This, believe it or not, was a cake:
A year ago today, England beat New Zealand in the Cricket World Cup Final at Lord’s, by absolutely no runs whatsoever.
I gave this event my full attention at the time, but I only heard about this cake today, because I had this anniversary cricket commentary going while I was in the bath, and they talked about it at half time. Apparently Mrs Prince Charles 2, Camilla Duchess of Wherever, told someone called Julie Brownlee to make it, and she did.
Just came across this quote in a posting at the Old Blog, and immediately transferred it across to this blog:
The state of the world is now such that, if you want to be optimistic about your own country, don’t whatever you do look at your own country. Look at all the others.
Wise words, I think, that will bear repetition, hence me repeating them in this posting. They are my words, so I’m biased. I originally wrote them in connection with China’s high speed trains way back in 2011. Miraculously, that link still, or at any rate now, works.
I’ve been reading Emmanuel Todd’s book, Lineages of Modernity. For any sort of review of this book by me, you will have to wait. But meanwhile, I did enjoy this snippet, about why people believe the things they do. In it, the historian Rodney Stark is mentioned admiringly, for having written books like A Theory of Religion (co-authored with William Sims Bainbridge).
Here is what Todd says (pp. 95-96):
In this piece of historical anthropology that we are conducting here, it is more reasonable to grasp the dynamics of faith on Earth, and to start from the elementary observation that a religion is not only a personal belief, but above all the sharing of a belief by a group of human beings on Earth. So let us agree that before it rewards us in heaven, a religion rewards us here below. We must understand why sexual asceticism and the love of the poor, extremist and deviant views for Antiquity, gave the individuals constituting the Christian group a positive reward during their lifetime.
To ask the question today, in a Western world that ideologically values sex and wealth, is crucial. For us, sexual asceticism and the love of the poor are now, again, incomprehensible extremist deviations, to be classified perhaps under the rubric of mere masochism. Today, sexual freedom and banking reign. This is where Rodney Stark’s work proves to be essential.
Influenced by the rational choice school, Stark has grasped the fact that the aberrant beliefs and behaviours of religious groups, whether masochistic or not, and the opprobrium that they bring upon their members, can for the individuals concerned be more than compensated by the group cohesion produced by stigmatization. The psychological cost of belonging to a religion, demanding for oneself but ridiculous in the eyes of the outside world, is so high that adherents can be sure that they belong to a group of exceptionally reliable people. The internal loyalty of the group is the true reward of the believing individual. This gratification is immediate, more secure and tangible than the promise of the hereafter. The argument developed by Stark applies to early Christians or Mormons in the United States, but we can see how it can also contribute to a better understanding of the survival of the Jewish people, who no longer appear to have persisted through history despite persecution but because of persecution.
We can reformulate this from a Durkheimian perspective. What the individual finds in the bizarre monotheistic religious groups of Late Antiquity – whether they were circumcised and refused to eat pork, or were disgusted by sexuality and fascinated by the degradation of the body of the poor – is a sense of belonging to a moral human group. In the chaos of the great ancient cities – Alexandria, Antioch and Rome – Judaism and then Christianity were, as Stark says, refuges. Christianity certainly offered, for later on, eternal life, in which its adherents could believe as a group. But what it immediately gave was an end to loneliness, a sense of belonging to a world of solidarity, and – in very concrete terms – psychological and even economic security. The Gospels, if read without prejudice, give the game away: there is a long series of miracles to do with food and health, and these point to a better earthly life rather than to eternal life.
Judaism does not generally promise eternal life, but among its faithful, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, it fostered a courage and a contempt for death that yield nothing to those of the Christian martyrs. Its enduring power suggests that Homo sapiens is, in the end, more afraid of loneliness than of death.
Boom:
Will the fake photos of the Boom Supersonic XB-1 ever get real? Will I live long enough to photo Concorde 2.0 over London? It’s starting to look like they and I might.
How noisy will it be? I absolutely do not care how loud it is, but others will, so actually: I suppose I do.
The USA aerospace industry is having a magnificent renaissance now, and of course I have libertarian friends who have been chattering to each other about little else for years. I agree with them, even as I have taken more of an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it line. But now that we’re starting to see it, this could be the big take on 2020 when the historians look back at it. Plagues and riots? What’s new about that? They’ll surely get a mention, if only for the panic-stricken reactions. But, meanwhile: Supersonic travel is back! Space travel is back! Last time around, as I now enjoy saying, it was money no object Cold War dick-waving. Now it’s getting real.
