A sneaky selfie by me, a week ago:
And a dozen sneaky selfies by Vivian Maier, photoed somewhat longer ago:
The point being that selfies are selfies, but sneaky selfies are selfies but with lots of other stuff going on as well.
Vivian Maier being my favourite of all the photographers whose work I have got to know by being a regular reader of Mick Hartley‘s blog.
Yes they do. Here are some I photoed on my recent trip to their country:
And here is a particularly interesting motorbike specimen, which I spotted inside a shop in Perpignan:
You see what they did there? They put a classic motorbike next to one of the great design classics of the twentieth century, the Barcelona Chair. What this says to me is: This motorbike is a work of art also. My photos are not works of art, on account of unwanted reflections, but they make the point I’m making well enough.
The best motorbike I encountered, and photoed with its owner’s proud permissions, was this one, photoed right at the end of my stay, while being driven back to Carcassone Airport:
The nearest thing to this bike I could find on the www was this. Not a perfect match, but an exact match on the colour scheme front.
I like to think that the French see something philosophical, Sartrian, existentialist, in their bikes. What with you riding a motorbike, today could be your last day alive! So climb on your bike and find your true self! Or something. I put this or something like it to a friend earlier this evening, and she said maybe they like bikes because unlike us lot here, they have roads which you can really ride motorbikes on properly. Sadly, I think that makes more sense.
Bloomberg reports that A $1 Billion Solar Plant Was Obsolete Before It Ever Went Online.
The US taxpayer faces an eye-watering bill. Which is very bad. But the interesting thing to me is why it was obsolete:
By the time the plant opened in 2015, the increased efficiency of cheap solar panels had already surpassed its technology, and today it’s obsolete — the latest panels can pump out power at a fraction of the cost for decades with just an occasional hosing-down.
I am not a close student of solar power, but to my uneducated eye this sounds like very good news. The savings that this rapid solar tech progress will yield will surely be worth far more than whatever the US government wasted (by being too impatient and/or corrupt) on this particular slice of pork.
There’s a graph in the Bloomberg piece which says that the “Cost of Solar Technology in $ Per Megawatt-Hour” has fallen from around $350 in 2009 to around $50 in 2019. Which sounds like quite a drop. I had heard rumours about how solar power is getting cheaper, but I had not realised how rapid this improvement had been. And, I’m guessing, will go on being.
New and overdue category here: “Energy”.
In connection with the death of Qasem Soleimani, Mick Hartley posts this picture [photo credit: AFP]:
Plenty of Middle Easterners are now, it seems, rejoicing.
In another posting, Hartley quotes Gerard Baker of The Times saying:
… But this wasn’t simply a case of retributive justice. This was no Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who were all essentially busted flushes when they met justice. Soleimani was the mastermind of a vast programme of slaughter, enslavement and repression that was continuing across the Middle East until the day he died. …
Meanwhile the Daily Mail offers this characteristically terse headline:
But no, I too had never heard of Soleimani until Trump had him killed.
Here is one of many fascinating little details from Snow & Steel by Peter Caddick-Adams (pp. 662-663), which is about the Battle of the Bulge:
[T]he town of Krefeld, a port lying on the west bank of the Rhine and north-west of Dusseldorf, had fallen to the US 84th (Railsplitters) Division, part of Simpson’s Ninth Army. Order needed to be restored to the town’s 200,000 inhabitants quickly, so the only GI in Divisional Intelligence who spoke German (the rest knew French) was promoted to become Administrator of Krefeld, in charge of everything from gas, water, power and transportation to garbage and hunting war criminals. The fact that he was a mere private mattered not; within eight days he had rebuilt Krefeld’s civilian government: the name of this multi-talented individual was Henry A. Kissinger.
That this book contains so many small pleasures like this one is all part of why it contains so many pages.
Indeed:
That was photoed by this blog’s setter-up Michael Jennings, last month, in Los Angeles. Presumably these cars were for some sort of movie or TV show. Whenever you see cars being carried about in lorries like that in London, that’s why they’re doing it.
I missed this photo when MJ first put it up at his Facebook site. But I encountered it more recently when an email incame, alerting me to another MJ photo. I liked that one, but then I scrolled back through all his recent Facebooked photos, and liked the above photo even more.
Here.
It’s Bryan Caplan (the guy who gave this lecture that I recently attended), talking to Darren Grimes of the IEA. Caplan disagrees with most voters, but in an ingratiating way. As he himself says towards the end of the conversation, if you have disagreeable things to say, say them agreeably and people will be more likely to listen.
LATER: Now, I’m listening to another interview. Scott Adams autobiographising. Terrific.
Found at the blog of Chuck Pergiel, who has occasionally commented here:
Read the whole posting here.
This evening I happened upon episode 1 of Trains That Changed The World on Yesterday TV, the show which has Steve Davies in it. This was the episode I missed the first time around, so I am very happy about this.
For the first half of the show, we were in Britain, covering the Stephensons and the transformation that trains wrought, as you’d expect, upon Britain. But then we crossed the Atlantic, and learned how trains put the U in USA. Which all the talking heads, including Davies, agreed that they did.
In particular I learned about this loco:
On the left, an Old Photo of what I take to be, more or less, the original. And on the right, painted in totally implausible paints of many colours, and also photoed in full colour, a Reproduction produced in the 1970s. And looking like it’s just got the part of its lifetime in Back to the Future 3.
This is the 4-4-0, the Model T of the railroad track. The big thing I learned about the 4-4-0 (which gets its name from its wheels) is that it burns wood rather than coal, on account of America being made of trees rather than coal; and that the big bulge on its chimney is to stop solid bits of burning wood pouring out and setting fire to America. I did not know this.
