Sirharris.com

On this last, frosty, Landscape Monday of November I link to you the excellent photo blog of Yorkshireman Chris Maughan, this work labelled "Minster Rise":



I trust, as ever, you had an enjoyable weekend.

"A pod of dolphins circled protectively round a group of New Zealand swimmers to fend off an attack by a great white shark, media reported on Tuesday."

"Lifesavers Rob Howes, his 15-year-old daughter Niccy, Karina Cooper and Helen Slade were swimming 300 feet off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when the dolphins herded them -- apparently to protect them from a shark."

Read the full story at Yahoo News

Found via: Joi Ito's Web

For us coffee lovers a perfect latte is liquid divinity. Let us glance for a moment at the expertise of the world class barista



Here is the spectacle and majesty that is the Netherlands Championship Latte Art 2004.

Found via: grow-a-brain

"Thanksgiving for Alfred Bernstein was a frozen TV dinner, without the television, because he couldn't bear watching the festive scenes — the Macy's parade, the footage of families celebrating or the holiday football games — without crying."

Here we have a lovely little story about the disconnected old and their joy at new found friends. Read the article at The Seattle Times.

Found via: Great News Network

From out of a two-tone heaven is plucked the Greyscale Wednesday, offered to us by flickr user JanV. A choice had to be made and I've opted for this clean simplistic expression over a lovely shot of an ornate church ceiling (view the full selection).



Greyscale matters! insist on bw!

"Using the power of weblogs for open-source charity. Don't just fight evil: Strengthen the good"
A visionary site, unifying the small efforts of good people to help noble causes. Please take a moment to visit Strengthen The Good. The current drive is for your old unwanted books. They need English literature to assist a hopeful community to integrate into the free world.



Bless those who strive to do that which is right.

The photographer captures the fantastic aurora along the Missouri River, this is Landscape Monday:

Consider this to be your motivational poster, cleansing your tired eyes after a doubtlessly strenuous week with a truly beautiful vision to behold. This is entitled "One Woman, One Dog" and, of course, is the work of Mr. Chromasia, you really should know that by now:



Thank you for the kind mails of late, your support is very encouraging and completely unexpected. I've even had the odd click on my adverts; I've mentioned before what I hope to do with that tiny revenue.

What is RSS?

"RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading."

"Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious."

Learn More (in a simple, straight-forward fashion) via: Software Garden

Some weeks the Greyscale Wednesday "don't come easy", this week it did. For the past month I've been following Minzky's Mono gallery:



There are countless other noteworthy pieces on this site including: this and this.

My choice, as usual, came down to human form versus landscape. The urban German scenery could often be a cityscape of Britain, creating a "spot the difference" where you, the viewer, scours to find a piece of German language or ephemera that is not available in Britain. Ultimately I opted for a fairground ride; There was little intelligence behind the choice, besides enjoying the fine detail heavily emphasised in the monochrome palette.

"A crumpled collar is an index of engagement and presence (no matter how feined) and anyone still crisp by mid-afternoon arouses suspicion: you get the feeling he just isn’t trying hard enough.
After work, it’s always better to have cocktails with people who look like they need them, and all that should be crisp at this point of the day is the wit and the gin."

AntiPixel supplies an enjoyable blend of the age-old combination: tailoring shirts and office employee attitude.

"Iran on Sunday notified the U.N. nuclear watchdog in writing that it will suspend uranium enrichment and linked activities to dispel suspicions that it is trying to build nuclear arms.

'Basically it's a full suspension', said one of the diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'It's what the Europeans were looking for.

Shortly after diplomats revealed the Iranian move, Tehran's top nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, confirmed that his country was giving its 'basic agreement' to a temporary suspension."

The full story: ABC News
Found via: Great News Network

We awaken to another week, another Landscape Monday. Morning comfort viewing is today provided by a Belgian photo blogger named Capo:



Enjoy your week.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.



The posting of this Rupert Brooke's poem of patriotic mastery is inspired by reading An Englishman's Castle; It seems so fitting with Remembrance Weekend upon us. The photograph is linked from UKLandscape.net and is accredited to Frank Blackburn.

