On Wednesday last, I got lucky with a flypast.  There I was, wandering along the South Bank from the Wheel to the RFH, and suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, these appeared in the sky with a great roar.  I got rid of all optical enlarging (because that reduces the area photoed and means you will probably miss completely), pointed, and clicked.  Bingo:

Click to get a bigger picture, but not any bigger of the actual airplanes.  Which I do to emphasise that Wednesday was yet another lovely London day, which was of course exactly prophesied by the weather persons.

The flypast, I subsequently learned, was to do with this event.  Typhoons, apparently.

But where can I learn about other flypasts, before they happen?  The Red Arrows have their own site, but these were not Red Arrows, just RAF.  What I want is not all the displays by the Red Arrows or whoever, wherever, that are coming up.  I want all aerial displays, by anybody, in London.  Can anyone help?  Who knows? - one day I might manage to take photos like these.

That Jeremy Clarkson is putting himself about, politically I mean.  When the historians write of how the New Labour tide receded, to be replaced by whatever other incoming tide replaces it, Clarkson will, I suspect, figure rather prominently.

I said in this posting about the excellence of our weather forecasts and the fact that Tuesday would turn out warm and sunny that I would put pictures up the next day of all this warm sunniness.  Apologies for the delay, but here they are, and they illustrate perfectly what a twat Stephen Fry is about weather forecasts.  I took them just after 5 pm on Wednesday afternoon.  If anyone wants to say that it was cloudy earlier in the day, I have cloudless pictures from earlier in the afternoon also.

Click to get them bigger.  The top two are looking in opposite directions along the canal, taken from the bridge that I walk over on my way to Kings Cross Supplementary.  The point about the big wobbly-fronted building is that if there are clouds that it might reflect, it duly reflects them.  That day, there were no clouds to reflect, no matter where you looked.  Just blue blueness.

It was also, again as prophesied, breezy.  That I find harder to photo.

Here’s one I took later, just before 8 pm, before disappearing back into Kings Cross Station:

Not the most spectacular sunset you’ll ever see.  No clouds.

Two amazing gizmos have been featured recently on Gizmodo.  First there is this eleven-a-side table football table (more here):

And then there are these hamster powered cars (product details here):

The hamster race-track could have been great, but it is far too small.  The cars should be racing each other on a track that is big enough for all three of them to have a meaningful contest.  All they have so far is one hamster going around a tiny single track, and not even in a car.  Just a sort of ball thingy.  Which is rubbish.  But, it is rubbish that is easily correctable, so hurrah for capitalism anyway.

If ubergadgetblogger engadget has recently mentioned either of these two superb gadget/gizmos, or any other gadget/gizmos that are half as splendid as these two, then I missed it.  Which could quite well be.

Not a great photo, but an okay photo of a great urban feature, just next to the Hammersmith Flyover, where I was on Saturday morning:

Temporary pleasures like this are surely among the ones most worth photo-ing.  The famous landmarks that we Billion Monkeys tend to concentrate on will be with us for decades.

The church being restored or rebuilt or whatever it is, is St Paul’s Hammersmith.  This is it before they covered it up.  And here is another view of the covering.  Better lit than mine, but less weird.

Stephen Fry is widely believed to be a rather clever man, but on an episode of QI that they showed this evening because of the snooker finishing early, he said something deeply stupid, to widespread agreement from all the fawning panellists by whom he was flanked.  He said that British weather forecasts are hopeless, about as much use as looking at the insides of a bird, or some such oh-so-clever classical illusion.

I’ve said it before and I will now say it again.  Nonsense.  Our weather forecasts are superb.  If ever I have in mind to go out tomorrow, I make a point of attending to the weather forecast very carefully.  Often my decision to go out at all tomorrow is made the night before purely on the strength of the invariably almost unreally accurate weather forecast that I have just watched.

We have just been told that tomorrow, for instance, as in May 6th 2008, the south of England will be delightfully warm, breezy and sunny.  Ideal for a day out and about.  And that, I am here to tell you, is exactly how it will turn out.  Tomorrow, I will show you the photos to prove this fact, as fact it most certainly will prove to be.

