Another taxi, another advert, saying this:
That’s right: PAY FOR YOUR JOURNEY WITH AMERICAN EXPRESS AND REALLY GO PLACES.
Unless this happens:
Same photo, photoed in the summer of 2017 outside the Royal Albert Hall, but with the bigger picture included.
2020? Really going places is not something being much encouraged.
Here are two signs that go rather too well together for comfort, I think you’ll agree:
And I bet I’m not the only one to have noticed, as I did in May 2017. The photos I photoed just before that and just after that were both moderately close-ups of the Walkie-Talkie, which gives you a rough idea of where this was.
Makes me think of this.
Although, when I image googled the Fry sign, the only images I got with the CCTV sign included were a couple of “alamy” photos. I hate “alamy” photos. They have “alamy” scrawled all over them.
Here’s a photo photoed years ago during one of my Last Friday of the Month meetings, at my home.
It took me quite a while, as in many years, to get that photo. What I wanted was what my meetings were like, but with no faces visible. Convivial, but with no conviviality being facially expressed. And it took me years to work out that the best way to get what I wanted was to stand on a chair and hold the camera up as high as I could, photoing lower limbs, but no faces, and photoing the kind of (decidedly junky) food that I serve.
It will definitely be quite a while before there are any more such meetings. Public moods can change radically, so never say never, but if the public mood concerning socialising remains at all like it is now, these meetings may already have seen their last. We shall see.
More generally, this is why photoing is a specialist activity, by which I mean that you have to work away at particular sorts of subjects before you get the hang of how best to photo them. I have photoed lots of digital photographers and have got quite good at it. I have not photoed many social groups.
You may say, well, given what you wanted – lots of youngish and casually attired bodies but no faces, a down-market style of hospitality – an aerial photo was the obvious answer. Well, yes, once I realised this, it was obvious. Once the obvious becomes obvious, it is indeed obvious.
A great deal of knowledge (all knowledge?), I believe, consists of that which is – has become – obvious. It’s just that it takes a while for the obvious to become obvious, for the penny, as they say, to drop. Many learning experiences have an element of Why-did-I-not-think-of-that-until-now? about them. Learning stuff need not lead to arrogance; it can lead to humility, as each step forward in knowledge proves how slow-witted you were to make it as slowly as you did.
A new online study finds that Republicans and independents are twice as likely as Democrats to say they would not give their true opinion in a telephone poll question about their preference for president in the 2020 election. That raises the possibility that polls understate support for President Donald Trump.
The headline above this story refers to the “Shy Trump Voter”.
Were I an American right now, I would not be a “shy” Trump voter. I’d be a Trump voter. But if, before I voted, some telephone pollster with whom I was wholly unacquainted was foolish enough to ring me up and ask me to tell him how I’d be voting, I’d stop the attempted conversation right there, tell him “no, not doing this” and put the phone down. There’d be nothing shy about the way I said this.
I have a good friend who rings me up from time to time, asking me about how I view the political landscape. That’s entirely different. He’s a friend. I enjoy those conversations a lot.
But election polling done by strangers has always baffled me. Who the fuck do these people think they are? Why does anyone give them the time of day?
Indian accent man: “Hello, my name is Barry.” Not doing that either.
Presumably, I am already on some kind of pollster’s black list. “Oh, he’s one of the fuck-offs.” Because, I seldom get bothered by these inquisitive arseholes, wanting to take up my time, and me to bestow valuable information upon them, in exchange for nothing. I could presumably put them on some sort of phone black list of my own, but I can’t be bothered. Besides which, me confirming, every few months or years, my status as one of the fuck-offs, is one of my life’s many little pleasures. That opinion of mine, about them, I am very happy to bestow upon them.
I love the animal tweets that Steve Stewart-Williams does, but a lot of his non-animal tweets are excellent also.
OK, I wasn’t expecting that: Car-seat laws function as contraception. They raise the cost of having a third child, because most cars can’t fit three car seats in the back. In 2017, the laws saved 57 lives in the US but led to 8,000 fewer births.
That’s been open on my computer for the best part of a month, but it refused to allow itself to be deleted. Too interesting.
By the look it, it’s like that bridge that joins Scandinavia to Scandinavia, with big long viaducts, a tunnel, island where the viaducts turn into tunnels, a in among it all. a tiny – but actually very big – bridge, of the sort that does the entire job in a place like little old England. Only, this bridge connects Hong Kong to China. (Or, as I now like to think of it, West Taiwan.) So, it’s bigger. The biggest.
