Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Tube Relief: Mardi Gras in London

You remember Police Chief Tami Brisset of New Orleans whom I blogged about a couple of times? Well Tami is back in the UK and this evening a group of us (mainly of Tube Relief fame) went down to Central London to meet up with her and her family at the Garrick Arms near Charing X. Jennifer even came up from Brighton, and had to endure one of the daily London-East Croyden commute exodus on her way back. Pictures are up - I can finally go to sleep! Yay!

56k killer warning! Quality of pictures vary as I switched between combinations of flash/no flash, low/high ISO, high/low shutter speed etc. Taking pictures in a low-light pub with a digital compact is a tricky and noisy business!


Tami and her husband!



Anthony, blinging up the pub!



Jenni.



Chris, Sam and Neil.








Chris from Upminster: Ultimate blinging king.





Congrats Stephen!






Cups from Mardi Gras, New Orleans.





Tube dusk masker picture from here.




Pete Lupton in a surprisingly dark picture.





Mex: buy her book here!



Update:
Tami made a video compilation in tribute to those who suffered and helped during the Katrina disaster. She gave us copies of these and yesterday I uploaded the video to YouTube. You can stream it live below (requires Macromedia Flash Player):


In other news, I just heard (at the pub) that Geoff (who organised Tube Relief 2005) received some kind of cease and desist order from TfL's lawyers in regarding to his collection of spoof maps (titled silly maps on his site). The maps has been taken down but lucky for me I have them stored on my PC (as some of them were rather useful during Tube Relief). I think this other spoof map, created by a disgruntled reader, sums up pretty much what I am feeling at the moment, if you don't mind me saying.



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3 comments:

Jay said...

Oh talk about a misleading title for your post :-p

Anonymous said...

Hey, Mardi Gras again in London already?

Btw, heard from a friend that Brighton is Gay Central in England? :P

Anyways, love that tube map art! How in the world can the lawyers find a way to shut it down??? How can drawing a bunch of colourful lines be a copyright infringement???

Jon Choo said...

Jay, you wish!

Sigma, it is apparently.

Regarding the Tube map, LU is very protective on the reproduction of the map as the design is now so widely recognised, the most common being the Circle Line 'bottle'. This is the most famous and intuitive Metro map we are talking about here.

The point of our anger is Geoff Marshall has always used the spoof maps on his site and isn't doing so for commercial reasons - something the TfL lawyers obviously missed.

In fact the LU map/roundel are cultural icons of Britain which is why I am baffeled by why we shouldn't be allowed to post these things even if they are copyrighted.