Month: August 2020

Towers and flowers

I spent this afternoon with Alastair, who often comments here. Great day. We walked from Greenwich to the Dome, with pauses for drink. So, am now knackered.

Which means that just one photo will have to suffice for now:

That was how the towers of Docklands were looking from the other side of the River, where there were flowers.

Good night. Sleep well. I will.

LATER: Well, I didn’t sleep that well, but I did get the starting point of our wanderings wrong. Blackheath, not Greenwich. Which makes it more than I said. Nobody else will care, but I like to get these things right, for myself.

Quotulated on the subject of responsibility

It’s always a pleasure to be Quotulated. That particular Quotulation being from a posting I did for Samizdata entitled Jordan Peterson on responsibility – and on why it is important that he is not a politician.

Here’s another bit from that Samizdata piece that was not Quotulated, but which gives you a flavour of it:

But getting back to what Peterson says about “responsibility”, the deeply refreshing thing about how he uses this word is that, because he is not a politician, he separates the benefits to me of me choosing to live responsibly from the idea of him deciding what he thinks these responsibilities of mine should be, and then compelling me to accept them whether I judge them to be wise or appropriate or meaningful for me or not. The process he wants to set in motion in my mind is of me thinking about what my responsibilities should be. He is arguing that I should choose my own cross, as best I can, and then carry it as best I can, because this is what will be best for me. He is not telling me which cross it should be, in a way that he calculates will be advantageous for him.

Because this Samizdata piece was done quite a while back, I began reading the bit of it that the Quotulatiousness guy Quotulated from it knowing only that it was a Quotulatiousness QotD, by somebody or other, and that it concerned Responsibility. I began reading it, and thought: This is not bad. I like this. I do like it when I read something I like, and then find out that I wrote it myself.

It doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes you read something you know you wrote, because your own name at the top was the first thing you clocked, and then you think: This is bollocks. (In this paragraph, for “you” read “I” throughout.)

Colourful messages in Victoria Street yesterday

One of the reasons I foresee a lot more colour in London in the next few years is that colour is all part of the imagery of thew political orthodoxies of our time.

These three photos, which I took yesterday, all illustrate this opinion of mine, or I think they do:

Left, 55 Broadway, flying a rainbow flag where previously flags like the London Underground flag or the Union Jack would flutter. Middle, a sign signifying the now near-universal worship of the NHS, outside the entrance to Westminster City Hall. Right, a rainbow very recently applied to the road. Who by? For how long? Not sure.

This sort of stuff is now the colour scheme of public virtue. These colours are not merely pretty. They mean something. They are all messages. Sexual identity flexibility. Ethnic diversity. These colours proclaim virtue, and denounce vice.

So, if you are against things being painted or decorated thus, that means you oppose virtue and you favour vice. This is why the colours will spread, because who’s going to stop this? Stopping it will mean favouring vice, and who’s going to do that?

Purple pavement passage

Which sounds like a description of a particularly florid piece of writing about a pavement, but actually I’m talking about this:

Passages like that one are one of the oddities of modern urban life. They happen when a rather posh building is being erected right next to a narrow pavement, over which they want to get some serious work done, but beneath which they do not want to antagonise potential customers and word-of-mouthers thinking about and talking about the people doing the building, thereby threatening the subsequent selling of the apartments or offices in the building, when it’s finished. If the developers mess with the lives of passers-by while they’re building, that at least suggests that they might have a similarly casual attitude to their actual customers. There is so much money at stake here, so big a gap between feast or famine for the developers, that a bit of extra bother at ground level, just next to the site, is well worth going to. Factor in the recent intensification of health-and-safety, and the desire by developers to avoid damaging fights with local bureaucrats, and you have yourself an entire new urban form, the scaffolded pavement passage.

In this particular one, which is in Victoria Street next to and beneath The Broadway, the shininess of the cladding on the inside and the colourful lighting combine to striking effect. We’re looking south east towards Parliament Square. The right hand photo is basically a close-up of the middle of the left hand photo.

I took these photos yesterday afternoon. As with so much that happens in cities these day, if you don’t like it, you needn’t fret. It’ll soon be gone.

Ireland beat the World Champions

The World Champions at One Day Cricket, that is, which would be: England. Today, cricket was back in a big way, in the sense that it was not just good, but that there was lots of it, all coming nicely to the boil.

Surrey nearly avoided defeat, but then didn’t, which was exciting to follow. At least Surrey were beaten by the other London team, Middlesex, rather than, I don’t know, some county in the North, that being because this year, it’s all being done with regional groups first, presumably to cut down the number of games played. Two other London-ish teams played each other, Essex and Kent. Essex had an unfair advantage. They had a Sir playing for them. Imagine that. Essex also had a new guy called Khushi playing his first game for the Essex first team, making this game his First Class debut. In the successful Essex run chase this afternoon, Khushi made 45 and shared a stand of 86 with Sir Alastair Cook, which basically meant Essex won. Imagine that. In your first big game.

With cricket you can tell all this sort of stuff just by following the score on the Internet, while occasionally consulting a player biography page. But for Khushi you didn’t even need his bio. He scored 2 in the first innings, and his highest score was his score in the second innings, and his total of first class runs was 2 more than he had scored in the second innings. Therefore, this was probably his first game for Essex. And there he was batting with decisive effect, with Sir Alastair.

After all that excitement, the England Ireland game, the third and final one of their three game series, England having cruised to wins in the first two, was bound to be a let-down. Thanks to their Irish born captain, E-something-something-n (pronounced Owen) Morgan, England got just under 330. Having only made about 200 in each of the first two games, Ireland obviously weren’t going to get anywhere near that. So, soon after Ireland had cautiously begun their “chase”, I went out, to replenish my photo-archive with photos taken this actual day instead of weeks, months or years ago, and after that to get some shopping done. When I staggered home with my shopping, I thought: I’ll just check out how much Ireland had lost by. And, well, imagine that. Ireland were 310-3 and about fifteen minutes later, they’d won. Wow.

