You Had One Job (a current Twitter favourite of mine) calls this “Brilliant”:
Agreed.
At a site called Idiot Toys they also do lots of gadgets with faces. Or, they did, because (I just looked) things seem to have slowed down there lately. But I can’t recall anything nearly as dramatic as the above image.
LATER: this.
Those little chinese cats, the ones that slowly wave their paws in the air, are often to be seen in gift shops. But I never thought I’d see one of these pretend cats being copied by a real cat.
Dogs will copy, including copying their humans, like in this bit of video at the same Twitter feed, but I never knew that any cats were also this way inclined. I didn’t know that there were actual copycats.
I guess my surprise comes from me not having known any cats who were growing up in the company of other cats, and hence still at the stage of learning how to be a cat, by copying those other cats.
Once more I find myself at tomorrow morning, without a posting here. However, as luck would have it, I was photoing Pavlova today, my two favourites being this … :
… , and this:
The sign.
The clock.
My friends Perry and Adriana now live a short walk away from South Kensington tube. I can now get to them in about half an hour, compared to over an hour when they lived way along and just off Kings Road, and a solid bus ride away from any tube station.
And just as good, every time I now visit them to collect the Amazon purchases that they receive for me, as I did today, I get to see one of my favourite statues in London, the one of Bela Bartok. When I walk past that, I know I’m going the right way.
Trouble is, when I go past Bartok, the sunlight usually arrives on his back, and I get a photo like this:
Nice windows. Shame about the face.
So, inspired by the example of 6k (see below), I cranked up my photoshopclone and redid the photo so that I could see what the face consisted of:
Nice face. Shame about the windows.
You could probably combine the two, and make it: nice face, nice windows. You. Not me. That kind of thing just does not interest me enough to want to know how to do it. I wanted to see the face and I did. Mission accomplished.
Indeed:
At the time I took that photo, in Lower Marsh, I was with someone else, and just grabbed the shot before moving on at once. But I reckon it came out really well.
Wikipedia tells us of Mickey Mouse’s compiucated origin. He was a replacement for a rabbit, and before a mouse was arrived at, it seems that many other animals were considered:
Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier cartoon character created by the Disney studio for Charles Mintz, a film producer who distributed product through Universal Studios. In the spring of 1928, with the series going strong, Disney asked Mintz for an increase in the budget. But Mintz instead demanded that Walt take a 20 percent budget cut, and as leverage, he reminded Disney that Universal owned the character, and revealed that he had already signed most of Disney’s current employees to his new contract. Angrily, Disney refused the deal and returned to produce the final Oswald cartoons he contractually owed Mintz. Disney was dismayed at the betrayal by his staff but determined to restart from scratch. The new Disney Studio initially consisted of animator Ub Iwerks and a loyal apprentice artist, Les Clark, who together with Wilfred Jackson were among the few who remained loyal to Walt. One lesson Disney learned from the experience was to thereafter always make sure that he owned all rights to the characters produced by his company.
In the spring of 1928, Disney asked Ub Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of various animals, such as dogs and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were also rejected. They would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. A male frog was also rejected. It would later show up in Iwerks’ own Flip the Frog series. Walt Disney got the inspiration for Mickey Mouse from a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney. “Mortimer Mouse” had been Disney’s original name for the character before his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it, and ultimately Mickey Mouse came to be.
Those two paragraphs are, at Wikipedia, crammed with links. Follow the link above and scroll down to where it says “Origin”, if you want to follow any of these links.
I will, however, honour the amazingly named Ub Iwerks with a link from here. I wonder how he was pronounced. His dad was from Germany, and I think I know how they’d have said the name there. But, Ub (!?!) was born in Kansas. When it came to Amercans pronouncing foreign names, all bets were off. My guess is there were lots of Germans where the Iwerks family grew up, and thus it was not felt necessary to do any name changing.
Blog and learn.
Many decades ago, there was a TV show called Juke Box Jury. I liked it best when someone said: “I like the backin’.” Subsequently, upon maturer reflection, I felt that I was quite right to zero in on that dictum, and I still do. So often, with pop music, it is the musical backing, rather than the mere singing, which turns pop inadequacy into something distinctive and entertaining.
Something similar can be said for photography. When a Real Photographer (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG) friend of mine was once upon a time telling me about how to do photoing, he too said: get the background right.
All of which is the preamble to this photo, which I took this afternoon, and the backin’ of which I like a lot:
That is a statue (so far so obvious) of (not so obvious) Prince Albert. When you image google for “Prince Albert statue London”, you get a lot of photos of him in golden splendour, seated inside his Memorial in Hyde Park, but not so many photos of this one. Judging by the other photos I did find of it, here, here (he calls it “the politest statue in London”) and here, this statue has recently been cleaned.
