Here.
Sometimes a blog posting could just as well have been a tweet. But most of my bog postings couldn’t. If Twitter had arrived before blogging, blogging would surely have been considered an improvement.
Category: Technology
Sun and rain in Brussels – February 2005
Every so often, I rootle through my rather chaotic (increasingly so as I go backwards) photo-archive, and every so often when I’m doing that (as I was doing last night), a particular photo jumps out, that I have no recollection at all of having taken, but (and) which I really like.
Such as this one:
The sunlight hitting the trees, and the pavement and the road, looks rather like snow.
That’s exactly as it came out of the camera. Which was only my second ever digital camera, a Canon A70.
Which sort of suggests that although things like superzoom on your camera have got a lot zoomier and cheaper, the basic way these things work hasn’t changed that much.
The screens on the backs of cameras, on the other hand …
Although come to think of it, what we see above is a scene with an abundance of light bouncing around in it. It’s when things get darker that the latest cameras really come into their own, compared to this old thing. The indoor photos in the same directory, of some long ago event in Brussels that I attended, now look very blurry and dated in their appearance. Either that, or hideously flashed, which I hate, and never do now, no matter what my camera says.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Pimlico roof clutter
June 8th of this year was a good day for roof clutter. In Pimlico:
It’s the variety I like, and the mixture of the ancient (the chimney pots (including some quite superior ones)) and the modern (aerials), that I like. The chimney pots are often very decorative on purpose, while the more modern technology is only decorative as a throw-away consequence of how it needs to be to do its various jobs.
In one of them, there is scaffolding.
It helped, at lot, that the weather was so nice. In my opinion, almost anything looks good in really nice weather.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Photoers ten years ago today
Yes, photoers photoed by me exactly ten years ago to the day, in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey, Westminster Bridge, Parliament, etc.:
Cameras you don’t see much any more. Even a free London newspaper you don’t see at all, any more.
Even the guy just smoking while photoing now looks a bit noughties.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A view from the Shard
Earlier this evening I did some laundretting, and while I was there, this showed up outside:
I still photo taxis with adverts on them, and I especially liked this one, advertising this.
It made me think of the last time I went up to the top of the Shard, just over a year ago.
So I took a browse through the photos I took that day, and this time around, this one particularly struck me:
That was cropped to confine itself to the one building, and photoshop(clone)ed to resist the dullness of the day and general fogginess of the original.
Part of me wants to say that this is a classic case of the behind-the-scenes bit of a building, a chunk of it that you are not supposed to look at and get all aesthetic about. It is what it is.
But I actually think that this is the facade of the building that the architects of it were most proud. There is an exuberance about this roof, done in the equipment-as-decoration style, that is utterly lacking in the rest of the building. The “official” bits of which are about as dull as dullness can get. They didn’t have the budget to go full Lloyds Building, all over. But they were able to go crazy on the roof, because the politicians whose job it was to tell them to redo the design more boringly didn’t give the roof any attention. They thought they were building a machine for studying in, but only on the roof were they able to go mad with “expressing” that machineness.
I reckon they were delighted that the Shard was later put right next to this block of boredom with a great roof, enabling thousands of folks to gaze down on their favourite bit.. Gotcha, boredom police!
Okay, just a thought, and a thought that could well be wrong. Maybe they really didn’t care how the roof looked. But take a look through these photos of this mostly very dull slab, mostly taken from street level, of course, and see if you don’t share my suspicions.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Poetry is not dead
Indeed:
Here.
She also wrote that NYT letter about white privilege, concerning which she Tweets:
Do not deny my lived experience.
Absolutely not.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A better way to package bananas
I can’t remember how Twitter caused me to arrive at this, but it did:
Bananas that are either not ripe enough or too ripe are a constant irritation to me. This – bananas sold in sets of bananas of different stages of ripeness – looks like a rather good answer.
A commenter immediately joins in and makes this into an argument about plastic in the oceans, the latest Green obsession that replaced the fading fear of climate catastrophe, except that the recent heatwave has now got them back going bananas about how the climate has now changed. Like there have never been heatwaves before. The climate presumably is changing, because it always does, but that’s no reason for humans to stop selling stuff to each other. Or for them to stop thinking of clever and helpful stuff combinations.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Interesting headgear
The final full day of The Great Heatwave of 2018 was two days ago, on August 7th. August 8th was a couldn’t-make-up-its-mind day, and today was a could-make-up-its-mind day, and it made up its mind to be cold and wet and generally horrible, perhaps in honour of the Lord’s Test between England and India, today’s first day of which was totally rained off. One day, magic beams will rise up into the sky from around the boundaries of all major cricket games and will divert the rain into giant vats, also on the boundary, and play will proceed no matter what the weather beyond the ground. (Such devices will also transform global agriculture, and make the entire population of the world obese.)
So, as I was saying, two days ago was the last day of the Heatwave, and maybe it was this heat which cause this lady to be wearing, in a street near me, this headgear:
This lady looked normal enough, apart from the headgear. I made no secret of the fact that I was photoing her, and she clearly saw me doing this and didn’t seem to min. Or maybe she was concentrating on her phoning and actually didn’t see me. Either way, I waited until her face was hidden.
