Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

A couple of recommendations for understanding The Plague

I am no doubt biased, by my libertarian politics to start with, and by the guesses I have already expressed in (what passes for me as) public. Nevertheless, for whatever it may be worth, I found this article, and, unusually, also its quite numerous comments, about why the world became so bent out of shape by this Plague, to be very intelligent. It’s more a panic than a conspiracy, he says. Which fits what I’ve been thinking.

And now I am listening to a man whose nickname is the Vaccine Pope, speaking with Ivor Cummins, whom I have been following on Twitter.

Oscar looks down on his neighbours

GodDaughter2’s Dad recently sent another photo of their cat Oscar, displaying his lack of any fear of heights:

And also, in this case, his desire to keep an eye on other cats in the neighbourhood.

Photo taken by GD2D from a nearby balcony. On the left, the original photo that incame. On the right, a crop showing the other three cats down below, just in case you missed them, as I did when I first looked at the photo.

I don’t fully understand Oscar’s relationships with other cats nearby. My first impression: It’s complicated. Whenever I witness Oscar “socialising”, there seems like a lot of exchanging of territorial proclamations going on, in among other stuff, but what do I know? And note that the three cats below are also, in a quieter and smaller way, keeping their distance from each other.

When you observe cats with each other, you get to realise how nice and polite most of them are to us, by comparison.

Scaffolding as architecture

I’m not the only one who thinks scaffolding is pretty:

That’s not a house that is being worked on by builders. It’s .. a house. It’s finished. Here.

However, when architects start “designing” scaffolding, I think that for me the scaffolding loses a lot of its appeal. A lot of what I relish about how scaffolding looks is that the people who put it up don’t care how it looks. When they start caring, as the designer of this scaffolded house clearly did, scaffolding loses its essential aesthetic purity.

Anther way of putting this is that once architects start designing scaffolding, I fear that it may start falling down.

Actual people attending a cricket match!

Yes, there’s an actual crowd at the Oval this evening. Well, a socially distanced crowd:

Note the presence of the Wheel, behind one of the gasholders. You can see a lot of Big Things from the Oval, if you know your way around.

It looks like a well attended four day game. Actually it’s a badly attended T20. I’m watching it here. Live. On almost-television.

Interestingly, they’re using the whole ground, and trying to hit sixes is rather difficult. They have to go a long way or you get caught in the deep. Makes a nice change.

Going by their form this year, Surrey, now well placed as I write this, will find a way to not win. If you care, see how it’s going, or more probably how it ended, here.

It’s a Golden Age for Pretending Not to Notice Acquaintances on the Street

Here. The point is made with the headline and the picture at the top. No need to read it.

Personally I have now reached that golden age on a permanent basis.

Getting old but also getting better

About a fortnight ago now, I suddenly started feeling pains in my lower back and stomach. They kind of meandered around, but centred on a spot just above my right buttock. After a few days of this not getting any better, I rang my GP – well, my “Medical Centre” – and described my symptoms to a receptionist. She promised that a doctor would ring back around midday, and when a doctor duly rang back and I again described my symptoms, he said, can you come in and see me in half a hour? Bending down to pick things up was very painful, but standing upright and merely walking I could do. So, I walked over to the Medical Centre, and within a few hours of my first call, I got the verdict. (There are lots of complaints doing the rounds now about how the NHS has been bent out of shape by the Plague, but for me, when it came to the NHS at least paying attention to me and my discomforts rather than just telling me to come back in a couple of months time, it seemed to be working pretty well. Maybe it was the hint of a possible emergency about my symptoms that got their interest.)

So anyway, yes, the doctor duly examined me and bent my legs around and checked how it felt. Doctor stuff. And his verdict was: Nothing serious. Just a strained muscle. Me: How soon will it stop hurting? A week? Doctor: A bit more than that I’m afraid.

Basically what he was saying was: It’s nothing serious. You’ll get better soon. Not as soon as you would like, but soon.

For the next few days, the pain continued, and I put up with it as best I could and as I had to, learning new skills for moving myself up and down by the use of my still fully functioning arms. Getting out of bed and into an upright position when I got up in the morning was the trickiest and most painful manoeuvre. Anything which required my stomach to exert itself, like putting on trousers or shoes, was hurtful. Getting up out of a chair meant pushing myself up with my hands and arms. I adapted.

But then, right on time and as if hypnotised by the doctor, my body checked the calendar, noted that the ordained time of somewhat more than a week had now elapsed, and I started getting better. Yesterday was painful. Today, it was just a dull and diminishing ache. This afternoon, I went out shopping in Tottenham Court Road. I did things like sit down in a tube train, get up out of a seat in the tube train, walk briskly along Tottenham Court Road. No problems. The worst thing was that it was raining, and the few photos I took were rather gloomy and blurry. Also, the tube train back was too hot, which doesn’t go well with being a bit damp when you get into it.

The relief I felt at this moderate but definite improvement in my bodily circumstances was considerable. When you are young and you get an illness or injury, the only question is: When will it stop? That it will stop and that you’ll soon be back and firing on all cylinders is not in doubt. But when I started recovering today, I realised that I had been semi-fearing that … this was it. This, the pain I had gone to see the doctor about, was what living inside my body was going to feel like from now on. The only thing that would change this would be when things took another turn for the even worse. That is what, in a dull, getting old sort of way, I had been fearing. I wasn’t caste down into utter gloom. After all, you expect this sort of thing as you age, and so far in my life I’ve been very lucky with such things. But, I had feared that this episode would go far worse than it now seems to be going, that is, that having gone rather bad it would stay rather bad from then on, until such time as it got even worse. What if the doctor had been sparing me the worst about how it could all go? What if he was simply wrong? But it now seems that not only was his speed in seeing me very speedy; he also judged my condition accurately.

