After yesterday’s beyond-the-call-of-duty activity here, both I and my computer spent today in a state of gummed-up inactivity. It was all I could do to get it to tell me the cricket and football scores. Apologies. Will have another go tomorrow.
Category: This blog
Merry Christmas – no sarcasm intended
On Christmas Day and the days surrounding it, my trickle of readers becomes even less of a trickle than usual, so the chances are that you are reading this posting, if at all, not on Christmas day itself, but rather some time in early January, doing a catch-up of what I have babbled and blogged about over Christmas, just as it is your occasional habit to do a catch-up of recent stuff here at other times of the year.
Nevertheless, if you are one of the self-selected few reading this today, only minutes or hours after I posted it, I wish you in particular a very …:
As I reported yesterday, I did a little walkabout yesterday morning, and I walked past many shops. But I didn’t see any signs saying things like that. How could you say that, in the window of your shop, totally closed for the duration, without sounding sarcastic and getting just broken glass or graffiti for saying such a thing? Or worse, of appearing to accuse passers-by of being the kind of heartless bastards who intend to have a merry Christmas and screw the rest of humanity? You couldn’t. Maybe its different in the less affluent parts of London, but in my vicinity, “Merry Christmas” is surely being spoken quietly but it is not being publicly proclaimed, in lights or in any other way.
Which means that above photo is from my photo-archive, having been photoed (in or next to (guess) the then still rather new Victoria Station shopping appendage) in the run-up to Christmas 2010.
I have other Christmassy things that I may or may not get around to reporting from my walkabout yesterday morning, but I just wanted to get that basic message up and posted, especially, as I say, if you are reading this on the actual day itself. Merry Christmas. You won’t want to go around shouting this in the streets to strangers, as I have myself sometimes done in the small hours of Christmas morning when returning home on foot from a Christmas Eve feast with friends. But, I hope you are having one nevertheless.
In the meantime: A photoer and his fingers
I’m working on a slightly more complicated posting, using photos I took at the top of Tate Modern, on June 22nd 2018. But I don’t want to be hurrying that posting, so in the meantime, to get things started here today, here’s another photo I photoed on that visit:
I like how we can see the details of his rucksack straps. I like his hair, a lot. I like how you can recognise St Paul’s, even though St Paul’s is out of focus.
But, I love the fingers of his left hand. That’s a classic digital photoer thing. At all contortional cost, those fingers must not get in the way of the camera. So, he does that absurdly exaggerated thing, to make entirely sure.
I have my internet connection back (thanks to The Guru)
Indeed. So that means I can post things properly, using all my fingers rather than just one, on a screen I can actually read without taking my glasses off and without putting that screen one inch away from my eyes. The nightmare, for the time being, has ended.
My thanks to Michael for yesterday’s posting, telling you all that I hadn’t died, but was merely out of touch, and for general moral support.
And my special thanks to The Guru, for talking me through all the intricacies of getting reconnected. My best guess is that in the aftermath of the Eclipse outage starting, I tried to rescue matters and that was when it really got bad, because then, when Eclipse got back on track, I didn’t.
One thing I can tell you. Internet outage trumps rather bad health. If you are poorly and without an internet connection, the priority is to get your internet connection back again. Then you worry about health. Or, maybe that’s just another way of saying that my health is not that bad. I suppose if you’re dead, getting your internet back wouldn’t make that much difference.
Anyway, hello, again, and it’s great to be back and gibbering away incontinently, rather than “texting” on the abomination that is my horrible, horrible, insane, mobile phone. Thank goodness (the goodness of The Guru) I don’t now have to start faffing about posting photos on that damn thing, and can go back to using a proper computer, in a big old suitcase, with a big old screen and a big (although actually not that big) keyboard with actual keys on it, and a mouse, as nature intended.
Big Things above three urinals
Indeed. To celebrate being able to post photos again with ease, this:
We’re in the Gents, at the Lord Palmerston pub, Dartmouth Park Hill. Although, they call it the “Lords”.
The above photo was photoed in 2015. I’d just been checking out the view from that Bridge that goes over Archway, from which you can see London’s Big Things for real. I went back to this Lords Toilet more recently, to try to get a photo that would work for the permanent top of this blog, but the Big Things had gone. Shame. Maybe looking at giant architectural penises proved off-putting for those seeking to piss through their own smaller penises.
Hello again
Yes, hello, from my mobile.
My mainframe computer is still failing to connect itself to the world, so I am typing this in with one finger, into my mobile. Since I don’t yet know how to post this, I will end this now and try to do that. Fingers crossed.