The sane explanation for the headgear was the heat. And honestly, I do believe that this was what it was for. That heatwave really was very hot.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Heatwave jacket derangement syndrome
I don’t believe I am the only man to have been deranged by the heatwave in the manner I am about to describe, in fact I know that I am not, because I had one of those How-Very-True You’re-So-Right type conversations with GodDaughter2’s boyfriend, Only The Other Day, about exactly this matter.
I refer to the fact that I, and many other men, do not merely wear a jacket to fend off frigidity. We also wear it to carry stuff. It is our version of a handbag. In my case: wallet, cheque book and paying in cheques book (so I was born before you were – live with it) (both these items serve another purpose besides handling the financial instrument relics of the previous century, which is to fill up the pocket containing my wallet and stop the wallet falling out (which would be a catastrophe)), pen, purse, Old Git free London transport pass, keys, handkerchiefs, mobile phone, spectacle case with reading spectacles, spectacle case with spare camera batteries and spare SD cards (the latter for if I forget to put my regular SD card back in the camera), Disprins, cough sweets, regular sweets, eye allergy spray, and no doubt several other things I can’t now remember.
Unlike some men, I also carry an actual bag around with me on my travels, containing: a folder with paper to take notes, a shopping bag for if I shop, a camera, a book, a small bottle of fruit flavoured anti-dehydration liquid, any food I have bought, any spare garments I might need for if it gets colder, an umbrella, and even sometimes a laptop computer, on those days when I am in a mobile laptop computing sort of mood (although lately I have tended not to be in such a mood (too heavy)).
But, transferring all the clobber described in paragraph two above into the bag, and into the midst of all the clobber described in paragraph three above, is a serious derangement, not least because the bag gets far too full. For remember, what if, late at night, if the heatwave abates, I need the jacket? I have to have the jacket in the bag, just in case, even though it is far too hot to wear it and in fact, throughout the heatwave, it remained so. So, with everything now in an unfamiliar place, much of it buried under other bits of it, all the usual reflexes stop working. Nothing is any longer where it usually is. I start suffering from that frightful female syndrome of digging about inside the bag, frantically trying to find whatever it is. Which may in fact be in one of my trouser pockets, or maybe even my shirt pocket, for goodness sake. Oh God, where’s my wallet (which contains all sorts of priceless stuff which I dare not even itemise (see above))?!?! Etc..
Today, the heatwave sort of ended, as in: the weather oscillated between pleasantly warm and somewhat warmer. But unfortunately the London Underground didn’t get the email containing the link to the short-term weather forecast, and chose to remain full of the horribly hot air that it had been accumulating throughout the previous fortnight, or however long it’s been.
But the discomfort I suffered was the discomfort of wearing my jacket when it was rather hot. That I can live with.
But worse, just like the London Underground, I too found myself suffering a systemic hangover from the previous period of high temperature hell. Earlier this evening I was in a pub, and when my pubbing was done, I picked up my bag, and visited the toilet, prior to leaving. Luckily, while there, I realised that I had left my jacket on the back of the seat that I had been sitting on. I reclaimed it, seemingly unmolested by plunderers, except that … hell’s bells, my wallet wasn’t in it! It was, of course, in the bag, where I had recently been learning instead to put it.
It’ll be a few more days before I recover my usual calm and suave demeanour, when out and about.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Cricket lovely cricket
Andy Bull of the Guardian lists the runs per over totals of the fourteen overs it took for Aaron Finch and Jason Roy to score 194 for the first wicket, for Surrey against Middlesex in a recent T20 slamfest at the Oval:
14, 17, 23, 15, 14, 15, 15, 10, 12, 9, 15, 11, 10, 14.
Middlesex had scored what looked like a very formidable 221 in their twenty overs. Surrey demolished this target with four overs to spare.
Then, in the next game, Jason Roy …:
… managed the philosophically challenging task of getting stumped for a duck without facing a ball, as he overbalanced to a wide speared down the leg side …
I was indeed puzzled, as I perused the result of that game on my mobile phone. 0 runs scored, 0 balls faced. Stumped. But I worked it out for myself, so I guess I solved the philosophical challenge. Finch didn’t do much better, scoring a mere 16. But Surrey still won.
And in between, there was the little matter of England squeaking home against India. So, a good three days of cricket, which, with the magic of mobile phonery, I was able to combine with having a bit of a life.
Apart from the little fact that Joss Buttler, whom I earlier talked up, was the only total non-contributor to England’s win. He got out twice for a total of one run, facing all of four deliveries. Adil Rashid, whom I talked down, got three wickets, including the crucial one of Kohli in the first innings. Kohli had, by then, scored 148 runs. But if Rashid hadn’t then got him, who’s to say Kohli wouldn’t have scored another big pile of runs and given India a match-winning first innings lead?
At least I didn’t trash Stokes, who got the vital wickets for England at the end, or Surrey’s own Sam Curran, who got Man of the Match for taking five wickets and for turning England’s second innings from match-losingly terrible into, as it turned out, sufficient.
The second test starts on Thursday. And another Surreyite, Sam Pope, is in the England squad and could also play. I can’t wait, as GodDaughter 2 and her sister both say in such circumstances. Meaning: I can wait and I will wait, even though I would prefer it if I didn’t have to wait.