I agree with those professional cricketers who have expressed the opinion that there ought to be more not-so-good teams, like Ireland, in the next World Cup. After all, what’s a World Cup without the possibility of embarrassing upsets, contrived by minnows whom everyone can unite in supporting against cricket’s versions of Germany (England, Australia and India)? Flushing all the lesser sides down the toilet, except one winner of some preliminary pre-tournament qualifying tournament, is just stupid.

I have yet to look at the photos I took.

Taxi with sealant and construction adhesive advert

I continue to keep an eye out for taxis with adverts. But, taxis are a lot less busy at present, because of You Know What, and their adverts now reach far fewer people.

But, the above observations may be because I, although not myself overwhelmingly affluent, live in a rather affluent part of London. The rich are getting out a lot less these days. But in less posh parts of town, life is much more like normal because it damn well has to be, aside from all the face masks. Taxis are busier, and adverts on them count for more, than either now do in central London.

So it was that I recently spotted this fine example of the species, outside Finsbury Park Tube:

One of the trends in advertising nowadays is that, because people can now easily do no-extra-cost photoing of adverts and read them at their leisure, it therefore makes sense for at least some adverts to be far wordier and more information-packed. There is a definite whiff of that about this advert, I think.

Watch the video here. “The snag list eliminator is here to stay.”

The adverts to which Google will now subject me are about to get very weird.

Tall bike under Blackfriars Station Bridge

A all regulars here will surely know, I love weird transport, especially weird personal transport. The personal transport doesn’t get much weirder than this biker on a very tall bike.

We’re under Blackfriars Bridge, the one with the Railway Station on it, on the south bank of the River. I was walking downstream. He was biking upstream. I had just photoed some buskers, in this busker spot, and he was just about to ride past those buskers. Because he was biking from right to left through my field of vision and through my photos, it would make sense to view the above photos by clicking on the right hand photo and then clicking the left arrow, rather than in the regular way where you start on the left:

That’s the tallest bike I’ve ever seen in its metallic flesh, so to speak. I mean, how the hell do you get on and off? From some sort of platform? What a palaver. I’m guessing he was some sort of entertainer, and I’m also than guessing that he knew exactly where he was going, and that all the clearances he would encounter would be taller than him on his tall bike. Although, with something that weird, all such bets are probably off.

I photoed this biker on his tall bike in October 2017, and I don’t believe I’ve ever got around to showing it before. If I have, then it is weird enough to bear the repetition.

Despite having walked along that part of the South Bank many times, I’d never seen this biker on his tall bike before, and I’ve never seen him since.

Tower Bridge at night

Lots of postings yesterday, but today, after one, other things to do. So, to make it two today, here’s a quota photo that I like:

This is another of Michael J’s, photoed, presumaably, on one of his nocturnal walks in the clear air of London (See his comment there). I copied it from his Facebook site a while back, but now cannot find it there. He has other photos up of a similar sort, including that earlier Shard photo, and including another similar view of Tower Bridge which includes the Shard, here.

I particularly like the way the surface of the water looks, like a rectangular grid of reflected light.

A new bridge in China: More than just a bridge

Indeed:

This is the Wuchazi Bridge, and very fine I think it looks. No wonder dezeen cannot resist showing lots of photos of it, of which the above photo is one and the below photo is another.

Says dezeen:

The design team created a continual walkable path within the Wuchazi Bridge as part of its aim to make the structure a recreational destination rather than a purely functional piece of engineering.

The sort of place, in other words, where those visiting it would behave like this:

I especially like those two bikes.

I’d be taking a lot of photos like that if I ever visited this place.

Which I surely now will never do, no matter how my circumstances change. Wuchazi is in China and politically, China is now an abomination. The world played nice with the ChiComs for forty years and now they’re shitting on us all. The idea that individual bits of shitting, like on Hong Kong, or like the Plague they unleashed while forgetting to tell us in time, can now be individually cleaned up is delusional. The HongKongers, the Uyghur Muslims, the anti-Plaguers and all others who don’t like how China is now governed need all to get together and try to change how China, all of it, is now governed. We may not succeed if we do this, but we will have fun trying and the government of China will really really not like this. On the other hand, if we do not unite against our common enemy (the ChiComs (not China itself)), we will definitely fail. So, we are now uniting. I know this, because this is the only thing now worth doing. Ergo, it is happening. Just wanted to include a bit of that stuff.

Meanwhile, on a kind of Nazi-uniforms-are-cool basis, I can still admire this bridge. Here’s hoping it outlives the ChiComs and becomes a treasured part of the truly civilised China of the future that most of us would now like to see.

Splashdown for SpaceX

John Stossel:

2 Americans just landed safely after spending 2 months in space.

11 years ago, an Obama committee concluded that would take 12 years and cost $26 billion. Elon Musk did it in 6 years– for less than $1 billion.

Private competition is always better.

On the other hand, says the LA Times:

Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies

Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.

And he’s built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.

Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.

“He definitely goes where there is government money,” said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research. “That’s a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day.”

Like the government is liable to cut Boeing off. Because now, it can.

I’m guessing Musk reckons he could find other customers, if the government stopped paying. But I’m guessing further that a chunk of all that money goes to schmoozing the government to keep on paying. In a decade or two, Musk could be no better than Boeing.

This is “privatisation”, and privatisation isn’t the same as a real market, hence the sneer quotes. Private competition is always better. So are lots of customers spending their own money, instead of just the one, getting its money at gunpoint. Let’s hope that in this case it will turn out to be a step in the right direction. As big as it now feels.