My Penguin Exhibition

Great Gatsby handmade book cover

Penguin are having an exhibition of handmade book covers of their My Penguin (blank book cover) range. They’ve asked 130 folk to participate and I was one of them, above is the Cover I’ve just finished for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had to choose the book at random, and I haven’t even read it yet (hope I get the book back so that I can?) so not sure how appropriate it is as a cover… Maybe someone who’s read it could tell me?

There’s bugger all info on the exhibition info page, but I believe it’s in a gallery somewhere on Brick Lane from Thursday 6th September to Sunday 23rd, private view on Wednesday 29th August.

Blog back up!

Media Temple Grid Service graphic

If you’ve visited my blog over the last few days you my of noticed that it wasn’t there! I ran out of my allocated 30GB worth bandwidth this month, I was quite surprised as usually I only use up 2 – 3GB each month. I’m getting more vistors (about 200 odd a day at the moment) but not that many more! Having a look through my stats I reckon it was probably Google images or similar image search sites that were using it all up, I think I had too many images with porn related image descriptions… I’ve deleted a few old posts that I thought were causing the problem, but I’ve also moved my site to Media Temple’s Grid-Service which comes with a whole 1TB of bandwidth (for the same price as my last place) so hopefully it shouldn’t be going down again any time soon.

Shiver me timber’s

POKE's Pirate Piss-Up

Sadly Emma is leaving POKE today :( She’s decided we’re all far too immature, so is off to teach a load of school kids instead. The good news though, was that we got to throw her a pirate themed picnic in Regents Park to see her off! We started to work our way through a case of Mount Gay Rum at 5pm, Kester was being sick on his feet by 8.30pm, Dave got us all barred from Primrose Hill Pub by 9pm, me and Alex downed Jagermeister and Red Bull Depth Charges at god knows o’clock and Igor was last man home at 5am. I’m still hungover now, 48 hours later…

Check out Nick’s, Dee’s, Emma’s & Marc’s photos on Flickr.

Weekly Desktop Part 22

Weekly Desktop Part 22 - Cartoon angry man

Last week I caricatured 5 Pokers for their birthday cards, my favourite was Dezza’s so I made it into this week’s desktop for you to download. Bit of background – Dezza always looks a bit grumpy, and the quote is taken from a famous coffee machine rant email he sent round work:

“Dear everyone,

Today (and not for the first time), I found myself sifting through the rubbish sack looking for the filter attachment for the coffee machine.

I thought to myself ‘what sort of cunting-congenitial-fucktard would empty out the coffee,  lose the filter and walk away?’

“Why this will render the coffee machine useless, and prevent anyone else from ever making a coffee again” they must have chuckled to them-self as they sauntered off, their nasty ‘I’m-a-little-cunt look’ smeared across their clown-featured face.

Be aware that this offence carries a penalty of loss of coffee privileges for life. Should I ever be lucky enough to catch someone in the act they will also find themselves being assaulted about the face with the weighty filter handle.

Thanks for your attention”

Trunki!

Ride on children's suitcase - Trunki

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about Trunki before, a bit slack of me… Anyhow Rob Law the guy behind Trunki is an old pal, we were house & course mates at university (I did an industrial design degree) it was back at uni that Rob designed the first Trunki, and I’ve seen him working at making it a reality relentlessly ever since. It’s a great little concept that you instantly ‘get’ as soon as you see it – Kids own suitcase that they can play with and ride about on while waiting around in airports, two jobs done in one, brilliant.

It’s been a tough road for Rob, he’s seen the original manufacturer go belly up, then had to borrow money to buy all the tooling back, then quit his job to concentrate on running the business full time, he’s had a roasting from the dragons den – didn’t get any cash. Probably for the best though, as business is really starting to taking off – He’s sold over 85,000 units, John Lewis says it’s one of their best selling hits of the summer, it’s also now stocked by Next, Mothercare, Fenwicks and even Harrods! Possibly the biggest news though is that Wal-Mart is the US is going to trial it in their stores.

All the best Rob, you deserve this success :-)

You can buy Trunki’s online through his website.

I’d like to teach the world to burp!

I'd like to teach the world to burp at the V&A village fete

The other week POKE went down to the V&A village fete with our stall ‘I’d like to teach the world to burp‘ the purpose of the stall was to try and record all the lyrics to ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ in burp form… Sadly due to not that many people other than me being able to burp words, we didn’t get enough words to string the whole song together but I have put together a video of just a load of random burping action captured over the 2 days. Watch the video here.

Anyone looking for a room to rent?

Photos of the room to rent and our house

Eleanor has bought a house and is leaving us… £320 a month room available at the end of August in converted factory space in Shoreditch, just off Kingsland Road, right next to the canal (10min walk to Shoreditch center). It’s 4 bedroom, sharing with 2 hirsute English gents and a Japanese girl (smokers). It’s is a great space to live, surrounded by lovely neighbours of similar age and persuasion. We are looking for someone chilled and up for a laugh but also someone who pulls their own weight, does their own washing up but doesn’t live by rotas. The room is like a blank canvas with a double bed, wooden floors and beams – it’s not a huge room but one that you can do what you will with. If you are looking for just a room then sorry that’s just not us. But if you are looking for a friendly house who really enjoy hanging out together then drop us an email.

Map

New (old) Headphones

Old school Pickering PH-4955 headphones

I’ve owned and broken numerous large vintage headphones over the years, but none as large and as achingly retro as the Pickering PH-4955’s I got through the post from ebay yesterday! Sound is brilliant, but they gives your neck muscles a bit of a workout by the end of the day…