Wheelchair access white knuckle thrill ride (update)

I thought it only fair to do an update on the Victoria Road car park, wheelchair access blockage. I am pleased to report that the pay here machine has now been moved and is no longer blocking wheelchair access at the top of the drastically steep slope. At least now when you finally get to the top of the slope you wait for the beads of sweat on your brow to evaporate before moving uninhibited into the car park. The exit is still as scary though as you roll at speed down the slope towards a very busy main road. Another exit is available right down the other end of the car park if you don't fancy your chances here.

I hope in some way my blog had something to do with alerting someone to rectify this unacceptable situation.

Previous post about this access.

http://bloggedubdoze.blogspot.com/2011/09/wheelchair-access-white-knuckle-thrill.html

One step closer to old age

I had a tooth pulled yesterday which has left a huge gap. It was a tooth that has been filled again and again because the filling kept falling out. There was about 40% tooth and 60% filling so it had to go as they could not continue to fill it.

I really don't want to think about a time in the future when I wake up and I'm smiling at myself from a glass on the bed side table.

Take your dad for a night out

I got an invite with a plus one to The Youth Club Gallery (Kingly Court) to see 'It's Something Hells' (a celebration of rockabilly, rockers and ted's style). I thought it would be right up my dad's street and asked him if he wanted to be my plus one. He did and we met up after work at Charring Cross station. After a quick drink in Carnaby Street we went to the gallery. We got our free drink and waited for the place to fill up.

There were DJs playing a cool rocking set that got a few people dancing. I even got a picture of Mr Ducktail, 'the demon barber of Carnaby Street' sneering at the camera.

Even though my dad was older than everyone there (77) he felt really welcomed and started chatting to people and posed for photographs with some of the hep cats there. What a great night.

One thing I saw made me realise that these people may dress in the styles of the past but live very much in the present day was when I saw one bloke combing his hair and using his iPhone as a hand mirror by filming himself and watching the result live on the screen.

Wheelchair access white knuckle thrill ride

There is a new car park that has opened in Victoria Road, Dartford. It has the most ridiculous disabled access ramp - a really steep slope with no chance of a run up! The wheelchair user has only the width of the narrow pavement to gain momentum to reach the top of the slope. If they do manage to achieve this impossible task he or she is faced with an immediate obstruction, the "pay here" machine. Then, if they get this far the person then has to manoeuvre a 90º turn whilst teetering at the top of the ramp to finally enter the car park.

Leaving the car park may be a bit more fun for the wheelchair user if they thrive on danger. Without being able to see if any pedestrians are going to cross your path, just launch yourself down the steep slope at great speed then try to stop pretty sharp-ish to avoid over-running the narrow pavement into the busy main road and maybe under an articulated lorry.

Nice effort Dartford Council. The quicker this wheelchair access is disabled the better. Convert the stairs into a gentle slope. I'm sure the able-bodied souls will be able to cope with it without too much extra effort.







View update to this post at: http://bloggedubdoze.blogspot.com/

Insult from my phone

On the way to work this morning I could hear my phone making beeping sounds in my pocket. My keys where pushing the keypad as I walked. To avoid calling someone by mistake I took my phone from my pocket to see what number had been dialed. I was shocked to see that the phone had gone into text mode and was displaying the word 'Tranny'. The worst thing about it was that the word Tranny had a question mark directly after it. The cheek of it! I wasn't even able to reply.

Dean Chalkley's Young Souls movie and photographic exhibition

I was invited to the launch of Dean Chalkley's photographic exhibition last week and really enjoyed it. There were three DJs playing rare Northern Soul records. I got chatting to DJ Jo Wallace who has been playing on the scene since the early 80s. She was really friendly and was spinning discs that she had paid £400 for. I found this out when an arrival to the exhibition asked if she could put her bag behind the decks and nearly pulled the stylus arm across the said record. Jo Sprung like a cat to protect her rare 45.

I attended the launch with a friend of mine, Brian Kotz who used to be in a mod band called 'Back To Zero', they released a single called 'Your Side Of Heaven', in the 1980s. A few people at the launch party knew him.

Dean's Chalkley's short film 'Young Souls' was playing at the exhibition and it is well worth a view. Some of the cast were at the launch. I talked to Sonny Evans who plays the lead in the film. He was really chatty. All the cast are actually friends in real life. Sonny grew up in Southend On Sea and aquired a mods record collection at the age of 15. He now runs The Hush Club at The Queen's Hotel,  in Brighton.

The film was shot on location in Southend On Sea and The Dome in Tufnell Park. The house Sonny parks up at is 133 York Road and the car featured is his own. The cat that crosses Sonny's path in this scene was just a random cat with no previous acting experience.

Check out the film at
https://vimeo.com/26458402

Hear Dean Chalkley chatting about the film and exhibition on The Modcast (podcast) episode 6.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modcast-eddie-piller-friends/id409149579

Exclusive limited edition prints from Young Souls will be exhibited at YOUTH CLUB from 21st July – 6th August.

YOUTH CLUB
2.1 Kingly Court (Just off Carnaby St)
London W1B 5PW

OPENING TIMES

MON to FRI - 11AM - 6PM

SAT - 1PM - 6PM

SUN - CLOSED

Head in a bag, on a skip, beneath Cannon Street Station.

I spotted this bag, on my walk into town, after work the other night. I did a double-take and came back the next day to take a photograph of it. I felt a bit like David Hemmings in the movie Blow Up. It turned out to be just screwed up paper.

