Category: This blog

Today I did Something (and saw five e-scooters (which are cool))

Typically, for the last few months, I have days and days of doing nothing other than whatever I feel inclined to do. On such days, doing two, three or even four blog postings here is doable. But give me a Something that I have to do, and there goes about two thirds of the day.

Once again, I think this is one of the many symptoms of getting old, for poor old me, anyway. Being old, I now need an hour or more to get myself worked up into a sufficiently active state to do the Something in question, and then when it’s done, I need a couple more hours to recover my wits. On a day like that, me doing three or four blog postings is a lot less likely. Today, if you include this one, I will have done three postings. But the first two were very perfunctory, more like tweets done on a blog than your actual blog postings. This one is a bit longer, but that’s just because it’s a ramble.

The silly thing is, the Something I did today was all done and dusted within about one hour. I stepped outside, went to my nearby bank, did my bank business, and then, because the weather was rather filthy, I just went straight home again. But even that made a big dent in my day.

The reason I mention all this is to make that same e-scooter point I’ve been obsessing about here lately, to the effect that e-scooters are about to conquer the world, aka London. Every time I go out, even just to the shops and back, I see several e-scooters. Today, the e-scooter count was: five. That’s a personal record. Five. In the space of less than an hour. I didn’t even try to photo any of them. Like I say, the weather was filthy, and cameras and rain do not mix well. Also, e-scooters are fast and are gone before I can photo them. That they’re fast is why they catching on so fast.

Maybe I should stop this posting now, but here’s another e-scooter thing. A friend with whom I recently discussed my current fascination with e-scooters said: You may be right about why e-scooters make sense. Trouble is: They’re naff. The people who ride on them are twats. E-scooters are not cool.

This friend, however, although far younger than me, is nevertheless no longer of the age where she gets to decide these things. It is teenagers and twenties who determine the coolness of lack of it of things like e-scooters. All my e-scooter sightings today were of teenagers or twenties. Clearly, these teenagers and twenties think that e-scooters are cool enough for them to allow themselves to be seen on them in public, given the advantages to them, in such things as speed and convenience. What old codgers think is only of concern to them if they can be doing something that the codgers disapprove of. If the old codgers, under the delusional impression that they think they can decide such things, think that e-scooters are not cool, so what? That’s just their old codger way of saying they don’t approve. Good. That’s a feature, not a bug. Bring on the e-scooters!

I am still not fully recovered from doing all that tedious Something I did earlier today. So, I reserve the right to go through this tomorrow morning and do whatever grammatical tidying and spell-checking is necessary. As of now, I’m too knackered to bother. I trust it still makes sense, despite whatever communicational blunders now afflict it.

Maintenance issues should now be sorted

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.

Maintenance issues

This blog is currently having maintenance done to it. There have been about two short outages today, and there may be one or two more tomorrow. If you come back tomorrow and find this blog not working, please just try again a little later.

New River walk with GodDaughter1 from Bounds Green to Enfield

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.

Now thrive the scaffolders and the craners

Quota photos, yes, but I trust amusing ones:

That’s the Tate Modern extension nearing completion, photoed by me five years and one day ago. So not really now. But the scaffolders and the craners do now still thrive.

Quota photos because I spent the morning failing to finish another piece of writing which just grew and grew. And now, I have to go out and Do Things, which always tires me out these days, so I wanted to have something here before I went out. More later. Maybe.

I hate not being able to go up that Thing and photo London and photo others photoing London. Can wait until it opens. And will. But would prefer not to be having to.

Reflections from One New Change

Rootling through the photo-archives, as I have been doing a lot lately, I came across a directory devoted to One New Change, and the views out over London you can photo from it.

Views like this:

Clear enough. Sky, very clear.

But then, I came upon this photo:

Weird. It’s some kind of reflection, obviously, but what it is reflected in? What was I doing to get that? I set the problem to one side and forgot about it.

But then, a few weeks later I think, I went back to the same directory, and came upon the answer. Because, here (below) was the same photo, with me merely holding the camera differently:

I photoed the photo where the reflected scene is horizontal from a similar spot, but with the camera turned round about two hundred and eighty degrees from how it looks in one immediately above.

Here’s another version of the above that makes everything clearer, by supplying some context:

That photo also shows how the top of One New Change itself looks.

You know me. I don’t just like to show you my favourite photos. My favourite photos are often puzzles, photos that make you, and for that matter me, ask: What’s that? And I want to find out, by looking at other photos taken at the same time, and then I want to explain them all to you, with all those other photos included in the posting.

Also, modern architecture is shiny.

Thoughts concerning To-Do lists

I have an ongoing To-Do list, consisting of a list of thoughts, in no particular order, just as they come to me, of subjects for postings that I might do here. One of the things that ought to be on my basic To-Do list, the one concerning my entire life, is: Regularly consult my Blog To-Do list. Because, it has been some while since I last did this.

