Tag: phonebox

brrrrr! drawing uc davis

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a little bit of england

After a week of winter storms and immense downpours, the weather calmed down a little (just a little) in time for the latest Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl. It still rained, but the main thing was that it was freezing cold! So not as many people came as on the last one, but a few of us braved the cold and got sketching. We met at the corner of 3rd and A – the rather optimistic plan was to sketch the UC Davis campus all day. I was sketching mostly in my new  59c micro-sketchbook and captured lots of little mini-sketches, some of which are below (I didn’t bother scanning all of them). The final sketch of the day, in a period when there was a little sun, was done at the MU bus station on campus, a little piece of England (the phone box above). That on was in my moleskine.

allanallan

Allan Hollander, veteran Davis sketcher.
helennewspaper boxes

Helen Peng from China, plus some newspaper boxes sketched from a cafe.

cynthiacynthia

Cynthia Sterling, sketcher from Napa. 
3rd & A, davis

Sketched at the meeting point, 3rd and A. Note the raindrops on my paper! (I was using a water soluble pen for a change).

The next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be in March (probably the 19th or 20th) at the Arboretum… details soon! Hopefully, the weather will be a little warmer…

leave me hanging on the iPhone

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phonebox at uc davis

I have told you I’m sure that UC Davis has some old things that used to live in London; some old double-decker buses, a couple of red phone booths, and, er, me. I’m not that old, but I do remember when people actually used phone booths, ah yes them were simpler days, 10p a call, with those big heavy phonebooks and the odd, ahem, business card stuck to the window. Phoneboxes. Remember when you had to queue to use one? People just don’t any more, now they carry the latest personal holographic cyber-communication devices from apple or orange or some fruit or other. Me, yes i have a cellphone I hate using, but I haven’t joined the iPhone age yet (never understood that name, wouldn’t an earPhone be more useful?). I can’t quite bring myself to join the Church of Apple, and become a devotee in sleek white and make annual pilgrimages to Macworld and worship the word of Mr Jobs. Then there is the iPad… when I first saw it I thought it was a joke iPhone, like the ‘HELLO?’ guy Dom ‘Triggerhappy’ Joly. ‘YEAH I’M IN THE APPLE STORE IT’S RUBBISH!’ What is the small ‘i-‘ prefix all about anyway? Apparently it makes things cooler. If they got rid of the nuclear deterrent and replaced it with iBomb or iNuke, CND would be finished. Countries would only stockpile them to make other countries jealous (hang on, that’s what the Cold War was all about, wasn’t it?). But that ‘i’… it’s a bit self-centered isn’t it? There’s no ‘i’ in ‘team; ah but there is in ‘iTeam’.   

Ironically enough, this old booth (drawn at the MU bus terminal, in micron 1 pen) has no phone in it. It’s just there to look cool. Which it does.

boring conversation anyway

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phonebooth on 3rd st

Do people even use phoneboxes any more? I barely even use my cellphone. I have a pay-as-you-go plan, which is not like the one I have on my still-active English phone (which still has the plan set up years ago on one-2-one, even has that logo on the screen!). No the one I have here means that you spend $25 to top it up fro three months. If you don’t add more money by the end of the three months, not only can you not use the phone but you lose whatever money you have left (and since I never use it, that’s usually most of it). If you renenw, it doesn’t just add three months onto whenever your three months is up, it just goes three months from whenever you topped up, so essentially you lose days, unless you renew right on the last day. Confused? I am. I have never liked mobile phones here. It’s just incredible to me that you get charged for receiving a call. That’s why I never give people my number, because I’ll never pick up if I don’t recognise it (for a while I was getting a lot of marketing calls, especially around the time of the election).

Speaking of cold calls, I hate those ones that have that pre-recorded message, “this is your final notification to renew your car insurance”, or some such, when yesterday and the day before and the day before that were the final norifications, and tomorrow too, all from companies I’ve never done business with. I hate the robots. At least with real people calling I can antagonize them a bit (sometimes I talk reeeeallllyyy reeeeeaaaallllyyyyy slowly), but even then my heart’s not in it, and I feel sorry for them. After all, everyone’s gotta work. I had to do it, once, for about a week and a half, many many years ago. It was not fun, and the guy running the show (I think he was called ‘Boyd’ or something) fancied himself as a bit of a hardnose, so I left to get a job as a male dinner-lady at a posh school. I remember one time, I made the marketing call, and ended up chatting to an old guy on the phone for about half an hour about his work (writing travel brochures), literature, travel, I forget now. Either way I didn’t sell him whatever it was they were selling. It cheered me up though. I sometimes wonder if those cold callers wouldn’t also fancy a nice long chinwag, a chat about the footy, or the state of modern television, just to ease the drudgery of their work. But if they do, I wish they’d stop calling me right in the middle of Jeopardy.

hanging on the telephone

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phonebox

No, this isn’t the magical forest where things from London just pop up between the trees, it’s the MU bus terminal at UC Davis, which has magpied a few British things to make them feel more like Londoners. Also at this terminal – it’s the only place in California where it rains, there are gangs of tabloid hoodies waiting to scowl at you from a distance, and there’s bloody Boris Johnson with his pointless competition for pointless new routemasters. Authentic. Actually no, you can keep those things, we’ll just take the phonebox, the lamp-post and the bus. Cheers.

Hanging on the Telephone… do you remember when Saddam was executed, and there were those guys filming it on their mobiles? I wonder if that song was running through their minds for a soundtrack?

On that note… Happy Thanksgiving!

morning in hampstead

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outside hampstead tube

A sketching morning in Hampstead, with Si, starting at the tube station, wandering about the high Street and its alleys, then off to the Flask for a good pint of Deuchars. And it didn’t even rain!

phone box on hampstead high street back lane, hampstead