A few pictures of Margate and the Turner Contemporary possible Sunday Ramble

Here is the link to the photos https://plus.google.com/photos/103118335852639233427/albums/5866740346639551633/5866740352178692882?banner=pwa being outside in warm sunshine was a bit of a shock to the system. 

We got to Margate after lunch and I had another look at the exhibits in the Turner Contemporary, I am not very keen on the current exhibitions there and am looking forward to future exhibitions.

There is a rumour going around that they are negotiating an exhibition of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. I may have to camp outside if they do.

I decided. Wrongly. It would be too cold to sketch outside and got a pot of tea in the gallery’s café, started to sketch the new step sea defences, almost immediately I started to get too hot and as you see the sketch wasn’t going well.

Then a couple of sketches of the people inside and outside the café, many of these people have a bit of a look to them, there is a word for this look, on the tip of my tongue. 

Ah yes got it, I first discovered this meaning of this word in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ the word is intellectual.

 Anyway my guess is that no one is going to get too stroppy about being drawn at an art gallery, fortunately everyone ignored me and I nailed a few likenesses.

Ramble on here later perhaps 

The temptation in the gallery at the moment is the Weebles, I mean if you give one a push does to roll back the right way up?

The Lady Vanishes, Google’s chrome starts peeling off, Blogger comment moderation, a ramble.

Google is a fact of life now, as you are reading this blog which is hosted by Google you are using it at the moment.

Anyone who has had problems with some aspect of Google will know how difficult they are to contact and how difficult it is to get any problem sorted out.

On the day Margaret Thatcher died, I wanted to make some sort of response, love her or loath her, her passing is a milestone in our history, I didn’t think sending flowers would be appropriate, but wanted to do something that I thought she would appreciate,

This Margaret Thatcher at the Pearly Gates cartoon seemed to fit the bill, I guessed she would be familiar with the Rubens of St Peter commissioned by the duke of Lerma and that perhaps there were aspects of the cartoon that not everyone would follow.

Anyhow I figured that if she was looking. What? Up, down, across on the day of her death it would probably amuse her. The blog post with the cartoon in it has been far and away the most popular one recently, because the picture of the cartoon keeps appearing near the top of Google’s image search, but for some reason it then vanishes. This means things switch from hundreds of people looking at it to no one much.

Direct criticism of the cartoon from family and artist friends has been pretty odd; ranging from: “I recognise Margaret Thatcher, but who is other bloke?” to “Obviously I understand it, but I don’t think many other people would.” As far as this sort of thing goes; pretty good.

Anyway among the various cartoons that have come out since she died, I thought it was one of the best, so I was a bit disappointed that it keeps vanishing off of Google image search. As far as Google goes, I wouldn’t even know how to contact them to ask them why it keeps vanishing, if is it that I tagged it wrongly then I don’t know what it was I did wrong.

On to the Google Chrome browser, I had a problem with my laptop (windows 7) saying it didn’t want to shut down because I had programs running, as I had closed all the programs I was a bit mystified by this and then I discovered that it was AdBlock which isn’t really a program but an add on app for Chrome.

If you get this problem you may be surprised to know that Chrome’s default setting is; “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed” you can turn this off by going to, settings, show advanced settings and unchecking the box next to “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed”

I am too embarrassed to describe some of the other things I tried before discovering this.

On to the business of hostile comment, I have had several conversations with other bloggers in the last few days about hostile blog comments and frankly several are reaching the point where it is becoming difficult to continue blogging.

A major new problem is that there is now a lot of hostile and spam comment aimed at individual blogs or groups of blogs. This usually takes the form of copying either longer and complex previous comments or related subject matter from the web and posting it as a comment. Some of these comments are then modified by the spammer or hostile commenter and some are not.

In my case these either take the form of local history copied from other Kent history sites or previous comments that were complex.

Some of the Kent village's history forums seem to have large parts of them now taken over by porn spammers, so even quite innocent looking links can lead to something nasty.

I am now treating all bizarre off context comment from anonymous sources as hostile and spamming it.

Another aspect of this is the impersonation of frequent bog commentators, so all comments claiming to come from bloggers who comment as signed on bloggers, that are left as not signed on I am treating as hostile, so if you have a google or blogger account please be sure to use it.

On to other matters, a couple of pictures of familiar Ramsgate buildings undergoing change.    

I am still trying to understand the forthcoming KCC elections using the internet, when it came to confusing this lot from the Gazette’s website probably took the can http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Thanet-UKIP-candidates-standing-Kent-County/story-18686306-detail/story.html#axzz2QNEPyZV5 until I realised the paper had mad some sort of ITC error

Another Lot of Thanet Election Candidates announced

This first lot is for the TDC election caused by Sandy Ezekiel being sent to prison.

And this lot caused by Ian Driver resigning from Ramsgate Town Council.

 And this lot for Brodastairs and St Peters, my thanks to Chris Wells for pointing out in the comments.

Neither of these elections effect me as they don’t involve candidates from my electoral ward, but they do beg the question; where are the online presences of some of the candidates.

Living as we do in the age of the internet, one would expect a google search of the candidates name combined with Thanet or the Thanet town they live in would produce something that people could grapple with.

I would expect anyone who aspires to become a community leader to have made some sort of mark on the world wide web.   

I don’t know what other people think, but I would say not having some sort of internet presence today can be considered as suspicious, ones first though being; what are they trying to hide?     

Obviously neither election will be decided by the majority of electors who always vote for the same political party, but both will be decided by the minority of people who both bother to vote and who vote for different people dependent on the circumstances.

My guess is that a for a fair amount of these people putting the name of a candidate they may vote for into an internet search engine will be a first port of call.

