Here’s a photo photoed years ago during one of my Last Friday of the Month meetings, at my home. It took me quite a while, as in many years, to get that photo. What I wanted was what my meetings were like, but with no faces visible. Convivial, but with no conviviality being facially expressed. … Continue reading Learning how to photo my Last Friday of the Month meetings
One of the things I have learned from my stats page, which has been operating since the end of April of this year, is that quite a few of the people who come here like to rootle around in the archives. This makes sense. Much of goes up here doesn’t date. A pretty photo is … Continue reading Pavlova reflected … twice … and now here
Tomorrow, assuming I have it right, a test match begins between England and the West Indies, in Southampton. There’ll be no spectators, but they’ve all played either English county cricket or whatever is the equivalent in the West Indies, so the players will know how to handle that, no worries. My favourite moment in an … Continue reading An England v West Indies memory – at least I got how the stumps looked afterwards
Western Traditionalist says: Brutalism is an attack on the soul. And whoever Western Traditionalist is, he or she illustrates this opinion with the following photo, of a building and a sculpture: This building is the Torre Velasca in Milan, and it would appear that Western Traditionalist found the above photo of it at Wikipedia, where … Continue reading A building can be both an attack on the soul and beautiful
You get the feeling that a certain New Statesman piece, written in June 2016, must have had a rather big impact on the life and career of its author. Here is what the headline above it said: Calm down. Trump won’t be President – and Britain won’t leave the EU The piece under that was … Continue reading Ian Leslie seems to be learning from his mistakes
Yesterday I said Modernism isn’t going anywhere. Today I say that this doesn’t mean we can’t also have more Ancientism. Like this: That’s Photo thirty-five in the top fifty architectural photos that were competing for this prize. It’s Eltz Castle and it’s actually not a nineteenth century rehash, done by that bloke who paid Wagner’s … Continue reading And we could also use more Ancientism
I recently watched the 2019 movie about the Battle of Midway. Wanting to make a bit more sense of what I had just watched, I then purchased Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. This seems to be a much respected volume, and now that I … Continue reading Parshall and Tully (and Slim) on why Japan lost
As earlier noted, Patrick Crozier and I recently recorded a conversation about the Falklands War, involving both what we each remembered about it from when we lived through it (early in 1982), and what we have learned about it since, which was not a lot in my case but a bit. It was a strange … Continue reading Patrick Crozier and I talk about the Falklands War
The Nurture Only view being, in this case, the claim that all the differences in behaviour and attitude – with regard to such things as casual sex, attaching importance to physical sexual allure, and so on – between human males and human females are all caused by societal pressure. Says SS-W (on page 90 of … Continue reading Steve Stewart-Williams on how looking at other animals helps us understand why the Nurture Only view can’t be right to explain human sexual differences
Following an earlier posting here, which linked to a cement enthusiast, here’s something which I did not know about the sort of sand that is used to make concrete: The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest … Continue reading The wrong kind of sand