We have just been told that tomorrow, for instance, as in May 6th 2008, the south of England will be delightfully warm, breezy and sunny.  Ideal for a day out and about.  And that, I am here to tell you, is exactly how it will turn out.  Tomorrow, I will show you the photos to prove this fact, as fact it most certainly will prove to be.

These universal ideas that are obvious bollocks are very odd.  Another one I recall from my youth was that people all used to say, to universal applause from every other idiot present, that there was “no difference between the major political parties”.  This is not true now, but it was total and obvious tripe in those far off days.  Yet everyone kept on repeating this mantra about there being “no difference” out of sheer habit.  It never seemed to occur to anyone at all to give the matter twenty seconds of solid thought and then to declare the notion to be the idiotic nonsense that it quite clearly was.  Now, if you want a cheap laugh at a party, say that weather forecasts are useless.  Or, maybe not.  Maybe someone with both a mind that works and a willingness to make use of it will be present, and you will be firmly contradicted for the thoughtless fool that you are.

I’ve been watching the world championship snooker on the telly, and Steve Davies did an interval report in which he said that in China they have more snooker players – about thirty million – than in the rest of the world put together.  I did not know that.  I take it for granted that all the cues and balls and tables and whatnot are now all made in China, but I didn’t know they were also turning out the majority of the players.  The picture is of Ding JunWei, who apparently beat Steve Davies in the UK Championship.  He is eighteen years old.

But as Steve Davies has also just pointed out, there were five players from Essex in this year’s championship, which is more than all of China had.  So for the time being, Essex rules.

Boris wins.  And actually not that narrowly.  1,043,761 to Boris.  893 thousand something or other for Ken Livingstone, with not that much difference between the second choice totals.

Here is the photo of Boris that I took in July 2006, at Lords Cricket Ground:

I’m watching the proceedings on BBC News 24, or whatever it’s called.

Boris is now making his victory speech, and he said it is already tomorrow.  Not so, this still gets in as May 2nd.  He’s going with magnanimity towards Ken rather than putting the knife in.

“Let’s get cracking tomorrow.  Let’s have a drink tonight.” Well said.  I feel a sense of connection to these London politicians.  It won’t last.  Tomorrow I will get back to realising that they are only politicians, and that politics is daylight robbery.  Now Ken is saying that it’s his fault he lost.  Also very impressive.  No doubt these two men will very soon also get back to stabbing one another, the way nature intended.  But for a brief moment, they conspired to create a little moment of magic.  Very cunningly but also very classily done by both men.

I’ll add a link or two to news coverage over the next few minutes.  It now really is tomorrow morning.

BBC.

The Man From YouGov is now crowing, ever so politely, just as Guido said would happen.

Rob Fisher is not amused.  Londonist is.  Diamond Geezer despairs.

Fraser Nelson on Boris’s secret weapon: driving the left mad.  Coffee House roundup of their Boris v Ken bloggage here.

Instapundit notices with more linkage, in particular to this.

John Redwood on Labour’s rubbish policy.  Not a metaphor.

Boris’s acceptance speech.

Last night they had bloggers on BBC1, and the BBC woman talked about them as if they were there to lower the tone.  In fact they raised it, and the BBC’s own Jeremy Vine lowered it.  Iain Dale did very well, I thought, coming across as thoughtful and analytical.  He too thought Vine made a twat of himself, as did Guido.

By the way, and I keep meaning to mention this, I don’t like the design of the top of Guido.  It makes it look like there’s dirt on my screen, which is annoying because there often is, so the illusion is credible.

Guido’s commenters are expressing the fear that a great pile of pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap postal votes will crash in and steal it for Ken.  I hope this doesn’t happen, and have now worked out why.  Aside from disliking tax-and-spend lefties, I am simply curious to see how Mayor Boris will turn out.  He reminds me of a recent radio comedy joke: “His men would follow him anywhere, if only out of morbid curiosity.” That’s Boris, I think.  The other Guido comment that stuck in my mind was from someone saying that Gordon Brown will now punish London, with complicated but deadly tax tinkerings, etc.  I hope that it’s Mayor Boris, that he proves as clever as his enthusiasts say he is, and that he bellows at Gordon whenever he does this.  Samizdata’s Johnathan Pearce has been drip-drip-dripping away lately with stories of big businesses leaving London, or, in the case of Shire Paharmaceuticals, Basingstoke, which is nearly London.

