of the four to six weeks that is usual for comedies at the Royal Court.
Maybe they were unsure whether the comedy would work so obviously out-of-season. To be honest, I had expected it to have been rewritten to take place during the summer months. After all, with the exception of the reluctant Santa, none of the of the characters were particularly tied to the festive season. Read the rest of this entry »
Ladies Night
Early as always, leaving time to enjoy a pre show meal, I stood in the queue outside Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre with my lovely lady.
There were lots of other lovely ladies in the queue. And as the doors swung open to let us in, I glanced back at the by now burgeoning queue to see that there were lots and lots of lovely ladies. In fact I was the only bloke in that first wave of theatre-goers!
I should have thought, the clue is in the title… Ladies Night!
You see, we always book for the first night of the next show. It doesn’t matter what the show is called or whether we have seen it before. We just book it. We simply love this unique theatre with its stalls set out cabaret-style with tables at which to eat your hearty meal (for just a tenner!), with its friendly helpful staff, its beautifully quaint and ornate décor – and of course… The Bar!
Hang on. It’s a theatre and I’ve not mentioned the shows yet. Truth is, we’ve kind of started to take for granted the fact that the show is going to be good. It always is, almost without exception, bloody good.
Anyway, as the only fella sitting in the auditorium, I was beginning to think I should have maybe read the flyer properly and given this one a miss. I could have left my lovely lady to whoop and ogle with the rest of the lovely ladies whilst I retired to the Penny Farthing around the corner with a cool Guinness or three.
In the event, I’m glad I didn’t. For a start, I ended up not being the only male member (no pun intended) of the audience that night. As the theatre filled up, I counted seven others in the stalls. Not a huge contingent, granted, and the relief on their faces as we made eye contact assured me they’d all had the same feeling of trepidation!
There was a sense of solidarity in our minority. We all seemed to strut our masculinity toward the bar at the same time in much the same way the girlies always seem to make for the loos in convoy. As soon as the curtain went up, all that was forgotten. For Ladies Night was a hilarious comedy loosely based on the “Full Monty” theme, although it pre-dates the film by a couple of decades. Originally written for the New Zealand theatre circuit, it has been specially adapted for Liverpool audiences to produce the sort of scouse comedy that the Royal Court does so very well.
The first night audience were on form right from the start too. Wonderful good humoured heckling was to be expected on a night like this. One of the most memorable was “Hey mate. If you get your kit off we’d wish we’d gone to Specsavers”.
The story line was predictable but that’s not a criticism. The first half was very much about five down-on-their-luck lads struggling with the idea of getting their kit off in front of a female audience despite the fact none of them were what you would call an Adonis.
Will they? Won’t they? We knew they would of course. And it was during the break that I started to feel a little uncomfortable again. The greater part of the second half of the play was to be the actual “show” that the five would-be strippers were putting on at their local club. How would I feel sitting amongst all these ladies, alongside my own lovely lady, watching five average looking blokes stripping off in the name of entertainment.
When I say “average” I mean, variously: skinny, chubby, geeky, god’s-gift and camped-up-to-the-eyeballs.
To their credit, they were bloody great. Dare I say – I actually enjoyed their routines. They were well choreographed, confident and downright sexy.
There – I’ve said it!
The lovely ladies, of course, loved it! They were standing in the aisles, whooping, clapping to the music and singing along. And you could see in the way these five actors were soaking up the adulation, that any doubts they may have had about appearing in this play had gone the same way as their clothes!
I always wind up my little reviews with a “would I recommend it or not”. I might be forgiven for saying I’d recommend Ladies Night to 50% of the readers of this blog.
But I’m not going to do that.
Fellas: Don’t go to the Penny Farthing whilst your missus goes to Ladies Night. Don’t use the World Cup as an excuse not to accompany your lovely lady to this show.
Go along and enjoy the show. It really is very funny and very well done. Anyway, there will be at least six other blokes in the audience offering their solidarity.
Ladies Night runs at the Royal Court until June 26th.
Please excuse the quality of the mobile phone pictures – they don’t allow photography during the show.
Maybe if I asked nicely they might invite me along to the dress rehearsals for future shows to get some decent shots. Hint hint! 
See also on the Daily Post and Liverpool Echo websites.
A Fistful of Collars
Funny, funny, funny. It was laughter all the way. In fact the only things that weren’t funny were Suzanne Collins’s legs.
Those legs are definitely not funny.
Those are serious legs!
A Fistful of Collars is the latest comedy from the pen of Liverpool playwright Fred Lawless and it has just hit the town’s Royal Court Theatre.
And the cast did him proud with a first night performance that was… well… F.Lawless! Read the rest of this entry »
Nikon’s “worst ever” Digital SLR
This reminds me of the time I was in a record shop next to a girl holding a Beatles Album and saying to her mates “Oh my god! – I didn’t know Paul had left Wings”!
What planet is this guy on?! Read the rest of this entry »
Cauliflower Roulette
Cauliflower Roulette is easy to play and not quite as dangerous as the “Russian” alternative.
You can play almost any day of the week at the CoOp
I’d recommend the one in Ruthin
First choose a cauliflower that has been reduced because it’s close to its sell-by date.
Then take it to the till and see how much they charge you!
Simple!
