How could anyone underestimate the resolve of this Spurs side?

Last night: Manchester United 0 Paris St-Germain 2.

This evening: Tottenham Hotspur 3 Borussia Dortmund 0.

From a BBC report on tonight’s game: How could anyone underestimate the resolve of this Spurs side after the manner in which they have kept pace with Premier League pace-setters Manchester City and Liverpool without any squad strengthening and recent injuries to key figures Kane and Alli?

But: Oh dear. Because this makes it that bit more likely that Man U will sack Solskjaer and buy in The Poch. Which it would seem they can do and Spurs are powerless to prevent, unless The Poch decides for Spurs. As he well might.

I really, really hope Man U contrive some kind of miracle revival in their away leg in Paris. As to what Spurs manage in their away leg, well, I just hope they get through, and that nobody else important gets injured.

And that the way Spurs are now playing says to Poch: You can’t walk away from this.

PLUS (later): This.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Alexa gets the bird (fruit, ice cream, light bulbs, a kettle ….)

This is definitely my favourite Other creatures story of recent months. Months because this was reported on before Christmas, and I’ve only just got around to mentioning it here.

Parrot used Amazon Alexa to order items while his owner was away:

So far Rocco the African Grey, from Didcot, Oxfordshire, U.K., has demanded treats such as strawberries, watermelon, raisins, broccoli and ice cream.

He has also ordered a kite, light bulbs and even a kettle.

Rocco likes to dance too and tells the voice-activated device to play favorite tunes. Sometimes they are slow numbers, but he generally prefers rock.

Where is voice recognition when you need it?

Alexa needs a setting, for junior members of a household, for whom she is allowed to play musical requests, but from whom she is not allowed to take purchase orders.

You’d think that with lots of kids in the world, many causing havoc, Alexa would be able to make the necessary distinctions. But it sure is entertaining when she doesn’t.

Columbia Road cat

Yes, a rather excellent James Bond villain cat, photoed in London’s Columbia Road, in the Bethnal Green part of town:

Found in the Instagram feed (click on that for her most recently instagrammed photo) of this lady friend.

Columbia road is, as other photos in this set make clear, noted for its flower market.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Burj Al Babas New Town

I wonder what this extraordinary place …:

… will turn into.

Approximately halfway between Turkey’s largest city Istanbul and its capital Ankara, the Burj Al Babas development will contain 732 identical mini chateaux when, or if, it completes.

Begun in 2014, the hundreds of houses have been left in various states of completion since the dramatic collapse of the Turkish economy led to developer Sarot Group to file for bankruptcy in November.

Too bad people can’t buy them one by one, and put them in lots of other places around the world. Sadly, houses don’t work like that.

Having them all next to each other surely defeats one of the major purposes of a new house like this, which is to outdo your neighbours.

It looks miniature, doesn’t it? The houses look like things you have to careful not to tread on.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Spurs win 0-1?

Last night, Spurs lost 0-1, at “home” (i.e. Wembley), to Man U. I had been half hoping that Spurs might lose, because this would make it less likely that Man U would want to replace their current manager, Solskjaer, with the man whom he outmanaged last night, Spurs manager Pochettino. Spurs really need Pochettino to stay, and they want Man U to back off trying to lure him away with their infinite money. It is all explained in this piece. I said that! But alas, I didn’t say it soon enough.

This being why the Spurs strikers were so careful to aim all their shots at goal straight at the Man U goalie, David de Gea. They want The Poch to stay with them too.

Just kidding. de Gea did really well. And concerning that, I liked this tweet at the end of the game last night from Watford goalie Ben Foster:

I see a lot of people saying all De Gea saves were straight at him, please factor in that the guy has some mad sense to know where to be at just the right time, you can’t teach that. Proper goally

But not very proper punctuation. What has Ben Foster got against full stops? Maybe he used up all his stops, performing a similar miracle to de Gea, for Watford against Crystal Palace.

I recall hoping on a previous occasion that my football team would lose. England were playing Germany at home. It was again a management issue. It was worth England losing to Germany if that resulted in Kevin Keegan ceasing to be England manager. Keegan is a great guy, but was wrong to manage England. England did lose. Keegan did step down. Soon after this, England beat Germany in Germany, 1-5. But sadly not in the World Cup or the Euros or whatever it was, which England and Germany both qualified for. Germany presumably won that.

