A FULL PLATE

 The 2025 Tour de France has just kicked off this weekend. I've been following the Tour since the 80's and remember buying this book when I was at school, 40 years ago!

Apart from watching this year's Tour highlights I seem to have about a million other things to do  this month, and this post is just a random collection of images that caught my eye.

This month was also part of an experiment - back in May I had a month off doing any blog posts, and surprisingly my hits actually increased, so I became interested in checking out what effect not posting has on my hit count. I'll fill this month in later, but in the meantime, apart from this post, I will monitor a second month off and see if a pattern emerges. 

 

ONE OF MY FETISHES

 

For some reason I have a fetish for taking photos of strangers.

I lurk about with my camera waiting to get a snap of them. And then I post their pics online and hopefully my unwitting victims never know! Here are some lucky strangers that caught my eye.

(I like my strangers in a Polaroid style)

OVER US$12k FOR A BLOG POST

 

GET RICH BY BLOGGING!

Back in 2016, in the early days of the blogging platform Steemit – when it still looked like an awesome new blogging platform rather than a massive Ponzi scheme – certain key accounts were flinging money about in an apparent effort to bring in new users.

One of my first posts got a $400 payout. Although the whole thing looked a bit suspect, I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth – I just went “choice mate, thanks a lot” – https://steemit.com/photography/@sift666/my-obsessive-polaroid-photo-fetish

Next I started learning about crypto currencies, and by early 2017 was hanging out to get started. So I cashed out some of my Steemit earnings and bought Bitcoin. They were only US$1000 back then so US$400 bought 40% of a Bitcoin.

Cryptos went nuts that year, and by the time Bitcoin went up over US$15,000 I was getting sweaty and nervous. I managed to cope with the stress until they hit US$17,000, then I sold the lot and breathed a sigh of relief. They actually peaked for a short time at US $19,000 but $17k was an awesome point to ditch them.

So 40% of a Bitcoin went up from US$400 to US$6800. Convert that into NZ$ and it became NZ$10,300. Next I used that money to buy gold bullion, back when it was $NZ1700 an ounce, so that $10,300 soon went up plenty more.

Later when Bitcoin dropped back from US$19 to US$5, I bought some more Bitcoin  at US$5000, and that worked out well too. I just waited for that nervous sweaty feeling to come back, and then headed back to the the bullion shop – https://www.mygold.co.nz

 

WOMEN’S TENNIS

Back in the 90’s people were gradually waking up to the realisation that all pro athletes were on drugs. If you were not on the juice there was no point competing.  Now people are slowly waking up to the fact that almost ALL pro “female” athletes are men. Yes, they are all trannies…

And nowhere is it more obvious that “women’s” tennis – where beefy men in skirts rule supreme. Anyone who seriously thinks Sarena Williams is female probably also thinks “Michele Obama” is too…