Another complaint about Guido, peculiar to just now I trust, is that whenever Guido is up on my screen, the rest of my computer misbehaves.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but no links to him for the time being.  I think he has just crashed Internet explorer for me, again.  Guido Fawkes, that is.  See my blogroll if you are confused.  Good luck.

Despite myself, I always get sucked into elections and election watching on the night.  I think the big news for London is that it is, finally, a political battleground, with two great\ political machines vying for the Mayor and all the Mayor’s budgets and buildings and corruption opportunities, instead of merely one Ken Livingstone machine just hoovering up all this stuff unopposed, or opposed only by the Evening Standard.  I suspect the big story of the next few days in London will be the high turnout, nearly as high as for a general election.

I hope Boris doesn’t put a stop to London having more skyscrapers.  Maybe the change will merely be that the skyscrapers will be Jewish rather than Arab.  I hope that if they decide to build a Thames Estuary Bridge, Boris decides to hustle up enough more money to make it a great looking bridge instead of a boring one, such as is I believe is threatened now.  And I hope Boris cancels the London Olympics, which will bankrupt us all for generations, but that is presumably too much to hope for.

There’s an election happening in London today, and the early guesses say that Boris Johnson will be the new Mayor, and Ken Livingstone the new ex-Mayor.  I have no idea.

Shane Greer is angry about this article by Steve Richards.  Greer says that Richards’ piece is elitist, because it calls the voters stupid and ungrateful.  But Richards has half a point.  Ken Livingstone has done quite a lot of popular things for Londoners, if you are the sort of Londoner who relies on public transport rather than your car., and who doesn’t pay that much in the way of council tax.

Voters aren’t stupid, but they are indeed ungrateful.  They don’t vote about what you’ve done, they vote about what they want done.  They don’t vote about the past, they vote about the future.  The most famous British example is probably the way that the victorious Winston Churchill was unceremoniously dumped in 1945.  War won, thank you Winnie, but no, you are not the post-war Prime Minister that we now want.  You can do heroism, but not a land fit for the heroes to come home to.  Goodnight.

Voters can also be punitive.  When someone they basically don’t like has done the job they were voted in to do a few years back, the backlash can be something terrible.  This is partly what happened to the Conservatives during the last decade.  This may now be happening to Ken.  Ken may have been regarded as necessary, to make the trains run on time, etc.  But he has never been really liked, and now all those corruption stories and all that disgusting cosying up to terrorists starts to count for more than the tube and the buses.  So, thanks for the buses mate, and piss off.

What I think also may be happening in London is that Ken Livingstone has made being the Mayor of London matter, and this has had the effect, it would now appear, of causing potential Conservative voters in London local elections to become actual Conservative voters.  Boris Johnson has served to highlight this same effect, by being a celeb with high recognition, and by not making any big mistakes.  My favourite comment about the London Mayor election is from a commenter at Guido’s - which I can’t now find because my I-now-wish-I-was-a-swear-blogger computer is playing up, as it is now doing from time to time - saying that the amazing thing was that Boris had said and done nothing seriously stupid for three whole months.

He has gone from the authentic Boris as seen on HIGNFY to a boring twat, in the manner of Robert Redford in The Candidate.  Which means he will probably win.

Amit Varma calls this the WTF quote of the day:

The bold new face of modern India now stands exposed as hollow following the slapping drama starring Harbhajan Singh and S Sreesanth.

Varma found that here.  Says he:

Both cricket and India are far too complex and nuanced to be captured in such lazy clichés. No?

Well, not quite.  This is indeed a lazy Indian journo stirring it hysterically by being contrarian about the IPL.  But I think that the IPL is indeed India showing a new face to the world.  But one IPL cricketer slapping another IPL cricketer is all part of the drama, along with Gilchrist hitting a century in 42 balls.  I’m not saying I’m in favour of cricketers slapping one another, and I agree with Harbhajan being punished.  It’s just that the bigger IPL story is how great it is.

