Ben's photo-du-jour

art deco capital of NZ

took this near the waterfront in Napier, the art deco capital of new zealand

dans le menu ce soir

sign is foldable; presumably seasonal?

spot characteristic darth vader shadow

in los angeles they just drive round these unfortunate impediments to traffic

underpants

in the absence of a wholesome biscuit-and-meat diet, underpants will do.

blur

we had a work party. some people can't stay away from the whiteboards, though.

lazy ass dog

this dog shane decided that the fold-out couch is better than the floor; and so sits and bitches (in his own labrador way) when I fall asleep drunk on the floor rather than unfolding the couch for him.

scouts

they let me be an approximation of a scout leader.

newlands corner

close to my parents' house.

ARRRRR!

pirate themed staff party in mountainview (at a company I don't work at); followed by stumbling round downtown mountainview with patches on, trying out various activities (such as trying to set a pint of beer down upon the bar) with monocular vision

postcard from australia

I posted this card probably in mid november; it took until I arrived in the US in late febuary to reach its destination (the same amount of time it took me, via the rest of australia and NZ)

quarks

startrek theme bar in vegas

wine and suit

somebody was foolish enough to invite me to their wedding. i mis-whitebalanced my camera in celebration.

canary wharf from greenwich

Taken from near the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (the home of GMT) looking out of the naval college to Canary Wharf in the docklands

lcc+book

lisa came to visit. we wandered into a bookshop on Oxford Street at random to see if they had her book. they did. here it is.

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

A (the only?) pedestrian tunnel under the Thames, the river that runs through the heart of London

sox

A trip to Chicago wouldn't be complete without one or more obligatory trips to see the White Sox

maori hut

An earlier Lord Onslow was once Governor-General of New Zealand, and had this Maori meeting hut brought back to his estate a km or so away from my parents' house

ass

A Finnish girl I met in Tallinn fell off a house while drunk climbing. This is her in hospital.

jaws of death

a couple of years since this was taken - shane, the dumbest friendliest dog in the world showing me a bone he's been chewing on for a few days

gold

it's a great big gold building.

Svag is

SVAG IS!!! SVAG IS!!!

butterfly

having survived the fire pictured yesterday, the outside of stockholm proved to be very nice, with nice little animals like this one. they didn't even mind that mere minutes before we'd been fountaining rotten fish juice all over the garden (apparently its a cultural tradition there. ummm, ok.).

fire

something to add a bit of excitement to the drive from central stockholm out into suburbia

taiwanese grrls

In the Tour Club hostel in Kyoto (which is in Japan), a lucky Taiwanese businessman had brought this selection of girls from his native country on holiday with him. Lots of Japanese alcohol in the pic too - the tins are of a sake-and-fruit-drink concoction which on various other occasions I consumed far far too much of; the big empty green bottle is labels something like 'big south sun' and I presume is sake. likewise for the tetrapak, which at least has the kanji for sake on the side. Plus there's the good old staple beer. Lucky monkey.

puppies at the goth club

puppies belonging to friends of a friend who is from orange county but lives in london, except when she lives in sweden. the puppies are also in sweden, and aren't really puppies but are small yappy dogs. they wanted to come to the techno club on slussen with us, but unfortunately their fishnets were in the wash that day. you can see from the looks on their faces how disappointed they were at this.

mmm deer

in Nara, famed for its giant gold shinto-buddha and also for the herds of tame deer wandering around the town. they really don't mind being grabbed for photos as long as you give them one of the rice crackers which you will have purchased for 100yen at one of the many rice-cracker shops. some of them are rather too tame, though - one fucker tried to eat my Lonely Planet and wooly hat.

mmm beer

wrong flag -- in some places, you'd get kneecapped for that. statistics on this beauty: 330ml, 372 yen, 4.1 something and 253Ksomething else.

mmm beer

It's a beer vending machine!

