WELL, ITS ALL HAPPENING HERE FOLKS!!!
Or is it?
Lots of rain and cold weather.
Flooding.
Finally an election result, a month and a half after the election...this takes 'manhana' into a new sphere entirely, and then factor in 24,000 discounted votes!!!
Corruption a-go-go!!!
Thats Saquarema for you. And most of the rest of the country too...
Unlike Britain of course where Democracy is all above board and fair square.
Did I say Democracy....sorry, I meant Mockracy, the system by which all Pretend Democratic Countries are actually run.
So finally, Franciane Melo, (co-incidentally) wife of the state legislator Paulo Melo is in the mayor chair.
Which presumably means hubby will release funds to improve Saquarema (see previous post for his petulant refusal to do so when his wife was outvoted!!!).
(That's hubby on the left of the poster.)



Meanwhile Dalton Borges, the actual winner on votes, has been disqualified and his votes, all 24 thousand of them, consigned to the bin. He has 13 charges of wrongful behaviour against him, including buying votes, so how he ever got to stand and be voted for in the first place is as mysterious (read corrupt) as everything else.
One might have thought, mightn't one, that a new election might have been in order, but no,
the judges in Brasilia deemed Franciane the winner.
And that's that. Sadly, it's probably the best thing for the area, but it's a shit way to get improvements...

MY NEW BIZ
I'm now involved with some buddies in a new business venture called Disk Comida...no, not as in vinyl disks this time..'Disk' over here means 'Dial a'...
Here's the link for the website...only a mockup at the mo' and in Eenglish temporarily...
http://diskcomida.blogspot.com/
And here's our logo which I accidentally nicked off the internet...

And no, it's not me...
Actually I keep telling Fernando, our chef, that it's him...well, he does have a moustache.
So basically, it's a home delivery meal service, plus event catering.
We're also offering my pad with it's massive living room and swimming pool for events, and also discussing the idea of a restaurant here at weekends.
The restaurant idea scares me somewhat, ( lack of privacy, being kept up to unearthly hours by drunken foreigners, as well as by the guests haha) but it's been on my mind for over a year, and this seems to be the perfect opportunity to have a bash...the high season starts soon, which is the time to do it so we'll see what we shall see...
...the delivery biz starts next week, we're just waiting on leaflets, then once they're out, just waiting for the phone to ring...beans and rice anyone?????
Herewith some pics vaguely related to our new venture...

OK this is a view of the scrappers where we went to buy spares for the
deliverymobile...it's a regular Aladdins hole...

On the right is Fernando, our chef, and behind the counter is the humorous scrapper boss...he has a nice line in pricing...you ask how much, and with much deliberation he goes, hmmmm, twenty two, thirty seven, plus fifteen, fifty two, and eighteen....how about twelve reais???


Here we all are at the printers, agreeing the final version-ish of the leaflet...
Blue ink on yellow paper...
Actually blue-ish ink on yellow-ish paper...


Long Shot.
Sums up my life actually...

CORSETS
(There, you weren't expecting that to happen, now were you????)

Check out my mate Fleur's new biz site...she makes amazing custom corsetry (and just about anything else you can wear, including a fine line in fairy wings as I remember...)



She did some great stuff for me too.
No, not corsets, you big stinkypants, and not Fairy Wings neither...
It was upholstery, alright???
Marvelous...good luck chuck!!!
That's a Gurkin on the left by the way...


http://www.fleurtyfairy.com/



MONORAIL ?
OK, now of corsets time for some boys stuff... (see what I did there?)
So I was watching a Brasilian movie on Sky called "Um Homem sem Importancia", 'An Unimportant Man', shot in Rio in 1971, and the main character and his mate head off on the famous old tram across the aqueduct and on up to Santa Teresa.
They then appear again on a different and much smaller tram (?), which appears to be a monorail...huh? Only with three wheels...huh?
I was always intrigued by peculiar/obscure transport modes, and this was obviously as pec/ob as they come...so, onto Google...and thence to a very helpful gent in New York called Allen Morrison whose made a massive study of all things tramlike in South America, the Universe and Elsewhere...
After I stayed up a night and photoed a rerun on Sky, he identified it as the Vila Jardim Santa Cecília Monorail, which provides the only access to about 45 houses with about 200 residents, upside a big hill in Santa Teresa.
This community is also known as the "Bairro Suíço" (Swiss Quarter) or "Morro do Alemão" (German Hill) because of its German-speaking population.
The 150 metre long 'monotrilho' was built by the residents in 1949, and is still there and as far as I know, is still active to this day.
The traction is provided by the tired road wheels at the rear, and the small wheels at the front grip the single rail and guide it.
It is undoubtedly both the most obscure monorail and one of the most obscure railways in the world.
Below are my pics from the movie, (complete with my TV!), and then pix of an almost equally obscure monorail in India...almost equally obscure but not quite!! (It has driven wheels running on a centre rail, and the big wheel you can see in the pic trundles freewheelingly along the roadway, just to stop it all falling over!)
Here's a link to Allen's page with more recent photos of the monorail...check out the rest of his site...it's amazing and absolutely massive...
http://www.tramz.com/br/rj/vj/vj.html

