Brian Micklethwait

Quins wins

There’s been all sorts of sport going on lately, what with England playing cricket against New Zealand (NZ won) and against Sri Lanka (a mismatch), and then New Zealand finding the time in between the rain of Southampton to beat India in the World Test Championship. Plus, there’s been football, and all the fuss when Scotland exulted in their 0-0 triumph against England at Wembley, which was their best moment so far and England’s worst. Today Wales got thumped by Denmark, one of whose players nearly died in an earlier game, so Wales were the bad guys of that. No links because if you care about all that, you already know it and if you don’t know about it you don’t care.

However, my favourite sporting achievement of the last week or two has definitely been Harlequins beating, first, top of the table Bristol, and then defending champions Exeter, both very narrowly, to win the Rugby Premiership.

Before these two games, David Flatman said, at the end of the final highlights show of the regular season, that Harlequins would have to tighten up their defence. Flatman’s was the classic “I’d love it if they won but they won’t win it, will they?” attitude. Harlequins just carried on trying to score more points than the other fellows, which would have to mean scoring a lot of points, because they don’t really do that defending stuff well enough to win any gongs, just by defending. That was their attitude. When you consider that Quins conceded 36 points while beating Bristol in the semi and 38 points while beating Exeter in the final, I think we can say that their way of winning worked out pretty well.

I actually support Harlequins, them being based at Twickenham, through whose station I have travelled many, many times, going from my boyhood home to London or more recently visiting friends out west, including one who lives in actual Twickenham. But like Flatman I considered Harlequins to be heroic losers rather than winners. The sort of also-rans whose running makes the Rugby Premiership a title worth winning, but not the sort who’d actually run out the winners themselves. Fun to watch, until it becomes clear who is going to win.

Not this time. Highlights of the semi already recorded. Final highlights tomorrow evening at 11.30pm. Video set.

Stormtrooper in Croydon

Here’s the other odd thing I saw in Croydon yesterday, and after that, I’ll concentrate on the more serious stuff, the sort that will require an essay. So, here’s the weirdness:

On the left, well, that was the scene the friend I was meeting up with (a regular commenter who can decide for himself whether to be identified here by name or not) saw, when he said “Oh look, there’s a stormtrooper in one of those windows.” Not having his eyesight I had to be told where to point my camera, photo the photo, the photo in the middle of the above three, and then satisfy, myself by expanding the photo on my camera screen, that there was indeed a stormtrooper to be seen. And photo three is the money shot, or would have been if I were the kind of photoer who ever got paid money for photoing which of course I am not.

Without my friend to tell me about this stormtrooper, I could never have photoed it, because I would never have seen it. So, thanks mate.

And now that I know about this stormtrooper, I can go a-googling and ask: Is this stormtrooper one of these guys?

Coming soon (I hope (I promise nothing)): The tallest tower in Croydon, in colour. Also, another look at No. 1 Croydon.

A Helter Skelter ghost sighting in Croydon

Yesterday I visited Croydon, and one of the more entertaining things I saw and photoed was this, of the frosted glass windows of the exit that rises slowly up from East Croydon station platform towards the main entrance:

Which is London’s most remarkable Big Thing? The Shard? The Gherkin? The Wheel? The BT Tower? The Walkie Talkie? The new and biggest one one still known only as 22 Bishopsgate? I hereby nominate: The Helter Skelter.

The two remarkable things about the Helter Skelter, a representation of which is to be seen in the above photo on the right, is, first, that it was never built, but, second, that the way it would have looked if it had been built still lingers. It certainly lingers here.

The expression “can’t wait” is overused, by people who can wait easily enough but who would rather they weren’t having to. But, those designers whose job it was at that particular moment in London’s history to plug London, by reproducing selections of its Big Things, actually could not wait until the Helter Skelter was finished before they started incorporating its presumed likeness into their designs.

“This video makes me feel like CRT is a cult …”

CRT, as referred to in this posting, and in this tweet, stands for Critical Race Theory. I say that because I very much like the idea that at least some of my readers here have no notion of what “CRT” stands for. After all I do not bang on here very much about such things, having other preoccupations nowadays, here anyway.

