The internet is no longer a nice place

I remember when the internet was nice. My part of it, the blogosphere, was nice, anyway. Every blogger, no matter what he thought about things, was a comrade. Every commenter, ditto. In those magic few years from about 2001 until about 2008 at the latest, when a whole generation of people the world over found themselves short of cash, the internet was a nicer, more trusting place than it is now. Since then, less and less. Now, the internet is not to be trusted further than it can be spat, and it can’t be spat at all, can it?

Which is why, when I go on holiday and leave my flat unattended, I tend not to broadcast the fact on this blog, by posting postings which are clearly from this or that holiday location.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: broadcast? This blog, a broadcast? Well, no, not to regular humans. But to all those cash-strapped desperadoes out there, it is a potential opportunity.

I don’t know if there are any internet creatures who spend their time working out, from blog postings and social media postings, that this or that person has left his home unattended, and then selling lists of such trusting persons on to people who might be able to do something bad about that, but this is not a chance I now care to take. I prefer only to be telling you about photo-expeditions after I am back home.

Also, as you get older, you get more easily scared. The less you have left to lose, the more you fear losing it. This may not make calculational sense, but does make evolutionary sense. The young need to be willing to take risks, to be willing to bet everything for the sake of their gene pool. The old have less to offer in such dramas. Or something. What do I know? Anyway, whatever the reason, we oldies get more timid as we grow older.

So yes, I was on holiday last week, in Brittany, and then yesterday, on the way home from there, I was in Paris, as I yesterday reported once I had got home.

I took enough photos while in France to last me a month of blogging, and I expect about the next week of postings here to be about nothing else. Here is just one photo from my travels:

That was my first view, again, this time around, of Quimper Cathedral, seen through the rather sunglassesy front window of my hosts’ car, on what was already quite a dreary afternoon, the day after I arrived, Sunday April 29th. Quimper Cathedral – to be more exact, one of its towers – was responsible for the timing of this visit. I’ll tell you more about that in a later posting.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Lunch in Paris

I’m back home now, but yes, earlier today I had lunch in Paris.

I don’t normally do food photoing, but I reckon this one came out pretty well:

This photo was an afterthought, but that helped because I photoed the food while it was being eaten rather than before we started, which worked out better, I think. And it tasted even better than it looked. It’s liver of some kind, and it didn’t come cheap, but boy was it tasty, and it kept us fueled for the rest of the day.

But now? I’m now knackered and am off to what will by my tardy standards be an early bed. More about all this tomorrow, unless there’s some unignorable drama somewhere, like someone dropping an H-bomb or some similar foolishness.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The men but not the luggage – and a round of golf

I have been reading more of Leo McKinstry’s Operation Sealion, and very fine it is too. I hadn’t been keeping up with McKinstry’s books, but now learn that, among several other topics, he has written books about Alf Ramsey, Jack Hobbs, and the Hawker Hurricane (“Victor of the Battle of Britain”). Memo to self: read more books, do less internetting.

In the Sealion book I have already encountered two little nuggets that were new to me.

After the “deliverance” that was Dunkirk, Churchill apparently said (p. 86):

“We’ve got the men away, but we’ve lost the luggage.”

I’d not heard that one before.

And nor did I know about this, concerning another Ramsay, Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who masterminded the Dunkirk evacuation (p.81):

The genius behind Dynamo, Admiral Ramsay, rewarded himself on 4 June with a well-deserved round of golf, on the course at Sandwich nearby, and, liberated from the strain, proceeded to attain the best score of his life.

I find it interesting that McKinstry seems to divide his writing time about equally between war and sport. I wonder if he has developed any opinions about how these things relate to one another, along, for instance, lines like these.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A missed opportunity

I really like this photo I took, a couple of years ago; of a poster featuring the Wheel with its top sliced off; and behind it the actual top of the actual Wheel

However, another version of this photo might have been even better. If I had gone closer to the poster, and put the top of the actual Wheel right on top of the poster, that might have been truly impressive.

But I distinctly remember thinking at the time that what with the road being full of traffic, this might have meant a long wait waiting for a gap, and what with me already having had a long day and wanting to get home, so I said to myself: I’ll come back later.

