My latest last Friday of the month meeting was this evening.  Thank you Simon Gibbs, and all else who attended.  Excellent talk and an excellent evening.

But I spent all day fretting about the meeting instead of doing anything for here, and now that it’s over I don’t want to say something stupid about the meeting.  I’d rather think about that some more and talk sense about it.

So here, instead of proper blogging, are some cat links that I like.  Google “cats” and of course you get a ton of stuff.  These few were my favourites.

Cats in the movies.

Florida Man Holds Gun to Cat’s Head and Posts Picture to Facebook.  The www is not amused.

Monkeys fear big cats less, eat more, with humans around.

Feisty feline saves boy from bullies.  But, there is no video, so not as good as this.

And for those who share my interest in American politics, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused Senate Democrats of meowing like kitty cats and enabling President Barack Obama to enact lawless executive actions like no other president before him.  I wouldn’t choose cats are a metaphor for lack of independence.

And see also the cat wheel linked to by David Thompson.

Today, by some means or another that I forget (other than it was the internet) I learned that the new trains for Crossrail will supplied by Bombardier.  Oh yes, I learned it here.

And then, and again I forget how exactly, I learned about this bizarre vehicle, the Bombardier Embrio:

Oh yes, how I got to this was I googled for Bombardier pictures, and in among lots of airplanes and some trains, I saw this weird one wheeled thing, and investigated.

It looks like something Sylvester Stallone would ride in a movie.

It isn’t real.  It is only a “concept” vehicle, and concept vehicles never happen.  They just become part of the past history of the future, along with flying cars, robots to do your vacuuming and serve you tea, and elaborate space travel by the end of the last century.  Still, weird.

I think what made me dig this up was that I have a soft spot for Bombardier, having done a few days, over the past few years, of planespotting at London City Airport, my favourite airport in the world.  Lots of the planes that fly in and out of there are made by Bombardier.  The world’s famous planes are made by Boeing and Airbus.  But the quirky ones, the ones with propellers, the ones you don’t recognise, are made by companies like Bombardier.

I also like the way that railway carriages have changed during my lifetime.  They have got better and better, with their automatic doors and spacious interiors.

When I say “back”, what I mean is, looking up its arse, at its bollocks:

Here is the same beast from its better side, together with some history, such as why it’s called the Coade Lion.

It’s one of my favourite London statues, especially when it lines itself up with the Wheel.

And here is something else feline, spotted in the place where all vehicles of interest to me seem to be spotted these days, Lower Marsh:

It’s the Bobcat E50, as you can see in my photo if you look carefully enough.

So, what is a “bobcat”?  I saw a TV documentary recently about honey badgers, and they are nothing to do with regular badgers.  So, is a bobcat a regular cat nearly, or a regular cat not at all?  Does it merely look or behave somewhat like a cat, to some rather unobservant people?  It turns out bobcats are cats.  Wikipedia has a picture of what it describes as “bobcat kittens” (which ought surely to be: bobkittens).  They look exactly like regular cat kittens.

Wikipedia is reasonably reliable on non-politically-controversial topics, but I was rather expecting the bobcat wikipedia entry to have a clutch of propaganda in it about how bobcats are an endangered species and how this is all the fault of people, capitalism, etc..  But actually the bobcat news here, according to Wikipedia, is quite good:

Although bobcats have been hunted extensively by humans, both for sport and fur, their population has proven resilient though declining in some areas.

See also, this strange guy.  I like the Police Academy movies, in which he appears, despite him rather than to any degree because of him.  The only thing I do like about him is that he omits the terminal e from his surname, thereby making it that tiny bit easier for me to make people spell my surname right.

Spent the afternoon and evening out with Goddaughter 2.  On our travels we encountered a poster advertising the movie Noah.  My opinion of Hollywood action movies is that they shrink all stories that they start with back to just the one story which is the same story every time.  I asked if that was true also of Noah.  Yes, replied Goddaughter 2:

It is basically Transformers with a boat.

LOL.  As in: I actually did.  Goddaughter 2 also sounds like an action movie, I think.

When I should have been taking my early evening nap, we were instead watching Cosi Fan Tutte at the Imax, and I struggled to stay awake.  Not that it was bad.  If it had been bad I would have just gone to sleep.  But it was good, so I kept on postponing my nap, for about four hours.  The result of all this is that I am too now tired to be saying anything more than what you just read.

Well, one other thing.  We met under the Big Blue Cock in Trafalgar Square, my thinking in choosing this spot being that you aren’t going to get it wrong.  There are no other Big Blue Cocks in London, and you can’t miss it.

We both like it very much.

As anyone who noticed the sudden piling up of moronic spam comments here may have suspected, I had an internet disconnect crisis last night, and it was still in effect this morning.  I fiddled about with wires, last night and again this morning, because the last time it happened this is what solved it.  I did lots of rebooting last night to no avail, so didn’t bother to do this again this morning.  Instead I rang The Guru.

