...or as HP Lovecraft might have said, 'an abominable, noxious flapping entity of undetermined nature'.

from way back, oct 03, a six am walk along the 'beach' at bankside.

Two drunken men stopped ruth in the street and insisted that she say to their friend "Tu me fâché", translated roughly as "You piss me off.", because he was on his phone all the time.

unbeknown to us, we'd arrived in the marais at the climax of the 'pride' march, and had to queue up to buy a felafel behind a six-foot high transvestite with two-foot high boots on, and his mum.
The dog seemed to have no comprehension of the complexities of sexual politics.

Question: which of these photographs is illegal? Answer: all of them, to different degrees. We'd just finished lunch when one after another policeman started appearing; they looked jumpy, began stopping vans and looking inside them. Then one of them came over and started questioning me about what I was taking photographs of - I suppose he thought I was the recon man for al-qaida, despite my protestations of 'je suis un photographe'; apparently it's illegal to photograph the police.
But beyond that, they passed a ridiculous law in France that says that people 'own' their appearance, so you're not allowed to take pictures of them without their knowledge/permission. Obviously, applied retroactively this would pretty much destroy the history of photography (au revoir Cartier-Bresson). At the time Luc Delahaye took to the Métro and did a whole series of secretly-grabbed snapshots of people's absent travelling faces (Baudrillard wrote the preface to the book).

The musée maillol is like a bank vault - cameras and security guards everywhere with CIA earpieces. You weren't allowed to take pictures, but my surreptitious snapshots capture the work better for me than the reproductions in the catalogue. I realised here how impossible it is to capture Bacon in reproduction: firstly the size - most of the canvases are of a size that has the very specific function of making the Baconian space an annex to 'real space', just big enough that you feel you could step inside; secondly the colours, which like Picasso's blue paintings with their dolorous radiation, bathe you in abstract forces. Pure demonstration of Bacon's ideal of impacting directly on the nervous system. Thirdly, the paint itself, which unlike a repro is anything, everything but flat. Even if you stand still, the infinitely implicated relief of the surface of the paint, frozen chaoid landscapes, give a depth and complexity to the experience that makes it very different from 'seeing a picture'.

Now that's what I expect from a philosophy department.

I don't know what the purpose of these is - to encourage dogs to cross the street?

"If you pray in space," said William Burroughs, "then you're not there". There's something similar to be said even for 'terrestrial' air travel; if you're bored, you're not there. If travelling above the clouds isn't an occasion for wonder awe or excitement then there's something wrong. So that ecology is balanced with a utilitarian respect for the value of human emotion, each passenger should fulfil a required jetfuel-to-elation ratio or be barred from future flights.

Under a fake marble ceiling, with mozart soundtrack, surrounded by towering rococo chocolate cakes and gigantic confections in the shape of dolphins, the nonsequiturial status of this concentrated piece of italianate kitsch is to be savoured. The staff are friendly and their cake presentation is second to none. Llovely, as the Welsh say. But everything's frothy in Newport, even the tea. It must be something in the water.

If you happen to be stupid enough to suddenly realise you need a new passport in two days time, and thus need to visit the passport office in Newport, during the two-hour processing time you could do worse than a solid breakfast at Rabbaotti's Burlington Diner, just a minute away down Bridge Street, next to the big metal statue of a pig. If you still need extra caffeine and sugar, head towards the civic centre and find Gemelli's Desserts, a more refined proposition altogether.

(cwmcarn, wales)
certainly the children have seen them
in quiet places where the moss grows green

coloured shells jangle together
the wind is cold the year is old the trees whisper together
and bend in the wind they lean

"Due to the death of my father Frank, Ribticklers Joke Shop is now closed...On behalf of my father may I take this opportunity to thank you for your custom over the years. You helped make him a happy man doing what he done best.
Entertaining!"