And great fun!
This example started off at £1.30, then was reduced to 95p before eventually hitting the shelves at just 20p
I bet you can guess how much we were charged!
You don’t even have to stick to cauliflowers – it works with pretty much any item that has been “reduced”
Of course the CoOp could spoil our fun by covering up the old bar codes with the new ones. But then that wouldn’t be so much fun for us – or as profitable for the CoOp would it?!
Google Street View Mooning
…and the Street View Camera fun goes on!
Yesterday, if you typed 16 Bolton Road W into Google Maps this was the Street View image.
What tickled me was the way the face recognition software had blurred the lads faces. Should they also include …erm …botty recognition algorithms? 
Today however, Google must have decided their servers couldn’t cope with the number of hits it was getting from the lad’s mates in Bury. Typing in the same address today results in this:
Spoilsports!
We all dream of winning the lottery. Well now you can witness how one family lived the dream – and the nightmare – in the comedy Lucky Numbers at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool.
The storyline revolves around a selectively senile granny whose ticket comes up £8million and the way the rest of the family vie for her affections and try to persuade her not to leave the lot to a donkey refuge.
Michael Starke (of Brookie, Corrie and The Royal fame) plays her work-shy son-in-law and Rachel Rae as her granddaughter gives a frighteningly accurate and hilarious portrayal of a stroppy teenager.
But the undoubted star of the show was Sheila Reid who pulled off a complex and convincing performance throughout the play. Remembering when she was supposed to be forgetful and not forgetting a single word of her lines, Sheila proved she has far more of her marbles intact than the ageing granny that was her character.
On the first night, you come to expect a few fluffed lines. However, all seven members of the cast kept the banter, humour and slapstick flowing sweetly and hilariously as if they’d been doing this show for weeks. Even during a scenery malfunction when a door knob fell off in his hand, Michael managed to work it into the script with a clever ad-lib, much to the appreciation of the attentive audience.
- (Please excuse the low quality of the two pictures above, taken on a camera phone.)
Lucky Numbers runs at the Royal Court until April 10th. You really shouldn’t miss it.
You can also read my reviews on the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post websites
Street View Fun
Wow! I know buildings go up pretty fast these days – but the guys working on the new apartments by the roundabout at the bottom of Ruthin’s Market Street must have had steroids in their flasks of Bovril!
As you can see, when the Google Street-View Camera Van joined the roundabout from Park Road, the new building (top right) was only completed up to the first storey.
By the time it had gone halfway around as far as the Station Road exit, the builders had completed the other two storeys and were already putting the roof on!
Who says British workmen are slow??!!
(Click on the images to enlarge)
Google portraits
Google’s latest Street View technology incorporates automatic face recognition to blur faces so people can’t sue them.
They even blurred the face on a portrait in my studio window!
Hmm! I wonder if I can sue them for implying that I don’t take sharp photographs?!
Click the image to enlarge
Funny Money
Remember the good old fashioned farce?
Popularised back in the fifties and sixties by the likes of Brian Rix, farces were fast-moving sit-coms based upon ludicrous misunderstandings, improbable co-incidences, slapstick and innuendo, with the actors running in and out of slammed doors, often with their trousers around their ankles.
At their best they were very funny …and very silly.
In more recent years, the farce waned in popularity, giving way to more sophisticated comedy. Well now it’s back. With a door-slamming, trouser-dropping, innuendo-ridden vengeance.
Ray Cooney’s 1994 play Funny Money has been suitably scoused-up by director Leslie Lawton for a month-long run at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool.
It is very funny …and very silly.
This fast-moving play revolves around Danny (played by Neil Caple) and his “suddenly alcoholic” wife (Eithne Brown) and the way they react to Danny having found a briefcase containing two million pounds.
The ensuing chaos is magnificently orchestrated, with the entire cast bouncing off each other, both metaphorically and physically, with precision timing. Neil’s long time Brookside buddy Mark Moraghan and Royal Court regular Alan Stocks delivered some particularly side-splitting cameos.
Funny Money runs at the Royal Court until 27 February and with tickets costing from as little as £10 you won’t need a briefcase full of money to enjoy it. This is unmissable!
Read my review on the Liverpool Echo website
More Mashed Potato Please.
Don’t you just Love YouTube?!
Following my Mashed Potato Challenge with the Hairy Bikers, someone just reminded me of one of the first songs we (The Exectutioners) did back in the late sixties.
Predictably we were often booked as support band to the Undertakers – and at the Iron Door Club too.
This clip really takes me back.
Spot the wally!
Liverpool Ferris Wheel
A first look at the shots from my 20 minutes eighty metres in the air above Liverpool One.
The blue sky as I queued to board the Ferris Wheel disappeared under a veil of cloud the minute the pod door shut. Still it was nice to see the city from a viewpoint that will disappear at the end of this month when the wheel comes down.
I would love to do another few flights, at different times f day and with better lighting conditions. Sadly, time, or playtime at least, is going to be scarce in the next week and a half. If nothing else, I have these shots to document the fact the wheel was there and I was one of its passengers.
Other than a little tonal control, these are unedited images. In a day or two I will replace them with the ‘finished’ versions, so please bookmark and call back.
Click here for my gallery of shots of the wheel at night.