I am surprised at how much I have come to like statues, and public sculpture in general. Three of the photos in this posting of mine, which I linked to from here yesterday evening, are of public sculptures, two of them statues, of Beau Brummell and of Anna Pavlova. I didn’t plan this. It just turned out that way.
Happy New Year, by the way. I’ve had a good 2018, so far.
Not long ago, Perry de Havilland told me what sounds like an old, old joke, about the difference between dogs and cats.
We feed and pamper and love and look after dogs, and from this, dogs conclude that we are gods. We feed and pamper and love and look after cats, and from this, cats conclude that they are gods.
As I say, it sounded old, but I liked it. And I remembered that joke when, this evening, searching for quota cats or quota other creatures, I encountered these photos, of books, in the British Museum. Including a book about a cat …:
… and of that same cat, celebrated on a clutch of mugs:
I took these Gayer-Anderson Cat photos in Feb 2010, but I doubt it’s moved since then.
Read about the Gayer-Anderson Cat, which actually was a god, here. Gayer-Anderson wasn’t two people. He was just the one, a certain Major Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson.
Get your own Gayer-Anderson Cat, for £450. (£405 to members.) Or, you could 3D print your Gayer-Anderson Cat.
When I took these photos, I was in point-shoot-forget mode, and have given them no further thought until now.
I love the internet.
Today I was in central London. It wasn’t good photoing weather. Grim and grey and wet. But I did take this photo:
At the time, I thought I was photoing an army of Santas. For some reason I find the photoing of large numbers of similar or identical objects, in a big clump or clutch, to be rather satisfying.
But it turned out I was photoing two British Personal Brands With Huge Global Reach, namely The Queen, as performed by Elizabeth Windsor, and Mr Bean, as performed by Rowan Atkinson.
A lot of their appeal is that these are both characters who do a lot of physical stuff, rather than characters who talk a lot. Neither Elizabeth Windsor nor Rowan Atkinson are stupid or inarticulate people. On the contrary both are notable wordsmiths, blessed with famously subtle senses of humour. Nevertheless, the Queen’s daily repertoire of stuff is adopting Royal poses and walking or being driven about Royally and making Royal gestures and doing Royal things like shaking hands with a line of lesser celebrities. And Mr Bean mostly makes faces and does pratfalls. These are things that anyone on earth can see – see – the point of with great ease. You don’t have to know a word of English to get what The Queen or Mr Bean are all about. And if only a tiny percentage of the world’s populace like what they see of these two characters, that is still a lot of people.
You see Queen and Bean together, in effigy, in tourist crap shops, a lot. That I photoed the two of them accidentally is no, as it were, accident.
Despite googling it, I still don’t understand what this is about.
I am trying once again to clear open windows from my computer. Two days ago I referred to something very interesting that had been hanging around for some time on my computer screen. I am now doing this again.
This photo explains it pretty well:
This appeared at Dezeen early in October, and I’ve been meaning to mention it hear ever since.
You want more? Here you go:
An app has launched that allows users to instantly identify artworks and access information about them, by simply scanning them with a smartphone.
Smartify launched at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last week. It has been described by its creators as “a Shazam for the art world”, because – like the app that can identify any music track – it can reveal the title and artist of thousands of artworks.
It does so by cross-referencing them with a vast database that the company is constantly updating.
There was a time when art galleries and museums would try to stop you taking photos, but those days are pretty much gone. It was the smartphoners what done this, because there are just too many of them to stop with their photoing, and anyway this can’t be done because you can never really tell whether they are taking photos or whether they are just doing social media with their mates or catching up on their emails. This app will end this argument for ever. People are just not going to tolerate being told that they mustn’t use this in an art gallery, and if they do use it, its use will look exactly like they are photoing. The key to stopping photoing is that you have to know when it is happening.
In the summer of 2007 I was wandering along the south bank of the Thames with my Canon S2 IS, and came across this statue, outside a pub in Greenwich, called the Trafalgar Tavern:
I only got around to posting that photo at this blog in 2016, such time lags being frequent here. It often takes me a while to appreciate how nice I think a certain photo is.
But 2016 proved soon enough for the lady who did this sculpture of Lord Nelson, for her new website was only then in the process of being put together. An email arrived early this year asking me if I would mind any of my photos being used for this website, and if I was agreeable to this (which I was), could I supply original full-sized versions of all the decent photos I had taken of His Lordship? Which I did. I also asked, more in hope than expectation, to be informed if and when any use was made of any of my photos, and I then forgot the matter.
But then, a week ago, another email arrived saying that the photo above of Nelson was to be seen at the website, now up and running, of Lesley Pover, at the page where it says Nelson returns to Greenwich. I even got a name check with a link back to here, at the bottom of that page.
All of which is most gratifying. Ms Pover and her website maker have said their thanks to me. I in my turn am grateful to be associated, if only in a very small way, with such an accomplished artist, and to have made a contribution to such a fine looking website.