I know exactly where to take you for this week’s ABC Wednesday post! Come with me to Venice – I found a great shop there, just behind Piazza San Marco: the Ferrari shop! And how neat is this – since I name all my ABC picture files using the letter plus numbers, the name of that picture is ‘F1‘! How fitting!

No, I didn’t go in and buy anything, and I have no clue how they got that thing in there, since there are no roads for cars in this district. I can only assume that somehow it came by boat. I’d love to have seen them do that, wouldn’t you?

Imagine a Ferrari being ferried down one of these narrow backwaters!

No shops in that picture, I fear, but there is plenty of washing flapping like flags among the flowers.

By the way, guess what they use as ferries on the Grand Canal? Decommissioned gondolas! Once their life as a tour boat is over, they have the fancy seats taken out and the gold plated fittings removed and the old gondolas are used as ferries to take shoppers from one bank to the other.

Fun? Maybe, but I didn’t like the way you had to stand up on the way over during ‘rush hour’. With my luck, I’d have fallen in.

No need to worry about that on the island of Murano. The canal here is hardly wide enough to need a ferry, and the bridges are frequent.

You might be able to spot an ‘F‘ in that row of shops, too – ‘F.lli Moretti’, which I presume is short for ‘Fratelli Moretti’, or ‘Moretti Bros’.

While we were on Murano, we had lunch. Fairly ordinary thing to do, I hear you say, but it turned into an adventure for me, because the speciality of all of the food places over there seemed to be fish – and I am allergic to some types of fish. Very allergic. But I was famished, and we found a place and sat down. Here’s a shot of the menu.

If you have very sharp eyes for fine print, you’ll see that there are only a handful of items on that menu which do not contain fish. There are fish appetisers, pasta with fish, fish dishes, fish, fish, and more fish. That small piece of paper there in front says (among other things) ‘Sono molto allergica al pesce. Il mio cibo deve essere cucinato separatamente dal pesce*’ and was written for me by the lovely T, because Italian is her mother tongue. It quite possibly saved my life because the people in this trattoria took it very seriously and cooked me something special, entirely separately from all the fish.

When we got back to the main island, we took a walk. Wandering through the funny little back streets and investigating the various shops on the way, I found this little gem. A photography shop – and since that’s spelled with an ‘F‘ in Italy, I feel quite justified in including it.

See that row of pictures by the door? Who is that famous fellow at the bottom there, the one with the white shirt? You know who, don’t you? Yep, Johnny Depp himself! It was taken at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. What a find, huh? There’s a short clip from an interview taken that year here on YouTube if you fancy it. He’s looking just as he is in that picture – which is just fine by me.

The fair hair, by the way, is because he’d just finished shooting Secret Window. It’s his ‘Mort Rainey’ hair.

* I am very allergic to fish. My food must be cooked separately from fish.

To start us off this week, for ABC Wednesday, I have a picture for you which was taken on my very first trip to the US to meet my Depp friends. I had been invited over to the Dewey Beach Greyhound Gathering where a whole group of women – most of them Johnny Depp fans – were renting a house for the weekend, and it was to be the first of many trips to meet these lovely ladies and their beautiful dogs. If I remember correctly, the house had no means to play the Depp movies which we all felt were an essential part of the vacation, so TJ had brought a DVD player along with about twenty movies. We watched most of them in a Depp marathon lasting till about 5.30am the next day, with Depp friend after Depp friend dropping out until there was just me and TJ, and one other ‘lady’, who was snoring non-too-delicately on the floor.

Anyway. One of the many pictures I took on the first day was that one. I had never heard of Dogfish Head beer, but I thought it made the window rather decorative. Things went downhill rapidly from there, and included drunkenness, dubious lighting displays (you don’t want to know), a lot of discussion about Johnny Depp, a very poor diet (mostly junk food), but not (as far as I was aware), drugs.

You can tell how our sense of humour deteriorated by this next picture

Yes, I’m afraid that middle book does say ‘Walter the Farting Dog‘, which, when you are staying in a house along with six or seven large greyhounds, seems amazingly apt, if not downright funny. It’s a wonder those dogs weren’t immediately renamed ‘Walter’.

While I was taking pictures, I heard a squeal (I think it came from TJ) and I turned to see my friends gathered around a shop window. What could they have seen? Well, that weekend it could have been anything from dog collars to doughnuts, but in fact it was Mr Depp.

Captain Jack Sparrow himself! That’s Cincinnati Sandy, by the way, with her delightful dog, Roady – and her booty; a poster delineating .. well, guess who! Yes, Roady does look a lot like my Princess Renie, doesn’t she? Sadly, like The Princess, Roady is no longer with us. A very great loss.

The Depp Ladies have met up again nearly every year since, sometimes more of us, sometimes less, at Dewey, mostly, but also in other places, such as California, where we visited Venice Beach. And, would you know it? We found another poster shop.

And there he is, Johnny Depp takes centre stage again .. well, actually, right of centre, but he is the focus of attention. And who is that, demonstrating that ancient insult, the digitus impudicus, otherwise known as ‘the bird’ or ‘the finger’? Why, it’s my dear friend Tennessee Jenn! She hates having her photo taken, you know. Tee hee.

So how do I finish after such delights? Well, how about an image of a crowded London square, complete with shops?