It was amazing how much The Guru was this morning able to learn about the problem, by which I mean to learn what the problem was not, just by unleashing his remote control Superpowers.  He then suggested another rebooting, and I did this, just to humour him, and back it all came.  But why?  What was I doing right, all of a sudden?  Very troubling.

It’s like that pivotal moment in movie history when Harrison Ford, in one of the first and good trio of Star Wars movies, got a bit of electrical kit in his spaceship to work properly by smacking it.

Yes, I’m afraid I’ve been doing rather a lot of quota posting of late.

So anyway, here’s the link.

And here is the quota photo:

That’s actually one of my more favourite recent photos.  It was taken just before Christmas, in Twickenham, where Patrick Crozier lives, through the window of a shop where they sell … things like that.

I like the water on the window.

Tomorrow evening the 2014 BAFTA Awards shindig will be happening, at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.  Roger Hewland, proprietor of Gramex (Records and CDs), Lower Marsh, told me this afternoon that BAFTA is paying the ROH three quarters of a million quid for this privilege.  Where RH picked this titbit up, I do not know, but it sounds a lot, doesn’t it?

Below is a picture that I recently took myself of the ROH.  If you google for pictures of the ROH, you mostly get either interiors, or else the big Parthenon-like front entrance.  But when I was at that Rooftop Bar I recently visited, I took this snap of the ROH:

What strikes me is how modern it looks.  It’s just a big box.  The decoration is no more than a gesture.  I know, I know, that’s because nobody can see this bit, this being before the age of buildings taller than this, from which people can look down.  But even so, you can see architectural modernism all present and correct, just waiting to emerge.

Taken on Christmas Day:

What I like about the crane is that, in this photo, it looks rather sinister, more like a tower in a Nazi prison camp in a war film than a regular crane.  It’s the barbed wire square, about half way up that does it, I think.  Plus, the slightly spooky light.  It doesn’t look like actual getting dark light.  It looks like getting dark light in a movie.  Blue instead of grey, in other words.  Cameras turn everything blue if given any opportunity, unless they are black and white and nothing else allowed cameras.

Of course, this effect would be greatly enhanced if the plane was not so obviously a very post-WW2 jet.  It should be a plane like the one in the opening credits of Where Eagles Dare, one of my most favourite movie sequences, because of the visuals and because of Ron Goodwin’s music.  In my opinion, nothing else in this movie is as good as this opening.

See also this earlier photo here, also of a big crane and a small plane.  I found out about this earlier posting when I tried to load the above photo with the name “Crane+Plane”, but was told that this photo title was already taken.

Yes.  I spent my blogging time today fretting about the finishing of this.  So, no time to do much here.

But there’s an internet out there.

Here’s a very quick vid, of Kenneth Williams opining (which would be a good word for him to say) about specialisation.

And here’s a slightly longer bit of video, which is a snippet from one of my favourite science fiction movies.  An astronaut argues philosophy with a bomb.  I found it here.  And I do mean here.

Enjoy.

And here’s a really good photograph, to make up for the really bad photograph in the previous posting.  I say really good photograph.  What I mean is a photo taken by me that is okay, of a really good photograph, taken by a seriously Real Photographer.  Limited edition, perfect paper, perfectly printed, framed, the works, worth hundreds of pounds:

Yes, it’s Dumbledore, making himself smile for the camera.

He’s been having his ups and his downs lately, it seems.  As do we all.

At the Do I attended last weekend, just after taking the photo in the previous posting, this photograph was one of the items being charitably auctioned.

This is the first charity auction I can remember attending.  But, despite my ignorance of how to do such a Do, let me offer you a tip, for if you ever organise a charitable auction.  Be sure to hand round a cash bucket immediately after the auction bit of the evening finishes, to enable all those who feel ridiculously guilty about not having bought any of the things being auctioned to part with a manageable amount of cash, without being encumbered with a unnecessary Thing, or worse, a Complicated Experience.  If they had done that at this Do, I reckon they might have increased their money by twenty percent or more.  They’d certainly have got twenty quid out of me.

… in among all the stuff that does not.

Foster’s flaccid Gherkin used to advertise erectile dysfunction treatment.  Personally, I don’t think the Gherkin looks like a penis, more like a vibrator.  Certainly not a gherkin.

And: Synthetic creature could “save nature” says Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.  Has this woman never seen any horror movies?

Related: Will Jellyfish Take Over the World?

Yes, incoming from Rob Fisher:

That’s images from the past, but colorised. Suddenly they don’t look old.  (Reddit comments on that can be found here.)

I am fascinated about why old things look old. Certainly print quality is part of it. Change, too: the Heinz beans logo (which has never changed as far as I can tell) does not look old in the way that some of these logos do.

I’m guessing this is follow-up to what I said here about how photography used to make people from the past look overly solemn, and what Rob said there, in jest, about the past being all in black and white.

Mark Twain must surely have been a bit more merry, in general, than he looks in the photo of him there, now colorised but still very grim looking.

What a lot of the colorised photos look like is stills from “historical” Hollywood movies.  You expect Brad Pitt, dressed in olden times clothes, to step forward at any moment.

As for the logos, it is noticeable (although this doesn’t apply to all of them) that in quite a few of them, there was a flurry of (often quite radical) changes in and/or up until the 1950s and 1960s, but somewhat less in the way of change since.  Often the later changes (see for instance: VW) are mere polishing.  It’s like they were trying to get it right, and then they do get it right and stuck with it.  At first they didn’t know quite what a logo was for and what logos are.  They they did know.  That is reinforced by the Firefox logo, which started in 2002 and then did the one early change in 2003, and that’s it.

How has the internet affected logo design?

Yesterday, I lived my life, but I am determined, having started, to finish telling you about last Thursday.

So, okay, I have now arrived at Westminster Tube Station.

Most tube stations consist of lots of underground tubes, not just for the trains but also for the people.  Westminster Tube Station is different.

In its original form, it was a regular tube station, made entirely out of tubes.  But then they built Portcullis House across the road from Big Ben and Parliament, the one with the giant chimneys on top, where MPs now have vast new quantities of office space to wreak their havoc.  Many think powerful MPs are a good thing, because they will “hold the executive to account” better, but what they mostly now do is nag the executive to bite off more and more unchewable activity, and complain if the executive ever doesn’t.

While they were building Portcullis House, they combined that with doing a total rebuild of the tube station right underneath it.

And this time around, instead of grubbing about in the ground like moles, they just dug a huge, huge hole, like they do when building any other new building.  Just deeper.

As a result, the process of getting from station entrance to train, or from train to train (what with the station now being an interchange between the District and Circle Line, and the newer Jubilee Line - which is the one I was taking), is as dramatic and theatrical as battling through a regular tube station is grim and demeaning and demoralising.  At Westminster Tube, you now go up and down inside a huge open space, like a department store with no stuff in it, and grey rather than all spangly and coloured.  I love it, even though it has a decidedly fascist feel to it, maybe even because it has a decidedly fascist feel to it.  At least its stylish fascism, rather than just lumpy and cloddish.  But mainly, I think I love it because it is so different from a regular tube station.

While there last Thursday, I only took one shot, namely this:

Had I known I was on a Blogged Odyssey, I would have taken many more shots, of all that dramatic open space with science fictiony structure in among it, supporting the building above and the escalators within, but on Thursday all I thought I was doing was taking the tube.  I would have taken shots like the ones here.  Someone really should set a movie gun fight in this place, don’t you think?  Perhaps they already have.

As for my picture above, it puzzled me for a while.  At first I thought the right-way-round Westminster tube sign was some kind of double reflection, but there is only one sheet of glass involved, so it can’t be that.  In the end I cracked it, metaphorically speaking.  The Westminster tube sign is where it seems to be, but how it looks is confused by the reflection of the wall behind me.  It looks like the sign is projected onto the wall.  In fact, the wall behind me is projected onto the sign.  To the left, you can see the regular wall that the tube sign is actually attached to.

That white circular thing behind me, actually a fire hose I think, looks like a full moon.

Once again, I fear most may not care.  But photographed reflections are a thing of mine.

Overheard while channel surfing last night:

Her, trying to persuade him to carry on with the romance: “Do you believe in fate?”

Him: “No.”

Her: “Neither do I.  You see.  This was meant to be.”

This is from the movie Wedding Daze.  One of those unregarded little movies which only gets two stars in the Radio Times, but which I think is a bit better than that.

Frank J:

Think about it: What’s the best way to make sure there is only goodwill out there towards Muslims?

That’s right: Kill all the bad Muslims.

It’s the way that he combines hate-the-hateful speech with everyone-live-in-harmony speech that makes it so funny, right speak with left speak.  Reminds me of that great speech for the defence in Animal House.

This evening I attended the ASI blogger bash, and one of the speakers, Harry Cole, said something along the lines of: Lefties are better at comedy than the Right.. Which I suspect is a lot truer of Britain than it is of the USA.  Closely related to that observation is that in Britain, as was also discussed, we are years away from anything resembling a British version of the Tea Party.  The British Right, in other words, is not in tune with the Zeitgeist, or even any major slab of the Zeitgeist, the way the USA Right is in the USA.  And even there, it may just be a temporary consequence of the Obama phenomenon,, which is a huge attempt to turn the USA into something entirely different.  Europe, basically.  When that attempt gets switched off, whenever that happens, the Tea Party may die with it.  By which I mean either go home or else turn entirely into dull old regular politics.

LATER:  Further illustration of the same proposition.  When Cleese was funny, he was, if not Left, then at least anti-Right.  Now that he’s not funny, he’s Right.