From comedian Johnnie Casson:
“You’ve put on weight, Johnnie.”
Johnnie Casson: “I’ve had a lot on my plate.”
Me too, lately. Like I said, brief and perfunctory.
I don’t know where this was. Someone was sitting there with his laptop, with headphones on, and he started laughing. The rest of us demanded an explanation.
After I photoed those metal men beside the river; outside the old Woolwich Arsenal, I then walked up river towards the Dome, photoing photos like this:
However, just before photoing that photo; I photoed this next photo, of a painter, hard at work:
And here is the photo I photoed of how he was making this scene look:
The painting above had yet to say this, but that is the Tate & Lyle factory just south of London City Airport.
I asked this artist’s permission to photo his painting, which he graciously gave, but I did not ask him who he was. The polite way of asking that would have been to say: Do you have a website? But, alas, I forgot to ask this: So, no link to any website, Apologies to him if he does have a website, and apologies to you.
I am ill. Not very ill. Just: ill. A symptom of which is not eating solid food. So here, to compensate me for not eating food, is a photo of some food which I ate in France in 2008:
I like squares and rectangles. Always have. So, I especially like the idea of eating something that is usually round but which has been made square.
Christine Macdonald complains, in an article recently linked to by Arts and Letters Daily that:
Street Art Used To Be the Voice of the People. Now It’s the Voice of Advertisers.
Given what Ms MacDonald means by “the People” (the people who ruin all the places they get control of), this development is to be welcomed. Compared to ruination by a diverse array of people, all with the same ruinous opinions, advertisers trying only to sell you stuff are a breath of fresh air.
Here is an example of this process at work, spotted by me in Stoke Newington, the day before yesterday:
And here is another van from the same stable, which I spotted and photoed on the same day that I spotted and photoed these other exercises in profit seeking and actual people helping, nearer to the middle of London, while out and about a while back:
Vans like this are different, and thus attract attention. They certainly got mine. Many beer drinkers will surely have been persuaded to wonder what this particular beer tastes like. If it tastes like crap, advertising won’t save your product. But if the product is good but is being ignored, advertising is just what you want.
But, all you graffitists who have sold out or who would like to, be warned. Soon, this style will look rather ordinary, once lots of others have started doing it. At which point people like me won’t photo it any more, and commerce that is trying to attract attention will be on to the next aesthetic fad.
Well, I sat down to do a blog posting for here after a hard day doing this and that, but, while I was doing that blog posting, I was also half telly-watching, and I chanced, on my television, upon the classic episode of Porridge in which Fletcher keeps on being disturbed and ends up pushing the padre off the balcony (into a safety net). Fletcher gets punished with three days in solitary, and the final line is him asking the governor if he couldn’t make it a fortnight.
Instead of a regular blog posting, let this be a recommendation.
Another shop window photo, photoed by me on the same day as I photoed, this, this, and this:
Click on that to get it quite a bit bigger than usual. It deserves the detail.
I have long considered the stuff in tourist stuff shops to be an underrated object of photo-devotion.
The summer of February 2019 has now ended, but I still have some photo-memories of it to stick up here.
These photos, for instance, of a man whom GodDaughter2 and I encountered in Hyde Park, back on February 15th. As I have already related, there was a lot of feeding of birds going on that day, but before all that bird frenzy, we had already encountered a guy who had taken the feeding of birds (and squirrels) to a whole new level. He wasn’t so much feeding these creatures as laying on a free canteen for them. And they obviously knew this, and greeted him like a long lost friend.
I photoed him and his friends (who included two green parrots), a lot:
You can see evolution taking a distinct turn towards something different, can’t you? The most trusting and friendly and fearless creatures are the ones who get best fed.
On Sunday evening, and then again yesterday during the day, my water supply was interrupted. This has never happened before. Electricity, yes, that has been interrupted, I seem to recall. And once, my hot tank refused to stop heating its water, which was alarming. I had to switch off all my electricity myself, to stop my boiler boiling itself and perhaps exploding like a steam locomotive having a crash. But, no water? That was a new one for me, here.
