Another Fine Day Out and the Revival of the Dickfingers Wildlife Programme...

Before we start I would like to say hello to all the disciples. Hello. I realised to my horror that I had lost one of you the other day so I didn't want to make it seem like I'm taking you for granted, I'm not, you're tops. Anyway, my frustration was shortlived as Former no 16 was quickly replaced so all is right with everything again and we can turn our back on Judas for ever more... 

After a somewhat slow start to the year, based on my general lethargy, shit weather, a soul crippling job and a soon to be announced sideproject monopolizing a large portion of my already hectic schedule, there hasn't been a lot of time for me to get out and about and take photos of stupid things to write about on here. Maybe thats why "Judas" bailed, who knows? But to try and rectify this situation, Mrs Dickfingers, announced that we were spending Good Friday, walking around a musuem. After my initial trepidation at the thought of marching around endless corridors filled with old pottery and fountain pens, it turned out that the wonderful Mrs Dickfingers, knowing me as well as she does, had picked The Natural History Museum in Tring, which also happens to be one of the largest collections of Taxidermy open to the public. I could only have been more stoked if it was a Half Cab Exhibition. So packing my camera and fixing a grin on my face that wouldnt be out of place on a Sunshine Bus, we embarked on what I later discovered to be the Best Place In The World For Fans Of Stuffed Critters...

To give a brief overview of the Natural History Musuem in Tring, it was founded by some old chap called Rothschild who deftly avoided being classified as mental by "having a load of money" which allowed him to settle on "eccentric." So he poured a large portion of his not meagre fortune into cataloging the various weird and retarded creatures from the various far flung reaches of the world. He did this by peeling them and stuffing them with sawdust or something so that 100 years later I could scamper around like a window licker taking more photos than is probably wise while the missus walked 10 steps behind shaking her head...

Blogfans would probably recognise, correctly, that as impressive as "normal" creatures are, there's a special charm in the less than attractive, overlooked creatures that some mythical skyfairy allegedly decided to put together in a week before he had a sit down. As amazing as they are when they're alive and wandering around and humping each other, they're definitely definitely far better when someone has stuffed them and the only thing that beats that is when they've been stuffed by someone who has clearly never seen what the actual animal should look like. 

Im pretty sure that these were in the category "Creatures Made From The Spares We Had Lying Around"

Look how stoked he looks...

This is called an Aye Aye. No shit. I think a Yorkshireman discovered them and to be fair, its probably not the worst looking thing to ever come out of Yorkshire... 

The Long Tailed Ken Dodd Monkey... 

I have absolutely no idea what the hell this is but I'm stoked on it nonetheless...

Some Bonkeyed Puffins... 

The Manhead Crane... Look at the size of its Dome, its almost too heavy for its little neck. Massive.

A very startled owl.

Apparently if you get Monkeys really really stoned they're easier to peel...

If your sole occupation is peeling and mounting dead creatures for some rich bloke you'd probably have to get your kicks where you could so I would imagine that poking a little fish out of a bigger fish's mouth would get a right laugh from the Victorian genteel folk...

This is a Witch. Fuck knows why they had to have so many witchhunts back in the day, surely you'd be able to spot one of these in New England? There can't have been that many about...

A Toby Fish. I sent a picture of this to Toby and his reply was "did you shoot that?" Im not sure he was impressed at having his own fish. I would be stoked as hell if someone emailed me a picture of fish named after me. Whenever you lot are ready, Ill be happy to look through Fish Submissions...

Nature is disgusting. I cannot for the life of me work out why they would let anyone display a Mingesponge in public view. There wasn't even a sign to warn children there was a Mingesponge in the next cabinet. If I was a parent I'd rather not have to explain to my progeny about Minges or Sponges in the same sentence... although saying that I did spend a few minutes looking around in the hope that I could find a Dicksponge to laugh about as well...

I gave up the search for a dicksponge when I got distracted by this absolutely massive crab. Its legspan was something like 3 meters from end to end. Anything with that many long legs should be hit with a shovel, standard. If its got four times as many legs as eyes it shouldn't be trusted and should be shovelled as an immediate precaution... Same thing goes for moths. I fucking hate moths. 

Manatees on the other hand are awesome. I saw a programme about a guy in Florida who drove down to the Keys every day to stand out on a jetty with a stiff haired broom and sweep the crap off of the back of the manatees. They loved it. Any creature that is so lazy that it will voluntarily swim out to something that could almost definitely kill and eat it, just so that it doesn't have to clean itself is something that I can support. 

I'm not sure how lazy Elephant Seals are but they're huge and they look funny so I like them too, although if I had to guess I would suggest that anything weighing in at the Tonne mark would more than likely be a bit sluggish... 

Wherever possible they try to display the animals in representations of their natural habitats so that we can get a really good idea of what they would have looked like before someone peeled them and stuffed them with sawdust. 