BOAT
OK so here we have some pix of the boat what I used to own and then half own and then not own at all.

Motor Yacht Glala.

Interestingly when you own a British registered vessel, you own 64 shares of it.

Odd number, I thought...why sixty four?

Why not a hundred...normally when you own all of something, you own

a hundred per cent of it.

Ho Ho.

Guess what.

There are a hundred shares.

You only own 64 of them.

You can only own 64 of them.

But guess who owns the other 36 shares.

Of your boat.

Whether you like it or not...

The fucking Queen!!

Actually, it works to your advantage, as she regularly chips in a third towards mooring fees and maintenance, which can all be crippling on an old boat.

And, luckily I know how to spell the word gullible.

Do you?????

So Glala now has a new owner, (well, he owns 64 shares of her at least!)

Below is a link to his website. He seems to be planning a big restoration, and talks about our work as having not been up to scratch in the late 80's. In fact the poor work he refers to was done by the guy I bought her from, who was somewhat of an idiot.

I'm about to send the new guy an email and fill in some informational/historical gaps.
http://www.ceze.net/glala/index.htm

This is Glala lying off Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo in 1940, the mass evacuation of the BEF and other allied forces back to Blighty.

Due to her shallow draft, Glala was able to get in close to the beaches and tow off whalers loaded with soldiers to the destroyers standing further out to sea.

She had an engine blown out during a Stuka dive bomber attack and had to head back to England for repairs.

The first 2 pix below were taken on the day of the relaunch in September 1989 after a year and a half of restoration on a slipway in Woolston,Southampton.

The bottom one is in Lulworth Cove in 1985, when she was a great deal less than seaworthy. She had just taken part in a Dunkirk Little Ships reunion.

Top photo below is M.Y.Glala the day I discovered her in early 1988, in use as a houseboat on the River Hamble.
Below that, a pic of her on Stem to Stern Boatbuilder's slipway, in Willment's shipyard, Woolston, Southampton, where we lived (on the slipway!) for a year and a half.
Phil Godard of Stem to Stern ran the entire rebuild and become a great friend of mine.
Anybody know where he is now??
Below that is Glala docked in the Isle of Wight, after relaunch, during sea trials/piss up. That was the day I bought a battered jam sandwich in a chip shop and nearly threw up. Seemed like a wicked idea at the time...the sandwich that is, not the vomitting...


MY BIRTHDAY MONTAGE CARD FROM HANNAH...thanks Spud!
Here it is.
My naughty childrens!!
All montagey!


CITRUSNESS..NICE PIC THEREOF.
Here is a picture of citrusness...one day these will be mine, all mine...
In fact my 1500 trees and all the rest are doing very well, after months of weather varying between rain and shine...perfect for citrusness...my trees are two meters or more now...must go and see them again soon...in fact I will save upo and go and wee on them...they like that...(as you will know if you saw The World's Fastest Indian...great film!!)



ETIQUETTE????
Now a Section on Etiquette...
Bet you weren't expecting this one even more than the other one you weren't expecting ...haha



How to greet a proper lady.

How to greet (or restrain) a not very proper lady.

ESCONDIDINHO

This is a new and very short section.

In fact, that was it !

No, ok...escondidnho is my new fave dish..

...basically if you boil up aipim, cassava, manioc, tapioca, gari, whatever you wanna call it, and then mash it up with cream and milk and cream cheese, (it goes transparent like wallpaper paste and all weird and gloopy...) and then bake it with prawns or carne seca or any meat or whatever underneath and some parmesan on topperneath it makes this sort of gooey with a thick crust kind of slightly cottage pie-ey mmmmm Yorkshire puddingy cum lasagne-ey comfort foody kind of yummy thing and basically...I like it.

I've made a rough version just with cream cheese and skimmed milk which was fine...

