Is there anyone in the world who reads this blog but not this one?  Perhaps, but it seems improbable.  On that off chance, this demographic should be sure not to miss this analysis of an epic car chase in one of those Confessions Of movies starring Robin Askwith.

That’s a seventies Rolls Royce going through a brick wall.  It seems that Mark Holland also takes pictures off of his telly.

This is not a move I would care to try unless I owned a lot of Rolls Royces, and as it happens I don’t own even one.  Frankly I think the wall would, in real life, have given a better account of itself.

But, I reckon the new German Panzer Roller would probably have done exactly that to it.  For months I have been watching out for one of these in the streets of London, moving slowly enough for me to photo it.  Nothing.  Well, one, moving far too quickly.  And then a few weeks ago I finally encountered one.  It was parked outside the magnificently red bricked Westminster Cathedral (the Roman Catholic one in Victoria Street), ready to take away the Nigerian bride and groom from their magnificent Nigerian wedding.  It was the best looking wedding I have ever chanced upon.  Great hats.  Ascot, forget it.  It was as if the entire occasion had been organised for my entire benefit.

I may stick up more photos of that event anon, with hats, but I promise nothing.  Sadly the light was not great, which is what has put me off doing this earlier.

I was expecting to find the new Roller overbearing and ugly.  But I like it.

This is a very cute design.

The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world’s children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.

The machines’ AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there’s no electricity. They’d be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes.

I reckon some quite old children might fancy that.

I have recently been trying to equip myself with the perfect bag for wandering around London with, on my photography expeditions.  And I can tell you that a rigid handle like that is massively preferable to handles which are floppy, because of being made of cloth or floppy leather.  Floppy handles crush the fingers.  But hard handles can be hard to find.

Please forgive all the phallic innuendoes in the above.  And I am now reminded that there is even a reference to “lunchboxes”.  Good grief.

More reportage and links, from the BBC, here.

I’m grateful to Adriana for linking to this article.  I have regular conversations with Adriana about her work, and I don’t always understand what she is talking about.  But reading this piece made sense of quite a few things.  In particular it explained to me what “the Internet is stupid” means.

I don’t think the Internet is at all stupid.  I think it’s brilliant.  But I now understand what the claim that it is stupid means.  It is stupid, in the sense that being so stupid, even I can be brilliant on it.  And I am brilliant.  If I weren’t brilliant you’d have stopped coming here.

By the way, I want one day before I die to see a Sherlock Holmes adaptation/spin-off where Sherlock Holmes says something rather obvious, and Dr Watson says: “No shit, Sherlock!”

When Americans use the expression “I’m confused” it merely means that they think you are and that they are about to straighten you out.  Very tedious.

But I really am confused.

Can somebody explain just what the hell this blog - which I have just found my way to by one of those I’ve-completely-forgotten routes - is about?  Is it satire, serious business, a gigantic practical joke, or what?  If it is serious business, what the hell kind of business is it?

My first guess is that it is the blogging equivalent of junk phone calls.  Which sounds bad and is intended to.  But what do I know?

Housekeeping.  One change is that the text column has widened, and photos that used to go all the way across now have a bigger gap beside them on the right.

This is so that the width is the same as for my old Culture and Education Blogs.  If I ever revive those, I would then have the option of using the exact same format as this blog.

To celebrate this change, here is one of my favourite pictures from the old Culture Blog.  It’s of the young pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, which I took off the telly when he was competing in the BBC Young Musician of the Year contest (Classical Music - scroll down to May 3 2004).  This particular picture had to be clicked to, and all those photos are now inaccessible.

I am still swithering about reviving my Culture and/or Education Blogs, and whatever happens it won’t happen soon.  But I’m now inclined towards reviving both.  More work, of course, but, I am pretty sure, many more readers.

But numbers are not the only consideration.  With those two blogs, I knew that the readers were interested in Culture and in Education.  Here, I feel less confident, and feel that I write less and less well as a result.  These feelings may be wrong, but they are strong.

Today I got a great birthday present, one of the best I can remember.  A friend needed the full-size manifestation of a picture of her that I had on my hard disc, so that she could print it out nice and big on her colour printer.  And having successfully transmitted that picture, I also sent over a couple of mine, and she printed them out too, as a birthday present. Because me, I don’t have a colour printer, only a crappy old black and white laser printer which cost as much as a clapped out second hand car and is now about as easy to get results out of.  Then we met for coffee, and I got an immediate look at what she had done. 

