I like this, from Roger Kimball:

Like many conservative books, the only place Encounter books appear in The New York Times is on their best-seller list.

That list always did strike me as a Trojan Horse waiting to burst open with news that contradicts all the other news.

I also like the picture Kimball has here.  (Spot the Billion Monkey (= digital photographer - which I have to put to stop any passing strangers thinking I am calling Barack Obama a monkey).)

And I like the fun he has with the word “structural” in this.  As a general rule, I tend to be confused by the use of the word “structure” (structure of the economy, structure of the population, or, as in Man, Economy and State: “structure of production") to describe anything except an actual structure, of the kind that engineers erect and which hold stuff up, or just themselves up so they can do things like be cranes or bridges.  Usually a word like “pattern” or “shape” would be better, and “structural” would improve clarity by being deleted.  “Structure” suggests that this bit of whatever it is is doing something causally significant to that bit (in the way that the lower bits of an actual structure support the higher up bits), when often all that is happening is that this bit just happens to be next to that bit.  Although, I suppose I have just answered the question of why Rothbard talks about “structure” of production, because this bit of production does indeed make the next bit of production possible, in the sense that making machine tools makes it possible for machine tools to make other things.  But I still find the word confusing, even in that sense.  I would prefer “nature of production”, or just “production”.

Anyway, Fareed Zakaria apparently blames President Bush for the “structural” deficit.  Says Kimball:

Gosh. “Structural deficit.” That sounds impressive. How, you might wonder, does a structural deficit differ from the common or garden variety deficit? Let’s leave that to one side, acknowledging as we do that a “structural deficit” at least sounds more impressive than a deficit without that adjectival honorific.

I wonder too.  Is the word “structural” rather like “social”, in the sense that it sabotages the meaning of whatever word comes next, by hinting at, in connection with something which would otherwise be real, a false theory about what exactly things of this sort really consists of and why?

Is the implication of “structural deficit” that this is the bit of the deficit that is hard to get rid of, because getting rid of it involves getting rid of the things that cause it, and that is really hard.  The unstructural deficit being the bit of the deficit that can just be got rid of, without anyg other things that cause if being got rid of, because nothing does cause it.  It is just lying around and sweeping it up and clearing it away is comparatively easy.  Am I confusing you?  Now you know how I feel.

I’m reading a lot of American stuff at the moment, with Instapundit, for now, being way ahead of Guido in frequency of visits.

There are some particularly excellent World Cup snaps here.  I don’t know just how appalling the Boston Globe is when it comes to grovelling to Obama and being patronising about Palin (my guess would be: very), but boston.com can sure assemble great pics.

I don’t need to explain why this one, the first of them, is my favourite, do I?:

That was taken on Table Mountain.

Here are a couple that I was able to flatten:

Those silhouettes are Germans celebrating goal four against hapless Argentina.

And this next one is of a photographer setting up his remote control camera before a game.  Behind the goalmouth?:

In general cameras figure prominently, and I’ll end with this one, because it doesn’t just feature Real Photographer cameras (Canon must have made a mint with cameras in the last decade), but also Billion Monkey cameras.  I wonder who the people were with the Billion Monkey cameras?  Spanish support staff of various sorts?  FIFA hangers on?  But maybe just regular fans who were in the right place at the right time:

I love how huge the Spanish captain/goalie is compared to little Blatter.

Today I went through the Leake Street tunnel, described by me it this SQotD posting.  I photoed this work in progress:

I prepared another version of this, by cropping it down to just the girl, but it stopped being a quite interesting photo, and just became a not all that well done painting of a girl with a spray can.

A more typical Leake Street image, taken (like that SQotD) in March, would be something like this:

Or this:

I like the hand holding the cassette.  This is how Billion Monkeys often hold their cameras.

Another will-be favourite photo, I think.  Taken the same day as, and very soon after, this:

I’m proud of that.  Another photo-category is being born, of London street lights, with interesting activities or buildings or whatever going on behind them.  London’s best street lights make me say to myself when I pass them: This is how to waste public money!

This, on the other hand, is baffling, to me anyway:

Any explanations?  It looks as if there used to be something there, rectangular, as per the marks on the concrete.  But what?

