Cheers for the gloves brov…

On saturday we went for a walk on North Head which is next to Manly. It’s a massive decommissioned military base next to the ocean that is now mainly parkland. Then we came back to Manly to catch up with an old friend and ended up at a fancy dress volleyball party. The Mario Bros won it. Random.

A pretty scary prediction from a world renown figure in the finance world:

Jim Rogers, Chairman of Rogers Holdings, has once again made a bold prediction and that is the British Pound could quite possibly collapse within the coming weeks.

Full article here.

This month I emerged from my semi retirement slumber to shoot 44 houses (I will put some up in a post later), I’ve visited or driven through approximately 250 of the 650 suburbs in Sydney (many of which are named after English towns or suburbs), I’ve covered 2400km on the scooter (knackering), and earned…well thats none of your business but its certainly been the best month since leaving London 14 months ago…

Now just need a few more months like this to get back on my feet before the world turns to moosh, and then we can plan some sort of longer term future… This place is growing on me, its got a real sense of character with the water dominating everything in the east of the city…now if it just had some mountains within easy reach I could see myself sticking around for a while…

A few photos from various random suburbs I have liked whilest passing through.

We had a great veggie patch going in Wanaka but sadly had to give it up. So we have just started again with what space we have on our balcony.

7 Reasons why you should grow your own food:

• There is nothing more local than food grown in your own backyard, your windowsills, or on patio containers.
• Growing your own fruits and vegetables means that you know exactly what does and does not go into your food and exactly where it comes from.
• You will get healthier in a number of ways. Not only will you end up eating more fruits and vegetables, but you will be getting added exercise. Did you know that you can burn as many calories in 45 minutes of gardening as you can in 30 minutes of aerobics? And, working in the garden reduces stress.
• You will get a bigger variety of your favorite fruits and vegetables because you can choose from hundreds of different varieties and you can grow the things you like the best.
• A survey done by the American Gardening Association found that the main reason given for increasing or maintaining edible gardening last year was to supplement household food supply — to help them save money on food. That alone is a very powerful reason.
• You can teach your children or grandchildren where their food actually comes from and that it doesn’t come from the supermarket but from the soil, the earth that we all depend on.

Doesnt it all just seem a bit too good to be true? According to the media we just dodged the biggest economic crisis since the 1920′s. Wrong. So wrong. The worst is yet to come. Of that I have no doubt at all.

“The people have been lulled into a false sense of safety under the rouse of a perceived “economic recovery.” Unfortunately, what the majority of people think does not make it so, especially when the people making the key decisions think and act to the contrary. The sovereign debt crises that have been unfolding in the past couple years and more recently in Greece, are canaries in the coal mine for the rest of Western “civilization.” The crisis threatens to spread to Spain, Portugal and Ireland; like dominoes, one country after another will collapse into a debt and currency crisis, all the way to America.

In October 2008, the mainstream media and politicians of the Western world were warning of an impending depression if actions were not taken to quickly prevent this. The problem was that this crisis had been a long-time coming, and what’s worse, is that the actions governments took did not address any of the core, systemic issues and problems with the global economy; they merely set out to save the banking industry from collapse. To do this, governments around the world implemented massive “stimulus” and “bailout” packages, plunging their countries deeper into debt to save the banks from themselves, while charging it to people of the world.

Then an uproar of stock market speculation followed, as money was pumped into the stocks, but not the real economy. This recovery has been nothing but a complete and utter illusion, and within the next two years, the illusion will likely come to a complete collapse.

The governments gave the banks a blank check, charged it to the public, and now it’s time to pay; through drastic tax increases, social spending cuts, privatization of state industries and services, dismantling of any protective tariffs and trade regulations, and raising interest rates. The effect that this will have is to rapidly accelerate, both in the speed and volume, the unemployment rate, globally. The stock market would crash to record lows, where governments would be forced to freeze them altogether.

When the crisis is over, the middle classes of the western world will have been liquidated of their economic, political and social status. The global economy will have gone through the greatest consolidation of industry and banking in world history leading to a system in which only a few corporations and banks control the global economy and its resources; governments will have lost that right. The people of the western world will be treated by the financial oligarchs as they have treated the ‘global South’ and in particular, Africa; they will remove our social structures and foundations so that we become entirely subservient to their dominance over the economic and political structures of our society.

This is where we stand today, and is the road on which we travel.”

More of this very worrying article here.

It took me a little while to work it out but I think Shaun White has made my site stats go mad…

Normally I get anything from 50-100 hits a day.

A few days ago things started spiking a bit…

Google seems to like my photos as this has happened a few times before but my Shaun White double cork images from the NZ Open feature really high in any search…

Damn I love Dolphins. What would I come back as? Dolphins rate pretty highly.

They can certainly surf better than me too…

I have dived with them a few times but pods riding the surf and catching air is something pretty special…

A few more photos here.

Roar?

This week marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year. This will be a very special Year of the Tiger. The year of the Tiger comes in between the Year of the Bull and the Year of the Dragon. I think the Bull is a fitting symbol for the West these days, virile and aggressive but lacking in wisdom and patience. The Dragon is very old and wise but is perhaps too cautious and passive and can be seen as a symbol of the East. If you mix the best elements of the Bull and the Dragon, the result is a Tiger.

This has already been a huge year for me and I think this world has got a big year coming  up…Gggrrrrrr.

My old friend Brian has lived in Whistler for a long time (although he now looks more like a pirate than when I last saw him…:) and has been filming snow longer than I have been shooting it.

He is understandably a little cynical of the Olympic circus coming to his small corner of the world.

It is always refreshing to see a side of Whistler and Canada that is not the Media generated sponge fest that is being shown on TV right now…

Another good vid from Brian here, and an interesting Canadian story from another very talented shooter Ian Provo here, and on his own turf here.

EDIT: Even Blotto and Jussi are getting in on the Canadian act too…