Things to make you go aah

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There has been low grade drizzle outside for the last three days.  The landscape looks drowned, it has been so drenched by the snow melt coming down off the hills and bursting the banks of the burn.  There is not even a suggestion of anything living; no bud, no furled leaf, no nothing. Everything is brown.  The sky is the colour of old dishcloths.  On Tuesday I must drive five hundred miles to a funeral. I am spending far too much time contemplating mortality. In other words: I am gloomy as fuck.

This is normally the stage where I call in the Perspective Police (you may read about them in Backwards, where they get a whole little section to themselves). They duly bash down the door and tell  me firmly I am not living in Chad; no dodgy Ukranian is selling me into sexual slavery; I have all my arms and legs; I live on more than a dollar a day.  But sometimes, just sometimes, I can't be fagged with the bloody perspective police.  They do make such a mess when they shatter the doorframe with that phallic black metal device they like to use.  Also, they are very busy, and so sometimes can get brusque and shouty.  They have even been known to grow sarcastic: middle-class white women gets a bit down in the mouth because it won't stop raining, big whoop.

This, I discover, is where the internets come in, because sometimes actually what you need is a bit of frivolity and eye candy and ephemera and a cute picture of a penguin. Nobody does penguins better than the blogs, it turns out.  So here, on a dark day in February, is my selection of cheering up loveliness and absurdity. I have to have something to take my mind off the looming sovereign debt crisis which is about to sink Europe.

I love The Sartorialist, one of the best and most simple and elegant sites out there in blogland, and I love this fellow standing in the middle of Paris like he invented it:

 

One of my newly discovered blogs is a snippy, snappy, sceptical site called Jezebel. It put up this hysterical vintage ad a couple of days ago, with the drop-dead tagline - 'you was exhibitionist dog owners, too':

 

Boing Boing had something to make the grammarian in me (never far from the surface) laugh:

 

Overheard in New York appealed to my inner sceptic (we can't all be hearts and flowers and polar bears every day of the damn week):

Greenpeace guy: Hey, sign this petition!
Girl in black: No, thanks.
Greenpeace guy: It's to save the Earth!
Girl in black: Fuck the Earth.
Greenpeace guy: But what about the children?
Girl in black: Fuck the children.

--7th Ave & 25th
Overheard by: NSC

 

District of Chic had a glorious picture of a Miss Louise Ireland and a Miss Helen Marve, getting ready to play polo in 1925. I don't know quite why I love it so much. It's not just the old school style. I think it's because even now polo is still regarded as a game for the fellows. Women do play, but it belongs to the men. So these two must have been quite some girls to glide into that male sanctum all those years ago. I like that they look deprecating but pretty determined about it. Also, anything with a couple of good horses in it always makes me feel better:

 

And finally, there is my daily dose from Pixdaus. Pixdaus is one of the most frustrating and brilliant sites on the entire interweb. It is brilliant because it has a wonderful collection of thousands of photographs, and I love something pretty to look at when the rain won't stop falling.  It is maddening because it has no text. The photographers are often not credited, the locations are almost never named; there is no context, no date, no explanation of any damn thing. I want to know who, why, what, where, how.  Also, there is an awful lot of dross, and some inexplicable pictures of ladies playing musical instruments in the weather without many clothes on. It is like shopping in Woolworths in the old days: if you rummage about enough, you find the occasional gem. Today's gem is of penguins, of course. And not any old penguins, but baby penguins. Try and feel cynical while staring at this:

There. That's better.