I also like this:

That’s definitely me on the left, and it looks like another street light on the right.  But, if you think it’s a rubbish photo, you would also have a point.

So I went searching for a good quota photo, and this time, I went back a bit, to the era of the Canon A70, which was only my second digital camera.  And here are two pictures I took with it, the first in December 2003 and the second in April of the following year:

Click to get them bigger.

What these snaps have in common is that they are now becoming out of date, but in a good way.  The Gherkin is starting to attract a whole new gaggle of Things around it, sadly none of them are as pretty as the Gherkin itself, and a few of them bigger.  And that camera that that bloke is holding looks to me to be about five or six years out of date.  Which would probably be because it is.

The best of my snaps will, I am starting to believe, get better, as time goes by.

I love this:

Here via here.

The point being that however fast the biker is moving, his shadow doesn’t move at all, relative to him.

I remember snapping a skateboarder and his shadow on the South Bank, by following him with my camera.  I went looking for that, but instead found these, of which the one in the middle of the bottom three is also a skateboarder, approximately in focus while all around is blurry.  I had no idea I was capable of such brilliance.

Earlier in the week I heard a similar expression of arrogant humility, from E. J. Moeran, on the subject of his cello sonata, which was played on the radio. 

Here we are:

“I have just spent all day yesterday on cello sonata proofs. You know I don’t usually boast, but coming back to it, going through it note by note, and looking at it impartially, I honestly think it is a masterpiece. I can’t think how I ever managed to write it.”

Ain’t the internet grand?

Although, any dumbo can still take the odd great photo, provided only that he knows its greatness when he sees it.  The real artists when it comes to photography are the geniuses who make the cameras.  Once I have one of these cameras, I don’t have to put my photos together “note by note”.  Cello sonatas, that is to say, are not something you can just get lucky with.

Indeed:

Here.

Excuse me sir, might I ask why you are taking those pictures?  I’m doing it because I like it.  You like it?  What kind of a reason is that?  Might I enquire what your name and address is?  Ah well now that’s where it gets a bit complicated.  I could tell you, but then I’d be missing out on a story for my blog about you PCSOs harassing innocent photographers who are not terrorists but who are a bit weird and who know their rights because they’ve read about them on the internet.  I’m not harassing you sir, just asking for your name and address.  Although, if you don’t give it, I’ll get one of the proper policemen to arrest you for being weird.  Yes you make a strong point.  Tell you what, have a read of this (which I am actually thinking of getting printed out and taking with me in triplicate on my photographic expeditions).  Etcetera, etcetera.

I feel like I’m part of an era in British social history that may soon vanish.  It can’t be long before only foreigners and the government will be allowed to take snaps in Britain.  So, while I still can:

That was last Saturday, I think, at Picadilly Circus, definitely.  I took lots of this particular little drama.  I figure, if they put on a great big show like that, I’m entitled to snap it too.  I did, anyway.  And if you take lots of pictures of a real photographer in action, in bad light, sooner or later your opinion about the best time to take the snap coincides exactly with his and you get what I got.

Actually, snapping other photographers in London, who are mostly foreign (although I’m guessing not this one), is easy now and is likely to stay easy for quite a while, because I look like one of them.  You seldom see PCSOs asking Billion Monkey foreign tourists why they are taking photos, because if they did, it might cause an international incident and threaten the tourist trade.  A few months back, I seem to recall a policeman harassing a tourist Billion Monkey, and it did cause an international incident and it did threaten the tourist trade.

Plus: Mr Clown says I’m - you have to scroll to the end - a genius.  I ought not to care about such things, but I do.

Today, in London, it was the first first day of spring.  What I mean is, it felt like the first day of spring, but wasn’t.  The sky was cloudless, the temperature temperate.  Tomorrow, it will almost certainly go back to being winter.  Then in a fortnight’s time, there will be another first day of spring, followed by more winter.  Eventually there will be a first day of spring that really is the beginning of spring.

I, of course, went out snapping.  But because of the cloudlessness of the sky the photo that I took that I found the most striking, when I looked through them back home, was this one:

Ignore the Big London Thing on the right.  I like it, but that’s not my point here.