Wow.  I had no idea I was such a good photographer.

For some reason there was a dip in my photographic enthusiasm over the summer, but my efforts on Ashes Tuesday relit the photographic fires.  And last week I took a couple of trips to the new Wembley Stadium, to see how that looked from close up.  It looked most impressive, and I hope to show you more snaps of those trips, anon, I hope, but I promise nothing.

In the meantime, I today chose a couple of those snaps to be printed out.  I chose this one on the left to see if it was as good as I thought it might be.  (It was very good.)

And I chose this one to see how well the stadium in the background came out.  (Very well indeed.)

Click on those and you get the full-sized original deals, rather than the slimmed down pictures I usually supply, big enough to fill the screen but no bigger.

My screen does these photos scant justice.  Yours probably does rather better, but only rather better.  Both print-outs were cropped a little, which did no harm to the first one, but which did hurt the second by slicing off the top. That quibble aside, they were a revelation.

I am definitely going to get a colour printer now.  Any suggestions?

Yes, as the link to the previous posting here from Samizdata reminds me, and as I nearly forgot to put here, happy birthday to me.

My thanks to all those who remembered.

And my thanks to all those who forgot.

And I have just learned that “Numbers can not be used as URL Titles”.  Why ever not?  Ah I see.  I can use numbers in the title, just not in the URL title.  You learn something new and fascinating every day.

I am being helped with this blog by my Technical Department.  So here is a link to one of his more interesting postings, to see if he gets anything at his end.

Here’s a link to something else.

I’ve been watching an old movie on DVD that I’ve never seen before, at all, any bits at all, called Two For the Seesaw, a black and white romantic two hander starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.  And it occurs to me that a definition of a great movie actor is that it never occurs to you that he/she ever seems miscast.

When I see Mitchum I often think, maybe this guy isn’t right for this, and that the real guy he’s doing isn’t like that.  Mitchum even had me thinking, until about a year ago, that the general he played in The Longest Day was completely made up, for the movie.  He seemed too like Robert Mitchum to be real.  But in fact, General “Cota” was a real as it gets.

Shirley MacLaine, on the other hand, always seems totally inside whatever she is doing, and forces you to believe that this is exactly who the character really is, and accordingly that she is perfect for the part and that anyone else would be a let down, because not Shirley MacLaine.

On the other hand, maybe I just fancy her and not him.  And yes, I do realise that her off-screen opinions are sometimes rather odd.

I’ve just been a-googling, and I see that in the original stage production of Two For The Seesaw, Henry Fonda played the Mitchum part.  Now Fonda seems exactly right to me.  The point about this character was that he is as indecisive as the Shirley MacLaine character, and Mitchum does not communicate indecisiveness convincingly.  Fonda, on the other hand, does indecisiveness a treat.  Or maybe a more polite way of putting it would be that Fonda is good at laying out the decision making process in front of you, so that the gutsiness involved in making the final decision is communicated.  Mitchum just knows what to do from the start.

Compare and contrast the performances of Fonda and Mitchum in Midway.  Fonda, as Nimitz, agonises over what to do.  Being Fonda, and being Nimitz, and this being Midway, he gets it right in the end, but it’s quite a carry-on.  Mitchum on the other hand, playing Admiral Halsey, only does one thing.  Halsey is ill, and Nimitz/Fonda (I think) asks him who should deputise for him.  “Ray Spruance”, says Halsey/Mitchum without even the slightest hesitation, with absolutely no gap at all.  Now okay, this may have been the editing, but I think that sums up Mitchum’s screen persona.  He takes his stand, and then compels events to unfold in accordance with it:

Ray Spruance.

And, more famously, in The Longest Day:

I don’t have to tell you the story. You all know it. Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach: those that are already dead and those that are gonna die. Now get off your butts.

That’s Mitchum.  Not hithering and thithering on the telephone, endlessly telling and retelling the story, with Shirley MacLaine.

Apparently, and I did not know this (I love the Internet blah blah), what General Cota actually said was:

“Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Let us go inland and be killed.”

Which is somewhat different, and rather more interesting, I think.  That “Gentleman” makes me think that the real General Cota was maybe a more complicated person than Robert Mitchum made him seem, and that Mitchum was once again miscast.