There have been the inevitable complaints that it cost too much, in lives as well as money. But this is not just a bridge for business. When transport infrastructure gets built on this scale, in a place like China now, there are militaristic as well as business reasons for it to get finished. Money, in other words, is not that much of an object. Nor is the odd life or twenty.
I prefer Renzo Piano’s new bridge in Genoa, built recently to replace the one that fell down:
I liked the design of this bridge when I first saw it, and I like it now.
Maybe I’m becoming too pessimistic about the state of the world just now, but will that Hong Kong bridge be the last of the big bridges for a while? And will most bridges from now on, and for a while, just be replacements for bridges that need replacing, like that one in Genoa?
Seen on Facebook:
After many imploring comments begging to know where this is, someone finally obliged. It’s in Wales. and about a decade old now. But that’s the first I’ve ever seen of it.
The “Giant Hand of Vyrnwy”.
I wonder what state it’s in now. Holding up, I hope.
We are enterting a period during which there is maximum confusion concerning the future of vehicles, what they’ll be, how they’ll look, and so forth. It’s rather like the confusion that reigned around 1900 about what exactly an automobile was, and would look like. And of all the things I’ve recently seen that bear on the next phase in powered vehicle history, this is probably the one that grabbed my attention in the most grabby way:
Because electric motors are now delivering the same punch for a fraction of the volume, weight and all round fuss of the petrol engine, it has, it would appear, become possible to think of road vehicles as being formed of two distinct and separable elements, the vehicle itself, and its load. Look at those things. They’re basically the bottom bit of an electric scooter, with the wheels doubled up for stability, and made big enough to replace old school cars.
Suddenly, in the constantly promised but never quite delivered world of the robot cars of the future, we get a glimpse of how those robots might actually end up looking, and how they might function.
I note with pleasure that Ree, one of the companies apparently busiest in this area, is based in Israel, the state of Israel being one of my favourite states.
The article to which I just linked, and where I found the above photo, talks only of permanently bolting the top onto these sorts of bottoms, if you’ll pardon the expression. But why does the load have to be permanently attached? The load can now become a separate object of robotised transport. Which makes all kinds of transport fun and games possible. You don’t get into your car in the morning, to travel to Timbuktu. You get into your pod, made of super-lightweight super-materials. And your pod then gets automatically taken to Timbuktu. By container ship, plane, train or automobile of this newly flattened sort, depending on how much of rush you are in and which forms of transport happen to be the cheapest at that moment.
Presumably, they have thought of making a lorry-stroke-electric-skateboard of this sort that can have a shipping container loaded onto it. It would be very odd if they haven’t.
Those are just first thoughts, and could be all wrong. Because rule number one of these transport upheavals is: Nobody Really Knows. Please friends and commenters, tell me of any related developments of this sort that you learn about.
Many is the late afternoon when I have walked along the South Bank from Westminster Bridge, past the Wheel, and on downstream, until fantigue caused me to seek a tube station. And quite often, I have enjoyed the shadow cast by the Wheel onto the face of the Shell Building, Here, for instance, are some photos of this effect that I photoed way back in 2006. This was how such shadows usually look, featuring the clearly visible pods on the rim of the Wheel.
Yesterday, I did this same walk again, and as already revealed in that earlier posting, the light yesterday afternoon and evening was really special. There were numerous clouds that might have blotted out the evening sun, but they didn’t, or not always. Therefore, there were times when the sun was crashing in past Parliament onto the Wheel, and casting a Wheel shadow onto the Shell Building, just as usual.
What was not usual, however, was the exact nature of the shadow cast. Because of an accident of direction, and perhaps also a quirk of the time of year (I seem to recall another never-to-be-forgotten lighting quirk that happened around this time of the year seven years ago), the exact shadow cast on the Shell Building was very different:
You may not recognise that, but I absolutely do, and did. That’s the middle of the Wheel. No pods. No Wheel rim. That’s the bit around which the Wheel rotates and from which the spokes radiate. I have never observed this effect before.
I am beginning to get less hostile about everyone besides me calling the Wheel the London “Eye”. This is because of certain puns that only work if it’s the Eye. Eye shadow. Eye pods. Change it back to Wheel, and those two don’t work, and there are surely more Eye something or something Eye things to enjoy, if only I could think of any.