Okay, okay. It does have Johnny Depp in it. He’s the dapper guy in white and dove grey, with a dashing fedora atop his distinguished self. See the trademark dangly things at his waist?

But there are shops. If you can drag your eyes away long enough to look for them.

Yes, I agree, it’s difficult, isn’t it. Why bother? To quote from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, you could say:

‘I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request’!

So today a new round of ABC Wednesday begins with the letter ‘A‘! And once more I’ll be adding my tuppenceworth .. but what should I do for my theme this time around?

I thought about this long and hard. I came up with a few possibilities, but in the end I narrowed it down to this: I have decided to show you a few of the shops I’ve found worth photographing for various reasons over the years – and of course, if I spot any more, I shall photograph them specially, but I will try not to bore you. I mean, you’ve all seen plenty of shops, right? So I’ll do my best to make it a little more than just ‘Here’s an accessory shop, see you next week’!

This first post was easy. I’ve had the picture at the top there for several years. I think it’s quite wonderful, but I’ve never had the opportunity to share this wonderful thing with you, until now.

Anyone know what it is?

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the Apple ‘Cube’ building in Manhattan, New York! Which is, of course in America, so you get two ‘A’s for your money!

Going closer, you can see how the only part of the shop which is above ground is that huge, empty, 32 foot glass cube. All of the activity takes place underground, down that gorgeous glass spiral staircase.

According to MacDailyNews, the flagship store cost $9 million and opened its doors in May 2006, and was the first Apple store to be open twenty-four hours a day. Reportedly, a glass elevator broke down only six days later, trapping a group of students for 45 minutes. I just love the following extract from a news story in AppleInsider about the incident –

“As the students waited to be rescued, Apple Store employees used step-stools to slip bottles of water through the elevator’s erratically opening and closing doors. All the students eventually exited safely once police leaked the hydraulic lines, though some were reported to have received minor burns”

Although … not the bit about the burns, obviously. It seems that the police leaked fluid out of the hydraulics so that the elevator would descend and they could get at the doors with their equipment and pry them open, but the lift was still sinking to the basement level when the last two people climbed out, and they burned their hands on the lights in the shaft.

I assume that the glitch in the elevator system has now been fixed. One can only hope, otherwise, there’s no disabled access, and no way for people with babies in buggies to get down there, and no way to ascend again.

Oh, and by the way – do you know what my desktop picture is, on my own Apple laptop?

Yes! It’s the delicious Johnny Depp in his role as Inspector Abberline in the movie ‘From Hell’. And yes, he is in the bath. You might almost say it’s an aqueous picture.

Today, we have Jack, AKA The Pirate, posing for the letter ‘Z‘ in the last week of this round of ABC Wednesday. He looks like a pirate here – in particular, his namesake Jack Sparrow, who was always wondering why the rum was gone. Well, well.  I wonder!

But what has all this to do with ‘Z‘?

Well, I’ll tell you. Jack looks a little zonked here, which would be quite good all by itself, but in fact I chose that picture for another reason. Look carefully at that bony little face, and you’ll notice that there is a nice round curve to his face just under that right eye. There’s one the other side too, of course, but you can’t see it so well.  Anyway.  That is the zygomatic arch, otherwise known as the cheekbone.  We have them too – Johnny Depp’s cheekbones are justly famous.  He has a very pretty pair of zygomatic arches!  So my little Pirate was well-named, don’t you think?

You’ll probably be able to spot them in this picture too, now you know where they are.   But look!

Look at his shoulder!  He’s showing us a very nice sideways ‘Z‘ indeed, as a ripple in his fur – it’s actually folds of skin pushed up to his tag collar by his scapula, which doesn’t begin with ‘Z‘ but I thought while we were on the subject of anatomy, you might like to know.  Oh, and look how zig-zaggy the Princess’ fur is!

Not to be outdone, The Princess managed a very creditable ‘Z‘ of her own, this week -

Using her front leg!

The Princess was such a lovely dog.  We called her ‘Prissy Paws’ sometimes, because she was so dainty about walking in the wet, or in mud, or even gravel.  But one day she mis-stepped and cut her paw on some glass, and then she had one very Prissy Paw indeed!

The little purple sock is actually specially made to protect injuries to the paws and keep them dry.  They look like deflated balloons and they’re called … wait for it! … PawZ!  They’re re-usable, and they’re not too expensive – and she’s wearing royal purple, not because she was a Princess, but because that’s the colour code for her siZe!

She was a laZy girl, and spent a lot of her time snooZing on the sofa.

but occasionally, she could be quite zippy!

The Americans on the greyhound forum call this ‘doing the zoomies‘.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim that the greyhound statuettes on the shelf behind that sofa are brass, which is a pity, since it’s an alloy of copper and zinc. But some of them are bronZe, and some are bronze-coloured resin.  However, the fancy collar and leads here all have solid brass hardware.

They used to belong to my Princess, so they don’t get used any more.

Talking of zoomies, remember Billy WhiZZ?

He’s the pretty silvery brindle pictured here with Sid.  He very nearly had to lose a leg too, because he separated the growth plate on one hind leg and it wasn’t healing, but I’m happy to say he kept the leg and is now doing fine,  He’ll never race for his living, but he can still do some pretty zippy zoomies!

Let’s end with a picture of the lovely Sid.  Here he is, catching some rays out on the patio.  Catching some ‘Zzzzz’s, too!