A phrase used to express that you don’t care which film you see at the cinema or what you have for dinner.

Yellow may be ‘the new swag.’ But it’s not swag enough to be the colour of this t-shirt, which is green…

And finally, in an otherwise quite nice underwear and pajama shop – the words SAD and BAD on a pair of knickers. I think this is the very opposite of having ‘lucky pants’.

Photo: Abbie Felton

University of Lincoln student and President of the American Football Society, Mike Hansford has received yet another career-changing opportunity.

The twenty year old from Bristol who was recently given the chance to coach pupils at Lincoln’s Christ Hospital School has gained the attention of the American Football team in Grenoble, France.

 “I sent off an email introducing myself to the team. I received an email back about three days later saying they were interested in me playing, especially with my experience and the fact I had my own kit!”

Grenoble’s American Football team, ‘the Grenoble Centuares’ are ranked second best in France and are considered to be amongst the top 10 clubs in Europe.

The have won 8 out of their last 10 matches including a 36-20 semi-final victory in the European Federation of American Football Cup (EFAF) against the Trianglé Razorbacks.

The opening means that Mike would have to join the Centaures’ B team in August when training begins. He would participate in training and friendlies until December when he will be given the chance to join the elite team; the clubs main senior team.

“The season begins with training and preparation until May 2014 when tournaments start. I’m very excited, I love the game and it’ll certainly give me a chance to improve my skills at a huge level.”

The International Business student who is currently in his second year at university is still unsure as to whether the move to France will go ahead.

An international placement is compulsory on the International Business degree at the University of Lincoln however; the transfer is dependent on the grades Mike achieves at the end of this year.

“If I do go as part of my course then I’ll be certain to join and train.”

If successful in reaching the club’s senior team, Mike would be the only English player on the sixteen strong squad which consists of 9 French, 5 Canadian and 2 American players.  Nonetheless, he is not apprehensive about the language barrier.

“I study French as part of my degree and that will help greatly, although many of the terms will translate easily into English!”

TAMWORTH – This exact city was mentioned by great William Shakespeare in his famous tragedy “Richard III”. Act V, Scene II, Line 15.

“Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends, bruised underneath the yoke of tyranny, thus far into the bowels of the land have we march’d on without impediment; And here receive we from our father Stanley Lines of fair comfort and encouragement. The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar, that spoil’d your summer fields and fruitful vines, swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough in your embowell’d bosoms, this foul swine Lies now even in the centre of this isle, near to the town of Leicester, as we learn from Tamworth thither is but one day’s march. In God’s name, cheerly on, courageous friends, to reap the harvest of perpetual peace by this one bloody trial of sharp war.” 

I hope you feel more educated now.

We’re moving down to OXFORD now. There is a reason why Oxford was not bombed by Germans during Second World War. Hitler had a cunning plan of using Oxford as his capital in case of conquering England. Nice try!

Next one on the map will be NEWHEAVEN famous for its The New Heaven LifeBoa which is among the oldest ones in Britian and was comissioned in 1803. Personally I think that the more interesting fact is that “Graduate” author, American writer Charles Webb is a resident of that English city. If you would like, along with a little donation you can give Matteo your copy of “Graduate” so he can knock on Mr Webb’s door in your name and ask for signing the book. Casually.

After getting on French grounds first stop will be in DIEPPE, which is famous because of its delicious seafood. Two dishes to remember: “Marmite Diepois” – fish and seafood stewed in cream, cider and oniones and “Moules Mariniere” – mussles in a wine, shallot and cream sauce.

Then we’re moving to AMIENS, which is a home of a writer Jules Verne and the largest Christmas Market in Northern France. I couldn’t pick two more random facts.

After Amiens there will be stop in REIMS, which is believed to be world’s capital of champagne. Never mind of the most beautiful gothic cathedrals.

We’re keep moving down to TROYES, which is the home of the luxurious brand with green crocodile logo. Have a guess which one I’m talking about!

In DIJON, which is next on the route there is plenty of the best quality mustard. We are also collecting the orders! Any of the supporters would like to get a little mustard souvenir from France?

LYON, is a home of modern cinema. Yes people, this is the place where two creative geniuses known as Lumier Brothers, improved on Edison’s invention and were smart enough to quickly apply for patent in France and England to keep their baby safe. Unfortunately Matteo will not have time to visit Lumier Museum, but anytime you are around Lyon, go and enjoy it!

