Category: Design

Some recent animal tweets from SS-W

Whenever Friday comes around, I like to do postings that involve the other animals with whom we share our planet. I mean, this is the internet. And currently my favourite source of animal stuff is the Twitter page of Steve Stewart-Williams. He wrote a book about one of the apes, The Ape That Understood The Universe, in other words: us. And his animal tweets often illustrate stuff he has already said in that.

But then again, sometimes he is just saying, along with the rest of the internet: Wow. take a look at this. There follow links to just a few of the many creaturely tweets SS-W has done lately, ones that particularly caught my attention.

Take a look, for instance, at this hammerhead shark skeleton. Wow. Or the amazing camouflage of the great grey owl. Wow again.

All the cute animal stuff on the internet is so cute because it shows animals plucking on our heart strings by behaving the way human children behave, often because they’ve evolved to do exactly that. Our animal pals can be unselfconsciously enthusiastic, eager to please, eager to try things. And as often as not they do all this with big round eyes.

Like this dog that plays volleyball with humans, or this baby rhino learning new dance moves. From a goat.

But don’t get too carried away with the cute. Take a look at how this stork throws one of its babies out of the nest. Take that, internet. And, don’t get all superior to Mummy Stork there. Humans are only as nice as they can be, and are regularly as nasty as they feel they have to be. For many centuries, resource-stretched human parents would give up on their less promising young ones, and I bet there are out-of-the-way spots on our planet now where they still do this kind of thing. Plus, you know, wars and massacres and whatnot. So yes, Mother Nature can be a bitch.

But then again, sometimes she’s a generous bitch. Venom from honeybees has been found to rapidly kill aggressive and hard-to-treat breast cancer cells. I wonder how they found out to investigate that. Guess I’d better now read the article.

Giant mouse

Well, no, not really. Actually a miniature carpet:

I did my best with some rotating and cropping, but it still looks like a regular sized mouse and a tiny carpet. Which of course it is. It’s number 22 of these silly things.

Number 19 is a sign saying: “Don’t kill your wife with work! Let electricity do it.” Which is entertaining to see, but you probably wouldn’t want to own it.

But I did like number 31, socks with sandals.

Number 46, a mobile phone that looks like a gun, might get you, as they point out, into trouble, but it might also get you out of trouble. Also, a gun that looked like a mobile phone might come in very handy in certain situations. They wouldn’t know what hit them until it hit them. But presumably Q has already done this.

Big Jim’s Trims behind its windows

This afternoon in Wilton Road:

It was the Walken faces that got my attention, as was surely the idea. Big Jim, or maybe just one of his hirelings, was behind the glass, doing a trim, and I was with someone. So this was all done in haste. But despite all the reflections and the confusions, I like them, and partly because of all the reflections and the confusions. What with windows being such a big deal in architecture these days. They create a lot of the particular look and feel of our times, the look being reflections, and the feel being the resulting confusions.

It’s late. All I’m really doing is showing you some half decent photos that I did today, rather than photos from my previous life.

Here’s the Big Jim’s Trims website. It’s a franchise. So, that won’t be Big Jim himself, just a guy with tattoos on his arms.

And here’s what that Barbicide sign is about. I can make no sense of it myself, but if you want to try, click on that, and I wish you luck. “Barbicide” ought to mean killing barbers, or maybe killing barbie dolls. Is that a clue?

Map of walking spots in London

Came across this today:

It’s a map of all the nice places you can walk through or along in London. I do lots of walking. This map has lots of words, which are searchable, so I may find this quite useful, to create Official Designated Destinations (these being the things that get me out of the house (actually my block of flats)).

If your eyesight is anything like mine, you’ll need to open that image in a new window

I found it at Londonist, but the map they showed had such low resolution that I couldn’t read it. What was it? One of my photos? No, but it might have been. I found a better version. Again with the words. Once you have the words, you can find anything.

London has a lot of parks, doesn’t it?

Colourful buildings in Leyton High Road

Memo to self, check this out:

This is the work of Camille Walala (who also did all this), and it’s Walala Parade.

The Londonist reporter is very right when he put, right underneath the above photo, these words:

Step onto Leyton High Road in east London, and you may think you’ve walked onto the set of a kids’ TV show.

The relationship between changes in childhood imagery and subsequent changes in the world of design and architecture is an under-explored subject, in my opinion.

In which connection, see also, this.

Like it or hate it (and I quite like it), the future of architecture is going to be more colourful.

Old cars

Photoed by me in London, between 2006 and 2015:

It’s the round headlights that qualify a car for membership in this particular club.

Nice logo at Lord’s

I have been spending part of my morning watching Somerset v Essex, courtesy the BBC. I am backing Essex because Essex is nearly London, while Somerset is nothing of the sort. And Essex are doing well. This morning they managed to get a first innings lead, which is a big deal because if it ends as a draw, they win. If you get my drift.

