Month: November 2019

People who claim to have seen aliens have actually just seen baby owls

Here.

A horse named Covfefe

And it’s doing well, according to this Daily Caller report a couple of weeks ago:

A horse named “Covfefe” won a Breeder’s Cup event at Santa Anita today. Named after President Trump’s famous mistweet, she has now won six of her first eight races.

Further proof that Trump has the best words.

Pop musicians who are (or were) also model railway enthusiasts

Anything Jools Holland can do …:

… Sir Rod Stewart can do better:

I first learned of this via Twitter, as a result of following comedian Simon Evans, who liked this.

The Telegraph dug up as many celebrity toy trainsters as it could find, as reported in this piece. The only ones who are not popular musicians are Peters Snow and Sellers, although even Sellers had a hit or two. For me, the big surprises were Johnny Cash and … Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, imagine it. Did the rest of the Rat Pack even know? If they had, I reckon they’d have expelled him. Or maybe killed and eaten him.

So, Rob, your sons are going to be pop stars. Well, perhaps not. I am unfamiliar with the details of this subculture, but it is my understanding that not all model railway enthusiasts are pop stars. Like many causal links, this one may not work if reversed. But the link between being keen on making music and keen on making toy train layouts might be stronger than random, I think.

Gimbal

Until recently, I had no idea what a gimbal is. But, recently, I attended an ASI event. Clearly, the important photos from that night were those I photoed of fearless Hong Konger Denise Ho. But I also took these photos, of the official Real Photographer for the event, in action, with a peculiar stick which I took to be something to do with stabilisation-while-videoing:

I asked him: What’s that? He said: It’s a gimbal. I said: Excuse me while I write that down. So, how do you spell gimbal? He said: g-i-m-b-a-l.

When I got home, I looked it up, because basically I didn’t believe this. I mean, really. Gimbal? But no, it’s true. Wikipedia establishes its reputation for truth telling, which it then applies to politics by telling lies, by telling the truth about things like the gimbal. So, I believe this account.

If you look at Photo 1, you see the word “Ronin”. So, is the gimbal in my photos, this gimbal? There appears to be just the one sort of Ronin gimbal, so: could well be.

Photoers in October 2014

The majority of them being men.

Do you think that my only real interest in photoing photoers is that it is an excuse to photo ladies adopting pretty poses? That’s definitely part of it. As I’ve said several times before, someone should do a ballet based on digital photoers. But me not allowing recognisable faces makes it look more of a bodily obsession than it really is. Basically, I think the entire phenomenon of mass digital photography is a fascinating moment in social and communicational history, and one that has made a lot of people, me definitely included, very happy. And photoing happy, absorbed people is fun.

Which means that photoing men is fun too:

I think there are more men featured in this photo-clutch partly because the weather, that day in October, was rather cold. When it gets colder, women’s clothing gets less interesting and men’s clothing gets more interesting, converging on a single style based on keeping out the cold and not caring about style so much. In plain English: men tend to put on interesting coats and jackets and, above all (in both senses) hats; women tend towards covering up both themselves and their best outfits. (With women’s outfits, less is often more!)

Also, in photo 8, there’s a monkey wearing only shorts.

An architectural contrast

I am fond of writing from time to time, about how people with important jobs to do who spend too much time fretting about mere architecture are liable to take their eyes off the ball. What are we trying to do? This question can get lost when you decide to build, and then move into, a brand spanking new headquarters building.

So I enjoyed reading about yet another such contrast in the book by John Lewis Gaddis On Grand Strategy (pp. 125-6).

The contrast Gaddis mentions is between how much architectural complication Philip II of Spain made for himself and how, in contrast, his enemy Elizabeth I of England meanwhile preferred to keep things architecturally simple.

On the one hand:

Philip personally designed the Escorial, the grandest monastery any monarch would ever inhabit. He then filled it with relics and sequestered himself among them, unable to see beyond the responsibilities that engulfed him, and, as a consequence, the paperwork that swamped him

Elizabeth, on the other hand …:

… didn’t even design her own palace; she simply took over, or borrowed the ones she fancied.

Personally, I wouldn’t find it at all simple to be even borrowing a palace, let alone building one. But you get the point. A little less focus on architecture and a little more attention to Grand Strategy on Philip’s part, and the entire history of the world, no less, might from then on have been very different.

Egg-like ice balls are piled up on a beach in Hailuoto

Which is in Finland. Reported a few days ago by CNN, as they tweet here. With a photo.

I’ve had a complicated day.

Remembrance photos

Today, to mark Remembrance Sunday, I photoed poppies outside Westminster Abbey, and got the sort of photos I usually do get at this particular time of year:

But then, I made my way along Whitehall, where wreaths had earlier been laid at the Cenotaph, and then turned right towards Embankment tube. Thus it was that I walked past the Royal Tank Regiment Memorial …:

and I photoed one of the messages that had been placed on it:

To me that brings it home more vividly.

I wonder how long that life together lasted.

A new Zaha Hadid Architects railway station in Tallin

The perversely lower-case lettered throughout designboom reports that “zaha hadid architects” have won a competition to build a railway station in “tallin”, which will look like this:

At the top of all this is a bridge, so I’m well disposed towards this Thing straight away.

Transport seems especially to suit ZHA. Recall that they are also doing that amazing airport in China.

It’s something to do with the fact that transport positively demands the kind of flowing curves that ZHA always want to do anyway. A train or a plane simply cannot do too sharp a turn. These vehicles simply must shift direction with slow, ZHA type, curves. So, the ZHA style fits. Even a car has to slow down a lot to do a ninety degree turn. Even in the rectilinear architectural sixties, roads would curve, when changing direction. (Think of those amazing motorway intersections.)

Sad, then, that this particular clutch of railway lines in Tallin seems to be dead straight. I bet ZHA ground their collective teeth about that. The ZHA curvilinear style suits curvey railway lines, but a straight railway line (or for that matter a straight airport runway) can do what nothing else in the known universe can. It can enforce straight lines upon ZHA.