Usually when you see a blog posting by me with the time 11.59 pm attached to it, that means I did it around 12.30 am and back-timed it.  But last night’s posting genuinely did get posted at 11.59 pm.  This, on the other hand, is being done a little later than stated.  But only a little.

Sometimes quota posting is stupid.  But the rule here is: something, however ridiculous, every day.  And I believe in rules.

I chanced upon the popular musical combo Franz Ferdinand the the telly the other night.  ("The other night”.  Odd expression that.  “The” other night, as if there is a special other night that everyone is supposed to know about.)

Anyway, yes, Franz Ferdinand.  And I finally pinned down what it is about pop music that old geezers such as I do not like.  Basically, we can tell where it has come from, and that’s bad.

As soon as Franz Ferdinand opened their various mouths and started to strum their various instruments, I said to myself: by The Proclaimers out of The Knack.  I quite liked the Proclaimers in small doses, and thought The Knack were one of the great unfulfilled promises of post-Beatles pop.  Whatever happened to them?  I have one CD of The Knack, and basically, that one CD was pretty much it, as far as I ever heard.

Franz Ferdinand’s insistent, heavy beat was unmistakably from Proclaimer/Knack territory.  I liked it.  But not in a pop music way.  I liked it in a music appreciation way, which is quite different.

My point is that knowing the musical antecedents of a pop group spoils it.  The whole point of pop music, it seems to me, is that it must sound completely new.  It must arrive, as it were, from outer space, and erupt within one’s adolescence as a great and glorious secret that is unshared and unshareable by the elders, even elder siblings.  When people told me that the Rolling Stones were just Crippled Fruit Blenkinson, with drums and a bit faster, I put my hands over my ears.  Even when the Rolling Stones themselves prattled on in interviews about how much they owed to Crippled Fruit Blenkinsop and the rest of those old guys from the Mississippi Delta or wherever the hell, I still didn’t want to know.  The point of pop is its musical newness and difference, not its musical pedigree.

Interesting:

Contrary to popular argument, contingent fees serve a social purpose. A lawyer paid by contingent fee will only take those cases that have a decent probability of winning – thus contingent-fee lawyers act as screeners, saving the court system and everyone else the trouble of examining frivolous cases. That’s right, contingent-fee lawyers reduce the number of frivolous cases! When contingent fees are restricted, lawyers naturally turn to alternatives such as charging by the hour. But a lawyer paid by the hour has little incentive to screen. . . .

If you agree with me that this, by Alex Tabarrok, is interesting read the rest of it here.

Whenever I read James Lileks, and whenever he writes about this, i.e. quite often, I become consumed with envy at how quickly he rips off his various articles for this or that organ, in among writing his gratis pieces for us lot, cleaning his house, organising his graphic fun and games, watching old movies, etc.

Well, now, I am just beginning to live that sort of life myself.  I don’t have a daughter, which would complicate things, but I do now have various regular (and paid) blogging commitments which mean that I sometimes start a day with the need to do about three blog postings for three different places, as quickly as possible.  Today, I am still in my pyjamas, and I still have an afternoon of Other Things to get stuck into, and an evening of Stuff ahead of me, but I have already sent off two blog items, both of which are, I hope, sufficiently good to get used.  And now I’m doing this.

It’s not much.  But when you feel your way into a new life, you (by which I mean I) start slowly, very slowly, and then you/I speed up.  I now feel myself (and I do not mean the pyjama sort of feeling myself) speeding up, or at least beginning to speed up.

And by the way, writing for money (which I have only recently begun to do) is a whole lot different to just shoving whatever you please up on your own blog(s) or on Samizdata which is a kind of group personal blog for a bunch of trusted writers (which I have been doing for longer).  That is easy, the way I do it.  You just scribble, and eventually you stop, as here, and as in this.  But writing stuff for other blogs, where they will, for instance, tell you if it is no good, or even if it is good enough but not really, you know, good, is a whole different experience.

For me, the key breakthrough with writing for these Other Blogs was separating the process of deciding what to write about from actually writing it, the first being the laborious bit.  And, I use old fashioned pen and paper to record my decisions about what to write about, so as not to forget them.  The actual writing is relatively easy, hence this morning’s success.  I wrote the two bits this morning, but I decided what to write yesterday.  Going from What the Hell? to Done! in half an hour is still beyond me.  Going from How Shall I Put This? to I’ve Put It! in half an hour, or less, I can sometimes now do.