But, this morning, wondering what to put here today to get things started, I did consult my Blog To-Do list (“2write4BMNB.doc”). I was curious to see (a), how many items were on the list, and (b), how many of these suggested postings I had actually done. I did not know the answer to (a), how many items there were on the list, but I was pretty confident that the answer to (b), how many of these posting I had actually done, would be zero. Because it so often is zero, when you come across a To-Do list of any sort, I find.

I’m not sure why this is, for me I mean, but I have a guess to offer. I don’t think it’s only that I am sorely lacking in willpower, although that is definitely part of it. There’s also the fact that To-Do lists don’t really contain the things that you really want to do, because if you had really wanted to do this or that, you would simply have done it, rather than put it on a mere list of things to do. I surmise, as many have before me, me included (but don’t now recall when or where), that the real purpose of To-Do lists is to decrease somewhat the chances of totally forgetting an idea about what to do that you actually don’t now want to do, but which you might later actually want to do, if only you could then remember it. To-Do lists keep alive memories of things that might one day be good to do. To-Do lists alleviate anxiety, about “forgetting” (see above) things To-Do.

The human mind is a big place. A mansion rather than a mere room, again as many have already said before me. It contains many facts and memories, hopes and fears, and it contains in particular many notions about things that you might one day want to do. You “forget” many of these. But, when reminded of this or that item you once were thinking about doing, you immediately “remember” whatever it was, and give it further thought. Maybe, then, you do it. And all because once upon a time you put it on a To-Do list.

Anyway, like I said several paragraphs ago, today I did consult my most recent Blog To-Do list. And here was the score. There were (a) ten items on the list. My recollection was that there were somewhat more than that. But no: Ten. But get this. How many of these ten had I done? The answer was an amazing, mind-boggling, in fact downright triumphant: Two. Two!!!! That’s twenty percent. I have actually done two of these postings! This is an astounding score, and I am hugely impressed by it.

For the record, the two postings in question were entitled: A national tree contrast and Two cats and a squirrel above the China Works Tower front door.

Remarkable. Truly remarkable. Hence, today, remarked upon.

The Screen of the Red Death – and transferring postings from the Old Blog to this New Blog

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.

Quota photo of the BT Tower advertising Follicular Lymphoma

Haven’t had many quota photos here lately, have I? But I am now about to go on what could be a long photo-walk, and don’t want to be worrying about not yet having stuck anything up here.

So:

Photoed from the top of my block of flats, last November. Ah, those were the days, when people worried about lots of diseases instead of just the one.

What is Follicular Lymphoma?

Follicular lymphoma (FL) is a slow-growing type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It develops when B-cells (also called B-lymphocytes) become abnormal. B-cells are white blood cells that fight infection.

The abnormal B-cells (lymphoma cells) usually build up in lymph nodes, but they can affect other parts of the body.

Have a nice day. I intend to.

Another perceptual flip to add to the collection – and why I find such things to be interesting

Yes, I do like these optical tricks that computer graphics makes it so easy for computer graphicists to play on the world.

Says Steve Stewart-Williams of his latest discovery in this genre:

If you cover the bottom of the ring, the top is closest to you; if you cover the top, it flips around.

Indeed. I clocked what was going on simply by scrolling, which I did because I wanted to see the whole thing, not because I had read what SS-W had said about it yet. But instead of seeing it all, I stopped seeing only the top and started seeing only the bottom, and … what he said.

A big part of the core curriculum of this blog, and of its predecessor, was and is something like: “How I see things and how other people seem to see things”. What do I particularly notice? What do you notice? Do you ignore what I notice?

Sculpture draws elaborate attention to itself. So does advertising. I notice both. Roof clutter and cranes don’t care how I or anyone thinks they look. They are just getting on with their jobs. Millions do not notice roof clutter and cranes, but I do, partly because of their unselfconsciously sculptural qualities. Do you ignore or notice some or all of such things? Chances are you do notice and enjoy noticing several if not all of these things, or you’d not be bothering with this blog. But if you ignore, I’m not complaining, just noticing. People vary, a lot.

See also, which is a generalised version of the above paragraph: Art.

But optical illusions are interesting, because, aside from being interesting for the usual fun reasons that people like them, we most of us tend to experience them in the exact same way. It would, for instance, be bizarre if you looked at the above-linked snatch of video and then wondered what the hell SS-W and I were both talking about. Sharing the same sorts of brains, I see most optical illusions in just the same way you see them. Assuming you share my interest in them at all and you see them at all.

Optical illusions thus celebrate what we all have in common. (Except those of us who don’t. Guess: Optical illusions, in addition to being fun, are also a tool to identify people with brain oddities or brain damage. ?)

Here is the previous one of these things that SS-W pointed me to.