Last night, at Chateau Samizdata, I and all others present drank this:

Until last night I did not know that there was any such thing.  Well, I knew there was Sauvignon Blanc, but not called that.

Sadly, I failed to properly include the hippo at the top of the label on the left, but you can see plenty of the hippos here, because of course there is a website and you can read all about it.

Clever marketing, I think.  The real wine buffs will like it, if they like it, regardless of the name.  “Oh yes, it’s actually rather good, you know” blah blah.  And the wine unbuffs like me will like it too, because it’s a laugh, and a bit of a tease of wine buffs of the sort who expect wine not to be called such a thing.  So, win win.

… 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?

Today I did something I very rarely do these days.  I bought a newspaper:

It was The Times of May 24th 1940.  Originally it cost 2d, which means two old pennies, from the days of pounds, shillings and pence, which I remember very well, because they lasted into the sixties.  Today, I bought it in the local gay charity shop in Churton Street, for £1.  There were quite a few more copies of The Times from that time still on sale there, most of them from late in 1939.  £1 each.  How long they will last, who can say?

Patrick Crozier, do you want me to get more copies for you, if they are still there?

Patrick Crozier’s talk at my place last month, based on The Times in 1913, was superb.  He turned the talk into six Samizdata postings, which you can find by going to the last one, and following the links back.  Highly recommended if you’ve not read them yet.

LATER: Twenty more copies.

Or maybe alligators.  Who is to say?  (You perhaps?)

Shop windows are full of strange and photographable things, I find.  Sadly, the window aspect of window displays often causes an eruption of reflections that get in the way.  Happily not this time, though.

Quota photo because I am now trying to put stuff up here at least every two days.

My friend Alex Singleton dropped by the other day.  He often does, after or between appointments that bring him near to my home.  He has a blog, which I recommend, and Alex himself recommends blogging as a good way to spread ideas or sell products.  I sort of knew Alex had a blog for a quite a while, but did not really register this fact.  I am now digging backwards, and finding things like this, from someone called Harold Burson:

The term communications has become synonymous with PR but this does a disservice to our profession by making it tactical … The best term for what we do is public relations.

I recently read a book where “PR” meant photo reconnaissance throughout.  It described a different world entirely from ours, in which misdirected photographic efforts could easily cost your your life.  But yes, good to encounter someone who is not ashamed of what he does.

Too few practitioners have even heard of the legendary figures of PR, such as Ivy Lee and Sir Basil Clarke, let alone read about them. But it does mean that those who put the time in to study how PR works – practically, not academically – quickly shine.

That’s Alex himself.  There are, throughout his blog, regular references to and quotes from old dead guys, another who is frequently mentioned being David Ogilvy.  Why reinvent the wheel?  A particular theme of Alex’s thinking is that the new social media don’t render all the wisdoms of the PR and advertising past obsolete.

I like how Alex writes.  He prefers short and clear sentences to longer and wafflier ones, clear words to the vaguer words so loved by PR-ists.  Everything he writes exudes confidence in his ability to help enterprise do their PR better.  Which would explain why he is not afraid to have as his latest posting an admiring piece about Rudolf Flesch.  Quote:

Flesch writes: “while we don’t need so many words any more to express our thoughts, the words we do use carry a much heavier load of ideas… as far as ideas are concerned, our sentences are usually much longer and fuller than those people wrote two or three centuries ago”.

The danger, he says, is that “our more heavy-handed writers don’t care much for the modern short sentence either; and so we get prose that consists of overlong sentences packed to the brim with long, overloaded words”.

And that, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with so much material that comes out of big organisations today.

You don’t put stuff like that up if you fear that your earlier postings will then be scoured by envious rivals, successfully, for great gobs of longwinded nonsense.

Alex, just like all these old dead guys, dresses smartly, as he explains in this posting, i.e. more smartly than he did in this photo of him (by me with me also in it) here.  I particularly like that one.

Talking with Alex also helped me to think through an enterprise of my own that I am now contemplating.  He supplied some very helpful ideas about how I could do this more easily and effectively.