However, this snatch of video strikes me a truly remarkable:

Wokeism is a new religion. Here's footage from one of their church services pic.twitter.com/mxNhZrHpwL

— Leo Kearse – political comedian/comedic politician (@LeoKearse) April 22, 2021

(“CRT” also causes me to remember a libertarian collaborator from my earlier late twentieth century life, Christopher Ronald Tame. Chris would have detested what CRT means now.)

I doubt that “Cardinal Pritchard” is really a cardinal, and if he’s not then I don’t know what else he is besides a (Not The) Babylon Bee writer, but this is what the Cardinal says about this bit of video.

In all seriousness though, this is one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a while. And I’m willing to bet that only like four people in that entire group found the experience “a little weird.” Cuz it seems like most of them are super into it.

If this feels like a “cult”, then I say that, in the days of my youth when I was an unwilling participant in it, Church of England congregations sounded to me just like this also. I suppose a religion is a cult that has achieved social respectability, by stabilising into a part of the social furniture and by becoming less pushy and obnoxious, and people no longer want to complain about it by calling it a cult.

But cult, religion, whatever. This is very clearly a religion-like event.

City Big Things photo

I love photos like this, looking up at the City of London’s Big Things, which I found above a piece of “partner content” at the FT:

Like I say, I like photoing upwards at the City of London’s Big Things.

So, although that “partner content” is very dreary, I do like the photo.

A way to think about photos is to arrange them along a spectrum, at one end of which is a photo that looks exactly as whatever it was looked like if you had been there yourself. But at the other end of the spectrum are photos which emphasise how differently the way the camera can sometimes see things to the way we humans do, and makes whatever it is look quite different to the way we’d mostly see it. Both sorts of photo are worth doing, one way or the other, depending on what you and trying to do with the photo. I’m just saying that they’re two distinct ways to do photos.

Because of all the reflections in the above photo (helped by the the fine weather), because of the untypical direction things are being looked at from (cameras (especially cameras with twiddly screens) don’t get cricks in their necks), and because of the difference between how humans see perspective and how cameras typically do this (this difference being why human artists actually had to discover perspective), this photo is much nearer to the looks-different-from-how-it-looks-to-us end of the spectrum.

Which is all part of why I like it.

Vauxhall views two decades apart

In 2000, I was mostly using my very first digital camera, a Minolta Dimage, to photo people, but I did also photo a few buildings, such as these ones. This is Vauxhall, seen from downstream:

And here are the same buildings, with recent additions and subtractions, as best I could find in my more recent photographic efforts, in 2020:

The two spots I was standing at are by no means identical. Different bridges, I’m pretty sure. And the angle is somewhat different. But, I hope you get the pictures.

The trick of photoing buildings, for me, is to focus not so much on the unchanging monuments, but for me somehow to divine which architectural scenes are about to change.

Failing that, as I typically do, I need to get lucky. And I got lucky-ish with these.

Cropping was involved to create both of the above images.

Two favourite footbridges

Indeed:

They are both about the same size, and both, in my photos, pointing in the same direction. Otherwise they could hardly be more different.

On the left, a footbridge which forms part of the walk from the downstream footbridge beside Hungerford Bridge, which enables you to carry on walking a bit above ground until you get to Charing Cross Station. This is one of my favourite walks in all of London, perhaps partly because it is so very short.

And on the right, the footbridge across Floral Street that connects the Royal Ballet School to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is not one of my favourite walks in London, despite being very short, because I can think of no way that I’d ever be allowed to walk this walk. I used to work in a bookshop that started out in Floral Street and then moved but only around the corner, so I used to see this little bridge often. I wondered how one might contrive actually walking across it and I still do. Getting to know some ballerinas would be a start, but only, I suspect, a start. Maybe they permit occasional tours at prearranged times, but I doubt it.

Both these photos were photoed early in 2004, with my Canon A70. This was around the time when I was just beginning to get the hang of how to photo London in a way that I liked.

I’m pretty sure I have shown these photos, or photos a lot like them, before, on one of my various blogs. No matter. These bridges are nice enough for me to be able to repeat myself about how nice they are.

Pavlova from a distance

If in doubt, here at BMNB, I go with Pavlova:

Okay, not bad. But the interesting thing is how far away I was. This next photo, done about a minute later to emphasise this, shows that we are actually way down Victoria Street, next to House of Fraser, quite a bit further away than, say, Westminster Cathedral:

That vertical smudge of sunshine between the big column in the foreground and the building on its left as we look is where a tiny and distant Pavlova was doing her dance. My eyesight is such that although I knew that’s where she was, I couldn’t properly see her.