Imagine for a moment you were born without the capability to read these words, that you had no sight due to the cataracts that formed over your eyes at birth. As you progress through life you accept the range of senses provided to you. You study braille, making the written word accessible, providing a tool to gain scholarly knowledge and wide experience.

Now imagine, after fifty years of complete darkness, an operation is performed to remove those obstacles to your sight; Suddenly all the colours of the spectrum intensely flood your eyeballs, awash in a visual bombardment.

"When the bandages were removed, Virgil could see, but he had no idea what he was seeing. Light, movement and colour were all mixed up and meaningless".

"A cat was particularly puzzling, as he could see parts clearly—a paw, the nose, the tail—but the cat as a whole was only a blur, as were human faces." We can only imagine the visual insanity for Virgil gained from the staring at this animal, smooth fur, it's eyes ever staring, its tail gracefully flicking from side to side.

It really is fascinating to share this moment of intense experience with the man, a favourite line is "A few days after his operation, Virgil said that ‘trees didn’t look like anything on earth,’ but a month later he finally put a tree together and realized that the trunk and leaves formed a complete unit." A skyscraper was consider so strange as he puzzled over how it could even manage to stand.

You can read more from the sources of Answers In Genesis, or with less commentary from the Oliver Sacks excert: To See and Not See from An Anthropologist on Mars.

Enjoy your sight.

By now the word Wednesday should promptly force your shout: "Greyscale!" It should be such the integral part of your week your body craves midweek monochrome like it does copious quantities of oxygen and long spells of sunshine.

In my search for something interesting (via Photoblogs) I came across a site named Hot-Trash. Displayed today is a piece linked from the photographer's "Other" library:

A fresh week commences, as customary, I bring to you a new Landscape Monday. A View From Nowhere offers us the following captured vision of Los Angeles, named "Wall To Infinity":

Past readers may recall my September posting entitled 21st Century Death Sports in which I focused on the fatal heroics in Britain. It's time to add some South American flair and introduce to you the "Surfistas".

"Isares Goncalves do Nascimento, better known as Indio, is not the average American. At the tender age of 13, he was already surfing the roofs of commuter trains bound for Rio de Janeiro. By the time he was 19 he had become a true surfista. While pinguentes, or “hangers-on,” cling to the side of the train, surfistas stand on top, every muscle clenched to maintain the vital balance."

..."ducking low overpasses, dodging 3,300-volt electrical wires, and maintaining one’s balance, all while atop a subway train moving over fifty miles per hour"

The authorities are clamping down to deal with such feats of macho masochism: "Brazilian fines of 75 cents for the first attempt, 85 cents for the second, are minuscule beside the awesome thrill of the surf". My tip for curving this sport would be to make the fine greater than the ticket price for the journey.

Optimism is provided by one proud mother of a Surfista: "something will happen to him. It happens to all of them. They only stop surfing if they get badly injured - or if they die.”

The abundance of quotes has been taken from the fascinating Jinx Magazine which advises and chronicles this and other types of "Urban Exploration" and adventure.

"Today there are 6 million Jews and 4.5 million Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza alone, not counting Jordan."
"This story is brought to life in the following pages in over 460 photographs and lithographs of the period."

It is Greyscale Wednesday. Below you are viewing two selections from the First Photographs Of The Holy Land, a plethora of monochrome from 1831-1910.





Found via: Grow-a-brain

Daily Dose of Imagery displays a collage of photographic delight, offered with an accompanying time-lapse video:

The description that a period of time "stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness in art forms, and rebellion against social conventions" would surely be fitting for the present day, no?

It was initially written to describe Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Around 250 years ago they were thinking as "Romantics".

“There is nothing new under the sun…”

You can read the article at TheOoze, Postmodern or Neo-Romantic?

Who would have thought it, another fresh week has begun - so full of possibilities.
We'll commence with the Sirharris.com tradition of Landscape Monday. This is linked from the photoblog of Michael Dausch, Downdream. His work is named "River Houses":