Photographed by me this afternoon, outside the Savoy Hotel, Strand, London, where there are two of these, on either side of the entrance road:

I couldn’t tell, no matter how carefully I looked, whether this is made of real vegetation or just plastic fakery.  I asked how long the cats had been there, but got no satisfactory answer.  All I learned was that these cats are there for “good luck”.

When home, I googled, and learned of Kaspar.

I shall definitely be having a go on this, which will be up and ready for climbing in the Autumn:

The boundaries between Art, Advertising and Fun get ever blurrier.

This particular bit of artistically fun advertising being to advertise a new way to use “tulipwood”.

Blog and learn.

That mobile phones have cameras means that even regular people now always have a camera with them.  Already, mobile phone cameras are quite good.  Soon, they will be as good as all but the best cameras, to the point where ever more people will be satisfied with their mobile phone cameras, and accordingly won’t want to be bothering with dedicated cameras at all.  This transition is already under way, a fact which I regularly track whenever I roam about London snapping (among other delights) my fellow snappers and their snapping machines. 

This photographer, for instance, looks like he’s using a “phone”, the inverted commas there being because these things are so much more than phones, to the point where the phoning is almost an afterthought.  As Michael Jennings said last night, it really is something of an accident that we just happen to call these things “phones”.

Here is a photo I took with my Google Nexus 4, very soon after I got it, of Randy Barnett (already featured here in this earlier posting - bottom right of the first lot of pictures there), speaking at Freedom Forum 2013:

As you can see, the quality is okay, but only okay.  Compare with the zoomed photo (at the link above) of Barnett, and you can easily see the difference that a better camera makes.  If the Google Nexus 4 camera has a zoom feature, I have yet to discover it.

As the picture above shows, I (of course) had my regular camera with me at FF2013.  But last night I was out and about for a short while, without that camera, only the Google Nexus 4.  I was dining at Chateau Samizdata, and collecting Amazon stuff that I have delivered there rather than at my own front door, because at my own front door there have been robberies.  So anyway, a recent arrive at CS was a keyboard, for use with the GN4, but although pre-warned that this keyboard would require two AAA batteries to make it go, I had forgotten to bring these with me.  So, I nipped out to buy some.  Without my regular camera.

Sod’s Law decrees that whenever you are out and about without your camera, interesting things will immediately present themselves to you.  And one such interesting thing did, in the form of a sign making use of the double meaning of the word Pole.  But, Sod’s Law was held at bay by my GN4, which I did have with me, in my jacket pocket, because keeping the GN4 in my jacket pocket at all times except when I am using it is The Rule.  Snap snap, which fortunately I had more or less learned how to do:

The GN4 may not be much good for distance Big Things, and the like, but it is fine for a sign.

And since the sign was the point, even though I do like scaffolding, here is the bit of the picture with the sign:

No computerised trickery there, apart from the cropping.  More than somewhat blurry, but entirely legible, the whole point of letters being that they hack their way through exactly such communicational barriers.

I know I keep going on about it, but now I will go on about it some more.  Signs make great photos.  Signs are extraordinarily evocative of the places where they are displayed.  Signs tell you what goes on in a place, or what people want to do or are liable to do by mistake, but/and must not.  Wherever the public goes, there are signs, especially nowadays, when you are legally responsible for whatever idiotic thing the public does on your patch, unless you can point at a sign saying don’t do that.  So, on that wedding day, I photoed signs.

It was, after all, a sign that told me I was in the right place to start with, see 1.1 below.  My favourite is 3.2, the one about swan rescue.

No, forget the swans.  My even more favourite one is the one that says: this parking space is only for Registrars, 2.2.  This told me that there are a lot of weddings here, and that they are accordingly quite good at doing weddings.  So it proved.

British Summer Time began last Sunday, and I surely wasn’t the only Brit taken by surprise.  According to our excellent and invariably accurate short range weather forecasters (the long range climate guessers are something else entirely), the current (bitterly) cold spell that we are enduring will only end around the middle of this month.

