Here:
There are more such vans there.
Meanwhile I love that particular photo. An ancient vehicle with round soup plate headlights and round soup plate hubcaps. Books, made of paper and cardboard. Unusual vehicles of any vintage. BMNB heaven.
Category: History
New River walk with GodDaughter1 from Bounds Green to Enfield
On April 2nd 2016, GodDaughter1 and I went on a photo-expedition along the New River. It was most enjoyable, and I prepared another of those big photo-clutches that I could seldom bother to do on the Old Blog, so that you can now, if you feel like it, click-click-click through them on this New Blog. But I also wanted to link back to an earlier posting I did about a rather exotic looking duck that we had encountered that same day.
For reasons explained in this posting, all postings on the Old Blog linked back to from this blog have to have been transferred to the New Blog. So, here I am linking back to What sort of duck is this?
But, problem. That posting itself linked back to a posting about Trees pruned into strange sculptures, because GD1 and I encountered a really strange piece of tree surgery (photo (6.2), on that same expedition.
Which, in its turn linked back to Losing the leaves in Victoria Park, because, well, because it did. So that had to be transferred across too.
When I put it like that, it all seems pretty simple. But following the link chain backwards and then forwards again, opening up each posting about four times over, was the Grandma of all muddles that I had not seen coming, and muddles you do not see coming can get really muddled.
Anyway, it’s all sorted now, and here are all those photos I mentioned, at the top of this:
My favourite is the plate-shaped foliage that has been emptied upside down into the water (photo 28 (4.4)).
There’s lots more I could say about all these photos, but this posting has already gone on far too long, and I confine myself now to saying: See also the plaque about Sir Hugh Myddelton (photo 37 (5.5)), who designed the New River. Designed? You don’t design rivers. They’re just there. But yes, he designed it. The point being it was designed and built, to supply London with fresh water, right at the beginning of the seventeenth century. So, at a time when so many stupid things were in the process of happening, something truly creative also happened.
Well, one other thing: the occasional interpolation of extreme urbanness (e.g. a newspaper headline about Ronnie Corbett (photo 27 (4.3)) and the van covered in stickers (photo 21 (3.5)) is because when you walk along beside the New River, it sometimes dives underground and you have to go up to regular London, until you get to the next bit.
Lordship Park lion
A rather mangy old lion, with a disproportionately big head, encountered yesterday:
This lion, once part of a two-lion team, no longer guards Lordship Park, because Lordship Park is now only a street. It now stands isolated, on a decaying plinth at one end of this street.
London contains many lion statues, and if they are in the tourist parts in the centre of town, or if they stand next to a building that still counts for something, like a town hall, they still get looked after. But my guess is that unattached lions, like the one above, are pretty much left to take their chances.
I just image-googled britannia and lion, and if the above speculations are right, I think the results I got tell us why that would be. All that imperial symbolism just doesn’t cut it any more. And especially not in Stoke Newington.
Shelby Steele talks to Peter Robinson
I just watched this video of Shelby Steele being interviewed by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute. If, like me, you’ve not been paying attention to this man, this interview would be a good way to correct that. If you have been paying attention, well, well done you. But for me, even seeing this man talk was a first. Better late than never.
The idea, which Steele talks about a lot, of freedom being a “shock” makes a lot of sense to me. I recall having this shock explained to me by an east European lady who had spent her adult life being unfree, under Soviet Communist domination. Suddenly she was in a Western style supermarket, facing choices she didn’t know how to make. And that was just the toothpaste.
Towards the end of the interview, Robinson asks if there are any more “Uncle Tom” Black people, now talking about Black Americans getting to grips with the freedom they now have rather than continuing to complain ever more implausibly about the lack of it, and Robinson mentions: Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and, er, that’s it. Well, how about, and this is just for starters, Candace Owens?
3D printed architectural models are now no good at doing colour
I just googled 3d printed architecture models, and at the time I did this (It may be slightly different for you now), this is what I got, these being the first few images:
I was following my own advice in this earlier posting, trying to encourage Google to tell me about … 3d printed architecture models.
But here’s my point now. Notice how the colours are all monochrome white or monochrome beige or grey, and the like. There is no colour, and in particular no colour variety. I’m guessing that this partly reflects the relative ease with which 3D printing can do shape, compared the difficulty it has doing lots of different colours. And partly, it reflects the fascination with shape and indifference to colour of the dominant Orthodox Modernism vernacular of our time.
Basically, if you want colour, you have to imagine it, just as you have to imagine shape when you look at drawings. Note, however, that drawings, including especially the kind of fake-photos (same link as the one above) of the sort I talked about yesterday, can do colour pretty well.
Furthermore, I would guess that old-school hand-made architectural models might actually be better at doing colour. You just chop and change the materials, and maybe add little colour print-outs to surfaces. Not easy, but easier than 3D printing can do colour, that being a whole step-up technologically.
If you define high colour architecture as the New Thing, and monochrome architecture as Orthodoxy, then the 3D printing of architectural models is a force for architectural conservatism, more so than older methods for describing yet-to-be-built buildings.
You might think that a good thing. Different posting, different argument. I’m talking in this posting about what is happening, not about what I think should happen.
Note also that if the clever people now developing 3D printing for architectural models were to make it easy to include quite accurate and quite detailed colour variety, then that could make a huge difference when it comes to making high colour architecture for real.
An old photo of a Robert Burns statue
I didn’t know until now that London had a statue of Robbie Burns, but apparently so:
How did I learn about this? I learned it from my photo-archives. I photoed this statue on August 29th 2008. The statue is one of several in Victoria Palace Gardens, a stretch of greenery-with-statues just downstream from Embankment tube station. Having photoed that photo, I gave it no more thought at all, from then on. Until now.
Partly it’s just that I quite like that photo, despite the over-brightness of the white building in the background. My camera then gave me rather mixed results.
But it is also, of course, that now is a time when statues are all over the news. Maybe Robert Burns, Sottish poet of yesteryear, will get involved. He must have said a few things that the Black Lives Matter people would disapprove of, it they were told about it. As they might well be told, by people trying to make problems for the Scottish Nationalists.
In other statue news, I see that Gandhi is now getting the treatment from the protesters. He said very un-woke things about black people when he lived in South Africa, but I suspect that what the people organising this demonstration really hate about Gandhi is that he is a Hindu hero, and the wokists are pro-Islam and consequently also anti-Hindu.
An even more portable e-scooter
This, the WalkCar, looks promising:
Promising because it is so very portable.
WalkCar is a small wheeled plate that is fitted with four wheels and an electric motor that takes the ship forward. It weighs only 2.9 kg and is about the size of a small 13-inch laptop PC, giving it the portability to fit in a bag. It is therefore very easily transportable anywhere. Besides, the vehicle height is just 74mm above the ground (about the width of a smartphone); its flat and square standing surface allows you to step off instantly in any direction safely.
This device is not at all cheap. $1,800. Which is much too much. But if this gadget catches on, as it surely might, that price will fall.
As with the regular e-scooter, the WalkCar will take a bit of getting used to, by other WalkCar users and by the rest of us. But, one to watch.
I have already speculated here that the end point of this story will be when shoes double up as transport. When not using these (I am, for now, calling them PowShoos), you can carry them on your feet! WalkCar has the look, to me, of a big stride in that direction.
As of now, this WalkCar is much slower that regular e-scooters, and has much less of a range. But again, those variables will surely improve. The lack of speed may even aid its acceptance by other road users, most especially pedestrians, who are already now tormented by lawless cyclists.
I’ll say it again. This is the big transport story now, not robot cars. Think of it as the motorisation and miniaturisation of Shanks’s Pony.
