Language – Page 4 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

The top bit of Alderney looks like a conductor

Yes. Did you know, that the top bit of Alderney, the northern most Channel Island, looks like a conductor. With a baton.

Photo on the right there, photoed by me from the plane back to London from Brittany, in July 2007. Now suitably rotated and cropped.

It would seem that a lot of people don’t know that. I can find no other references to this on the Internet, but cannot believe that I am the only one to have noticed this important musico-geographical fact.

Did you also know that the French for a conductor’s baton is “baguette”? That may be quite wrong, but I do recall hearing this somewhere, from someone. And it would seem that there may be some truth in this notion.

A different Wheel shadow on the Shell Building

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.

They’re not banging drums – they’re blowing a tiger horn

In this earlier posting here about The Plague, I said this:

The government will try to say that the continuing absence of Armageddon, which is what will be the next chapter in this story, proves that Lockdown has worked and is working. They’ve been marching down the High Street in weird robes and banging big drums to keep the elephant away, and look, no elephant! It’s working! It worked! No. There never was an elephant. A mouse, yes, maybe even a big old rat. But no elephant.

However, I must correct this. They have not, as it turns out, been marching down the High Street in weird robes and banging big drums, to keep the elephant away. I now learn that what they have been doing is blowing a tiger horn, to keep the tigers away.

Ivor Cummins explains. And tweets this, to get everyone’s attention:

Wow – the Tiger Horn is about to be blasted like never before!

Little old me doesn’t get to choose the metaphors for all this. Cummins does. So, forget about the elephant. Tiger horn and tigers it is.

The rise of global political parties?

I see that Brazil’s President Bolsonoro has been having a go at what Joe Biden said in the US Presidential debate, about Brazil and its rain forests and what he, Joe Biden, was going to do about them.

I am antique enough to remember when only Bolsheviks would plunge into what were then called “the internal affairs” of foreign countries. I suppose the EU was a big old exception to that rule, but that was only in a rather abstract and windy sort of way. Trouble is, modern communications, and I don’t just mean the internet although that is certainly part of this story, make such self-control ever more impossible. Thanks to the electric telegraph, and now its big bully of an offspring, the internet, it is the work of a moment to become acquainted with an argument in a far away country, and now, no matter who you are, you can join in. So, the idea that nobody should is doomed. Gonna happen. Just pick up a phone and start mouthing off to some foreign journo, and if you’re anyone at all big in the cheese department, they print it, or something related to it. Or, just say something about a foreign country shindig in one of your public performances, and those foreigners will maybe pick up on it anyway. Now, just sit down at your keyboard and bang away.

Communists, as I say, have been doing this ever since they got started in the middle of the century before last, during the first few years after the electric telegraph got started (Samuel Morse – 1844). Said the communists, contemplating this latest technological wonder: Workers (which was almost everyone in those days) of the World Unite! And from them on, whether in office or merely trying to be powerful, in public, in private and in the strictest secrecy, they interfered as much as they could in the internal affairs of other countries and they gloried in it. I mean, that was the whole idea.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the world did not abandon nationalism. Quite the reverse. As it turned out, the most important customers of those international electric telegraphs were newspapers, who were printing strictly national versions of world events to suit their strictly national readerships, and businessmen, who didn’t much care and who just want to get rich.

So, towards the end of the twentieth century, most politicians were still going through the motions of not being too public in their disagreements or (perhaps more interestingly) their agreements with politicians in faraway countries. Who the people of The Republic of Elsewhere choose as their leaders is a matter for them, and we will work amicably with whoever they choose, for the greater good of mankind. Blah blah. In private it got more heated, but in public that was the etiquette to be followed, and it mostly was.

Maybe it’s only my personal proximity speaking now, but I’d say that the Reagan Thatcher moment was when this hands-off-the-foreigners rule started being seriously put to one side. Those two made no secret of the fact that the warmth of their connection was not just based on him being President of the USA and her being PM of the UK, special relationship, blah blah. No, they downright agreed with each other, and by clear implication, wanted each other to win all their various elections, against other locals, with whom they clearly disagreed. It helped that all this happened within the Anglosphere.