When my taps first ran out of puff, I didn’t know what was causing this. At first, I thought the problem might be my own personal arrangements, as it had been with that over-eager heating system. But, I knocked on the door opposite and discovered that my neighbour had received an email threatening water disruption, and it all started to make sense. One of our neighbours was having work done which necessitated a block-wide water switch off. This was on Sunday evening, but the email concerned threatened disruption on Monday, disruption that duly occurred.
I wasn’t even completely sure if the water, when restored, would automatically fill up my pipes again, once it had abandoned them. You know how you can get water to to go up and down in pipes, in school physics lessons. What if interrupted water supply created a permanent unwillingness of the water to travel along my personal pipes, to my personal taps?
When the water returned later on Sunday evening, it was quite a relief to see it gushing out of my taps again, of its own accord, with no suction pump needed to coax it back into action. But then, disruption happened again, exactly as threatened, on Monday.
It’s only when you are deprived of something you are used to having that you realise how much you depend upon it. For washing, of me and of the things I eat from and off. For flushing the loo. There was an event I wanted to attend on Monday evening. No go. Unclean.
I had never had anything to do with my lady neighbour before this little water drama. Interesting that things not working properly and “community” go together like this. When the great machine we all depend on stops working, we suddenly become more dependant upon each other, if only to find out what the hell is going on and when it is likely to stop.
When GodDaughter2 and I took a walk through Hyde Park last week, we inevitably walked past the Serpentine, and next to the Serpentine, there was a lot of bird feeding going on, and I mean a lot. Great screaming flocks of birds, birds of all sorts all muddled together, were assembling themselves around happy humans, who were chucking stuff at them. It was also noticeable how very insistent birds were about checking out strangers, like me, to see what stuff we might have on our persons to chuck at them.
Here is a particularly fun photo I took of all this avian drama, fun because it turned out so artistic, being mainly monochrome (because photoed into the sun) and monochrome is artistic. Monochrome, that is, apart from the bright red feet of one of the bigger birds (also because photoed into the sun – this time with the sun shining through those feet), which makes the photo even more artistic:
But why was all this bird-on-human excitement happening, so intensely and on such a scale?
The answer lay in a shop next to the water. To my extreme shame, I did not photo the outside of this shop and cannot recall what it looked like. I only snapped interior scenes, of intriguing products on sale inside the shop. One of these products was the answer to this bird-human mystery.
The usual feelings that humans have about feeding birds in parks are (1) Hey! Wouldn’t it be fun to feed the birds? But also (2) Don’t feed the birds! It will give them a stomach ache. It might even kill them. Don’t feed the birds! Often there are signs to this effect.
But at the Serpentine, there is a different and non-contradictory regime in place. Feed the birds … this! And all was explained:
I computer enhanced that to make it less dim and dreary, what with the dim and dreary (at least compared to the bedazzlement outside) interior light.
You can bet that the shop assistants in that shop spent a quite large proportion of their day explaining to customers that yes, we know, you want to have fun feeding the birds! But, no indeed, you must not feed the birds human food! So, feed them this food! Fun for you! Food for the birds! Win win!
This is definitely my favourite Other creatures story of recent months. Months because this was reported on before Christmas, and I’ve only just got around to mentioning it here.
Parrot used Amazon Alexa to order items while his owner was away:
So far Rocco the African Grey, from Didcot, Oxfordshire, U.K., has demanded treats such as strawberries, watermelon, raisins, broccoli and ice cream.
He has also ordered a kite, light bulbs and even a kettle.
Rocco likes to dance too and tells the voice-activated device to play favorite tunes. Sometimes they are slow numbers, but he generally prefers rock.
Where is voice recognition when you need it?
Alexa needs a setting, for junior members of a household, for whom she is allowed to play musical requests, but from whom she is not allowed to take purchase orders.
You’d think that with lots of kids in the world, many causing havoc, Alexa would be able to make the necessary distinctions. But it sure is entertaining when she doesn’t.