I’ve already done one Big Thing in my life (you can tell from the look of the recent ones when I stopped), starting very very slowly, and eventually speeding it up a treat.  Well, I thought it was big.  I hope to do at least one more of these Things before they take me away and burn me.  And I hope that blogging will be the next one.

I want to believe that, Brian-blogging-wise, you haven’t seen much of what I can do yet.  My fear is that you have.

And this guy’s sister is married to my first cousin.

He was talking about this, on the Channel 4 news.

Small world, eh?

In real life he does not have green and pink vertical stripes on his face.

And I know this guy as well.  Dennis O’Keeffe was talking about truancy on Channel 5 news.

He said that compulsion is stupid.  The answer is to make classes good enough to attract both those who are now bored (because the classes are too dumb) and too confused (because they are out of their depth).

In your dreams, Dennis.  I say that if you get rid of compulsory schooling, you need to reintroduce (a) the right to work, and (b) criminal responsibility, for children.  And that’s not going to happen any time soon.

But if the kids just hurtle about in the streets, with nothing to do, and beyond the control of the Police . . . nightmare.

If imprisonment won’t work, then try carrots and sticks.  It works reasonably well with adults, most of whom behave reasonably well, most of the time.

I don’t have time to read the rest of this now, but I want to fix the link into my blog and consciousness, basically because of this early paragraph:

The reason he gives for having become an anthropologist is that he was raised an atheist. There was no god in the family. His father, Manes Sperber, was from a Jewish family, had refused to do his bar mitzvah, and he transmitted zero religion to his son, but at the same time, he had deep respect for religious people. There was no sense that they are somehow inferior. This left the young Sperber with a puzzle: how can people, intelligent decent people, be so badly mistaken?

My sentiments almost exactly, apart from the bit about becoming an anthropologist.  How can so many millions be so obviously wrong?

By the way, if you think I am being militantly atheistic about my atheism, I reply that this is me being militantly atheistic here, which in my blog is not really being militant at all.  Being militantly atheistic means being militantly atheistic somewhere like here.

On a related theme, I found that one of the effects of 9/11 on me was that it made me think more deeply about what I believe and what I do not believe, and not to treat religion as any sort of no-go argumentative area.  I figured, if religion was what made these idiots do this, then I am entitled to shove a bit of anti-religion out there into the global conversation.  I’m not going to kill people with jets, but I am damn well going to say it from time to time.

It’s probably not worth anyone’s while to try to convert me to Christianity, although feel free to fail if you insist.  But, for instance, did any Christians find that 9/11 made them more publicly Christian about things?  Or more publicly anything else?

It would appear that I am not the only one who reacted like this, because 9/11, I seem to recall, was basically what kick-started the blogosphere into what it has now become, a force in the world to be reckoned with.  Suddenly, a lot people wanted to tell the world what they believed and how they felt.

Sebastian Coe was on the telly last night, remembering his most memorable bit of telly news for the ITV 50 Years celebrations.  He chose the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.  He recalled going jogging along the East Berlin side of it during 1988, and later the same day having lunch with the British Ambassador to East Germany.  When will the Wall come down, he asked?  The patronising reply was: not in your lifetime, my boy.

It would be tempting to have a rant about the characteristic ignorance and anti-anti-communism of the Foreign Office, but the truth is they were not the only ones to be surprised by the collapse of the old USSR.  I recall reading a science fiction book called The War in 2020 , and very good it was too.  But, although it was published in 1991, the regime ruling Russia in 2020 were still called “The Soviet Union”.  It was a complete mess, but that was still what it was called.

The white South Africans were still in power too.  The surprise ending of the Cold War also meant that the Apartheid Regime became superfluous to Western requirements, and could be abandoned.  But if the Cold War had instead staggered on, so would Apartheid have, Nelson Mandela or no Nelson Mandela.

It’s always fun when you see people on the telly whom you used to know.  And I know this guy:

Peter Caddick-Adams is one of the resident experts who tells various Channel 5 TV shows which weapon of this or that sort is the best and why.  This evening, he was experting about personal weaponry.  Submachine guns, pikes, longbows, that king of thing.

In the few internet pictures I later found of him, he still has hair, but now, as you can see from my photo of him on the telly tonight, he sports the totally bald look, in a way that suitably combines menace with guruness, oriental military monk style.  Particularly suitable when you consider that unarmed combat came top.

He has been busy.  This looks interesting.

I used to do desk-top publishing for Peter.  I have a vague feeling that I am still owed money for some of the work I did with him, not by him personally but by some aspect of the British Army.  If so the innefficiency was at least as much mine as his, and anyway I could be imagining this.

Weymouth Bay by John Constable:

Bigger here.  Smaller but with added expertise here:

There is some disagreement over whether this painting of Weymouth Bay is a sketch painted out of doors during Constable’s honeymoon, or a later work prepared for sale on the basis of sketches made at this time and left unfinished. It seems so fresh and spontaneous that most viewers have wished it to be a direct record of Constable’s visit, …

Popular preferences in painting have changed, from the finished, photographic look, to the very obviously painted look.  Originally, this just wasn’t finished.  Now people want the unfinished look to be deliberate. They want this picture to be photographic only in the sense that they want it to have been done on the spot rather than afterwards.

I envy painters their skies.  They can do what my camera refuses to do, namely pick out all the detail in the land and in the sky, no matter how much or how little light is hurtling around.

Consider this picture, which I took yesterday.  Dazzled by the light trapped by the cloud, the camera darkened everything else.  Not just the church and the rest of the foreground.  It also turned the sky from the bright blue that my eyes registered to dark blue.

I tried fiddling about with Photoshop, but you have to be a cleverer Photoshopper than I am to make it look the way it actually looked, to me.  Basically, the camera took the view from the afternoon into the evening.  I like it, but it isn’t what it actually was.

I want a new setting on my camera, called “Constable”.

Last Monday England won the Ashes.  Did you hear about that?  Did I mention it?  Maybe yes.  Anyway, yes, England won the Ashes.  I reckon they were extremely lucky that they won the Ashes.  Two very narrow wins (one of them very narrow) for England to one thrashing of them by Australia does not “outplayed” make, even though you have to say that if you are the losing captain, because saying “we nearly won but we were a bit unlucky” is not dignified.

But despite all that, I am very glad that England won the Ashes, and my way of celebrating is to blog about it a lot, while all the while admitting that England were very lucky.  To win the Ashes.

To be a bit more serious and cultural about it, during the final game of the series, at the Oval, I couldn’t help being impressed by the new stand they have built there, which was making its test match debut.  They showed aerial views of it from time to time during the game, done from the Betfair Blimp, and I took some snaps of my telly of some of these shots.  None of my pictures were technically pretty, but this one gets the message across okay.

And here is what it looks like from ground level, this being a picture of the celebrations at the end:

As it happens, I live only a walk away from the Oval myself.  It’s just across the river from me.  So late this afternoon I went there with my camera to see what it looks like from outside the ground.  One of the things I like about London is the way these big, futuristic new structures, like the Wheel or the Dome or the Gherkin hover above the mundanity in the foreground.  What kind of effect did this new Oval stand make on its surroundings?  Could you even see it from outside the ground?  If so, how did it look?

Click to get these bigger.

The face presented by the new stand to the outside world is rather strange, not what I expected at all.  All those curves, sticking up like a huge rib cage on its side, looking as if the bones are made of chipboard, and with vegetation growing out of it.  And in truth, when you get right up close to the roof structure itself, as you can at the right hand end as you look at it in the aerial photo, it all looks rather out-of-town-shopping-centre-ish.  The lines at each end don’t join smoothly.  Instead they kind of kink inwards, in a rather ungainly fashion.  This is the new Norman Foster late modernist style, but done by people who don’t have money to burn, which can be a real disadvantage.

But, imperfect though it may be, this thing certainly makes its presence felt.  The area around it is somewhat drab and down-at-heel, with boarded up shops and seedy pubs.  A landmark like this adds a lot.  Maybe the new stand is already raising the tone of the place, and the drabness is phase one of redevelopment process.

UPDATE: I’ve just found a truly excellent photo of this stand, here.  It is becoming clear to me that the way to make this thing look good is to get above it.  In case it goes away, I’ve decided to steal this photo for here.

On September 2nd, I posted a big prophecy of non-doom, from “Ted”.  It featured ten specific prophecies, of which this was number two:

2 Big Media : death are in the thousands. Me: Death will number about 300.

Ted then said:

I could go on and don’t want to make light of a disaster. However the people of NO, as well as concerned US citizens, not to mention millions of us outside the US, need better than this garbage. The media outlets have from the first sign of Katrina hoped for the worst as this helps ratings. They have deliberately manufactured an apocalypse from a natural disaster, where no such apocalypse exists.

Turn off the TV news and stop buying newspapers NOW.

Now put that alongside this:

As the last of the evacuees from New Orleans settle into shelters, the levees are plugged and the water begins to recede, what is being revealed is not the tens of thousands of dead bodies predicted for the past two weeks but some of the most inaccurate reporting of a major news story in memory. While the mainstream media has been climbing all over itself trying to find ways to tie George Bush to the New Orleans disaster, it might be better served trying to figure out how they could have so uncritically accepted a body count from New Orleans that could easily be ten or more times the actual number.

My guess is that the final score will end up being something not unlike Ted 10 Big Media 0.  We’ll see.

Check out the best teen star ever.

Link via Michael Blowhard, buried in among a piece about Sophie Marceau.

No doubt this email has been received by everyone in the entire world, a group of people that definitely includes the pathetic little gaggle who read this blog, but just in case I am wrong, here it is in full, because it is very interesting.  It’s from someone called TANG Shun.

I have just checked Harry Hutton to make sure he hasn’t published it already, and that he didn’t write it.  Apparently not.

It’s a piece in the Foreigners eh funny or what category, but I will just call it This and that.  It starts well, with an unidiomatic plural, and gets better and better.  Not that it’s not true, and important, and worth reading for what it says, etc.:

It is about English Grammars

Do you know some disputed English grammars? What about some basic grammars that grammar writers hide away and don’t even want to dispute?

In supporting a rule that the Present Perfect tense doesn’t stay with past time adverbials:
Ex: *They have worked here yesterday.
== It should have been in Simple Past instead.
English grammars have been avoiding to talk about the Past Family, a frequently used group of time adverbials containing the adjective ‘past’: in the past, in the past year, for the past two years, over the past three months, during the past four decades, within the past five weeks, etc., because these past time adverbials can stay with Present Perfect:
Ex: They have worked there within the past few years.

No grammar books or websites will display the use of these past time adverbials, for displaying them will undermine the “golden rule” above. If they know there is any explanation at all, why don’t they ever put it in the books or websites?

A couple of decades ago, I posted letters and consulted many universities overseas how to explain the Present Perfect tense. They posted to me a free issue of ELT (English Language Teaching) Journal, which was published in October 1984 by Oxford University Press in association with The British Council. In the Journal Tregidgo had posted his rather well-known yet startling comment titled: How far have we got with the present perfect? He expresses his doubles and dissatisfactions over both conventional and contemporary methods in explaining the tense. At the end of the article he concludes: “Meanwhile, one thing seems to me to be pretty clear. Whatever the grammarians may say about it, the problem of the English present perfect remains very much alive and kicking!” Put it shortly, they admitted they could not explain the tense. Admitting the difficulty will alleviate the pain in the ones who pursue the answer.

Now in the Internet epoch, people still have a difficulty to explain the tense. In English forums, both students and teachers are asking for your better idea, just as I did decades ago. During a discussion on the web, I searched for Tregidgo’s article and noticed an “updated version” in the following page:
http://www.developingteachers.com/
articles_tchtraining/pp1_sarn.htm
The author thought he could explain the tense to a developing teacher, and finally found he could not. The tense had made his student ‘wailing’. The author has now turned a critic to the tense. They don’t put the comment there without reasons. Again, it helps relieve the pain in studying the tense.

With good intention, I post this message to notify those who are interested in English study: there is now a new approach to the explanation of the tense in my website. I have found out the tense-changing process:

(a) Simple Present action indicates a present action (= incompletion):
Ex: I live in Hong Kong.
(b) Present Perfect action indicates a past action (= completion):
Ex: I have lived in Japan.
BUT: If we mention a definite past time, tenses have to be changed:
(c) Present Perfect action indicates a present action (=incompletion =a):
Ex: I have lived in Hong Kong in the past three years.
(d) Simple Past action indicates a past action (=completion =b):
Ex: I lived in Japan five years ago.
http:/www.englishtense.com/newapproach/1_3.htm

It is a breakthrough in the explanation of English tense. The process at once explains the use of both Present Perfect and the Past Family. According to it, Present Perfect is actually either Simple Present or Simple Past, while old grammars have been wrongly doing the opposite, proving Present Perfect is neither Simple Present nor Simple Past! It is small wonder they could not explain the tense in the past.