Osaka skyline

took this one from the roof of the Umeda sky building - going up tall buildings and looking out of them seems to be something that I've done quite a bit of on my travels. The thing that I really like about this picture is the sky trails from two passing aircraft, with little blips on the trails caused by their strobes.

universal socket

doesn't do plugs from Singapore, though. Or Ireland.

lost in New York

After a long night drinking in New York, I took an unfamiliar subway line and ended up in Queens, far far out of the way. Rather than get back on a train in the opposite direction, I stopped to take this picture of the platform.

snow

Train from Oslo to Bergen (or vice-versa?). In the middle of the journey, there really was nothing to see but a bunch of snow until we came to a mysterious station in the middle of nowhere, where lots of people got on and off. Fuck knows what they were doing.

Hiroshima again

Hiroshima for second day in a row. This is the hotel that I stayed in, with thick tatami mats on the floor (comfy), my two rucksacks (when they were still relatively clean), sleeping pad, a little pot of tea which was placed in my room every afternoon while I was out. The TV is pay-per-view -- there's a common little device to the left of it which takes 100yen coins and connects the electricity (these were also used commonly in hostels to control the monitors on internet PCs -- once I figured out that it only switched on/off the monitor, I would set uploads going and leave it churning away headless; they've also made their way into australia and NZ, reflecting the growing influence of Asia on our fallen far-southern empire.) Annoyingly this place locked its front door at something like 22h or 23h, though that was pretty common amongst budget accomodation all around Japan.

Hiroshima

These urinals at Molly malones (a fake Irish pub with a real Irish bar man, close to ground zero) look out over the street (a street with no name, probably, as the Japanese don't really seem to bother). Because of this lovely view, various men took their girlfriends in to have a look out. Got very drunk at this pub and oggled some blondie British (?welsh) girl whose was visiting her sister, which was maybe a bad thing to do as her boyfriend was right next to me. Lukcily the Irish barman whose name I can't remember at the moment pointed out my drunking lechery and I stopped before there were drunken fisticuffs. This bloke's wife (a Japanese girl he'd met somewhere in Ireland) was selling tickets for River Dance. All so very Irish. So I do have some pictures of the exploded dome by the river, but they look the same as every body elses, and I find these urinals more interesting anyway.

Great Wall of China

went for an 11km hike along this wall. Beijing is, I think, to the left of the picture (and thus is, I suppose, on the inside). Too much climbing -- it doesn't look too steep, but after 10km it was barely manageable.

huey

In Vietname (in Ho Chi Minh City, I think) I visited this museum full of war plunder captured by the Vietnamese when they won the war against the Americans. I think its a Huey.

did somebody say McDonalds?

A greasy fingered friend of mine works for McDonalds, so one of the things I've been doing is taking pictures of their global empire. In many countries, they transliterate their name into local script; this contrasts with starbucks, which I saw transliterated only once, on an outlet in Beijing.

birthday

In celebration of one of my birthdays, here is a picture of me on another one of them, in a food court in Stockholm. The sushi restaurant would not allow us to drink our wine from the wine stand. There was a small crisis, until we realised that we could eat the sushi in the wine stand. Everyone is happy. As you can see from the photo.

this parrot is dead

Walking round in a nice riverside park one day in Adelaide, I came across this Pythonesque scene.

willy

This started off as 'just a dick joke', but I have been told that that was insufficient. so ''in Oslo, there is a big park full of naked people sculptures - the Vigelandsparken''

long distance petrol

In the outback, near (in an Austrlian sense) to Ayer's Rock. For retards, 815km is about 506 miles. I also have a picture of lots of backpackers taking pictures of this hilarious sign, but its so funny that I can't possibly post it here so you'll have to go find it on the main photo site.

Varanasi cows

this pretty much sums up my experience of India; most people seem to think that this is an unusual photo, but it really is the way that stuff was in Indian urban areas -- cows wandering round everywhere and rubbish lining the streets, beaten-up old post boxes and rusty bicycles