And the relief I’ve been feeling today, also in a dull, getting old sort of way, has been, as I say, considerable.

More urban picturesque

To add to the collection. Although the second one here is maybe more urban gothic, because in it, a piece of innocent roof clutter looks more like some kind of science fiction monster:

Those were taken at the top of my block of flats, way back in 2006, just as I was starting to get the hang of this photography thing, both in the sense of what was worth photoing, and what would photo well.

I often read about how photos “communicated the excitement felt by” the photoer, and am typically skeptical. If the photoer was excited, it was because he was excited by the photos he’d taken. They made him excited rather than vice versa. Nevertheless I do recall being very excited by my first visit with a camera to that roof, which for a long time I was not able to get to, because the vital door was locked. And the above photos were taken on one of the earliest visits to this spot.

On the whole, the close-up roof clutter proved more diverting than the rather distant views of the tops of Big Things, with dreary vernacular boxes getting in the way in the foreground. The fun I get from photoing Things Big or Small is when they are combined and seen in new ways. But every time I go up to that roof now, everything looks pretty much as it always did. On account of everything being pretty much as it always was.

Flying cars are stupid

Apparently some idiots in Japan have tested something they describe as a flying car. What it really is is an aircraft capable of lifting a car. Big bloody deal. Why would you want to combine a car with an aircraft? They’re two different things. Cars are compact, to avoid occupying too much road. Aircraft reach outwards into the air, with big propellers or with big wings, to grab hold of the air and push themselves upwards. Two totally different things. Oh, you can build a “flying car”, that is to say a car which always carries a huge set of wings or propellers around with it. To put it another way, you can make an airplane capable of travelling on a very long runway shared with lots of other vehicles, by, you know, folding up its wings or propellers really really tightly. Yes. And you can make a baby pram that can also mow your lawn, really quietly so as not to enrage the baby. You can make a toaster that can also do the ironing. You can make an umbrella that doubles up as a snooker cue. But what the hell is the point of doing two such distantly related things, both very badly? Why not just do each thing separately, and each thing well?

I tried googling “flying cars are stupid”, for the first time just now. The least silly thing I read was this called that exact thing, by someone called James McNab. McNab ignores the point I just made and makes a whole other point, which is that flying cars would need to be driven by people as careful and skilful as pilots are now, rather than people as careful and skilful as car drivers are now. “You can’t handle flying cars!”, is how he puts it, referring to that movie where Jack Nicholson says “You can’t handle the truth!” Which, now I think about it is actually the same point as my point, but put in another way. Why waste a pilot driving a mere bus with hideously low mileage for half his working day, merely because, if you are rich enough and stupid enough, you could preside over such an arrangement? Makes no sense. We’re back to cars and planes being different.

Another big flying car idiocy is that flying cars will get rid of traffic jams. No, they’ll just create bigger and jammier traffic jams in the sky.

McNab also makes another point, which concerns why people who ponder innovation often start thinking that innovation has slowed down and may soon stop.

One source of innovation pessimism would be if you “invent” something that you think ought to have happened by now, like a flying car, note that it still does not exist, and say that therefore “innovation” itself has stopped. No mate. It was just a stupid idea, that did not happen for bloody good reasons. There’s plenty of non-stupid innovation going on nowadays. You are just fixating on stupid stuff. McNab accuses Peter Thiel, no less, of this non sequitur, when he goes from the non-arrival of flying cars to the slowing down of all innovation.

Interestingly, the writer of a book called The Rational Optimist has since written a book about innovation which ends rather pessimistically, in just this kind of way that McNab talks about. Matt Ridley’s fixation is on genetically modified crops, which don’t now work as well as they could because a lot of governments don’t like them. But those same governments have allowed plenty of other new stuff to happen. One of the features of a successful innovation is that it doesn’t piss off politicians too much. It sneaks under the political radar, and by the time the politicians have noticed it, the people already have millions of the things.

As you can surely tell, I am stream-of-consciousness-ing about this, thinking in internetted words. Which is one of the things this blog is for.

A photo of itself on the outside

In this earlier posting, about the very underwhelming lights of Piccadilly, I mentioned the relatively recent phenomenon of buildings covered in scaffolding, and the scaffolding then being covered with a picture of the building.

Last night, I came across an example of this in the photo-archives, dating from 2013:

That looks like a photo to me, made possible by the latest graphic trickery that they do with giant printers nowadays. My photo was taken through a bus window on a rather rainy day, but I think you can see what I’m on about.

We’re in Parliament Square. To the left is Parliament itself, and to the right, Westminster Abbey and Victoria Street. Is that St Margaret’s Church? At present I find the statues in the Square more diverting than the buildings around it. I’m in a rush to get out and get some exercise, so I’ll leave that question there. If nobody else answers it, I’ll try to answer it myself later.

2013 now seems to me to be about when this sort of thing started being done quite a lot, presumably because, around then, it could be done. But maybe it’s that I first noticed this happening around then. When archive-trawling I’ll try to see if I have any earlier examples of this sort of thing.

Once again, what we’re seeing is how a temporary circumstance takes the visual shackles off. If it’s temporary, you can do whatever you want, because if it isn’t liked, it’ll soon be gone. In this case, anti-trad grumblers didn’t have to endure this obvious shunning of an opportunity for anti-trad modernity for more than a brief while.