In other sports news, what does it take to eject an English club from the Champion’s League?  Answer: another English club.  (Seriously.  London Arsenal were ejected by Liverpool, Now Liverpool have been ejected by London Chelsea.  In the final, either London Chelsea will lose to Man U or Man U will lose to London Chelsea.) Patrick Crozier ((London?) Watford) and I (London Spurs) watched the first half of tonight’s London Chelsea v Liverpool game in a pub near me, after doing a podcast.  London Chelsea were leading 1-0 at half time, which for them would have been sufficient.  That’s probably all the drama there’ll be, we said, as we left.

It’s amazing what they can do with pixie dust nowadays:

How? Well that’s the truly remarkable part. It wasn’t a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder - or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story.

Mr Speivak’s brother Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him the powder.

For ten days Mr Spievak put a little on his finger.

“The second time I put it on I already could see growth. Each day it was up further. Finally it closed up and was a finger.

“It took about four weeks before it was sealed.”

Now he says he has “complete feeling, complete movement.”

The “pixie dust” comes from the University of Pittsburgh, though in the lab Dr Stephen Badylak prefers to call it extra cellular matrix.

It comes from the lining of a pig’s bladder, apparently.

If they can perfect the technique, it might mean one day they could repair not just a severed finger, but severely burnt skin, or even damaged organs.

It reminds me of a story I recall reading as a child, about the Apples of Youth.

I recall writing once about how our Mum used to take us on buses when we were small to expose us to lower class germs and build up our immune systems.  Various bloggers and friends quoted this because, I don’t know, they thought it was funny or something.

Well now, scientists have discovered – so it must be true – that the same principle applies with dogs:

Children run less risk of being sensitive to allergens if there is a dog in the house in the early years of their lives, scientists have found.

The conclusion, based on a six-year study of 9,000 children, adds weight to the theory that growing up with a pet trains the immune system to be less sensitive to potential triggers for allergies such as asthma, eczema and hay fever.

Imagine what it would be like to live, when young, with a lower class dog.  Not even the Black Death could touch you.

As regulars here know, bridges are a big deal here, so the biggest story in Italy just now, from the point of view of this blog, is the plan to build a huge, huge suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina.

Apparently Mr Berlusconi, Italy’s recently victorious Prime Minister or President or whatever it is, had this to say about the Messina Bridge:

He said that work on his pet grand projet, the planned suspension bridge over the Strait of Messina to Sicily, cancelled by Romano Prodi’s government, would resume without delay.

To quote Wikipedia about this bidge, under the heading Controversy and concerns (so take with pinch of salt):

There are concerns about the role of the local mafia.  It is feared that organised criminals obtain a monopoly on construction contracts by intimidating competitors and bribing local officials and then overcharging for the work, generating large profits.

Many also question the priority of the bridge, since some towns in Sicily are still without running water, and claim that the money used for the bridge would be better spent elsewhere.

There are also those who claim that the bridge would be totally unnecessary, since the local economy is already providing for the conversion of a local former NATO airport into a commercial terminal to export vegetables to northern Europe.  Alternatively, a much cheaper revamping of the current structures is claimed to be sufficient (for instance, the ferry lines on the Calabria side are now accessible by trucks only by driving through very narrow streets, which are a tight bottleneck for transport).

Finally, there are concerns about the environmental impact of the bridge, its actual feasibility, and whether it could resist earthquakes, not uncommon in the region.

Well quite so.  I’m sure that if this thing does ever gets built it will be a huge political bribe of some kind.  But most bribes don’t look nearly as good as this one will.  If they do build it.  And assuming it stays up.

Another excellent addition to the Billion Monkeys Flashing collection.  And she’s carrying a big bag.  And she’s holding another camera besides the one she’s using.  And she crouching down with the best of all those in the Billion Monkeys Crouching archive.  Tick tick tick tick.  Taken yesterday.  Click for the bigger picture.

And, I’ve just remembered, I want to do a collection of Billion Monkey pictures which do not violate anyone’s privacy, for exposure on such places as Flickr.  Tick tick tick tick tick.

(And here.) It’s not compulsory.  You can do a blog any way you like.  But, it’s easier:

One of the things that holds me back from waking up this blog is the feeling that any post that comes after a long silence ought to be important.

I know that feeling, and I don’t like it.  If you want something by moi that is deep, try this.  Or this.

See what I mean about easier?