Said Sir Clive Woodward, no less, yesterday morning: England will return from Scotland comfortable winners.
Oops.
My new FZ150
No, I’ve not bought yet another camera. I refer to the new Panasonic Lumix FZ150 that I bought myself, as a late Christmas present, in January 2012. When I look back through my photo-archives it becomes clearer and clearer that this was the moment when my photos really started looking pretty.
On February 1st 2012, I posted nine of the photos I had taken on January 30th, of my fellow digital photographers. Here are nine more photos of photoers, that I took on that same expedition:
In these photos, we observe some dedicated photographers, with their SLRs, some hobbyists with what are still only cheap cameras, and, inexorably on the rise, smartphones.
One more for luck, an example of a genre I grow ever more fond of, the perhaps rather (in this case very) blurry bird, in flight:
I cropped the original, to hide the photoer’s face.
Yes, I picked nine good ones to show you, back in February 2012. Now I can easily show nine more just as good, and then another that I only now noticed.
That was the change that new camera brought with it. Before it, I took the occasional good photo, and many bad ones. When the FZ150 arrived, I took quite a lot of good photos, and as many bad ones as ever.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A fixture clash
I’m watching the France v Italy rugby game, which happened earlier this evening. It kicked off at 8pm. But I had a meeting at my home, which also kicked off at 8pm, so I had to ignore the rugby until now, late in the evening. But I set my telly-recorder, and all was well with that, so now I am watching it. As of now: France 5 Italy 7. Two imperfect teams, both desperate to “play rugby”, which means run like mad and score tries, which makes for a great spectacle for the neutral. The game, so far, has been what is technically known as “frantic”.
I am now on Twitter, observing but so far not contributing, and normally, following my meeting, I’d be catching up with that. But one of the Twitter things I follow is rugby, and I don’t want anyone to tell me the score. The only way to be sure of that not happening is for me to ignore Twitter, until the game is over. As in: over for me.
As for my meeting, it was addressed by Jordan Lee. Superb.
One of the good things about these meetings is that because there is no camera running, and because the aim is basically only to make sure that we don’t have the same damn conversation month after month, I can take a chance with speakers. I knew Jordan Lee would be okay, by that standard. But I had no idea he’d be as good as he actually was.
He talked about his work as a teacher of troubled children, the kind that have got spat out by regular schools, at a place with the wonderfully made-up-sounding but actually real name of Wishmore Cross Academy. Cross is right, judging by some of the dramas that Jordan described.
The gist of what Jordan Lee said was: there’s no easy answer to what the rights of children ought to be. They can’t be completely free, like adults. Nor can their parents own them and be allowed to tyrannise over them.
France are now winning, after fluffing a lot of earlier chances. Commentator Jonathan Davies said that they needed to be more clinical, and finally, they are starting to do that. France 24 Italy 10. I was hoping for an upset, but it ain’t happening. Later: 34-17, which looks like being it. France have only three tries and need another for a bonus point. France pressing, but no, France couldn’t manage that fourth try. France 34 Italy 17.
Bed.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Worse than bad form
There were so many fun things in Churchill’s underground wartime lair. Some of my favourites were not to be seen among the genuine antiquities. Rather were they mere reproductions, on sale in the gift shop. Of these, I think this one, a wartime poster, spoke to me most eloquently, from that far off time, just a handful of years before I was born:
I have always been very careful to refrain from dressing extravagantly.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Small Lego buildings and small 3D printed buildings
One of the photos illustrating this report:
Can we please have a Lego London?
I just typed “lego london” into google, not expecting anything helpful. A Lego cow in London. Lego shops in London. General Legonic activity of all kinds, in London. I did not expect to be told, right at the top of the list, about making London in miniature, out of Lego. But, I was immediately shown this:
Cancel my request for Lego London. It already exists, and it is very bad. Indeed, I would say that using Lego to mimic a very particular looking thing on a tiny scale is the very essence of what Lego is bad at doing, and the fact that Lego seems to spend so much of its time and trouble and focus and resources doing this exact thing spells its long-term doom. The whole point of Lego, surely, is that you can make everything – everything, that is to say, that you can make out of it – with a few generic shaped objects. Just like the Meccano of my youth, in other words, but architectural rather than mechanical. A big Tower Bridge, yes, good idea. A big Big Ben, not bad. But tiny versions of these, stupid and totally unrealistic? See above. Stupid.
For that, what you need is a 3D printer. And the smaller you make your small buildings, the more of them you can have in one spread.