Amusement arcade memories

When I was a kid our family used to go on holiday to the Isle of Wight. We probably went to Sandown every year from 1967 to 1976. My favourite part of the day was the visit to the amusement arcades on the sea front and on the piers, Sandown, Shanklin, Ventnor and Totland  Bay.  The machines were mostly on penny play and very inventive. Totland Bay pier had a vintage amusement arcade. During the day I would be given between 10 and 20pence to go up to the amusements with my brothers. When our money ran out we would stand by the penny pushers and give them a nudge and hope for some coins to fall out. Sometimes in the evening our parents would take us to the amusements and join in the fun. I only had a small amount of money to spend so chose the machines I wanted to play wisely. I always found a machine which paid out when it shouldn't. One time this happened I filled up two or three cigarette boxes with pennies. My dad used to really give the penny pushers a shake to get us some spare coins. He didn't care if the alarms went off  and the attendant came over. He would blame it on our dog which we had with us. The amusements always seemed more exiting and bright when you had just come in from the dark. In the evening more adults would be in there so it would be much louder and many of them would have had a drink or be out as a group. 

Many of the games I played then have long since disappeared from many arcades today, so I was pleased to find a few online amusement games I could play again. Tooty Fruity is one of them and I have posted a picture above. You get twenty coins to play with and can replenish them after you have lost them all. It is a very strategic game but also relies on a lot of luck. The odds as always are stacked against you. you can play it here: http://www.nostalgiapelit.fi/tooty-fruity.html  The simulation looks and sounds like the real thing. There are some other great games on the site too which I will leave you to discover. If anyone knows any other similar sites please let me know and I will post them here.

You can also play another oldie called Conveyor here: http://www.pennymachines.co.uk I found this page in the arcade section of the site and it took me ages to work out how to get the machine to work. If you get stumped get back to me and I will tell you how. It involves obtaining coins to play before it will work. Very authentic. If you are not careful you can drop the coins you have and they get lost. Totally frustrating even though they are just virtual coins. Very clever though. I remember this happening playing a game called Wheel 'em In  (made by Streets) which had a unique way of paying out your coins when you won. The coins would roll down a sloping piece of glass towards you and be stopped when they had hit top speed by a thin strip of wood so that they dropped next to the slot where you would put them straight back in the machine. This was if they hadn't rolled onto the floor and under another row of machines. The coins were also vunerable to older brothers or taller kids intercepting them before they even got to you.

Watch one in action here 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62v2drGElXQ

Some of the other games that can be found on the same site as Tooty Fruity are shown below.

There is a collector of these old slot machines who posts movies of these old machines working and opens them up to show the workings. It was always a treat when the man with the keys opened a machine in the amusements. 

You can watch the film stream at: http://www.youtube.com/user/supershotbattymanbor

HAVE FUN!!!!

Podcasts

I am still a proud owner of a second generation 20GB ipod which I still use on the train every day. Apart from my 3000 or so tracks I have on it I recently discovered some podcasts which adds another dimension to the brute. All the pod casts I have subscribed to are free which is a bonus.

My favourites are listed here:
British Invaders, which is about British science fiction television. There are over a hundred pod casts so far and the ones I have downloaded are very well put together. The presenters sound as if they put the programme together via a web link. The presenters introduce themselves as Brian from Canada and Eamonn from England. They cover some quite obscure British television programmes and give you the good and bad points of the series and where you can view them or if they are available on DVD. There was a double episode on Alternative 3 which was a spoof science documentary shown back in 1977, which inspired me to watch it on Google video. It is well worth a look. It runs for 54minutes.

Anyway British Invaders have there own website where you can download individual episodes or listen online. They have a forum on the site too. I subscribed to the podcast through ITunes. New episodes appear quite regularly. A top podcast and very easy to listen to on the train to work. Each episode is between 20 and 30 minutes.

Another podcast in the same sort of vein is from the wonderful Resonance FM which is a station I accidentally came across in the days of cassette radio Walkmans. I tuned into some weird interference which was the recordings of the sounds produced by people and traffic crossing one of London's Bridges. It was very experimental. It is the worlds first art radio station. The FM broadcast is very limited to a small area of London so the best way to listen to their programmes is via their website. Anyway on to the podcast, The Original Soundtrack Track Show . It is resented by Jonny Trunk who plays film Library and television music. The shows last about two hours.

Other Podcasts that I won't go into detail about but are worth a listen are:

The Modcast with Eddie Piller and Friends. Not specifically about mods but alot of mod culture creeps in. They go on for just over an hour and have taken off in a big way in a short time.

For music podcasts I mainly subscribe to 6Music podcasts

Tom Robinson's Introducing which is like a full CD of new music with a bit of talking between tracks. If anyone tells me that music today is rubbish I tell them to listen to this show first before passing comment.

Domino Records also have good podcasts and have free tracks from their artists. I don't like everything but one of my favourite bands is Clinic and they are on Domino. It is a very good introduction to new and up and coming artists.

Mmmmmm pizza

Be creative with your litter.

Homer Simpson

Barrett Homes

I was painting the floorboards of the main bedroom white. This involved removing all the furniture. Once the room was empty and the floorboards were painted, the room looked really spacious. The paint took a couple of days to dry and the room remained empty. It would be good to keep it as a minimalist room. Syd Barrett would have felt at home here.  

We all have our pipe dreams. The furniture went back the following day.