But my camera, a rather recently acquired Nikon B700 (and yes mine is red also), was able to see Pavlova very clearly. Although, the slightest motion of the camera meant I completely lost her from the picture, so I had to have several goes at photoing her before I got what I wanted.

I wish I could tell you that these photos were photoed in the last day or two, but sadly, they were not. Last September.

National Geographic on the evidence for evolution

Following my recent medical disappointments, I have been pondering, as you do in such circumstances, the big questions. Like: What Do I Really Believe? And it turns out that one of the biggest things I believe in is evolution, as the best explanation for why we humans are the sort of creatures we are, altruistic and selfish, affectionate and murderously aggressive, doomed to die, and so on. I was raised by Church of England atheists, and that is what I still am. The older I get the more this is so.

But what is the evidence for the truth of evolution, as opposed to the rival god-did-it explanations which evolution is slowly but surely replacing?

Was Darwin Wrong? asks a recent National Geographic cover. Inside, in very big capitals, the answer: NO. (Thank you Steve Stewart-Williams.) I opened up the article, to learn what I hoped would be more about all this evidence.

No one observation of the natural world would be enough to convert a convinced god-ist, because after all, god can do anything he pleases. Atheism is hard to prove with one knock-out punch. But evolution wins, for me, overwhelmingly, on points. Point after point after point, each point being made perfect sense of by the idea of natural selection of chance variations, and each point meaning that any god is going to have to have been the kind of god who, for no very obvious reason, wanted all creatures without exception to look exactly as if they had all evolved. Simply, evolution makes sense to me, while god, especially the idea of God that Christians and Muslims proclaim, makes, to me, no sense at all. It’s the range and volume of evidence that is so convincing.

Two of the many points made in the National Geographic article made particular sense to me. It’s not that I’d never thought before about such things, just that this time around, they both hit home with particular force.

Point one:

All vertebrate animals have backbones. Among vertebrates, birds have feathers, whereas reptiles have scales. Mammals have fur and mammary glands, not feathers or scales. Among mammals, some have pouches in which they nurse their tiny young. Among these species, the marsupials, some have huge rear legs and strong tails by which they go hopping across miles of arid outback; we call them kangaroos. Bring in modern microscopic and molecular evidence, and you can trace the similarities still further back. All plants and fungi, as well as animals, have nuclei within their cells. All living organisms contain DNA and RNA (except some viruses with RNA only), two related forms of information-coding molecules.

Such a pattern of tiered resemblances — groups of similar species nested within broader groupings, and all descending from a single source — isn’t naturally present among other collections of items. You won’t find anything equivalent if you try to categorize rocks, or musical instruments, or jewelry. Why not? Because rock types and styles of jewelry don’t reflect unbroken descent from common ancestors. Biological diversity does. …

Point two:

Vestigial characteristics are still another form of morphological evidence, illuminating to contemplate because they show that the living world is full of small, tolerable imperfections. Why do male mammals (including human males) have nipples? Why do some snakes (notably boa constrictors) carry the rudiments of a pelvis and tiny legs buried inside their sleek profiles? Why do certain species of flightless beetle have wings, sealed beneath wing covers that never open? Darwin raised all these questions, and answered them, in The Origin of Species. Vestigial structures stand as remnants of the evolutionary history of a lineage.

As I tried to explain in this conversation with Patrick Crozier, evolution performs, for me, many of the functions of a religion, in that it gives the best answers we humans have to the “big questions”, like: Where did we come from? And: Why does life feel the way it does for us? It even makes sense of things which we personally reproach ourselves for feeling, like an extreme and “irrational” fear of irrationally hostile strangers.

What I do not feel, now or ever, is any need to believe anything to be true that I do not in fact believe to be true. In that sense, evolution is not my “faith”, if that’s what faith is. Doubting Thomas, in the Bible (here comes my Church of England upbringing), says to Jesus: “Lord I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.” I simply believe what I believe, and doubt whatever I doubt. I believe in evolution, not just as true but as very helpfully and very illuminatingly true, and I do not doubt it.

When checking the links in the above, I discovered that National Geographic doesn’t want me to read that article again. It seems I have gone beyond my limit. I hope that if you want to read it, you’ll be luckier.