Brian Micklethwait

Pavlova dances on a sign and next to a clock

Once more I find myself at tomorrow morning, without a posting here. However, as luck would have it, I was photoing Pavlova today, my two favourites being this … :

… , and this:

The sign.

The clock.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Made up abbreviated words

I’ve often wondered about words like these, but Susie Dent explains:

You can be gruntled (satisfied), kempt (combed), couth (polite), ruthful (full of compassion), whelmed (capsized), and gorm-like (have an intelligent look about you). And, for a while in the 1600s, you could be shevelled too.

A commenter adds the words “chalant” and “consolate”, which were apparently first used in a New Yorker piece.

Also in that piece: “wieldy”, “descript”, “gainly”, “cognito”, “make bones about it”, “beknownst”, “it would be skin off my nose”, “both hide and hair”, “toward and heard-of behaviour”, “maculate”, “peccable”, “new hat”, “terminable”, “promptu”, “petuous”, “nomer”, “choate, “defatigable”, “committal”, and quite a few that I surely missed.

Immaculate and impeccable are odd ones. Does im at the front mean not? It’s not clear. Pressive? Pact? Mitate? Agination? Immiserate sounds the same as miserate. This can get very intricate. Although, you may think it to be not very tricate. Also, I hope you are being ritated rather than the more common negative of that.

“Indefatigable” could be shortened twice. Defatigable. Fatigable. Which means something very similar to indefatigable.

Timidate. Timate. Genious. Sipid. Cest. Ert and Ept, I’ve heard before. Nuendo. Finitesimal. Juriours,

For “over”, you could just put “der”.

I hope this posting has interested you. My apologies if, instead, you have been terested.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A face and some windows

My friends Perry and Adriana now live a short walk away from South Kensington tube. I can now get to them in about half an hour, compared to over an hour when they lived way along and just off Kings Road, and a solid bus ride away from any tube station.

And just as good, every time I now visit them to collect the Amazon purchases that they receive for me, as I did today, I get to see one of my favourite statues in London, the one of Bela Bartok. When I walk past that, I know I’m going the right way.

Trouble is, when I go past Bartok, the sunlight usually arrives on his back, and I get a photo like this:

Nice windows. Shame about the face.

So, inspired by the example of 6k (see below), I cranked up my photoshopclone and redid the photo so that I could see what the face consisted of:

Nice face. Shame about the windows.

You could probably combine the two, and make it: nice face, nice windows. You. Not me. That kind of thing just does not interest me enough to want to know how to do it. I wanted to see the face and I did. Mission accomplished.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My original version compared to 6k’s version

I like my photo:

But I also like what 6k has done with it:

So, which is better? There’s only one way to find out!

Compare the two by looking first at one, then the other, and back again, and so, until you are able to decide.

Did you think I was going to say they should fight each other? That would be ridiculous. Photos can’t fight other photos. (Nor is it wise to fight fire with fire. Just found out about that one.)

I think I prefer the 6k version. Which is why I shamelessly ~~stole~~ borrowed it for here. That big 2, bottom right, is much clearer. But, not sure about the greeny-yellowy colour. You decide.

Ain’t the internet amazing?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The light and the lights on Blackfriars Bridge

This is the last of my postings about my walkabouts beyond Lower Marsh on Jan 5th and on Jan 18th, the three photos below having been taken on Jan 18th.

Just as on Jan 5th, the light was extraordinary. On Jan 5th, it was, for me, at its most extraordinary on Blackfriars Road, and then at Victoria Station (see the posting immediate below this one). On Jan 18th, at the same time of the day, it was at its most extraordinary when I was on Blackfriars road bridge, which is what Blackfriars Road turns into when it crosses the river. Blackfriars Bridge being the one next to the Blackfriars railway station bridge, as you can very clearly see here:

What we see there is the now nearly horizontal sunlight bashing in under the clouds overhead and picking out the bridge. Very dramatic. And just as on Jan 5th, the light was particularly good at picking out something painted red. On Jan 5th, it was a crane, the very same crane that we see in the above photo, in the distance, in front of 240 Blackfriars. On Jan 18th, it was Blackfriars road bridge itself.

