Roads • Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge is my entry for this week’s episode.
This actually qualifies as a road here…
For other entrees click on the picture below.
Roads • Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge
Month: February 2020
Narrow • Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #84
In the #84 edition of the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge the glove that Amy has thrown us is to find something ‘Narrow’. Streets in Southern Europe sprang to mind, but a quick browse through the entrees into this challenge revealed it’s been done.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as narrow. It does makes sense in Dutch though…
Narrow they are, at least in Dutch, as well as original. At least I never saw eels and an octopus on display in a museum before. I hope you saw them first on this #84 Lens-Artists Photo Challenge.
You can find more entries in photo challenges here.
Salvador Dali’s Doors • Thursday Doors
‘Salvador Dali’s Doors’ is the entry for February 20, 2020 Thursday Doors. Hosted by Norm 2.0.
Last week I posted some blue doors that I encountered in Cadaquès, Catalunia, Spain. This week’s post is centered around the doors of Salvador Dali’s house there.
Fortunately I was able to capture these doors in the patina they’re in. I was told by the foreman of the crew doing renovations the doors would be painted blue again.
Don’t you just love this patina?
To put everything into a bit of context, here are two photos of the house.
You can safely ignore this piece as it’s only here to appease Google and the likes. But if you really want to see my last entry into Thursday Doors, you can find it here.
Fake News • Mid-Week Monochrome #25
What are you doing there? • Wordless Wednesday
What are you doing there? • Wordless Wednesday
Numbers on a Jaguar C-type • Tuesday Photo Challenge
Numbers on a Jaguar C-type• Tuesday Photo Challenge is my submission into Dutch goes the Photo challenge – Numbers. What you see in this photo is a rare, street legal Jaguar C-type racer en face. Complete with the license plate numbers.
This historic beauty had just come into the shop for its regular maintenance and a much needed tune-up after its latest adventure. The 90th anniversary edition of the famous (notorious might be a better word) Mille Miglia.
The Mille Miglia
This thousand mile race (as its name says in Italian) ran from 1927 to 1957. After it was resumed in 1977, the “Mille Miglia” has been reborn as a regularity race for classic and vintage cars. Participation is limited to cars, produced no later than 1957, which had attended (or were registered to) the original race.
The route (Brescia–Rome round trip) is similar to that of the original race, maintaining the point of departure/arrival in Viale Venezia in Brescia.
Numbers on a Jaguar C-type
This particular Jaguar had entered the Mile Miglia twice in recent years. As the stickers on the side say the 2011 edition, as well as the 2017 special 90th anniversary edition. Judging by its starting number of 468, the car was seen as a somewhat serious contender. From 1949, cars were assigned numbers according to their start time. For example, the 1955 Moss/Jenkinson car (which won the race that very year), #722, left Brescia at 07:22. While the first cars had started at 21:00 the previous day. In the early days of the race even winners needed 16 hours or more, so most competitors had to start before midnight and arrived after dusk – if at all. (Source: Wikipedia)
The cockpit
The cockpit-like interior shows that racing this C-type was anything but relaxing. Try to imagine racing it for more than 16 hours straight on Italian roads.
While the seat looks somewhat comfortable, I can assure you its not. It even lacks a headrest.
I took these photos in the shop of Kooij Cars in the Hague with a Nikon Coolpix D500. Minor colour editing in post with Apple Photos.
For my previous submission in Tuesday Photo Challenge, click here.
Insane51 Berlin Mural • Monday Mural
Insane51 Berlin Mural • Monday Mural.
We found this mural at the foot of the Oberbaumbrücke in Berlin.
With the help of scooj (https://scooj.org/ and see his comment below) the artist is a Greek by the name Insane51. It is kind of a 3D mural, with a blue lens you get to see the woman, with a red lens her skeleton.
Sami then pointed this YouTube video out:
That also led me to his video of how he makes his art:
Discovered on December 3, 2018. Entry in Sami’s challenge February 17. For more of my entries, see for instance this.
All-in-all I find this ‘collaboration’ of an Insane51 fan for this Monday Mural post truly great!
Spiritual Window • Monday Window, 17 February
Spiritual Window is my entry in Ludwig Keck’s challenge Monday Window 17 February.
Photo taken in one of the back streets of Cadaquès, Catalunia, Spain.
For my previous Monday Window click here.
Click below to see what fellow Monday Window bloggers cooked up.
Pull up a seat • Uh…no thank you
Pull up a seat • Uh…no thank you: is my entry in Pull up a seat #7. A Photo Challenge hosted by XingFu Mama.
1337
On February 3, I received this cryptic note from the WordPress folks saying I had reached 1337 likes…
First of all I couldn’t make head nor tails about the magic of the number 1337. I could understand reaching 1,000 likes as a milestone, but 1,337…?! I decided to check this out, but a short holiday in Catalunia, Spain came first. So yesterday evening I found some time to do some digging.
The first thing I did is run 1337 through Wikipedia which featured a sentence on top of the page saying ‘This article is about the year 1337. For the internet subculture term, see leet.’
As curiosity never killed any cat of mine, I naturally clicked on leet:
‘Leet (or “1337“), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance.
The term “leet” is derived from the word elite, used as an adjective to describe formidable prowess or accomplishment, especially in the fields of online gaming and computer hacking. The leet lexicon includes spellings of the word as 1337 or l33t.’
But that’s not all, Wikipedia continues with:
‘Leet originated within bulletin board systems (BBS) in the 1980s,[1][2] where having “elite” status on a BBS allowed a user access to file folders, games, and special chat rooms. The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective has been credited with the original coining of the term, in their text-files of that era.[3] One theory is that it was developed to defeat text filters created by BBS or Internet Relay Chat system operators for message boards to discourage the discussion of forbidden topics, like cracking and hacking.[1] Creative misspellings and ASCII-art-derived words were also a way to attempt to indicate one was knowledgeable about the culture of computer users.
Once the reserve of hackers, crackers, and script kiddies, leet has since entered the mainstream.[1] It is now also used to mock newbies, also known colloquially as noobs, or newcomers, on web sites, or in gaming communities.note
Ah, so there you have it. 1337 identifies me either as a member of some ‘elite’. To which my response would be ‘thank you very kindly but I never started this blogging thing to belong to a certain class, let alone ‘elite’. Here in Europe we fought some bloody turf wars (the first one was the French Revolution in 1789) to get rid of this classy nonsense.’
Or WordPress uses it to mock people like me with being a Newbie or a Noob. Which, in all fairness, I still am this far in the game, but do I need to be reminded of that by WordPress?
But in all fairness no, I refuse to believe a money-making machine like WordPress would dare to mock one of its paying customers. But I’d take my cap off to them if they would have the balls to do so. Now, there’s a refreshing thought for their marketers, is it not?