Interesting Facts

According to a report from Bloomberg, Twitter is going to stop counting photographs and links in its 140-character limit. (There is no official reply from Twitter, but the founder Jack Dorsey has been reported as saying they wanted to allow users to write longer posts.  Don't go too far Twitter, it's your brevity that makes you unique.)

The album Abbey Road was nearly called "Everest". (This would have meant that one of the pop world's most iconic photos was nearly never taken, but the idea of schlepping up Everest for a photo shoot was abandoned, and on 8th August, 1969 the Fab Four walked out of No 3 Abbey Road, and whilst a policeman held up the traffic on Abbey Road, the photographer Iain Macmillan took photos as the band walked back and forth. Since then quite a few people have reproduced that moment, but with no friendly policemen around, they are taking their lives in their hands.)

Photographer Charles O'Rear took the iconic photograph, Bliss, that has adorned many computer screens around the world; the default wallpaper in Windows XP. https://plus.google.com/115724842162075287959/posts/WHHAYFpncaP (He took the photo 60 miles north of San Francisco in a wine region of Napa Valley called Carneros. It is now a vineyard, so that particular landscape no longer exists, but although the operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft, the image will live on for this generation. Estimates say that ‘Bliss’ may have been seen by over a billion people around the world, from Buckingham Palace in London, factory control rooms in North Korea to the situation room of the White House in Washington DC.)