The last French stop will be in GRENOBLE. Now, there is one interesting fact about the city. During the French Revolution, Grenoble was rebaptized Grelibre. The people wanted nothing to do with nobles and royalty. “Libre”, which is French for “free,” made the city sound much more revolutionary.

Then we’re already in Italy, Matteo’s homeland. First stop will be in TURIN, which is also believed to be “DETROIT of ITALY”. I’m wondering if any one Italian people ever heard of that…

Then we’re moving to ALESSANDRIA which is a host of annual Fraskettando SkaBlues Jazz Festival and even Blues Brothers performed there!

And then we’re nearly at the end of the journey in GENOA. Here I am only going to quote Charles Dickens who apparently said about the city: I would never have thought that I would have become attached to the stones of the Genoan streets, and to think of the city with affection, as the place in which I had spent many hours of peace and happiness.

Hopefully we’ll finish the initiative with Matteo in excellent state, safe and sound back in his hometown and with enough money to help REKKO build the ambulatory!

You know how to support us guys, so let’s do it!

We had to watch this film so that we could create work in response to it…or so I thought (more on that later). I decided to focus on the phrase “The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life” which is spoken in the film, this, in turn, made me focus on the repeated soap advertisement which kept popping up.

Classic fifties advertising right there ^. There was also quite a bit of dialogue about happiness (or a general lack of it) in Debord’s film so combining all of the above I made this little thing.

Cleanliness is next to Happiness

My original intention was to actually buy 59 bars of soap so this could be exhibited as opposed to just shown as a photograph but you might be surprised at the sort of price that all that soap clocks up! So much for cheap materials eh? So yes, I’ve cheated a little bit and managed to make this with only 9 bars + my renowned awful Photoshop skills. However, as I said before, this is the sort of thing I thought we had to make. But no, no, no, no, no….no. We were in fact, as a class, supposed to work on the same version of the 18 minute film, and respond to it by adding or taking bits away. I only learnt this the night before submission so, safe to say, I was in the computer room tearing my hair out in front of Final Cut Pro at 8am the next morning. I managed to insert sections from the shower scene in Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho‘ into Debord’s soap scenes just in time for presenting. Phew.

It’s a shame I couldn’t get hold of a final version of the finished film. It really was quite funny. Someone copied arguably the most boring part of Debord’s film and irritatingly pasted it on repeat about 10 times, there was some Lord of the Rings in there, some Gangnam style, a song about horses as well as a crazy African lady warning you about bacteria. However, there is little worry of bacteria with all this soap now lying around…

Feb. 25, 2013 — Particles from the upper atmosphere trapped in a deep pile of Antarctic snow hold clear chemical traces of global meteorological events, a team from the University of California, San Diego and a colleague from France have found.

Anomalies in oxygen found in sulfate particles coincide with several episodes of the world-wide disruption of weather known as El Niño and can be distinguished from similar signals left by the eruption of huge volcanoes, the team reports in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the week of February 25.

“Our ability to link of reliable chemical signatures to well-known events will make it possible to reconstruct similar short-term fluctuations in atmospheric conditions from the paleohistory preserved in polar ice,” said Mark Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who directed the research and dug up much of the snow.

Thiemens, graduate student Justin McCabe and colleague Joel Savarino of Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnment in Grenoble, France, excavated a pit 6 meters deep in the snow near the South Pole, with shovels.

“At an elevation of 10,000 feet and 55 degrees below zero, this was quite a task,” Thiemens said. Their efforts exposed a 22 year record of snowfall, a pileup of individual flakes, some of which crystallized around particles of sulfate that formed in the tropics.

Atmospheric sulfates form when sulfur dioxide — one sulfur and two oxygen molecules — mixes with air and gains two more oxygen molecules. This can happen a number of different ways, some of which favor the addition of variant forms of oxygen, or isotopes, with and extra neutron or two, previous work by Thiemens’s group has shown.

Unlike polar ice, which compresses months of precipitation so tightly that resolution is measured in years, relatively fluffy snow allowed the team to resolve this record of atmospheric chemistry on a much finer scale.