 

this picture is to illustrate a comment

A quick sketch from Deal Pier a few photos of Deal in The County of Kent, possibly a day off ramble if I get time.

My day off today but we didn’t get out until after lunch when we went to Deal to buy some books, the café on the end of Deal Pier is relatively new, about four years I think and although I have used the old one in the past, this was my first visit to the new one.

Pot of tea and a very large chunk of shortbread was about £3.50 I think, all good quality and a useful place to sketch when it is too cold outside.

The sketch is done with a grade B 0.5mm propelling pencil any sketching errors erased with a propelling rubber, a very useful item for sketching out and about as the rubber part doesn’t get dirty in the pocket. With so many buildings now painted magnolia, it is useful to have Naples Yellow in your palette.

Here are the photos from my phone https://plus.google.com/photos/103118335852639233427/albums/5865653757559748817?banner=pwa

Deal is a town that seems to have weathered the problems of modern town centres better than most. There seem to be more independent shops than most small towns in the area.

There are only a few empty shops and still a larger proportion of independent shops selling real products than most town centres.

I guess with it being so close to Thanet, there is a sense the Thanet town centres could have survived better in the way that Deal has. 

The Royal Sands on the Pleasurama site developer investigated by Advertising Standards Agency.

This has been reported by the BBC see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-22096722

I will add to this post in a few mins if I get time.

A bit of a strange one this, SFP Ventures UK is the dormant company set up in 2006 after complaints that SFP Ventures Partners Limited were a British Virgin Islands company.

A bit of a chequered history here, it was SFP Ventures Partners Limited who initially tendered for the development on the Pleasurama site, claming in their presentation to the council that they were the investment arm of a Swiss bank.

After the council chose them as their preferred developer, it transpired that they weren’t part of a Swiss bank, but were an offshore company based in The British Virgin Islands.

SFP Ventures UK seems to have been a dormant company since it was formed, so they may have a bit of difficulty persuading the Advertising Standards Agency otherwise.

This could be difficult for them as I believe the BBC previously did a story about miss-selling of the apartments. 

In order to understand roughly how BVI companies work here is a link to a firm that will set one up for you http://www.bvi-corporations-ibc-incorporate-in-bvi.offshore-companies.co.uk/

Basically provided they don’t do any business with BVI residents they are subject to virtually no regulation.  

Margaret Thatcher at the pearly gates cartoon

A quick cartoon for Margaret Thatcher in the hope it will give her pause for a chuckle during what may have been a difficult day.  

Pleasurama Update

Mayor of Ramsgate and TDC cabinet member David Green has just stated on the Friends of Ramsgate Seafront Facebook group that he doesn’t have any idea who is behind SFP the Pleasurama development.

I take this to mean as he is a TDC cabinet member that this means neither do the council officers or councillors. As this is a closed group and I think this information important to the future of Ramsgate I have copied here what he said and my reply.

David Green said Barry James David one simple question. Who has the beneficial interest ie owns SFP services Ltd?
As far as I know, Mr Keegan is the only contact I know of.  

Michael Child said David there is the rub, the council, I think started out thinking that they were engaged in a Whitbread project financed by the development arm of a Swiss bank.

This is clearly set out in the initial prospectus and under that basis it made some sort of sense.

Then the situation changed and it transpired that SFP wasn’t, as stated the development arm of a Swiss bank, but a BVI company where all the beneficiaries where able to hide their identities.

As you know from 2003 I made a considerable fuss about this and eventually SFP UK was formed in 2006 I think and assurances were made to me that the council was now dealing with a UK company with all the checks and balances that implies.

Then in 2009 I received the cabinet report for the 2009 meeting, which clearly shows that this was just lies and that the company was still a BVI company and that the £1m security came directly from another BVI company.

Obviously the accounts for SFP UK show it to be and always have been a dormant company, so any SFP that is able to finance the project is a BVI company, or even no company at all and with the council taking the stance that any money coming into a UK bank account via Credit Suisse is legitimate money, then you just can’t tell who is behind it.

Back in 2004 I wrote to all the councillors making it very clear that I thought they were putting themselves in the untenable position where it would be impossible for them to prove that they weren’t financially involved in this project. 

Effectively you now have a position where anyone can say to you Cllr Green, you’re the part owner of a company that has used council privilege to obtain a low market price for a council property leasehold which you are now trying to obtain the freehold of at below market value and I don’t think you could disprove it.

Frankly I think you and the other cabinet members ought to come down on this situation very firmly, get clear documentation about what due diligence was done by officers both in 2006 when the initial leases were issued and later in 2009 when the variation was issued.           

Sign of the times, KCC and a sort of guileless Monday madness from them and a rant from me.

Living and working in the town centre these days is interesting, in the may you live in interesting times, curse type of thingy.

The most interesting aspect is a combination of the previous Labour government's 24 hour licensing and the previous Conservative TDC administration's method of interpreting licensing, particularly when applied to late night - 4am - takeaways, and of course the lack of town centre policing (this end of King Street doesn't count as town centre anymore) means that much of the time between about 8pm and 4am is an uncontrolled drunken riot.

Enter into this a five foot high temporary metal sign, partially blocking the pavement, catching the legs of passers by and making the progress between busses and lorries, er interesting.

If you look at this photo you will see that there are already two permanent signs, which should tell motorists that they are entering a one way street, as it is they have both been modified by the inebriate so neither of them achieve anything.

What the drunkard will do with this latest addition is pretty obvious, not such a big worry for me though, once when I had something like this come through a plate glass window at 2am I used to call the police. However In an effort to improve the crime statistics the police have now developed a regime that means I no longer call them (no one likes to be woken by the police at 4 having boarded up a window at 2 and gone back to bed, even if they offer you victim counseling the next day) and I have had the shop window panes changed from two big ones to 16 little ones.