 

This is a still life shot of the Bulbous Nosed Shelf Deer that perches quietly in the corner of rooms looking quite pleased with itself. 

While the Sabre Toothed Rabid Deer looks like it might pretty much kill everything else in the world 

A couple of Gay Kangaroos staring at each other's balls. Dirty Gay Kangaroos. 

I found the creature that a large number of muppets must have been modelled on

Then found the cafe for the first cream tea of the year which was lovely despite the confused woman behind the counter trying to charge us for the same coffee three times. 

In other news, the little feral bastards of Stotfold, not content with keying my car and stealing our bikes, decided that they'd pass the time with that friendly fun filled time passer: arson. 

Nothing says Saturday evening fun like torching a transit van and shouting from a safe distance at the "cunts ruining it" or "firemen" as they're otherwise known. 

Just to balance out the otherwise totally animal friendly blog, I went and shot a couple. Apparently though its quite difficult to peel and stuff your own museum when all you have are two moody wood pigeons so I decided to eat them instead. Except they were a bit fierce by this point so I threw them away, but the intention was there.  

Next time: I'm continuing the theme of day trips and fun times and am going to Brussels with Mrs Dickfingers for a cultural investigation that ticks all the boxes: beer, waffles and me not being at work. Expect a thrilling international update soon when I may or may not have sorted my exciting side project out enough to actually explain what it is... I may also have sent an email to the lovely people at www.lippiselkbag.com who may or may not have sent me a lovely sleeping bag suit. I've already checked and I'm on the first page of Google so only time will tell...

Until next time... 

Skyrape, Crying Angels, Mullets & How To Stuff A Pufferfish...

Happy New Year followers and welcome to the first post in what will hopefully be a full year of blogging. Inexplicably, despite the month long hiatus which has been spent pretty solidly sitting down doing nothing, I have managed to build on the ever increasing momentum of this pretty triumphant blog and reach the giddy heights of 16 followers. After some fairly rapid mental arithmatic, I have worked out that based on "the Bible" I am, at the time of writing, 7 years younger than Jesus, yet have 4 more disciples, which means that if we get into a league type situation I will have the advantage of being able to choose substitutes. Which is always a nice thought should there ever be a league for blogbased disciple fights... Gimme 2000 years and I may well have my very own church. We can but hope. 

Following on from my earlier comment that I have been sitting around doing nothing (and I'm not joking, I've pretty much done fuck all apart from shoot things and eat other things since the last post) I've decided that its hightime for another retrospective trawl through my harddrive to uncover something that might be vaguely interesting for me to write about... Unfortunately this is all I could come up with... If you don't like it, tough, you'll have to wait until the weather's not so shit for me to get out and start doing something a bit more interesting... so brace yourself for another wander into the Dickfingers Archive...

As some of you may know, a few years ago, I spent a good three months taking time out of my busy schedule of bumming about in England to fly to America and bum about over there. My reasons were pretty straight forward: its hotter and the portions are bigger. Add to that I wouldn't have to learn another language and as I wasn't keen on the idea of accidently eating dog I opted against the Orient and went to 'Merkka instead...

While in that fine and proud land, I decided that it was going to be a good idea to get all the things that I had been wanting to do for years out of the way in one fell swoop and skydiving was definitely top of the list. Bearing this in mind, when we rolled through to Vegas, I concluded that there probably wouldn't be a better time to do it. Up we went, out of the plane we jumped and photos were taken to mark the occasion. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to me as I was plummeting groundwards at terminal velocity, the instructor, who I can only assume was bored with jumping out of a plane for the tenth time that day, decided to spice up the picture with what I can only guess to be a joke. Quite how funny it is to pretend to be thumbing in a softie at at 10000ft remains to be seen, however I have to conclude that it is a joke as the alternative is to accept that I narrowly avoided being the first person to be raped in the sky...

Other stuff happened, but I was there for 3 months and some light fingered gobshite stole my camera in LA just before I flew home, most of the pictures I do have are someone elses with me in the background so you'll have to make do with Skyrape for now... Anyway, I came back (obviously) and as I wasn't in any particular rush to start work, I carried on bumming about over here... Toby "Formerly The Brock" Batchelor (who incidently doesnt want to be known as The Brock anymore) was working as TM for iFive Distribution so I ended up spending a few months tagging along, not really doing anything other than listening to "The Squirters" horrendous stories about clawhammers and decapitations while postponing actually getting a job. The following photo was taken at the Park in Great Yarmouth where we went for a demo, and is the first documented example of someone asking for my autograph. Admittedly the kid in question was overweight, had glasses like milk-bottles and as well as having a mullet that could make a German envious, he was rocking a pretty suspect earring and to top it off, smelt like dogshit but everyone has to start somewhere and it still definitely counts and I signed the shit out of him...

The only thing that  can follow on from a doughy mulleted child, is Puffy.