But by the time I did come back later, the poster had gone.

If you see a photo, take the photo: Immediately.

One of the categories I have assigned to this posting is: How the mind works. But this was more a case of: How my mind didn’t work.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

In Mile End Road

Is it Mile End Road or The Mile End Road? Shows you how well I know that part of London.

Anyway, here is something I photoed there, towards the end of last year, from the I Just Like It directory:

I have a vague recollection of someone shouting at me, just after I took this. Did he think I was going to make trouble, in some way that I still cannot work out? Whatever: All I was trying to do was take fun photos.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

When rain looks like snow

Some days ago, on a day when the weather was undecided about whether to be sunny weather or rainy weather, and was switching between both, I caught site of a roof near to my home. Later, I could not decide which of the four photos I took to show here, so here are all of them:

As to why I show them, well, see my title, above.

Usually; you want your camera to show what is really going on. But this time, I enjoy its confusion. If I did not tell you that this was wetness on those tiles, reflecting the sun, you would surely reckon that whiteness to be snow, or frost.

The human eye knows what it sees, so at the time I knew at once what this was. My camera merely saw what it saw.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

There is no such thing as user friendliness

Today, I connected my camera to someone else’s Mac. But clicking through the photos on my camera proved impossible, the way I find this to be trivially easy on my clunky old PC with clunky old Windows. We could not make this work. Which just goes to prove that ancient computer truth. There is no such thing as “user friendliness”. There is only what you know how to make a computer do, which is trivially easy, and what you do not know how to make a computer do, which is impossible.

See you tomorrow. Maybe only as briefly as this. Or maybe not see you tomorrow at all.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Possible blogging interruptions

Because of how my life is going to be for the next week or so, there may be interruptions to the daily stream of blog postings here, daily in the sense of being something every day however trifling or banal, and daily in the sense also of me doing something before every bed time.There may even be no postings at all, for the next clutch of days.

This particular blog posting is being done before bed time tomorrow evening, and also before bed time this evening. But after midnight, which means it can either be backdated to today or left to date itself as tomorrow, the latter option being the one I select now. All of which is within the rules I choose to go by.

But, be warned. Maybe there won’t be any interruptions. We shall see.

Meanwhile here is a rather randomly selected photo, taken last summer, of the old version of New Scotland Yard in the process of being deconstructed …:

… to make way for this. So far, this (see previous sentence) has yet to become visible. It has yet to show, as they say of pregnant ladies.

In a perfect world, the traffic light in my photo would have displayed a number, denoting the number of seconds that will elapse before the light turns red. But this is not a perfect world, as you have surely noticed on the basis of similar – maybe worse – circumstances that in your life you have experienced. The traffic light had already turned red.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Personalised cat flaps

And by personalised, I mean personalised for your cat.

This evening I had a Last Friday meeting at my home, and during it, I learned about a cat phenomenon that suits my Friday Cats and Other Creatures blogging habit.

It seems, or so I was told by one of my lady guests, that a recent invention is that a cat can have a chip on its shoulder – as in: electronic chip – which means that it can get in through the cat flap in the door to your house, but no other cat can do this. For all other – chipless – cats, the cat flap refuses to flap.

This deals with the habit that cats have of following each other into their various “homes”. Apparently, cat flaps of the more primitive sort have been allowing passing stranger cats to take occupation in your home when you are gone. And your cat can’t stop them, if it is not a dominant sort of cat compared to the invading cat. If your cat is not dominant, your house can become a house for all his dominant acquaintances. Scary for you, and even scarier, I presume, for your cat. But now, your can avoid all this grief, because if you have one of these new style cat flaps, only your cat can get into your house. Your house becomes his safe haven.

Presumably what my lady guest was talking about was something like this:

SureFlap cat flap with microchip identification is made of plastic material. All cats can go out, but only cats with corresponding microchip can come in again. …

When you think of it this way, cat flaps must have made quite a big difference to the lives of cats, good for some and bad for others. And these personalised cat flaps are another big change.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog