It’s Friday, so you want cats and/or other creatures. So, what sort of other creature is this?:
It’s quite a puzzle isn’t it. I’m describing my question, but I’m also answering my question.
It was one of these.
It is rare that I categorise a posting as this and that. But this defies ordinary classification.
Time for some more horizontality:
Click on that to get the 1000×750 original bigger picture, which I found here.
Notice the title of the posting. Hartley really is fascinated by colour, whether present, as here (in the sky), or absent, as is the case for the black and white birds here.
Interesting that stripping out the context, which makes it that bit clearer that these are birds, makes these birds that little bit harder to see clearly, as birds.
I have a friend who roams the earth working in exotic places. Friend supplies this photo of where Friend will be staying tonight:
It’s alright for some. Taken with a smartphone (what else?), in Rotterdam, earlier today.
More seriously, what this building makes me think is what I have long thought, which is that modern architecture is, a lot of it, about what kind of aesthetic experiences architects had when they were little kids. Does this Big Thing not look like big bricks of the sort given to small children, piled up rather inexpertly on top of each other, and now looking as big as it looked to a small kid? That’s what it looks like to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Good to have the arse of the ship there, to show how big this Big Thing is.
Nothing says Christmas to me quite like Special Christmas Edition packs of Walkers Potato Crisps. And actually, I came across these in Sainsbury’s … it must have been nearly a fortnight ago now:
Photoing a shiny package, with information directly under the shininess, is somewhat above my photoing pay grade, what with my photoing pay grade being: zero without expenses. On the left there, we have Turkey & Stuffing, Brussels Sprout, and Pigs in Blankets. On the right, Glazed Ham, Turkey & Stuffing (again), and … well that’s not so clear.
So here’s another photo which explains that it is Cheese & Cranberry:
However, my favourite bit is this little disclaimer, concerning the Brussels Sprout crisps:
I love it. Guaranteed entirely made with artificial flavouring. No natural flavouring at all. Real turkey. Real stuffing. Real pigs. Real blankets. Real ham with real glaze, real cheese, real cranberry. But: fake sprouts.
I don’t always hate the twenty first century. Today, I love it.
One way to photo such packages as these more clearly is to empty them, and flatten them out, like they’ve done here, because that brings the light under control. At lest, I think that’s what they did. Those photos certainly look flat. But a package that is flat rather than curved stops looking like a package. Such photos literally take the crisps out of the picture. And who wants that?
With blogging, excellence is the enemy of adequacy, and often what you think will be excellence turns out not to be.
Eight days ago now, Patrick Crozier and I had one of our occasional recorded chats, about transport this time. Train privatisation, high speed trains and maglevs, robot cars, that kind of thing. I think it was one of our better ones. We both had things we wanted to say that were worth saying, and both said them well, I think. Patrick then did the editing and posting on the www of this chat in double quick time, and I could have given it a plug here a week ago. If I have more to say about transport, I can easily do other postings. But, I had some stupid idea about including a picture, and some other stuff, which would all take far too long, and the simple thing of supplying the link to this chat here was postponed, and kept on being postponed.
Usually, this kind of thing doesn’t matter. So, I postpone telling you what I think about something. Boo hoo. But this time I really should have done better.
There. All that took about one minute to write. I could have done this far sooner. Apologies.
Yesterday, I went on a shopping expedition which involved boarding a train at Charing Cross, which I planned to reach by going first to St James’s Park tube.
The first of the photos below (1.1) is of a taxi, parked close to where I live, with some sort of poppy related advert on it. I like to photo taxis covered in adverts. Temporariness, the passing London scene, will get more interesting as the years pass, blah blah.
Then, in Strutton Ground, just this side of Victoria Street, I encountered two besuited gentlemen wearing military berets and medals. I photoed them both, with their permission, and I post one of these photos here (1.2), also with their permission. Sadly, the other photo didn’t come out properly.
It was only at this point that I realised that, the following day (i.e. today) being Remembrance Sunday and what’s more the exact one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice of November 1918, London in the Westminster Abbey area would already be awash with Remembrance Sunday photo-ops. My shopping could wait a while, and I turned right down Victoria Street.
The seven other photos below mostly involve small wooden crosses and dead autumn leaves – autumn 2018 arrived at Peak Dead Leaf yesterday – but they also include another poppy related advert, this time on a the side of a bus (3.3), which I photoed in Parliament Square:
Sadly, the plasticated documents referring to “British Nuclear Test Veterans” (2.1) were insufficiently plasticated to resist the effects of the rain. It began to rain some more when I was arriving at Charing Cross station and it did not stop for several hours, so I’m guessing these lists suffered further rain damage. It’s odd how little sadnesses like this stick in your mind, in amongst the bigger sadnesses being remembered.
The autumn-leaves-among-crosses photos, all taken outside Westminster Abbey, are but a few of a million such that must have been taken over this weekend, in London and in many other places. Is it proper to include two mere advert photos, even if they are poppy related adverts, in such poetically symbolic and dignified company? I chose to do this because one of the things I find most interesting about these Remembrance remembrances is that, as each year of them passes, they don’t seem to be getting any smaller. People still want remember all this stuff, even though all the veterans of World War 1 are now gone. Hence the adverts. If the adverts didn’t get results, they’d not be worth their cost.
As to why these remembrances continue to be remembered, and by such huge numbers of people, year after year, I think one reason is that each political tribe and faction can each put their own spin on the sad events being remembered, but in the privacy of their own minds. For some political partisans, these ceremonies and symbols are a chance to wallow in the pageantry of patriotism. For others, they are an opportunity to rebuke such nationalists, for stirring up the kinds of hostility that might provoke a repeat of the sad events being remembered. “Patriotism” and “nationalism” being the words used to salute, or to denounce, the exact same sentiments. But declaring red poppies to be a warning that the defence budget should be increased, or that they are anti-Trump and anti-Brexit symbols that Trump supporters and Brexiteers have no right to wear, would be too vulgar and partisan, so on the whole this kind of vulgarity and partisanship is not indulged in, not out loud.
The phenomenon of the political meeting where all present hear the same words but where each understands them to mean different things – I’m thinking of such words as “Britain”, “freedom”, “democracy” and “common sense” – has long fascinated me. Remembrance ceremonies remind me, on a larger scale, of such meetings. I attended many such little political meetings myself before I decided that mainstream politics was not for me, and switched to libertarianism, where meanings are spelt out and arguments are had rather than avoided.
For less obsessively political people, Remembrance ceremonies and symbols are simply an opportunity to reflect on the sadness of history in general, and in particular the sadness of the premature deaths of beloved ancestors – or, perhaps worse – hardly known-about ancestors. We can at least all agree that premature death, in whatever circumstances, is a sad thing to contemplate. And until young men entirely cease from dying in wars, Remembrance Sunday will continue to be, among other things, a meaningfully up-to-date event.
And so, year after year, these ceremonies continue. Will this year’s anniversary come to be regarded as Peak Remembrance? We shall see.
Here are two photos that go nicely together.
First there is this photo:
Not the greatest shard photo ever taken, although a bit better of Guy’s Hospital, next to it. That is because it’s maximum zoom.
But now, taken with minimum zoom, with me standing in the exact same spot, pointing my camera in the exact same direction:
You can actually see the Shard in the faraway background.
I bought the Lumix SZ150, then the Lumix SZ200, and now my current SZ300, because these cameras all have in common that they have both quite impressive zoom for very distant scenes, and an quite impressive wide angle coverage on close-up scenes. Both features help a lot with architecture.
These two photos taken at the beginning of last month, at East India DLR station, on my way home from a photo-expedition.
This is not an advert for a book. Well, it is, but that’s not my purpose in showing it here. My angle is my niece, the crime fiction writer Roz Watkins, who is quoted here, enthusing about the book:
The point being that, with what seems to me like remarkable speed, Roz has turned herself into someone whose opinion about other people’s writing is considered worth quoting.
I found the above graphic at her Twitter feed, along with her thanks for having been described as “the great Roz Watkins” by a grateful publisher. Everything about Roz’s public and social media presence says to me, and I am sure to everyone else who is following her, that she is very serious about her writing career. Deadly serious, you might say.
This matters, because readers of crime fiction need to know that, if they invest their time and curiosity and shelf space, to say nothing of their cash, in a leading character, this investment will pay off. The energetic and upbeat way that Roz presents herself says that there will be plenty more books about her lead detective. There is already a second Meg Dalton tale coming out next April, and if several more Meg Daltons do not follow, at a speed no faster than (but no slower than) is consistent with the maintenance of quality, I for one will be very surprised.
One from the I Just Like It directory:
That’s the view you get of Central Hall Westminster, that you now get looking over where New Scotland Yard used to be. I walk past this view whenever I go to St James’s Park tube. Well, that’s the view you get if you go to as much trouble as I did to frame Central Hall Westminster with a concrete pump.
There is now a glut of new luxury apartments in London, so I suppose it’s possible that this view may become a bit less temporary than it would have been two or three years ago. But my guess is that The Broadway, which (from a helicopter) will look very approximately like this…:
…, is now too far advanced for it to make sense for them not to finish it. Although maybe not as ostentatiously as that picture suggests.
I remember, during the reign of President Bush Jnr., how I used to blog about how photography was used to glorify President Bush. Well, here’s another political photo of a rather similar sort, which has been an open window on my computer for some time:
What I find entertaining about this photo is the extreme contrast between the clearly very humdrum appearance, for real, of the old guy in the photo, and the way that (I suspect) pushing just one Photoshop button has turned this same guy into something almost heroic.
The headline above the photo is telling:
The old guy in the photo-edited photo is US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom the Tea Party people used to regard as a waste-of-space sell-out, but who is now being lauded to the skies by the Trumpsters.
Says Jewish Chronicle writer Marc A. Thiessen:
While President Trump deserves credit for making outstanding judicial nominations, long before Trump declared his candidacy McConnell was laying the groundwork for a conservative transformation of the federal judiciary. It was, he told me in an interview last week, “entirely premeditated.”
McConnell reminds me of a particular American actor, whom I recall having seen in a number of movies. Trouble is, that actor is the sort of actor you recognise the face of, but whose name you never quite register. It’s that sort of face.