Lockdown chat with Patrick
On June 2nd, Patrick Crozier and I had another of our recorded conversations, this time about Lockdown.
In the course of this, I refer to a photo that I did take, and a photo that I didn’t take. The photo that I did take was this:
That being me, and another bloke, recording the fact of empty shelves in Sainsburys. The photo that I didn’t take, but talk about with Patrick, is the one I should also have taken of how the shelves laden with less healthy food – crisps, chocky bickies etc. – were crammed with yet-to-be-sold stuff, a lot of it offered at discount prices.
Patrick, in his posting about this chat, mentions something he thought of afterwards but didn’t say during, which is that what may have been going on with the crisps and bickies was not that people were shunning unhealthy food, but rather that they were shunning party food, on account of there suddenly being no parties being had. Good point. In my photo above, you can see in the distance, the drinks section. Plenty of drink still to be had also.
I remember, when I used to do chat radio, I used to regret not having said things I should have said, either because I had them in mind but forgot, or because I only thought of them afterwards. But, in due course, I realised that what mattered was what I did say. If that was reasonably intelligent and reasonably well put, then I did okay. People wouldn’t say: Ooh, but he forgot to mention blah blah. They would merely decide whether they liked, or not, what I did say.
Well, this time around, I think there was a huge elephant in the virtual room that we didn’t discuss, which I am sure some listeners would expect us to have at least mentioned. Sport. As in: There hasn’t been any! Patrick and I are both sports obsessives. He is a Watford fan. But he has had no Premier League relegation battle to warm his heart during the last few months. I love cricket, not just England but also Surrey. Likewise for me: nothing, despite some truly wonderful weather at a time when it’s often very grim. But, not a single sporting thing, other than ancient sportsmen reminiscing about sports contests of yesteryear on the telly. Yet we never mentioned any of that. Since a lot of the point of our chat wasn’t to yell at politicians and scientists, hut rather just to remember the oddities of our own lives now, this was a major omission. We talked, as we always do whether that’s the actual topic or not, about war, this time in connection with the question of which economic policy attitudes will prevail during whatever attempts at an economic recovery start being made in the months to come. Yet sport, the thing that has replaced war in so many people’s lives, got no mention by us.
Churchill boarded up
So there I’ve been, quietly photoing statues, for all kinds of trivial reasons, such as: that they can be relied upon to stay still; and: they won’t make a scene about being photoed. And now, all of a sudden, statues are news:
I got that photo from Guido Fawkes. Apparently this is how Winston Churchill is now looking. Memo to self: check this out.
Signs of our time
Regulars here will know that I love to photo signs and notices. So evocative. So precise for defining a time, a place, a mood, or an official attitude. And never more so than right now:
Those are some signs I photoed yesterday, inside the entrance to Oval tube, and on the side of a bus. Right now, such verbals are commonplace. Soon, we must all hope, they’ll become an impossibly weird reminder of an impossibly weird time.
Here are three more that I photoed in April, of signs in shops windows:
On the left, the bog standard sign that happened in nearly every shop. We’re shut for the duration. Sorry. In the middle, the regular signage at the front of my local chemist, and on the door, a scrimmage of irregular signage, concerning this and that. And on the right, one of the signs saying: We’re still open. Come in. Buy stuff.
Finally, one of my favourites, from way back in March at the Wigmore Hall, at one of the last public events I attended, a performance of all the Beethoven String Trios, as I recall. Superb. We were up in the socially distanced seats at the top and back of the hall. Normally the Wigmore would have been packed out for a show like this, but this time, there were empty seats. If we’d known then blah blah, we’d surely not have gone.
They don’t allow photoing of performances, but at the beginning and at the end, you can photo away, so I photoed this, at the beginning:
And we obeyed. My impression, as I recall it, was that there was actually less coughing than usual.
A great souvenir sign, from pretty much the exact moment when it all suddenly kicked off and got serious.