Sandlander

If you immediately recognize this image at the left then you are ossibly, like me, an addict. Yes, I find myself compelled to visit play.blogger.com on a daily basis. It delivers a stream of visuals which are in the process of being uploaded to blogs hosted on the Google system.

The blue hills (and a second very similar photo), however, are a bit of a mystery. They appear repeatedly, almost every time I while away time using this insidiously appealing app.

Of course I could click through to see the blog in question - and I can't think why I've never done that before. But why would a bona fide blogger be uploading identical photos on a daily basis? To be honest, I've almost come to the conclusion that it's a kind of default automated system verification. Or maybe it's there to make you embarrassed that you've again been spending ages peeking over the shoulders of other bloggers and seeing the visuals they want to share with the rest of the world.

Animals, babies, duos and trios of Asian schoolgirls' self-portrayals, romantic landscapes, holiday souvenirs, the range of subject matter is logically vast.

When I note an image which interests me I'm surprised by how often I land on a non-English language site.

Clicking through when I stumbled on an example of high-energy street art I found the blog to be in Portuguese; it's now a subscription in the design folder of my blogroll and delights me daily.

There are amazing surprises in store when you start wandering through other peoples' visuals. For example, I found myself thinking about Tehran yesterday, after being confronted with the cars used by the elite police SWAT team in that city.



My understanding of all things manga, anime and outrageously kawaii has been deepened just by happening on an arresting rendering and then accessing the information posted, provided the blog isn't in Japanese! And when it is in Japanese there's the chance to discover, with any luck, new gems of Nipponese pop music.

Another realization arising from my visits to the PlayBlogger URL is the fact that so many of the blogs I click through to are in their infancy, hardly more than one or two months old. I think I must have surprised a novice blogger by sending a comment to her very first post!



Since it's Christmas Day , 8:30 in the morning in the United Kingdom, I imagine I am hearing the sound of wrapping paper being ripped from millions of presents... The seasonally appropriate shot below is not from the beach in front of my office window. But here in the Sandlands it's sunny and as pleasantly warm as it must be on the shoreline in Brazil.