When I told Hannah about it she said she'd just seen some Indian cook knocking out almost exactly the same thing but currified...small world innit? No actually, it's really big but everyone eats one of the same three things pretty much...cassava or rice or pasta or bread...ok four things...actually Brasilians eat pasta, rice, potatoes, toasted manioc flour and chips at the same meal all the time...ok five things...

This is a picture of Escondidnho.

Obviously, really, isn't it???

It goes thick and crusty round the sides as well...mmmmmmmmm.

TOONI ON THE TELLY!!

How marvelous!

Tooni who used to work in the Bell in Bath is now one of the presenters on the BBC2 series 'Ocean'. Here she is in the Arctic. She trained as a marine biologist whatever that is but only so she could get on the telly I expect!

She told me once she was called Tooni because her mum'n'dad liked...you guessed it...cartoons!

(By that logic, my name should be Citroen Theatre Groupie)

By the way, for any Brasilians looking in, the white stuff in the picture is called 'snow' and is what we call 'cold'. It's very similar to 'hot' but not as.

The big white thing hiding in 'the snow' behind Tooni is 'a polar bear' and is very dangerous and very hard to spot, and behind that is a thing we call 'a boat'. It gets stuck in what we call 'the ice', as you can see here.

Tooni will be stuck there in 'the snow' with 'the polar bear' because 'the boat' will probably remain stuck in 'the ice' for what we call 'quite a long time'.

Good luck with the TV presenting Tooni!

LAFER

Well isn't this quickfire diversity at it's most diverse and quickfire!

I feel quite proud and all encompassing!

OK my fave Brasilian furniture tends to be by a firm called Lafer.

They also make or made glass bodied copies of the old MG, and are most famous for building the fibreglass Earhole phone boxes you see all over Brasil.

But sod all that, I like their seating...and here are pix of my absolute fave design...

One day it shall be mine, oh yes, it shall be mine...

Absolutely stunning, I reckon.

I search for these and other goodies every day online and off.

I have a couple of sections of this, the YOKO by Tok &Stok...the Brasilian equivalent of Habitat. I'm constantly searching for more. It's a rip off of Michel Ducaroy's TOGO design for Ligne Roset, which featured on the Big Brother set a couple of years ago, and which is closely related to my beloved Cinna Sandra set, which now lives at my mateToby's house in Batheaston. Hello Tobe! Hello Sandra!

It's illustrated in black leather below, and you can see mine in my ex apartment on the last bunch of blog, belower down.

This is another gorgeous, though tatty Lafer, upholstered over a

fibreglass shell on a wooden base. I'd love to find a set of these with the armchairs an'all.

OTHER STUFF

Odds and some sods...

This is a stunning 1960's piece by the American Paul Evans from his Cityscape series.
I doubt I'll ever find one of these.

Guess what you flick to turn on the lamp...

Old audio cassettes type lamp!

VARIOUSER AND VARIOUSER

Amanda, Sonia's niece, has now gone back to a life of evangelism

in Rio with her dad, the minister.

God help the church.

Wicked T.

And another shot of the Gurkin.

And the Anna.

Well, when I first opened my record shop, I bought crates of pristine stuff from a guy up the road, most of it on US labels. And the wooden crates had these weird stickers on them, but no address or contact, in fact they didn't make it clear what Liquorice Pizza actually was even.

So, the other week, after fifteen years, I trawled the net for clues, and there it all was.

LA and environs, a chain of record stores, all very fondly remembered by punters and staff alike.

Great name, and great graphics tambem. Ooooops. I mean as well.

If you flip back in my blog to March you'll find the guys from Bath's Jammadesamba staying with me for a break after drumming all over Rio throughout Carnaval.

Here the article in the local paper, in which Jackson says that Finnish girls samba harder and better than Brasilians. Tell it like ya see it son...and keep yer head down!

Talking of which, last night I thought I 'd been shot!

Whilst on the piss in my fave bar by the lagoon,my fullglass of caipivodkaexplodedwith a massive bang, simultaneously with me noticing a car pull up outside and then move on rapidly. I was so convinced, and lacking any other explanation, that i ran my hands over my body to find the bullet hole and ready for the pain to kick in! I still know nothing but I guess the ice erm, exploded!! (Does ice explode??)

Here's Sonia cooking up a storm at my place the other week.

I'm trying to put her in for 'Iron Chef'.

(Don't tell her.)

I told the estate agent I wanted to live by the Lagoon, not in it.

And here as a final finale, my road this morning after a certain amount of raininess
Which is why it really does matter whether Paulo Melo gets the hump as to whether or not his wife gets in and whose votes get thrown in the bin and who bribes who and all that shit...

Democracy, please, not Mockracy.