The above photo captured the drama that I saw at the time. The next photo, taken moments before the one above, isn’t so dramatic. It felt very dramatic, but my photo captures little of the drama that I saw. The light that illluminated that scaffolding in the middle looked amazing. But I now have to point it out to you:

So, why this photo? Well, for my purposes, it does have one great merit, which is that it shows that the street lights, on the right of the road bridge as we look along it, were not switched on. Yet moments later, these lights were “switched on”, by the sun, just as similarly un-electrified lights in Victoria Station had been lit up by the sun on Jan 5th:

Behind these lights are the lower floors of One Blackfriars, now nearing completion.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The light and the lights of Victoria Station

Well, I’m making some progress on the WordPress front, and there will be a new BMblog, but meanwhile, the last of the photos I want to show you that I took on Jan 5. I took the tube back home, but chose to get out at Victoria rather than Pimlico, probably to try to buy the Gramophone, which I can now, near to me, only buy there. And because I did that, I was able to feast my eyes on this:

That is the late afternoon sun crashing through where the trains go in an out, and bouncing off various reflective surfaces.

I like how this kind of scene permits bright colours, like those little union jacks, but turns fainter colours monochrome, like when that little girl in a red coat appears in Schindler’s List.

I particularly like this little part of the scene:

What I love about sights like that is the way the sun turns those lights on. No electricity is involved. It’s pure sunlight.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The delivery scooter – first improvised now designed

Do you remember when those things started appearing on top of the cabs of articulated lorries, like the bonnets of Volkswagens, for pushing the air upwards, over the rest of the lorry. Something to do with the price of petrol having got so high that it made sense to buy a big lump of metal to stick on the lorry, just for the sake of lowering the air resistance and thereby saving a small amount of petrol?

And do you further remember how, in due course, lorry cabs started appearing where the lump on the roof of the cab had been incorporated into the design of the cab?

Course you do.

Well, now, something similar has happened with those scooters that delivery guys ride about on, delivering stuff. They used to be regular scooters, but with a big cube of a box attached to the scooter at the back. Regular scooter, big box attached.

But now, take a look at this:

That was photoed by me this afternoon, in Warwick Way, when I was out shopping earlier this evening.

And that’s right. The box is now seamlessly incorporated into the design of the scooter.

I did not see this coming. I should have. But I didn’t.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Another January 5th photo – trees and cranes and 240 Blackfriars

All this stressing about having to have a new blog is, well, stressful. So, thank goodness for all the lovely photos I took that day. They have been a great comfort. I have nearly finished bragging about them, but not quite.

This is one is one of my particular favourites from that day:

Remember I said that Windows Photo Viewer is turning everything a bit yellow? Well yes, it is, although a more accurate description would be: cream. And the odd thing is that the above photo actually looks prettier to me in its creamy manifestation than it does here, as taken. But, I still like it a lot. I suppose I could squirt some cream into it with my photoshopclone, but I don’t hold with that sort of thing, which has created another barrier, which is that I don’t know how to do that.

Once more, we see: trees without leaves, and behind them cranes, and behind them, the top of 240 Blackfriars. We are looking along Lower Marsh in a north-easterly direction, towards 240 Blackfriars, and behind that, the City of London and its bigger Big Things.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Today’s error message

Yeah, another. (See also: this one.) This time it was brief, and to the point, whatever point that was:

PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 7C8108EB

I don’t know how long that was the solitary message being sent out by this blog, but that was it.

It has become a priority for me to set up a new blog, powered by WordPress, and I need someone who knows WordPress to help me do that. In exchange for money. Anyone interested? Anyone know anyone who might be interested?

This blog being this blog, I am pretty confident that the answer, here, will be: Comments (0). This posting is more in the way of a memo to self. This is the thing I now need to be cracking on with.