Puffy is yet another abomination/decoration that adorns Dickfingers HQ and is on a not-exactly-exclusive list of things that the poor, long suffering Mrs Dickfingers has banished to "the back room." The Back Room, for anyone interested,  is the grown up version of blu-takking a picture to the fridge "so that everyone can enjoy it" which is really a glorified way of keeping it out of the way. It is basically home to all of the really horrible things that Mrs Dickfingers doesnt really want to have to carry backwards and forwards every time her Mum & Dad come to visit. As such, it includes the assembled Dickfingers Collection of Fine Art, most things skateboarding related including any occasional houseguests and a stuffed pufferfish. (For the record, Hank the Christmas Owl is in constant threat of being sent to the back room.) Puffy is the product of my brother's trip to Croatia I think, Im sure it was somewhere like that and when faced with the prospect of getting something thoughtful and useful he used his initiative and got me a stuffed dead fish instead. The best bit, after the fact that "its a dead pufferfish" is that the eyes are the googley eyes that you used to get on stuffed toys and if you look in his mouth you can see the cotton wool they stuffed him with. God only knows how you go about taxidermyingying a pufferfish but if I had to guess, (and as we're doing this, I'm going to,) I'd say you'd probably want to get a whisk in there to churn up the innards and separate everything on the inside of the pufferfish from the outside of the pufferfish. Pour the insidey bits out then sling a balloon in it, blow it up until you've got the rough shape youre after and then varnish the fuck out of it as quick as you can before you sling on some googley eyes. If anyone would like to donate their eldery or recently deceased pufferfish, we can test the theory. I'll even make you a cup of tea when you bring it round and you can take photos for the blog... enticing eh?

The next few pictures were from a visit up to Yorkshire to visit Mrs Dickfingers elderly and very northern Grandad. Fortunately, I have the tastes of an old man anyway so was pretty stoked to spend the day pretending I was 80 by gurning out of the top of a open topped bus in between eating pub lunches, drinking beer, having cream teas and complaining about having to walk. It was tops and York wasn't nearly as grim as the media would lead you to believe. I hardly saw a single whippet and it didnt rain once...

Here I am enjoying what I was assured was the very best Cream Teas in the land at Betty's Tea Room in York. This is the starting point of my fascination with Cream Teas and as Tea rooms go its a pretty good place to start really as they've had about 200 years experience in fattening up folk with scones and brews so they know what they're doing. They bring you out shit loads on dainty little silver trays and there are flowers on table and everything, its ever so refined...

The rest of the time in York, (other than the sitting and the eating of Pub Lunches) was spent ambling around Yorkminster, which to the uninitiated is a bloody great big cathedral, slap bang in the middle of York. On the surface it looks fairly normal but upon closer inspection there are some pretty suspect looking decorations in there. I'll start off gently and happily admit that I was actually kind of stoked when I found these sculptures commemorating the brave and noble Muppets that ruled over York in the 17th Century. The did a very good job especially considering they were made of felt and most of them didn't have legs...

However its a shame that the Muppet Bishop Kings were overshadowed by one of the creepiest statues I have ever ever seen. And thats including those weird bastards that paint themselves gold and stand in Covent Garden begging or performing or whatever it is they claim to do... (Honestly, don't get me started on mimes, if I spent my entire working day keeping as still as humanly possible whilst doing nothing, someone would have a nuclear shit-fit instead of handing me money and Lord knows its not as if I havent tried) 

Now, I would be lying if I said I knew a lot about the fine and no doubt intricate details of interpreting Statues but I have no idea what was going through the sculptors mind when he decided that the best way to decorate a Church would be with a recumbent Vicar gazing dreamily into the distance while two angels, who happen to be naked children, stand either side... Crying.

...the worst part was that noone else seemed to have noticed it so I spent a few minutes staring at it in disbelief while an entire tour walked past it without breaking stride. Maybe reclining priests surrounded by traumatised infants are more commonplace up north... Mindblowing... 

Other random things on my harddrive include my foray into the art world after Mrs Dickfingers parents got me some Art Stuff for Christmas. I'm not sure what they expected me to come up with but I think that they're grateful that I haven't ended up with a sketchbook full of veiny cock and ball combos... 

My new found status as an artist also qualifies me to take pictures of trees and horizons at sunset. 

Oh and I got a gun. It's this one. It's ever so good and if you're ever in the area I will happily take you out to shoot things with it. Youre welcome... 

I'm actually in the process of starting another half assed website that will more than likely include sporadic updates and general nonsense in a slightly different format so if I'm not updating this as often, that will be why... But don't worry,  you'll be the first to know as soon as I get off my arse and sort it.

I've got no idea what the next one will be about. If you have any suggestions I'm open to requests, although if you don't come up with anything good I'll have to empty and varnish a pufferfish... You have been warned...