Rob and I bid farewell to Scotland on the Tuesday after the Mega Scotland 2010 event and set out for Hexham in Northumberland. We followed the A68 most of the way. At one point, we headed off to try and find the Waterloo monument, which we saw from afar but never found the road to the parking lot for it. We did, however, see it in the distance from the end of a long farm road.

We paused at the Scotland-England border to take the obligatory border photos and find a geocache.

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I’m sure you’ve seen it. In fact, you probably see it almost every day, though you may not even register it most of the time.

I’m talking about graffiti.

Graffiti has been around for thousands of years, with some of it persisting to this day. Then, like today, there were discussions and debates as to whether it is art or vandalism.

On my trip to Greece a couple of years ago, I was exploring Nafplio when I came across this slogan spayed on the wall of a building.

But even the graffiti artists couldn’t agree, it seemed, because across the alley was this war of paint between those with stencils and those without:

A little closer to home, I’ve seen tags and more elaborate works of art sprayed on street furniture and other things in the urban environment. Most of it, particularly the tags, gets removed or painted over shortly after it appears.

There have been studies that have shown that if you don’t remove a tag within 24 to 48 hours you’re much more likely to be re-visited by taggers.

One piece of graffiti that caught my eye years ago and has survived the anti-graffiti police, the elements and other graffiti artists, is a piece sprayed on a green utility box on Fisher Avenue near Shillington Avenue.

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I took a few photos (ok, 292’ish… whatever) at the B-52s concert at the Ottawa Bluesfest. I’ve dropped some of them into a gallery, which you can view here.

Commentary sometime Friday.

I headed out for a short bike ride this evening and ended up at Parliament Hill shortly before sunset. While I was standing at the fence behind the Library of Parliament, I watched a family taking the usual tourist shots. One of the RCMP officers that was nearby went over and offered to take their picture. He got them organized, but something wasn’t right. Reaching into a pocket in his vest, he pulled out a small Canadian flag, gave it to the little boy and then took the pictures. Then he swapped places with the father and posed for a couple of pictures with the rest of the family.

Though he wasn’t wearing the Red Serge or sitting on a horse, I’m certain the family didn’t care.

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I was out for a walk along the canal earlier today. As I approached Pretoria Bridge I noticed there was something floating on the water. Getting closer, it became clear that this part of the canal is the Rideau Canal’s equivalent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, except for pond scum (mostly).

Now, I know that the canal workers will be clearing this out as they do every year, but I was surprised at just how much there was. And I wasn’t alone in this – I heard a number of people talking about it as they walked along.

Not exactly the best thing, perhaps, for tourism, but at least the ducks seemed happy as they munched on it.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken some night shots. The rain this evening offered some interesting possibilities that I couldn’t pass up.

While perhaps not the most interesting photograph, this 2 second exposure of the intersection of Holland and Scott taken from my balcony gave me a chance to play with some of the toys in Photoshop CS4.

You can see the usual orangey hue caused by the street lights. I manually fiddled with some of the settings before deciding to try the white balance tool.

Using the white stop bar at the bottom of the photo as the reference for white, I was able to get rid of the orange and produce this image:

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the intersection was being lit by giant floodlights. Very cool.

I posted a video to YouTube today of the launch of VE3REX-11 this past Saturday:

I’ve also posted a few pictures in an album on Facebook that you can view even if you don’t have a Facebook account.