A subset of them could be made to be exactly the right size for making buildings to attach to miniature railway layouts. So, do railway modellers use 3D printers, to make, not trains, but train layout appendages? It would make sense.
I just image googled railway modelling 3d printer, and got mostly 3D printed trains and train bits, rather than architecture.
Could making such models be the domestically owned 3D printer killer app? Because so far, a domestically owned 3D printer killer app has been conspicuous by its total absence, and any company which has tried to make its fortune making domestically owned 3D printers has gone bust. Such modelling – trains and houses and mountains and stuff – was all the rage when I was a kid, but all that has since been replaced by computer games. But might not those computer games in their turn come to seem rather dated? As is not the making of things now returning to the rich countries again, now that the computer guys are applying their wizardry to stuff-making? Conceivably, toys may some time soon become three dimensional and material again, with swarms of robot cars and lorries replacing the trains.
Probably not, because things seldom just come back into style like that, any more than dance bands ever did or ever will. More likely, the kid’s games of the future will involve some variation on virtual reality, which is to say they’ll be computer games only more so. If so, we might see a further reduction in the crime rate (see below).
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Television – video games – crime
These are experts whom I want to believe, so I do:
I have long believed that television caused crime waves, in each country it arrived in, by immobilising the respectable classes inside their respectable homes and handing the world’s public spaces over to non-television-owning ne’er-do-wells, every night. It is not the sex-and-violence-on-telly that causes the crime. It is the near total absence of these things. Violent people were repelled by telly, because it was so abysmally well-behaved.
I myself have spent a huge proportion of my life watching television. Had television not existed, I would have been out in public places fighting crime, by looking like I might notice it and then give evidence against the ne’er-do-wells committing it.
But now, with the rise of video games, it is the ne’er-do-wells who are busy playing video games. Video games are not well-behaved. You get to kill people, and to commit grand theft upon autos. If duty calls, it calls on you to kill yet more people.
Presumably, this evening, the public places are all deserted. I wouldn’t know. I am watching television.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Ladies in Quimper Cathedral
Yes, still ill, so still quota-photo-posting:
July 2009.
I like the hands.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Piano being played at Tottenham Court Road tube station
I am not well, so blogging here today will be perfunctory:
See what I mean. Photoed by me at Tottenham Court Road Tube Station, last Thursday.
Investigate this further, if you want to.
I’m off to an early bed.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A twentieth century bank robber gets a nagging from the cashier he is robbing
I still get cheques through the post, and then I insert these cheques into my bank account by going physically to my local physical branch of my unlocal bank and by handing the cheques over to a cashier. My bank, however, doesn’t like this. Just like Tesco, they want me to do the work. In Tesco’s case they now demand that I become my own check-out person and operate their computers for them. So, it’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose for me, from now on. Bye bye Tesco. In the bank’s case, they want me to do their work for them while I sit at home. But, I like the exercise. In the huge bank queue, I get to read a book concentratedly, because there is nothing else to do. Good.
All of which is a preamble to the fact that when I came across this, I LedOL:
“Are you aware that you can now do all of this online?”
Genius. K. J. Lamb, well done.
One of the many techniques they use to put you off actually going to the physical local branch of your Big Bank is to keep changing the people behind the bars. And these total strangers are constantly, and insultingly, asking you to prove that you are who you are. Well, madam, I’ve been banking with your bank for the last half century. Who the hell are you? Please could you give me proof that you actually do work here?
Someone should make a movie about a twenty first century bank robbery, where the robbers, who are disgruntled ex-employees of the Big Bank that owns the bank branch they bust into, bust into the bank branch, overpower the witless bunch of newbies who happen to be running the place that day, and park them all in a back room for the day with tape over their months, and then the robbers run the bank all day long, while one of their number hacks into the mainframe computer of the Big Bank that owns everything, and sucks all the money out of it. The point is: none of the customers who visit the branch while all this is happening would find it in the slightest bit odd to be confronted by a bunch of total strangers. That would ring no alarm bells at all, because this happens all the time.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
But they didn’t mean this thing to look like a penis
You wait nearly thirteen years at BMdotcom for a giant penis photo, and then, out of the blue, two come along. That one, in the post before last yesterday, and this one:
Crikey, blimey, etc.. Or as we Brits also used to say: Well I’m blowed.
Fox News, so also “other creatures”.
You Had One Job calls this an “unfortunate helicopter shot”. But I bet the photoer could hardly believe his extreme good fortune.