Read Full Article Here

Related articles

• Clues to climate cycles dug from south pole snow pit (esciencenews.com)
• Clues to climate cycles dug from south pole snow pit (oddonion.com)
• Clues to climate cycles dug from South Pole snow pit (universityofcalifornia.edu)
• Clues to climate cycles dug from south pole snow pit (eurekalert.org)
• Clues to climate cycles dug from south pole snow pit (sciencedaily.com)

train to Bardonecchia…

stand off in Grenoble…

snow play in Berlin…

Silence

More work from my Volume – Installation module. Still more than a bit obsessed with communication, translation, deception and the like (probably from the whole moving country/language barrier thing) but this time I decided to make something which would reflect these themes in an almost aggressive way.

I wanted to write in a language that lent itself well to being three-dimensional, and because the idea of braille is to read by touch it certainly fit the bill. The content of these works plays well with braille to ‘confuse’ the senses because they reference things like silence, talking, hurtful words, but obviously braille lacks the usual spoken element of ‘languages’. Also, because of the materials I have chosen to use, the works aren’t physically accessible in the way braille would normally be.

It has become quite an evasive series in all it’s anonymity, but I feel a personal, visual interpretation of these pieces, even without knowledge of braille, could be more valid than if someone necessarily could understand the words here. It’s a shame I couldn’t bring these back to France with me to exhibit, especially after I’d started to have some fun with the lighting, but god knows what airport security would have thought if I was carrying so many nails in my hand luggage! However, it’s my intention to make a large scale version of one, which is essentially a bed of nails. Not sure if I’ll let people attempt to lie down on it yet though… I don’t really want to make the headlines with something like ‘ENGLISH GIRL KILLS TUTOR WITH ARTWORK.’

To Hurt You

To Hurt You

To Hurt You (Detail)

Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stones

(The temptation to submit these to a bad photoshop subreddit is very high.)

Putting antlers on an owl.

Putting Justin Bieber shoes on an ostrich.

Putting a dinosaur on holiday. (Well at least somebody’s having some fun.)

Grenoble 19-02-2013 13h03

In general, fashion is not for the weak or weary-minded, but when it comes to the menswear showcased at New York Fashion Week 2013, even our fearless Crosby Press editors & photographers were occasionally gripped by subliminal horror.

From fearsome street-goth, to hipster-vampire, pale skin & black leather were two key elements that consistently made us shiver. But we gotta say — a massive, Rasputin-bearded model in bondage gear will have us crapping our leather sweatpants every time.

CLICK INTO THE GALLERY BELOW TO FIND OUT WHO WON FIRST PLACE!

Main photo: Before You Kill Us All

It’s almost been a month since I arrived in France.

Every corner of the streets, the people, the usual Monday routine on the tram station still intrigue me every single day.

Every once or twice a week, I’d bring my camera out to capture few portraits of my new surrounding. I still got myself lost while exploring the little lanes on the Centre Ville and found myself in a completely different part of the town.

So here it is. The foreign feeling captured in black and white.

Here are few portraits of my new, little town, Grenoble

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Babel #1

Babel #2

I have to admit, I’m a little worried that these are too small to be considered as complete work, after all, the module they’re for is called ‘Volume – Installation’. It’s just that so many of my other ideas were shot down because of expense or time limitations (as per usual) whereas clearly that’s not a problem here! Perhaps they should be seen as ‘sketches’ for more room-filling versions… So, anyone got a couple of thousand tin cans going spare?

Moncler Grenoble Fall/Winter 2013 brainwashed the ski-bunny aesthetic by reading it 1984 repeatedly, then hooked it on hard drugs and turned it into the ultimate slope-killing machine.

Can you tell we’re fans?

The French label’s presentation at New York Fashion Week, dubbed “Human Forest”, was an impressive, intimidating spectacle involved over 300 models arranged in a circle around the attendees.

All 300 of ‘em are clad in ski wear for the hard man — dark, foreboding parkas & puffers paired with not-so-friendly yellow mountain boots and pitch-black pilot goggles that look to have been grabbed right out of the Top Gun MiG cockpits.

What do you think of the subdued notes and somber tones of the Fall/Winter 2013 collection? Would you freak out if you were surrounded by 300 people wearing these clothes?

Sound off in the comments!

