It took a while for me to notice that
Flickr provides an analysis of how many times your photos have been looked at. I’ve never expected any of my stuff to have broad appeal, but it’s intriguing to see what people seem to be interested in.
With one exception, this is the fairly stable order of popularity amongst my pictures.

10! I still haven’t seen Patrick Keiller’s
London again, so I still don’t know how close I got to
guessing the particular location of the forgotten corner of the city that briefly appears in the film. Instead, I relied on Iain Sinclair’s description of finding the same place some years later, somewhere near St Andrew By The Wardrobe.

9! Trainspotters ahoy! The Tube’s inexplicable allure adds a cachet to even the most mundane snapshots.

8! Heh heh, I said ‘faggots’. I’m amazed this one isn’t the most viewed in the entire set, because half of my website traffic consists of kids on MySpace linking to
the smaller version on this blog.

7! The promise of violence. Because people like violence. Especially when
it’s close enough to enjoy but you’re safely out of the way.

6! The tastefully understated Colloseum photograph. One of very few taken on
my holiday in Italy. I can’t help feeling people are mildly disappointed when their searches turn up my photos.

5! See? This is exactly what I mean. This a security guard outside the Sagrada Familia and is tagged accordingly, so I hope people turning up this one are more interested in handcuffs than Gaudi.

4! The only thing more exciting than an old Tube station is a derelict Tube station. Aldwych station, once briefly known as Strand station, is now a ghost station and frequent stand-in for real Underground stations on film and TV.

3! Now here’s the anomaly. A blurry shot at a graduate art show off Brick Lane, which has suddenly rocketed up the charts in only the past week. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s been discovered by a cabal of Ballardian fetishists who like to pretend this is Rosanna Arquette.

2! A street stall of nested dolls for the tourists
in Riga. There’s nothing like Harry Potter, Stalin, and Osama Bin Laden tags to boost the hit rate, although I guess this photo must have disappointed many feverish authors hopefully searching for illustrations for their slash fiction.

1! Ah, the
inanimate carbon rod of my photo set! These soothing wood tones and rich timber grain have brightened the
desktops of geeks around the world. A pinnacle of repose and tranquility, which I thought had an unassailable lead over the others until the James Spader wannabes turned up.
It’s in the right column somewhere. It’ll also appear on
the main site pages too once I figure out the coding.
Cooky La Moo Enterprises (which includes this blog) is moving to a new server, so the site may be a bit flaky over the next couple of days. Please drop me a line if you notice anything unusual.
Normal service will resume shortly, with more room to offer new and exciting features (i.e. more
unpopular music).
Hello. I have spent the better part of the last week helping my girlfriend decide on what kind of a small rug she should put in the hallway. In my spare moments I have thrown together a barely-coherent review of
Satyagraha, and an unpleasant rant after going to see
The Sound Source night at the ICA. There was also
the Radius concert at Wigmore Hall on the weekend, which I should say something intelligent about.

“Normal” “service” will “resume” by the “end” of the “week”.
In case you tried to read this site last week and wondered whether I had trashed everything in a fit of blogger burnout, the answer is no. My
kerazy web hosting service likes to keep things lively by randomly deleting my account from time to time, then reinstating it a few days later with a terse apology but no explanation. Suggestions for a less impetuous web host are welcome.
I’ve used the downtime productively by getting all fatalistic and not bothering to finish up the next article I was preparing. Meanwhile, at Sarsaparilla, an intelligent posting about language and erudition has descended into a discussion about people sticking inadvisable substances into
various bodily orifices. You might enjoy that.

Pardon my French, but the new version of Blogger is a bloody disgrace. Above, on the left, you see the official portrait of this website’s patroness and muse, Ms Cooky La Moo, as she appears in the standard Blogger profile. On the right, the deformed and wretched travesty, like a mildew’d ear, of said portrait as displayed in the pop-up comments window in the new, “improved” Blogger. A bloody disgrace, I say.
The accolades are coming thick and fast. Having only just recovered from the shock of being named
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2006, I’ve returned home to find that The National Library of Australia has decided that a blog devoted to gratuitous references to Jeremy Bentham is an “electronic publication of lasting cultural and research value of national significance”. So they’re archiving Boring Like A Drill on a server somewhere in
Fyshwick, I guess. A winner is me!
These things come in threes, so I expect an envelope from Reader’s Digest any day now.
Yes, it’s a placeholder. Today’s post about
Morton Feldman has been held over until tomorrow, because it’s late and I suspect it’s gibberish.

(Somewhere between Bonn and Bristol. Back in a few days. There are comments on the posts below to tide you over.)