Two other snaps also startled me, for a related reason.  I was photo-ing Billion Monkeys, and the Big London Things they were photo-ing, preferably both at once.  But what happens if you are photo-ing Billion Monkeys on the other side of the road, and a certain sort of rather boringly decorated lorry or bus drives past you just as you are snapping?  This:

Modern Art!  Masterly in their monumental restraint.  Exhuberant, yet calm.  Big and yet somehow small.  Loud, and yet, almost perversely, soft.  And a strong yet also oddly reticent comment on the decadence of late capitalism in era of mass consumerism.  Click on them to get them bigger.  If you need to.

Actually, I think the green one is someone dressed in green walking right in front of me, literally about a foot away from my camera, just as I was snapping.  The thing is, if people don’t know you’re taking pictures, which is the situation when I am snapping Billion Monkeys, they don’t know to keep out of your way.  Fair enough.

Paxman has just referred to this on Newsnight.  “If a million monkeys were given typewriters, blah blah, Shakespeare, blah blah, but now a bunch of scientists at Edinburgh University actually have given a camera to some chimpanzees!” How could I ignore that?

Google google.  Here‘s the story:

The team constructed a sturdy orange coloured box which had a monitor on the side acting as a viewfinder so the chimps could see what they were shooting.

John added: “I’m pretty sure they understood what they were filming.”

“We were dealing with an average group of chimps but they worked with us very well and gave it their best.”

Sadly, they were given just the one movie camera, not each given Billion Monkey cameras, which is what I would like to see.

Yesterday, the need for sheets took me to Primark, Oxford Street.  Having obtained my sheets I walked along Oxford Street towards Bond Street, to inspect the HMV shop there, where the depressing news is that the space formerly occupied by classical now houses both classical and jazz, and lots of other wrinkly pop stuff like Frank Sinatra etc.  Classical CD recording hurtles onwards, with ever more iterations of the standard repertoire and ever more obscure discoveries.  But I guess for most, the internet is replacing the shops.

Classical CD shops are not the only businesses with problems.  Take property development.  Before I got to HMV Bond Street, I passed this huge building site, right next to Oxford Street:

I know.  Not much like a building site, is it?  What’s happened is they’ve stopped, and they are trying to sooth a bit of the pain by hiring the place out to advertisers.  Hence the giant Fiat.

Another big building site I’ve recently been keeping an eye and a digital camera on is this one:

This is where they are still saying they will be putting the Shard of Glass.  Michael J keeps telling me: no way.  MJ may well be right, but judging by the number and power of the cranes and diggers I’ve seen there every time I’ve visited, it’s going to be a very expensive patch of empty ground, if that’s all it proves to be for the next decade.

So, will it be Giant Promotional Things for the next ten years, or this?:

I live in hope.

As regulars here will know, I like to take snaps of London’s big new landmarks, but from unobvious places, with unobvious stuff in the foreground.

So today, I was standing on platform 5 at Vauxhall station, and took a snap of the faraway Docklands Towers, straight in line with the track my train was due on.  On the left, the snap I was going for:

And on the right, taken seconds earlier, a version of the snap that went wrong, for some (at the time) inexplicable reason.  On my silly little Billion Monkey screen, it made no sense.  Had I allowed something bizarre to fall in front of the lens?  But what?

Only when I got home did I see what had happened.

Like I always say, Real Photographers decide what they want and get it.  We Billion Monkeys just snap away, and then pick from what we get.

Indeed:

Snapped outside the Channel 4 headquarters near where I live, earlier today.  Obviously you can’t too careful, but I don’t think they have any plans to blow it up.  No need to panic.

Indeed:

Here.  Via the Flickr blog

Here is one of these New York composites, linked to last Friday by David Thompson:

And here is my most interesting recent Billion Monkey snap:

The interesting bit is that while I was taking it a taxi got in the way.  I was angry, until I looked at my little camera screen and saw what had happened.

Because somebody recently commented on this posting I recently relistened to the recorded conversation I did with my friend Bruce the Real Photographer, and as I said to Bruce the Real Photographer during that, Real Photographers think of the shot they will most like and then systematically contrive that shot, while we Billion Monkeys just snap away pretty much at random and then pick the shots we most like.

UPDATE: Billion Monkey Monk!