I am not creating time, but old grammars have missed a concept of time. I agree “Last Week” is a past time, and “Now” is a present time. But what about the time between last week and now? It is neither Last Week nor Now, but something between them. It has no name and Present Perfect is used to indicate things finished in this time span. It explains Present Perfect. Who has found out this concept of time and tell it clearly? This is the whole point in my website.

Even with good intention, I will post very scarcely. But if you don’t want to receive notice from me anymore, please unsubscribe your email address in the following link: http://www.englishtense.com/unsubscribe/unsub.htm

Sincerely yours,

Admin
englishtense.com

Eldest brother Toby worked out in Hong Kong for a few years, and he told me that the Chinese had endless difficulties with English tenses.  Toby once had some work he wanted done, and asked a Chinese subordinate/colleague: “Are you doing it?” “No” said the Chinese guy, looking at Toby as if he was mad.  He was drinking a cup of tea with Toby.  Couldn’t Toby see that?  Bloody hell, these white people … What Toby meant, of course, was “Will you do it?” (And try to imagine what “Are you going to do it?” must sound like.  It’s a wonder their brains don’t regularly explode.)

English tenses aren’t called “tense” for nothing.

Still on a cricket theme, I did laugh at this:

I found it here.

When England won the Rugby World Cup and paraded it through London, I watched it on telly, and took photos of the telly.  Which was okay.  But this time, England having won the Ashes, I decided that I would go to Trafalgar Square and witness the celebrations for myself.  The bus being due to arrive in Trafalgar Square at 12.30 pm, I got to Embankment tube station at about noon, and walked up an encouragingly uncrowded Villiers Street towards the Strand, where I discovered myself to be (a) on the route the bus would take into Trafalgar Square, and (b) near enough to the front to see things very clearly.  Thus it was that I got my best view of the bus and the guys in it almost at the very beginning of my photographic journey.  The best photo here is, I think, the one taken straight upwards, with the bright blue sky behind.  And yes, it was indeed excellent weather.  But the bus was gone very quickly.  As always when I try to photograph some particular thing, especially if it is newsworthy, my respect for Real Photographers was greatly enhanced.

The crowd by the side of the Strand then followed the bus into Trafalgar Square, and I joined the sea of cricket fans, real or fair weather, there assembled, about two thirds of the way down on the eastern side, and tried to take whatever pictures I could.

My choices of shot, to take and to show here, reflect my fascination with the current state of photography itself.  However, there were actually not that many cameras present, proportionately speaking.  Most had just come to see and to cheer.  But I did get a number of the characteristic Billion Monkey pose of the day, which was to hold your camera way up above the throng and either hope for the best, or, if you had one of those twiddly screens such as I have, try to do a bit better than hope.  (I particularly like the one from straight behind the snapper’s hairy head.) But so bright was the sunlight that frankly, I could make very little sense of my screen and I too was mostly just pointing and hoping.  I only really found out what I had when I got home.

I chose a selection of what seemed like my best shots, and have spent the last hour or two arranging them in the assemblage below.  Frankly, I don’t consider them that great, as photography.  I can’t handle light that good in circumstances that disruptive of thoughtful calculation.  Plus, frankly, I couldn’t see much from where I ended up.  But they do communicate a sense of what it was like.  To further enhance the air of confusion and fun, I have neither cropped nor processed the pictures that you get to if you click on the little cropped squares.  What you get to if you click is exactly what came out of my camera.

Note the presence, in addition to the men’s team, of the victorious (also against Australia) England ladies team.  When I first saw their bus I was baffled.  Who were these women?  I had completely forgotten, despite having done a Samizdata posting about their triumph on the day it happened.  Only when ladies captain Clare Connor was introduced and interviewed did the lady bus make sense.  But I got some pictures of them anyway.

Because I had such a hopeless view of the actual performance itself, at the top end of Trafalgar Square, I ended up taking a lot of photos of a TV screen, just as if I had been at home.  (Does anyone have a link to some professional photos of the same proceedings.  I went looking for this to put here, but could find nothing.  But then, I am a very dodgy googler, or whatever it is you have to be.) But some of my pics were pretty good, I think.  I hope you will agree that some of the more striking images are simply of words on that screen.  The names of cricketers, and of the lucky companies who sponsored all this.  And the words of the songs they had us all singing.  In general, as a photographer, I like words.

Enjoy.  Unless of course you are an Australian.