More recently, I recall President Obama making it very clear who and what he wanted to win the British EU referendum. He was told my many of those who did not share his opinion not to interfere in our internal affairs, but given that he wanted to interfere, there was nothing and nobody to stop him.

Now even the Nationalists are at it, forming what is quite clearly a sort of global National International. Trump and Trumpists everywhere (think Nigel Farage) are starting to show up on the same platforms and to be more than usually friendly towards each other. Trump fights for his corner, which is the USA. And he expects other political leaders to do the same for their countries and to be equally upfront about that. And he wishes them well in their elections, against other politicians who have different tastes in such matters.

Trump has also been sceptical about climate change, as has Bolsonaro, which is all part of why, thanks to all those electric telegraphs, the American Left now hates Bolsonaro with a passion and can spend its entire day hating him, should it be inclined. So, Biden having a go at Brazil is popular with a lot of the people whom he wants to be voting for him. And Bolsonaro makes a similar calculation and hits back at Biden.

There’s lots more I could say about all this, as I often like to say when I am about to stop, but one thing worth emphasising is that the old arrangement – keeping one’s hands off of the other fellow’s back yard and him doing the same – was an unstable equilibrium. It worked if everyone did that, near enough. But once any big time politician breaks from this cosy arrangement, the pressure on the others to follow suit is irresistible.

Michael Jennings London photos

I have done a lot less photo-wandering of late than I would have liked, so I have kept meaning to post a Michael Jennings London photo here, to fill that gap here. But, I’ve never quite got around to doing this. Time to correct that, with a gallery of some of his recent photos, as already shown by Michael, one at a time, on Facebook:

The same circumstances that have had me staying at home more than usual have caused Michael to be staying in London more than usual.

All of the above were photoed, I believe, with a mobile phone, during the late afternoon or evening, that being an interesting time of day for light, especially when natural light and artificial light are about even in strength. (Is that why it’s called “evening”? Could be.) This also accounts for the predominantly sepia colouring that one normally associates with nostalgia-prompting photos of times long gone.

Will there be nostalgia for Lockdown, if and when it ever ends? Probably yes, on the same principle that some people, for accidental reasons, remember WW2 with some fondness, in among all the grief and stress. Many will remember liking the peace and quiet, even as they realise that it could not be allowed to last. Michael himself has spoken to me of the cleanness of the air. Not least because it allows photoing to be better.

A French cat and a Roman dog

An autumn scene, in France, with a cat:

One these autumn photos, picked out by Mick Hartley. Other photos Hartley picked out feature some cows, a pig, a dog, and a horse.

And, an ancient Roman scene, with a dog:

Cave. As in: car vey. Or KV, as we used to say at my posh prep school, where, for all the good it did us, we actually did Latin. By which I mean we had it done to us.

Here. Via David Thompson.

Fucking amazing rant by Scott Adams

Yes, this is fucking amazing:

For about ten minutes I thought: this isn’t a “rant”. It’s a calmly but firmly made argument. But then, the argument having been made, it suddenly turns into the fucking rantiest fucking rant fucking ever.

I have long been hoping – really fucking hoping – that Trump doesn’t just defeat Biden, but absolutely fucking crushes him and everything he fucking stands for and is standing next to, by the proverbial fucking landslide.

It is my clear understanding that this Scott Adams rant makes this distinctly more fucking likely. I mean, everyone’s going to want to fucking see this. Fucking everyone.

The “Mainstream Media” of the USA have not been the actual mainstream media for nearly two decades now, ever since the Internet got into its stride. This piece of fucking video fucking is going to prove that more fucking completely than anything else I have ever fucking seen.

I mean, quite aside from anything else, the old ex- “Mainstream Media” would never have fucking allowed anyone to fucking say “fucking” so many fucking times, without pulling the fucking plug on him. But now fucking Scott Adams can fucking do it. And I can sit, on the other side of a fucking great ocean, and I can fucking do it in this little fucking blog posting. And nobody is going to fucking stop either of us from fucking doing it.

Roll on that fucking landslide.