LATER: It worked!
I hope to start doing actual posting again quite soon. But it’ll be on this and consequently rather different.
Technical difficulties with Brian’s internet connection
This is Brian’s blogmaster Michael here. Brian has just called me to tell me that he is unable to post at the moment because his home internet connection is not working. He will resume posting when it is fixed. We are not presently sure how long this is going to take.
Rabbits in a tray on a hamper
I am about to embark upon various medical complications involving things like blood tests, so am rather preoccupied today. I’ll probably manage more later, but meanwhile, since it’s Friday, here are some rabbits I photoed somewhere in the vicinity of Victoria Station, in 2013:
Also plates, a hamper, a sofa, some flowers. But it was the rabbits that got my attention.
More to come, I hope. I don’t actually promise, but I nearly do.
LATER: Another rabbit, made of metal, on a church, in Scotland.
At the Royal Victoria Docks in March 2012
The basic reason I do personal blogging has always been that I don’t want any constraints placed by some agenda, in my case a political one, on what I consider to be interesting, or beautiful, or amusing, or interesting, or just likeable in some indefinable way. The rule I try to stick to is: Never, if I actually do not, say what I think or feel that I am supposed to think or feel. If that results in “contradictions” between things I consider of interest, so be it.
All of which is a preamble to saying that I hope I never stop doing postings like this one, with photos like this:
All of the above photos were photoed in March of 2012, on the way to (photo 1), on the way from (photo 28), or at or from (photos 2-27) the Royal Victoria Docks, which are out beyond Docklands. This evening, I came across a little directory, where I’d put them all, with something like this in mind. All the work of selecting had been done. So here they all are. And yes, you are right, I do have very conventional tastes in sunsets, with interesting things in the foreground. But if you ever decide to dislike something you like, because other people also like it, more fool you.
I love how shoving up great clutches of photos like this is so much easier than it was at the old blog, and that it is easy for you to click through them, if you want to, just as slowly or as quickly as you like, without a lot of backwards-and-forwards-ing. I don’t think that’ll ever get old.
Two Big Things were, at that particular moment, under construction. They were finishing up with The Shard, and they were building that weird cable car thing across the River, having, in March 2012, got as far as building the towers but being yet to attach the cables or cable cars.
One of my favourite Things at these docks is the new footbridge they built across it. It’s great to look at, and it’s great to look from.
I really hope that by the time half decent weather returns, some time around March 2021, I’ll be in a fit state to take advantage of it, and do more of this kind of photo-perambulating.
It looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken
A new restaurant is opening up in Tel Aviv:
At a new restaurant in Tel Aviv called The Chicken, the chicken on the menu is grown from cells in a bioreactor in an adjacent pilot plant visible through a glass window. Diners don’t pay for their meals; instead, SuperMeat, the startup making the “cultured chicken” meat, is asking for feedback on its products, as it prepares for large-scale production of food that it thinks can transform the industry.
The main item on the menu, the Chicken Burger – a crispy cultured chicken fillet served on a brioche bun with toppings – looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken. “The burger has a juicy chicken flavor, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside,” says Ido Savir, CEO of the startup. “Feedback from multiple tasting panels was consistent that it was indistinguishable from conventionally manufactured chicken, and simply a great-tasting chicken burger.”
So not really a restaurant as such, more an exercise in handing out free samples. But still very interesting. Although “feedback”, in this context, sounds like someone’s been sick.
Human guilt about the way we treat animals has been building for quite some time. Which means that as soon as we can stop maltreating animals so that we can then eat them cheaply, we will. In the same sort of way that we largely did away with slavery as soon as some of us felt that we could.
I learned of this story from the endlessly informative Steve Stewart-Williams, my favourite tweeter by a considerable margin. He has supplied me with many a story for my Fridays here, when I like to reflect upon and giggle at and about animals and their complex relationships with each other and with humans, from mutually supportive to horribly cruel. And there could not be a more important animals/humans story than this one, because it will surely utterly transform how animals are treated by humans. (Next up, animals won’t be allowed to eat each other either. They too will only eat “cultured” meat. Think about it.)
Sadly for many animals, the choice they have is between being reared by humans, maybe cruelly or maybe not, and then being eaten by humans, or not being reared at all. Life as food, or not life at all.
On a cheerier note, watch the heads of veggies explode when they realise that the fastest food is now also the most veggie food.
And yes, if you’re thinking I must have prepared this earlier, as they say, you are quite right. I wrote this, apart from this, last Monday.