I love the rain the most when it stops. Perhaps if I lived some place where rain was a rarity I’d go outside to feel the drops hit my face and walk in the puddles kicking up the water like autumn leaves. But it’s been a rainy summer here, and as beautiful as it can be at times, I still love the rain the most when it stops.

I took these photographs in my garden after a rainstorm, and snapped the rainbow when it appeared in a field as I drove along a country road.

The American playwright, Tennessee Williams, once wrote “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons… when an hour isn’t an hour, but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands, and who knows what to do with it?” - Well I’m trying Mr Williams, but maybe the rain has yet to learn that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

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Diamonds in the rough
Out there
Joe Purdy - I love the rain the most when it stops

Over the weekend me and a few other guys went to Scotland for our friend Gavin’s ’stag weekend.’ I’d write a post about it, but we agreed that what happens in Scotland, stays in Scotland. So you see, my lips are sealed.

I would love to write a funny post about the birds and the beers, the laughter and the tears, the ups, the downs, the rage buggies, the flamenco dancer girls, and the conquests of Fozwaldo the great, and the blood sucking vampires. But the stories of the stag weekend are sealed now among an elite pre-wedding ninja brotherhood that can never break the unwritten code of silence.*

*Code may be temporarily deferred by members of the pre-wedding ninja brotherhood for the purposes of humorous regaling with absolute license given for embellishment or complete manipulation/fabrication of the facts for the extension of merriment, amusement, embarrassment or ridicule.

It’s Friday, and I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a little underwhelmed of late. It’s nothing serious, just a simple a combination of small things like the complete lack of a summer here in the UK and a plethora of tedious work projects that are about as exciting for me as grocery shopping. I want to feel inspired and energized. The upcoming weekend away in Scotland with friends will help no doubt, but for now I’ve found a distracting site that allows me to peer across the expanse of the internet and find out how other people are feeling. Welcome to the voyeuristic virtual vista that is wefeelfine.org.

‘We Feel Fine’ (wefeelfine.org) is a clever and completely engrossing website that scours the internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings. The site scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. Having found an occurrence the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database including any image that accompanied the blog post.

For the end user of the site those feelings can be explored using a unique and quite beautiful self-organizing particle system interface, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains, clicking that sentence or photograph then takes the user to the blog from where the feeling was harvested.

Created by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar ‘We Feel Fine’ is described by them as “an artwork authored by everyone”. It’s been harvesting feelings since August 2005 and to date has collected 11,441,722 feelings.

So it’s Friday and maybe you’re feeling in need of a little distraction yourself? If that’s the case then I feel like you should check out this fascinating site. They say it’s going to be a sunny weekend here, maybe even a hot one too. If that’s the case then I’m quite sure I’ll be feeling fine again too.

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We Feel Fine

I know it’s the start of the week and probably too early to be posting websites for procrastination purposes, but I thought you might enjoy this one.

Canadian cartoonist Cathy Thorne takes a humorously look at the day-to-day things women face, but while her cartoons are obviously appealing to a female audience they’re funny and enjoyable even for a red blooded male like me.

Working from her home on a quiet street in Toronto Thorne publishes a weekly cartoon “about real women” on her website ‘Everyday People‘ which is really worth look. As a guy I found myself thinking “Yeah I know how that feels” when looking at some of the cartoons, like the one which shows a woman standing alone with a captions that reads; “It’s not that I want to change him, it’s just that he would be so much better if he were different.” Or another in which a couple stand apart, arms crossed in annoyance with the caption; “I know I’ve been overly emotional lately, but that only means you should be nicer to me.”

It’s a funny site that’s well worth a visit. You can even email the cartoons, though you can’t add a message to the email unfortunately. I wanted to email a couple of them but I decided against it because on their own I was worried that it might seem like I was just being mean. But there I go again, trying to preempt what a woman would think - I guess I’ll never learn!

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Everyday people cartoons