We have been really blessed by our current apartment in La Tronche. Matt found it within a week of moving back to France. It was brand new, completely furnished, and in a really nice location. We are in tram or walking distance to everything we need, which was perfect before we had a car. And we live right along the river (plus for Solo) which has a gorgeous view of the mountains (plus for everyone!). Unfortunately, we feel we have outgrown this little studio apartment. While having a dog is a big part of that, I feel that even if it was just the two of us we would still feel the same. It has become a pain having to roll up and pull a cover over our bed every-single-day. It takes “making the bed” to a whole new level. And our new apartment has a small yard so no more having to get dressed and bundled up to take Solo to the park every morning (you can’t just walk out in pajamas here in France…).

So our new place! Here are all the details:

• It has a kitchen, living/dining area, separate bedroom, hall closet, and an “American style” bathroom (I call it that because the shower and the toilet are together. Usually over here they are separate).
• THERE IS A DISHWASHER! I hate washing dishes. Matt usually does them because he likes to, but if there are any dirty dishes hanging out in the kitchen I feel like the whole place is a disaster zone. So with a dishwasher I shouldn’t have to worry about that anymore.
• As I already said, there is a small yard and a nice sized terrace, which is covered.
• The apartment is completely brand new. They are still doing construction on the outside buildings, and they haven’t put the grass in the yards yet.
• Although we will no longer live within walking distance of Grenoble/the trams, there are plenty of buses around.
• There is a grocery store (and a boulangerie) just around the corner, and that’s even better than here because right now I have to walk/ride the tram for 30 minutes to get to the store.
• We get the keys on February 20th! I know it’s pretty soon; we found out a few weeks ago but I am just now getting around to blogging and telling everyone about it.

And here are some pictures! The ones from the agency aren’t very good quality but you get the idea.

The kitchen! It comes with a stove/oven and a dishwasher (it’s the small “cabinet” on the far left). Matt’s parents are giving us their old refrigerator too, which will go against the wall on the left.

The front of the apartment. There’s the front door and the hallway, the bathroom door is on the far left, and then you can see most of the living/dining space.

Bedroom picture 1: it’s pretty big! About half the size of our current studio apartment.

Bedroom picture 2: the window…pretty self-explanatory.

Bedroom picture 3: featuring my adorable niece!

Bathroom! There is also a lot of space in front of where the toilet is, and I love the brown tiles (it’s one of our favorite colors).

Another bathroom picture, so you can see the sink area.

A view of the living area and terrace. I am really excited about that door and the yard, and pretty much everything else here too!

A view of the back of the apartment from the yard. They have not yet put the grass in, probably because it’s winter. I’m hoping it will be there in the spring, though.

View of the left side of our yard. If you can make out that white thing near the bottom left of the picture, that’s about where the yard will end. They are going to install some dividing fences soon.

Sorry for the over exposure, but here is a view of the other side of our yard. If you can make out those baby trees, that’s where the other divider fence will be. So it’s a nice little yard!!

And, lastly, here is a view from our building. Like I said they are still doing construction. Everything is brand new!

I will definitely be posting more pictures and apartment updates within the next few weeks, once we’re settled and all. We are so thankful for all that God has provided us with and we are really excited about moving!

Here are photos from Moncler’s Grenoble Fall/Winter 2013 collection presentation. The presentation took place last night and it featured  classic and iconic elements that the brand is known for, new materials and techniques added innovative details to the outer- and skiwear of the collection. It took hundreds of models to fill the Gotham Hall that also had an impressive mirror ceiling. Look out for the rest of the collection after the click.

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A l’occasion du Nouvel An Chinois, le dragon offert à la ville de Grenoble par la ville de Suzhou (ville jumelée proche de Shanghai) défilera cet après-midi dans les rues du centre ville de Grenoble !

Il sera également visible jusqu’au 23 février à l’entrée de l’exposition “Regards de Chine” (http://couic.fr/mm)
-Ville de Grenoble

On the occasion of the Chinese New Year, the dragon offered to Grenoble from the city of Suzhou (twin city near Shanghai) will be parading through the streets of Grenoble this afternoon!

It will also be on view until February 23rd in the entrance hall of the “Regards de Chine” exhibition. (http://couic.fr/mm)
-Ville de Grenoble

Photos par Grenobloise | Photos by Grenobloise

***UPDATE 10/02/2013: Aujourd’hui j’ai fait mes propres raviolis chinois ! Today I made my own Chinese dumplings!