On September 13th 2018, Big Ben was looking much as it does now, being smothered in scaffolding:
It looked, for a moment in October 2019, as if this scaffolding would come down, but all that went was the scaffolding at the very top.
So anyway, on that September day in 2018, on Westminster Bridge, I came upon a lady who had an answer to the problem of photoing Big Ben at a time when Big Ben was not looking like Big Ben. She put her own little Big Ben in front of the scaffolding encrusted actual Big Ben, thus:
Many Londoners find tourist fun tiresome. Personally I love it when tourists have tourist fun in this particular way, sticking their own small thing in front of a Big Tourist Thing, like Big Ben, or the Wheel or Westminster Abbey or the Shard. Whenever I see fun like this, I have fun of my own photoing it.
One of the photos I photoed of this lady was of her turning, and looking straight at me. She grinned as she saw what I was doing, and then carried on with her own photoing. Nevertheless, I choose not to include that photo in my little gallery of her. She was making a bit of a spectacle of herself, so it was a borderline decision.
She wasn’t making nearly such a spectacle of herself as was the lady featured in the previous posting here.
As already reported, those who now dip into the Old Blog are no longer greeted with the Screen of the Red Death. But Google still says it’s “not secure”, and the whole point of this New Blog is it works far better, no matter what kind of hardware you are using. So, I’m still transferring stuff from the Old Blog to here, whenever the mood takes me.
Yesterday I transferred a particularly favourite posting, from way back in 2007, which featured a photo by me of a celebrity whom I encountered in Piccadilly Circus:
There is also, in this old posting, a photo of men wearing mankinis. Being photoed by others besides me, naturally.
All this happened on the one afternoon.
It seems that my current obsession with e-scooters is quite widely shared. That being why I am obsessed with them.
As of now, e-scooters are only borderline legal. In some primitive places e-scooters are illegal in all public places.
Elsewhere, such as in London, well, as it says here:
Electric scooters have long been something of a grey area, ..
You can hire them and ride them, but you can’t own them and ride them. Or something.
Meanwhile, yesterday, I was out for a bit, and spotted three more e-scooters scooting by. The people are fast making up their minds. The regulators need to catch up, or they’ll start looking very silly.
See also, Michael’s comment on an earlier posting here, about how the path is being cleared by cyclists for e-scooters. The regulators are creating e-scooter paths, which they now call “cycle lanes”.
So, cyclists are smoothing the ride for e-scooters. I seem to recall once upon a time reading that cyclists, way back when, did something rather similar for cars. They created a demand for flatter and better roads. Which the cars then proceeded to dominate, until now, in places like London, where so many of the cyclists are members of the regulating classes. E-scooters are more evenly matched against cyclists. Perhaps because of that, expect battles. Maybe the e-scooters, like cars, will get kitted out with bumpers at the front.
On the same photo-walk that I photoed the Red Lion (see immediately belw) I also came upon this:
And I got a hell of a shock, I can tell you. I am fond of graphic representations of London’s ever more entertaining skyline, so I took a close look at this piece of graphic fun and games. But but but!!! had they suddenly constructed a giant flamingo in the middle of London which I hadn’t heard about until now?!?
Turned out the Wheel is now the last minute dot com “London Eye”, and the pink flamingo is something to do with last minute dot com and the fact it helps you book hotels in foreign parts. At the last minute, presumably.
A giant flamingo might be quite a good idea. How about somewhere out east, beyond the Thames Barrier? That part of London could use a bit of livening up, with a giant tourist trap. Ideally, you could go up its vertical leg in a lift. Then stop off at a restaurant in the middle. Then climb up its neck on a staircase, from which you could view the estuary, and central London.
There has been lots of photo-reminiscing here lately, so here are some photos I took much more recently. Well, in May of this year anyway:
Yes, it’s the lion at the South Bank end of Westminster Bridge.
This South Bank Lion has quite a history, the strangest thing being that it used to be red. I was going to show you the “photo” of the lion when it was red that I found here, until I realised it was faked with Photoshop. But that link is worth following.
The lion hasn’t always perched on the bridge. His first home was on top of the Lion Brewery, a booze factory once based on a site now occupied by the Royal Festival Hall.
I bet the brewery would have made a better concert hall than the accursed RFH.
This photo, on the other hand, of the lion with men and scaffolding is genuine:
The photograph above was kindly shared by Nick Redman of London Photos, whose grandfather (second on the left) was one of the scaffolders who helped move the lion from the soon-to-be-demolished brewery.
I found that here. Also well worth clicking on.
I assume this must be why so many pubs are called “The Red Lion”.
Apparently Emile Zola was very fond of this lion. Blog and learn.