Here.
It would appear that dogs aren’t the only ones who copy what their humans do. (That link is to a posting on the Old Blog featuring a photo of my sister and her dog. I copied it over from the Old Blog to This Blog, just so I could link to it in this. You’re welcome.)
Any person who have had anything to do with IT (aka everybody) knows, when IT work is being done (even something as humble as doing some rearranging of a little blog like this one), that the word “should” can cover a multitude of unforeseen disruptions. So, maybe the little round of maintenance issues that Michael was dealing with over the weekend and then again this morning (he refers to them in comment 4 here) have, in reality, not yet been entirely sorted. But Michael and I both believe we have good reason to hope that, now, they have been.
One thing that you may have suffered from is that if you clicked on a link from a posting here to another posting here you may, depending on when you did this, have been told “about: blank”, instead of getting to the linked posting. This was caused by the fact that this blog was being migrated (to somewhere cheaper) but migrated before its name had been migrated. It changed its name from “brianmicklethwaitsnewblog” to “3.8.5.22”, and helpfully changed all the links from here to somewhere else here accordingly. It had then to be persuaded that its name was still brianmicklethwaitsnewblog. Which it now has been. As in: should have been.
Other strange things happened this morning, but they too have stopped, and so, touch wood and hope to die, all should now be well. If all from where you sit seems not to be well, please comment to that effect. (That’s assuming the comments system is itself working. Follow the above link and you’ll learn of three lost comments from last night.)
What I’m basically saying is: Sorry if you’ve been mucked about, but with any luck it should have stopped now.
On April 2nd 2016, GodDaughter1 and I went on a photo-expedition along the New River. It was most enjoyable, and I prepared another of those big photo-clutches that I could seldom bother to do on the Old Blog, so that you can now, if you feel like it, click-click-click through them on this New Blog. But I also wanted to link back to an earlier posting I did about a rather exotic looking duck that we had encountered that same day.
For reasons explained in this posting, all postings on the Old Blog linked back to from this blog have to have been transferred to the New Blog. So, here I am linking back to What sort of duck is this?
But, problem. That posting itself linked back to a posting about Trees pruned into strange sculptures, because GD1 and I encountered a really strange piece of tree surgery (photo (6.2), on that same expedition.
Which, in its turn linked back to Losing the leaves in Victoria Park, because, well, because it did. So that had to be transferred across too.
When I put it like that, it all seems pretty simple. But following the link chain backwards and then forwards again, opening up each posting about four times over, was the Grandma of all muddles that I had not seen coming, and muddles you do not see coming can get really muddled.
Anyway, it’s all sorted now, and here are all those photos I mentioned, at the top of this:
My favourite is the plate-shaped foliage that has been emptied upside down into the water (photo 28 (4.4)).
There’s lots more I could say about all these photos, but this posting has already gone on far too long, and I confine myself now to saying: See also the plaque about Sir Hugh Myddelton (photo 37 (5.5)), who designed the New River. Designed? You don’t design rivers. They’re just there. But yes, he designed it. The point being it was designed and built, to supply London with fresh water, right at the beginning of the seventeenth century. So, at a time when so many stupid things were in the process of happening, something truly creative also happened.
Well, one other thing: the occasional interpolation of extreme urbanness (e.g. a newspaper headline about Ronnie Corbett (photo 27 (4.3)) and the van covered in stickers (photo 21 (3.5)) is because when you walk along beside the New River, it sometimes dives underground and you have to go up to regular London, until you get to the next bit.
This afternoon, I found myself at Oval Tube, seeing a man about a mobile phone. The weather was filthy, just short of actual heavy rain, so you’d think there’d not be a lot of photo-fun to be had, but actually I photoed several things of note.
The photos describe just one of these circumstances.
Okay. First, I’ve arrived at Oval tube (by bus rather than by tube ut the point is that’s where I was), and I crossed the road in the direction of the City of London, that being the direction we’re now looking:
Now, here comes the kill shot, the photo this posting is all about. I’m zooming in on the what you can only see above in the far distance:
Forget the filthy weather. Just look at what we’re seeing there. There are two major Big Thing alignments happening there, in just the one photo. Top right, Shard next to Strata. (Strata is the official name of the one with three holes in the top. The unofficial name is something like “Razor”, but that’s never really caught on, because too few people in London care about this Thing to bother naming it.)
And the other Big Thing alignment, below and to the left of the centre of the photo, is the Walkie-Talkie and the Scalpel. (Another version of this same alignment, from the actual Oval, can be seen in this posting.
I did two further photos of each separate alignment there, but separate photos defeats the point of what is really happening here, which is that both are in the same scene and the same photo.
Besides which, I already blogged about the Strata/Shard alignment, in this posting from 2014. Click on that and you’ll see that what I was looking for then was to get the Shard right behind the Strata.
I just copied this posting over from the Old Blog, so I could link back to it without inflicting upon you the Screen of the Red Death. You’re welcome.
However, there seems to be a problem with that earlier posting, which is that I appear to be in the wrong place, according to the map there. In the above photo, the Shard is alongside the Strata. The actual Shard is further away and a lot taller. In order to see the Shard above the Strata, I needed to be further away. Yes, I just checked the original directory of photos (actually photoed in 2012 (from which those photos for the 2014 were selected)). To get those I was actually nearer to Stockwell tube, i.e. much further away. So it wasn’t that I didn’t notice that both alignments were photoable in one photo; I wasn’t in the right place to see it.
Besides which, in 2012, and for matter in 2014, there was no Scalpel. It wasn’t finished until 2018. So, the other alignment was not then seeable from anywhere. I almost certainly have photos to prove that, but this posting is already way out of control, and needs to stop, now.
My Old Blog now, if you click on it, greets you with this graphic horror:
Which puts me in mind of this old Vincent Price movie. No passing reader who happens upon that is going to go any further.
This Screen of the Red Death stuff never happened while I was still posting things at the Old Blog, but it did start happening a few months back. Just as well this New Blog was already in business. Well, in pleasure, anyway.
Ever since I began the New Blog, on May 1st 2019, I’ve been occasionally transferring stuff from the Old Blog to the New Blog, mostly beginning this exercise with the most recent stuff there, but earlier stuff also. And a regular trickle of people coming here do seem to read postings that have been transferred from the Old Blog. Especially the postings I’ve done about Emmanuel Todd, these having been among the first postings I transferred. Anyone who knows how to automate this process and would like to earn some extra dinner money, get in touch. But, warning: transferring stuff from “Expression Engine” to WordPress is complicated. Which is why I am doing it, for now, by hand, so to speak.
One particular thing that has driven this process forwards is that if I ever want to refer back to a posting on the Old Blog, I want never to oblige readers actually to go to the Old Blog, but rather to be able to read the posting here, me having transferred it to here before linking back to it. And that can get complicated, as I may or may not relate (I promise nothing), in a future posting here.
My favourite posting that is now here but used to be at the Old Blog is, I think, this one about Two geese. Or were they ducks? Whatever they were, geese or ducks, they were having a romantic interlude beside the River, and I photoed them.
Recently seen on Facebook, with that little “world” thingy at the top, which (I think) means he doesn’t care who reads it, beyond his circle of Facebook regulars:
I have had a problem with the hosting of the domain that my Gmail account is linked to with the result that it couldn’t receive email for several days. During that time I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time online and on the telephone sorting out something that wasn’t my fault. Suffice it to say that I am very impressed with the customer service of DiscountDomain24 (German company out of Saarbrucken) and I am really not impressed with Google’s. For those not familiar with Britspeak “really not impressed” means “I think their customer service stinks like a month old corpse in a pile of steaming shit”. Still, all working now.
Living on my own, I don’t get the twenty first century explained to me on a daily basis, so still cannot tell whether I am breaking some sort of Facebook rule. Can a friend who maybe recognises the above perhaps comment here? I mean, I was able to link to this, but can anyone? If they can, should I be telling them?
Here’s the link. I can get there. But can you? And should you?
Some or all of this may in due course disappear, depending on what anyone tells me about Facebook and its rules.
Here:
Natalie Solent mentioned this strange phenomenon in a Samizdata piece entitled Solving the problem of dogs stuck to the ceiling. Natalie quoted a commenter saying, ironically of course, that this is a serious problem which We Should All Seriously Think About, and herself commented on that comment thus:
Although the writer did not try to make any political capital from this issue, it did lead me to wonder what other problems in modern society are conceptually similar to the plight of these dogs.
Natalie’s point being that some problems are only problems because you are looking at them the wrong way. In this case, the wrong way up. It’s quite a profound piece. She says that the “gig economy” is such a problem, and I agree. There are definitely problems associated with the gig economy, like people not paying for work by the date they promised they would. But just making the gig economy illegal would make everything far worse for the gigsters. There already is a law saying payments have to arrive when promised, but it is no use to the gigsters at the lower end of the gig economy. They’d rather do work that they do eventually get paid for, probably, and in the meantime not antagonise such a customer. Their solution is to get more and better customers, not to sue. One of my best friends (the one who photoed this bird, and also the ducklings in the previous posting just below this one) is a gigster. As was I a few years back.
Like I say. Quite profound stuff.
But I only paid Natalie’s piece proper attention after David Thompson had linked to it, while mentioning that he got it via Samizdata. In his Friday ephemera, he likes weirdnesses of all kinds, and likes libertarian messages also to be smuggled in in among the weirdness. So, this was all perfect for him.
As mentioned in this earlier posting, I’ve found another photoer to follow. Sharpe: good name for a photoer.
The Sharpe photo (to quote one of his tweet-commenters: “Wow”) that got me pressing Follow at his feed was this Supermoon photo from last September …:
… is way better than My supermoon photo earlier this month. As, for that matter, is Sharpe’s Supermoon photo earlier this month.
Sharpe would appear to have a very similar photo-relationship with Ely Cathedral to the one that this guy has with Salisbury Cathedral. Both photo the same cathedral, lots of times, with the cathedral looking different every time. (A bit like my photoing of London taxis-with-adverts.)
I love exploring the countryside.
I’ve said it before, at the end of the last posting here, and I’ll say it again, at the beginning of this posting: It’s up. It being Patrick and me talking about the World War 2 bombing offensive. Patrick got it posted and listenable to less than a day after we recorded it. My salutations to him.
As you can see if you follow Patrick’s link, just by the notes Patrick offers, we meander a bit, as we do, but I hope not too intolerably.
I’ll add here a few things that Patrick doesn’t mention. Here are three blog postings by me, two here and one at Samizdata: The amazing Merlin; Dowding’s amazing lack of tact: The strange birth of the Avro Lancaster. Also, here’s a book that Patrick doesn’t mention in his notes but which I do mention in the podcast: A biography of Bomber Harris.
Our next phone conversation, we now think, will be about the Vietnam War. I made most of the running in this last one, but on the subject of Vietnam Patrick will be laying out the story, and I’ll be clarifying, or at least I hope I will. His basic thesis: The Americans won it, and then threw it away. My question, as of now, is: Did the rapprochement with China, and subsequent (consequent?) US victory in the Cold War, have something to do with the “throwing it away” bit?
You can listen to any, some or all of our recent podcasts by going here.
No …
The main reason is that AIs will themselves be part of the economy. …
One of the things I’m doing today is getting rid of lots of interesting links that have hung about on my computer since I don’t know when, without actually getting rid of them, in other words by putting them here. The idea was I’d have clever things to say, somewhere, about each of them, but all I really have to say about all of them is: Hmmm interesting.