On April 20th, two friends of mine are to be married, hopefully in the warm outdoors, and I hope to be taking photos of it, in the warm outdoors.  They hope, as do I, that the cold will soon abate.  Fingers crossed.  The weather is getting sunnier now, but is still amazingly cold.  Coldest March Britain has had for over half a century, they are saying.  It was several years ago now that they (i.e. the long range climate guessers) changed Global Warming to Climate Chaos.  Wise move.  Wiser would have been to shut the fuck up and let Western Civilisation (a) proceed without them fucking with it, and (b) deal with any climate dramas if and when.

Meanwhile, the cold has kept me from roaming London taking snaps during the last week or two.  Instead I roam through my recent archives, looking for interesting snaps taken on warmer days.

Days like March 5th.  I have already displayed here a number of snaps taken that day.

Here are some more:

This time there are more of those commonplace things that look better in good photos, as I hope you think these somewhat are, than they do when you actually see them.  That’s if you even do see them, as in notice them.

Besides which, a double decker bus advert may be pretty obvious stuff to a fellow Londoner.  But what if you are one of those lost souls who lives outside London?  Or worse, who has never even been to London?  Or perhaps never even set eyes on a double decker bus? A double decker bus advert must seem, to such a person, almost unbearably exotic and glamorous.

Note, in the first picture, top left, reflections of these buildings.

While I was on that Waterloo Station upper deck, I espied a couple of adverts next to each other, put out by this organisation.

Here they are together:

And here they each are separately, for you to click on to get them well and truly readable:

Okay, I accept these challenges, and will respond.

The left hand one is a variant on the theme of “a billion people can’t be wrong”.  Yes they can.  Why has the Qur’an remained unchanged?  There are any number of reasons why that would happen, other than what they are trying to say, which is that it is all true.  Because it is an object of unthinking worship, rather than of serious study?  (Remember that the memorising of it is often done by people who have no idea what they are saying, merely reproducing sounds.) Because people have been too scared to challenge it?  Because Islam remains stuck in the seventh century, and unthinking bigotry is built into it?

Science, which the second advert seeks to argue was pre-echoed by the Qur’an, has changed over and over again.  And this is a sign of science’s intellectual seriousness and intellectual vitality.  Lack of change, century after century, signifies the opposite.

As for the claim of the Qur’an to be science before science, the real theory of the big bang is but the conceptual tip of an intellectual iceberg consisting of a ton of evidence and interpretation, and it is the latter that gives science its force. Science is not merely true.  It explains why it is true.  It argues about whether it is true.  And consequently it gets ever more true.  Islam is no truer now than it was thirteen centuries ago.

The good news here is that the claim that the Qur’an is as scientific as real science is a huge concession to the acknowledged intellectual superiority of science.  “We have been right all along, and science proves it!” But if they really thought that the Qur’an was the last word on everything, they wouldn’t be dragging science in to back the claim up.  Science would be ignored.

But they know that they cannot now ignore science.  Science is a challenge they know they have to respond to.  On account of it being so much truer and so much better at getting at more truth than the unchanging and unchangeable incantations that they are stuck with.

I have recently acquired a new cleaning lady.  She’s been twice now, and she seems good.  I am paying her £20 for two hours, which is a bit more than she expects, but I need her services rather less regularly than many people might, and at irregular times, so a bit more seems fair.

She is keen to get further cleaning and housekeeping work in the London area, so if anyone in London would like me to put them in touch, get in touch with me.

Yes, she is Eastern European.  I have yet to ask if she is a trained concert pianist.  She definitely sings in a church choir.

So how about another Feline Friday:

Photoed by me this afternoon, next to Westminster Abbey.

In the forecourt of the Channel 4 headquarters in Horseferry Road is a big 4, which gets variably decorated from time to time.  This is the latest variant, photoed by me this afternoon:

That must be a guy in a wheel chair, there to flag up the Paralympics coverage on C4.

And yes indeed, perfect summer weather.

Last Tuesday, at 10pm, I met somebody at Piccadilly Circus.  I seem to recall it being on QI that actually the Eros Statue isn’t really an Eros Statue, but despite that, we met next to the Eros Statue.  It sounds more exciting than it was.

While waiting for this person to arrive, I of course, took photos of people taking photos:

And on the way home, I photographed some Modern Art:

That’s in a tube station.  Green Park, I think.