If you don’t, it really doesn’t matter, because what I really want to tell you about is a cunning logo I kept seeing, at the edge of this game, in the background:

Trade Nation. TN. And I really like how they combined the T and the N there. Because of my admiration for this logo, I even investigated the product. Pass. But, investigation is all you ask from an advert. I am old. I do have savings, and spare time. Just the sort they’re looking for, in other words. And although I’m not buying it I am now writing about it. Sometimes advertising really does work this well.

The internet streaming of county cricket is getting slowly but surely better, as is presumably the case with all sports just that bit smaller than big time. For county cricket, there used to be only one camera, and if the ball got hit to the boundary it went off camera and you had to take their word for it, just like on the radio. With this streaming of this game, we cricketophiles are seeing more. Soon, this will as good as regular television. At which point, the advertising spots at the ground will become that little bit more expensive.

I can remember when the internet was going to put an end to regular advertising. Didn’t happen.

Architecture for dogs

I get daily emails about “new london architecture”, and from Dezeen, the design website. From these emails alone, it is clear that the profession of architecture is in a bad way just now. Big new buildings just aren’t being built in anything like the numbers they were a few years ago. Even Zaha Hadid, who have been continuing to build big stuff in China, are being flattered by journos eager to keep in with them, not by plugging their latest Big Thing in China, but by writing about that space ship house that the late Zaha Hadid herself designed, several years ago.

The latest Frank Gehry project to get a write-up in Dezeen is a perfume bottle.

But of all the stories that speaks to this architectural go-slow, the one that I find most divertingly bizarre concerns an exhibition in London, organised by some Japanese goofballs, concerning architecture for dogs. Dezeen has noticed this, what with their being so little else of an architectural sort to be noticing, with a story about an architect who has done a sort of table thing that dogs can occupy, or something.

Dogs will get enthusiastic about anything their human bosses tell them to enthuse about. They’ll do anything to oblige. So they happily go along with this nonsense. But really. Could the world of “design”, all cool and calm and sophisticated and minimalist, be more completely at odds with the world of dogs, all enthusiasm and rushing about, sniffing each other’s arses and generally making a totally undignified spectacle of themselves and not caring a toss? To me, it all smacks of desperation. You can hear the wailing at Dezeen: What the hell else is there to write about? Well, I guess it’s dogitecture again.

Food and drink on wheels

Along the South Bank late yesterday afternoon. I photoed, among other things, food and drink emporia, mostly of the motorised or at least transportable sort:

My favourite by some distance is the one selling CLIMATE POSITIVE BURGERS.

Capitalism, eh? It gives you whatever you want.

New robot ship

My thanks to Facebook and Actual Friend Tim Evans for alerting me to this:

It’s Britain’s First Robot Ship. The coolness of that fake-photo is a big reason for this posting, but not the only reason. I am actually interested in robotised transport.

For some bizarre reason I found I was able to read the article linked to above, but then I wasn’t, and so far I’ve only skimmed it.

So what follows is speculation that could well be answered in the very article I’m linking to. But here goes anyway.

I sense a certain confusion about what a robot ship actually is. Is it a ship that is told where to go and from then on makes all its own decisions? Or is it a ship which is just as much commanded by a human commander, but is merely commanded by a commander who is using a radio link rather than being on the bridge of the ship? My guess is that there is quite a lot of the latter sort of human commanding going on. On the other hand, warships don’t like revealing to the enemy things like their location by sending or receiving radio signals, so maybe the ship really can command itself. But whichever it is, I’m impressed.

Ships now have expensive crews. You don’t need an onboard toilet in a car, or beds for everyone, or an elaborate food supply system. But on ships, you need all that and more for that crew. So, not having people on board is a big deal. Especially if you are sending the ship into battle.

But there are bigger issues than toilets and beds and canteens. The more I ponder the contribution of “robots” to transport, in the form of robot cars especially, the more I am sure that everything depends on a predictable and controlled environment, with the necessary infrastructural back-up. The DLR, with its centrally controlled “robot” vehicles, works a treat, because people, at any rate in Britain, are already well schooled in not wandering onto train tracks, and if they do and get themselves killed, nobody blames the trains. But cars in city centres trying to avoid disaster are a different story altogether, as the delay with robot cars is now proving.

And the sea, rather oddly, is a more controlled environment than a city centre. Although sea dramas can be very dramatic, they are mostly dramatic in a predictable way. Other ships are much more tightly policed than are all the things that can happen on the roads in cities. So robot ships, for war and for transport, make a lot of sense. They are yet another fun thing to be keeping an eye open for, during the next few years.