My thanks to Patrick Crozier, with whom I dined earlier this evening, for lots of details about the above, which I had either forgotten or never knew in the first place, like Foster being the Watford goalie and England playing Germany in the last game at old Wembley and then winning 1-5 in Germany.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cluck

I was in the West End earlier this evening. Not having done any blogging here today, and today being Friday, I kept my eyes open for something creaturely.

I spotted this, in the window of one of those very Old School shops, in Cecil Court:

Ah, cigarette cards. Never had them here before. And I don’t think poultry have been featured here before either.

Click to get them a bit bigger.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Hell or Habito

I continue to photo taxi adverts, whenever I get the chance. Last Sunday, I photoed this one:

There wasn’t space for to get the whole taxi, and there wasn’t time for me to go the other side of the road and get the whole taxi, because I was in a hurry to be somewhere else. But I hope you agree that that photo suffices.

This being the century of the internet, I have since found this, and this, and this.

I bet Jimbo Phillips never thought he’d be selling mortgages.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The STAEDTLER Mars plastic has staying power

Recently, I bought a book on Amazon, about English as a Global Language. I’ve not read it right through yet, but it seems really good.

As regulars here will know, one of the things I like to do is reproduce short excerpts from books. This I do by scanning. But, unfortunately, my copy of English as a Global Language came to me full of underlinings of what the previous owner consider to be significant sentences and phrases. For what it’s worth, I often agreed with his choices. But such underlinings play havoc with scanning, so I wanted them gone.

Luckily they were not in ink, only in pencil. So, an eraser of some kind ought to do the trick. So, where could I buy an eraser locally? I actually wasn’t sure. It would certainly be a palaver. So, maybe I already owned an eraser. I had a rootle through a couple of small transparent crates, which I use to keep such things as pens, pencils, felt tip markers, and so forth and so on.

I found several erasers, all hard as rock. They hadn’t been used for a decade and they might as well have been plastic cutlery for all the use they were for removing pencil marks. But then, I came across this:

Just like everything else in the crate, this thing had not been touched for a decade. This too would prove useless, surely.

But no. It worked perfectly. The rubber was as soft and useable as it was the day, lost in the mists of time of the previous decade or even longer, when I first acquired it. Amazing. And the print of the book was utterly untouched, so soft was the rubber of this wondrous item.

One of the things you seldom see on the internet is any reportage of how well something works a decade later. Usually the reviews are instant. Does it work now? If it does, five stars, or four if you have some minor quibble about it.

So now, I am delighted to report that the STAEDTLER Mars plastic, or whatever it’s called, has real staying power, as a remover of pencil marks. Buy a STAEDTLER Mars plastic now, and if you still have it a decade hence, it will still work.

The thing is, it was such a trivial task. To have to have spent an afternoon wandering around London SW1 looking for a new eraser would have been so annoying. To be able to get erasing right away was just so satisfying, compared to all that nonsense. That the actual erasing took hardly any time at all only emphasises the contrast between how well things went and how annoyingly they would have gone, in the absence of my STAEDTLER Mars plastic.

I may never do any actual scanning of this book, but that’s not the point. The point is, now I can, with no bother.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Now thrive the cardboard makers

Indeed:

That’s the wrapping of the new sofa, which arrived the day before yesterday.

It interests me that cardboard seems to have defeated expanded polystyrene as the delivery wrapping of choice these days. It’s basic superiority is structural. It is weak in compression, but strong in tension, at least in one direction. Polystyrene is weak in every direction. Its only strength is as padding. And even there, cardboard (or just scrunched up paper) usually seems to suffice. Worst of all, expanded polystyrene is (the clue is in the “expanded”) takes up too much warehouse and lorry space.

Expanded polystyrene looks cooler. But cardboard does the actual job better.

And consider also the sofa itself. Central to its low price, compared to the big bulbous monster sofa style, is that it can be folded flat. Again, far less warehouse and lorry space.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Boxing Day posting

And here, as promised yesterday, are the other dozen of the Christmassy (Google reckons it’s double ss at the end there rather than the single s I used to name the photos) photos that I was gathering together yesterday. They, like the previous lot, are shown in chronological order, the first one being from 2015 to now, the most recent from earlier this month:

I used half a dozen of these two dozen photos to concoct a Merry Christmas photo-posting at Samizdata, in the small hours of this morning, what with there having been nothing there yesterday, until I did that. And then faked the timing. Just like I often do here.

Which means that, for the last week, I have not only done something for here, every day, but have done something there, every day. More on the thinking behind this sudden burst of Samzdating here, some time soon, maybe, I promise nothing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog