On Friday afternoon, as already flagged up here last Thursday evening, I had a recorded conversation with my friend Adriana Lukas about her work as a social media (?) consultant (??? - wrong word but can’t think of a better one – see below).  The question we started with was “What do you do?”, but we never really answered that, her “thing” being as close as we ever got.  And that despite the fact that the conversation went on a bit, twelve minutes over the hour.  Which is surely far too long compared to . . .  you know, what it ought to be, I suppose.  If you don’t have time like that to spare, I perfectly understand.  But, we found it interesting.

What we did do was sketch the historical background, in the foreground of which people with knowledge like Adriana’s are not only themselves convinced that they have something to offer to more traditional business people, but are also being searched out by those same business people.  These guys knows that there is something amiss with their regular ways of doing things, and that they need explanations and prescriptions for a new and altered world.  They face big problems, and big opportunities, famines and feasts.  Adriana can help.  She is starting to make a pretty good living doing this.

I fear that our conversation may seem too obvious and basic, but often that kind of stuff can be the best.  That’s how it often was when I was writing Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, and then when others wrote them with my editorial prodding.

Anyway, Samizdata got talked about quite a bit, because that was where we both got started with blogging.  Other blogs we referred to were this one, and this one.

Towards the end, we also talked about our shared enthusiasm for digital photography, Adriana being deep into Flickr.  I especially like this New York set of hers, one of them being this one of Adriana, presumably taken by some groovy New Yorker, but with her camera:

Monty Panesar has this afternoon done for Pakistan’s Big Three – Younis, Yousuf and Inzy – and England must surely win now.

Nevertheless, by far the biggest cricket news today, in Sri Lanka and everywhere else where cricket is played or followed, is this:

Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara came together when Sri Lanka were 14 for 2, and when they were finally separated, 157 overs had elapsed, during which period 624 runs had been added to the total. During the course of their monumental partnership, several records fell by the wayside, the most significant of which was obviously the world record for the highest stand, not only in a Test, but also in all first-class matches: the earlier record for first-class games stood in the names of Vijay Hazare and Gul Mohammad, who’d added 577 for the fourth wicket for Baroda versus Holkar. In Tests, the earlier record was held by another Sri Lankan pair - Sanath Jayasuriya and Roshan Mahanama had added a small matter of 576 runs against India in 1997.

I think my favourite cricket stats are for stands, rather than individual scores.  My most vivid early cricket memory is not of Laker’s 19 wickets at Old Trafford in 1956 (much wallowed in during this current Old Trafford test), but of the big stand between May and Cowdrey at Edgbaston against the West Indies the following year.

I think that Monty Panesar somewhat resembles, especially when he celebrates having taken a wicket (he got three yesterday, including that of Lords double centurion Mohammad Yousuf which began the Pakistan collapse from 90-2 to 119 all out), the actor Hugh Griffith, shown on the right here in his Oscar winning role as Sheik Ilderim in Ben Hur.  Panesar photoed by me from off the telly yesterday, rather dimly reproduced by pausing my tape machine.

And while googling for pictures of Hugh Griffith, I encountered this, which enables you to hear (although not see other than in a still shot) that brilliant snatch of dialogue between Kenneth Griffith (who died on June 25th of this year) and Hugh Grant in Four Weddings.

“How do you do.  My name’s Charles.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!  Charles died twenty years ago.”

“Must be a different Charles, I think.”

“Are you telling me I don’t know my own brother?”

It’s the speed with which this conversation careers into a parallel universe which is so beautiful.  I love that film.  Nobody else seems to, apart from the general public, but to hell with that.

Tomorrow, assuming all goes approximately to plan, I will be recording a conversation between me and Adriana Cronin-Lukas.  Many of my readers will know exactly who this person is.  (She’s the one kneeling and Billion Monkeying here.) To those who ask: who she? I reply by copying and pasting the following:

Someone who left a very strong impression upon me, even before we got to know one another more, was Adriana Cronin-Lukas. There are few people in life with whom you connect on very intense levels, and know that your meeting was not a coincidence. Adriana is one of those people, to me (and others, of that I am sure). In addition to speaking at industry events - as she did the next day at Vloggercon on Net Neutrality - Adriana is making marks in the world as a Sherpa of social media, and then some.

When I met Adriana it was a coincidence.  But despite that, i.e. despite me being not only a devout atheist about God, but also a devout atheist about most of the God-substitutes that do the rounds these days (destiny, fate, California, manifest destiny, it was meant to be, etc. blah blah), we immediately became friends as if God Himself had deliberately introduced us.  It will be extremely interesting to see what kind of conversation we have, once my little podule machine is switched on.

As to that Sherpa reference, this insufficiently describes Adriana’s intentions towards the universe.  Although I suppose it is relevant that a Sherpa was equal first to the summit of Everest.

The only reason I mention this is that I just had an hour on the phone with Adriana by way of preparatory chitchat, which left no time for me to say anything much else here this evening.

I wonder what Adriana would think of this.  Maybe I’ll ask her.  I suspect she wouldn’t be totally hostile, because what Adriana C-L and Alice B-S have in common is an extreme dislike of dishonesty.

Tragically, as a result of communing with Adriana, I will probably miss the recorded highlights on the telly of day two of this, which today was really good:

Tonight I scored a great social success by recounting, to two delightful young ladies who were hanging upon my every word, Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery.  Hurrah!  Young ladies do not hang upon my every word all that often.  When they do. It’s an Event.

Yet, tragically, my own life is now being scripted by this same law.  I get paid dribs and drabs of money to write Proper Blog Postings, because, although pretty good at this, I am now rather fed up with it, which means that people will now pay me at least some money to do this.

But when it comes to Billion Monkey photography, which I am also getting to be quite good at, I still get paid nothing.  Why?  Because I love it.

Last Saturday, for instance, I was invited to attend the naming ceremony and subsequent party for the recently acquired baby daughter of Tim and Helen Evans, and to bring my best camera.  “Tell me what we owe you,” said Helen, at one point during the afternoon, as I snapped away happily.  At which point the fateful words just leapt out of my mouth: “Oh, please, this is my present to Her Highness”, or words to that effect.

On Monday night, at that Globalisation Institute jamboree (see my photos here, here, here, and of course here (i.e. here)), it was the same story.  Think nothing of it dear boy, they’re on me.  And oh, the thrill of a personal name credit at Guido.  This is the poshest thing I have done, social kudos wise, since I deputised a couple of times for David Starkey on the Moral Maze.

I also love to podcast, heaven help me, and am fixed to do several more podcasts with several Really Interesting People in the days and weeks and months to come.  In exchange for no money whatsoever.  Also, thin end of the wedge, I’ve already done some podcasting – i.e. recording of other people talking, but into my kit – for other people, without me talking at all.  That’s how much I now like podcasting.

What’s the betting that in five years time, I am (a) being paid to do Billion Monkeying, and (b) being paid to Podcast, and that I hate both.

The universe.  Sometimes I really do not like it.

Or maybe it’s just that I spent two and half hours watching a really depressing Romanian Film, in a cinema with friends (which means no switching channels or going away), which was so depressing that eventually it became very diverting.  Nothing like the misfortunes of others to cheer you up, I always say.

Some quite pretty looking woman in a late night telly show has just said: “Is it just me, or is the whole world just falling to pieces?” It’s not just you dear.  And as if to prove my point, the man she said this to replies with his own contribution to universal happiness: “Everything good in my life is just sliding away, and there’s nothing I can do about.”

I’m definitely going to go on banging on about Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery, though.  I will never make any money out of it, though, because I like it too much.  Although I suppose one day I may get fed up with it, at which point people will then pay me to bang on about it, the way they don’t have to now.

Yesterday evening I was the officially appointed Billion Monkey at a GI party at 11 Carlton House Terrace, which is the Foreign Press Association!  Some of my snaps were used by Alex Singleton at the GI Blog, and some were used by Guido Fawkes!  I also stuck some more of these snaps up at Samizdata!

Guido had a camera with him, but my photos must have been better!

Other Billion Monkeys were also there!  Like this one!

. . . and this one!

And she played some Billion Monkey games . . .

. . . with her strict (see comment number 12 at Guido) friend!

Last night I made a small breakthrough with my little Panasonic camera, which is a DMC-LZ1.  For several weeks now I’ve taken the occasional snap with this camera without the little “SD” storage card.  Trouble is, I couldn’t then get these pictures out, because the little wire that connects the camera up to the computer doesn’t work.  However, last night I had a fiddle with the nobs on the camera, and found a way to copy these pictures, hitherto lost in limbo, displayable on the camera but otherwise inaccessible, onto the SD storage card, and thence into the computer.

Most of them were pretty poor, but one, of roof clutter on top of MI6, is excellent.  The roof clutter is, anyway:

Of such small victories is happiness painfully assembled.

Snap!

Actually that’s not quite the shot, because in her snap she was holding her camera sideways not up and down.

I will have to get her to give me a tutorial about how to photograph indoors, in artificial light.  I use “automatic” for everything.  Maybe I could do better.

Okay I’ll try again.

I arrived at Lords just before the tea interval.  Had I waited a further half hour I would have had to pay only £10 instead of the all day price of £20, but I wanted to press on with my day, and was immediately rewarded with a siting of my first of several celebs.

Yes, Boris, braying in his Boris voice that “It’s a draw”.  Behind Boris, that Space Pod is actually the new (by Lords standards) Media Centre, which is one of my favourite new buildings in the whole world.

As he walked past me, I grinned at him and said “Celeb”, and he grinned dutifully back.  Celebs are fair photographic game, is the agreed point.  Not that the distinction between celebs and civilians bothers me much.

Boris was eventually proved quite right about the result, but almost the first bit of action I personally set eyes on was the fall of the fourth Pakistani wicket.  Faizal Iqbal, our second ball in the first innings, was finally out in the second, caught Cook bowled Panasar.

This picture only shows the general view that I first saw, from the back of the stand to the immediate left of the Space Pod.

But zoom in a bit and you can see the England side in a huddle on the left, celebrating, and Faizal, with his back to us, trudging back to the pavilion.

A couple more wickets soon after tea and it would have been game on.  I wrote last Monday about how Pakistani batsmen like to play shots and might be unsettled by having to grind out a draw, and England captain Strauss in his after-match interviews said the same thing.  His plan was that England didn’t have to worry about runs and could pile on the pressure.  But as he also acknowledged, Pakistan batted well under said pressure.  Abdul Razzaq, who was exactly the kind of dashing stroke player that I and Strauss thought might lose patience, and Pakistan captain Inzaman-ul-Haq calmly batted out the final session, and I contented myself with taking snaps of what action there was.  These few are the best.

My favourite is the second one.  That must be a Pakistani physio sitting on top of Razzaq, but what on earth are they doing?  And a couple of the England guys appear to be drinking Toilet Duck.

But one moment Inzy was stroking it around for ones, twos and fours, and the next moment they were all shaking hands and it was finished, England being accompanied back to the pavilion by a man with one of the very latest hand-held miniature TV cameras.

I also photoed the ground as a whole, of course.  Cricket grounds are special, because, being so big, they are not all one big lump of unified stuff, however stylish.  The best ones, Lords definitely being a great example, are stylish in a quite different way, having several stylish buildings all jumbled together.  The first of these shots is cute and arty, but the best architectural snaps turned out to be panoramic, in a way that gives you a feeling of what it’s like to be there.

And, of course, I kept my eyes and lens open for Billion Monkeys.  But at first I saw hardly any.  Maybe they felt intimidated and even superfluous.  Great sports, such as cricket, have always been very, very happy hunting grounds for Real Photographers, and the ground was also dotted with film crews.

So instead of snapping spectators with cameras, I began by merely snapping the most interesting looking spectators, with my camera:

If those last two, Flintoff (the news on that front has suddenly turned bad again) and the Pindi Express, had been playing, it would have made a better game of it, and there would almost certainly have been a result.

At first, as I say, few Billion Monkeys, but then, as I moved ground the ground towards the pavilion, from stand to stand, especially after the game was over and they were setting up the little end-of-match presentation ceremony on the far left as I first saw the ground, I started to notice Billion Monkeys, and by the end of my day I had quite a decent collection:

Another classic water bottle snap there (number 3) and an excellent Monkey self portrait shot (number 6) to add to the collection.

Next, a couple of snaps of Channel 5 TV commentator Mark Nicholas and his gang, first waiting to do, and then doing, their thing, interviewing players etc.  Nicholas is in the dark suit, with the mike.  And unless I am grievously mistaken, that’s Boycott in the hat.  The celeb count was starting to rise!

Going back to that last of the Billion Monkey shots above, that hubbub, which happened outside the pavilion after the game was over, was, when I photoed it, just a hubbub.  I just stuck my camera in the air and tried to get all the other Billion Monkeys in action.  Snap snap snap snap.  (The marginal cost of digital photography is zero.  Underspend on cameras and overspend on storage media.  Blah blah.) But who or what was being hubbubbed?

It was only when I got home and took a more careful look at my snaps, on my computer screen instead of on the silly little screen on my camera, that I found out who the fuss was about.  Yes, Ian Botham!  I had been within about twelve feet of God, and I hadn’t even known it.

And then there were these guys.  They weren’t being mobbed madly, but they were being treated with way above average respect.  Signatures were being solicited.  Billion Monkeys were snapping.

Again, I only worked them out when I got home.  These guys were the umpires, Simon Taufel and Steve Bucknor.

The most pleasing snap of my entire day in the “what have we hear?” category was one of the Media Centre.

Yes, that media centre.

But now look at this snap:

In the 500 pixels wide version that you see without clicking on that, you just get a jumble, but when you click, you start to see that there are people there.  So let’s crop out these guys . . .

. . . and click on them.

That’s right.  Those are Test Match Special radio commentators.  It says so, on the sign.

Jonathan Agnew is clearly visible through the open window (which I seem to recall TMS demanded as a condition of operating in the Media Centre), and on his left and our right is Mike Gatting.  More dimly visible, but still definitely visible, to Gatting’s left, is Christopher Martin-Jenkins.  Did I ever tell you people that I was at school with CM-J.  Probably I did.  Well, anyway.  I was.  He was the captain of cricket in his last year, being an okay batter and an okay medium pace bowler.  But he also excelled in the end of term Footlights type review and was also very brainy, and I have not been at all surprised by his subsequent career path.

My camera has far better eyesight than I have.  It has a x12 zoom.  Bringing a camera to an event about quadruples the total pleasure I get from the event, because when I get home, I don’t just remember what I already saw; I get to see things which I did not see at all the first time around.  Without the camera, £10 would have been a bit steep for this Lords visit, given how flat the cricket turned out to be.  With the camera, £20 was a stunning bargain.  Best value entertainment I’ve had in a very long time.

Final shots:

On the left, W. G. Grace and an appropriately named roller.  On the right, two towers, glimpsed through a gap, on the way out.  Yes two towers.  Mostly that’s the tower of the Regents Park Mosque, but directly behind it is the BT Tower.

Because, when you think about it, this England v. Pakistan cricket match was, in its polite and good-humoured way, a clash of civlisations.  There’s a whole Samizdata posting to be done in connection with these snaps, in which the fact that the Pakistan cricket team has recently got more Muslim.  See in particular Mohammed Yousuf.

One of the reasons Strauss and I were disappointed at how patiently the Pakistanis batted in this game was that these Pakistani players have become more disciplined in their religious observances, as a team, encouraged by captain Inzamam, and as a result more disciplined as cricketers.

But I don’t want to suggest that this was a clash of civilisations in a bad way.  As I hope you can see from my pictures, Asian-descended and white Brits, and all shades and ethnicities and nationalities in between and all around, all mingled contentedly.  There was no “news”, i.e. unpleasantness, whatsoever.  (One of the things I like about the Internet is that it enables you to learn about non-news, satisfactory, nice-to-be-there events such as this one, in far away countries such as mine may be for you, instead of just about wars and famines and catastrophes.  The news at Lords last Monday was that it was a draw.  Yawn.  And the sun shone.  Nil all with three to play.  Nothing happened.

And all this at a time when the news type news in other parts of the Islam versus the Rest part of the world could hardly be worse.

With my favourite photographs, they often stick around on my hard disc and refuse to be ignored.  Finally, I surrender to them and stick them up.  Here are two favourites which I took about six weeks ago:

Click to get the bigger versions.

Both are of Westminster Cathedral, one of my very favourite London buildings, and both are shot from just inside the new retail palace across Victoria Street from the Cathedral, which has a kind of internal street through it along which you can see the Cathedral and in particular the tower of the Cathedral, which is one of my favourite towers in London.  And both snaps involve reflections off the shop windows on either side of this internal street.

I’m sitting here listening to Thomas Zehetmair playing the Brahms Violin Concerto, on the radio, Proms.  I missed the start, and before that, Schumann and Ligeti.  Curses.  I would especially have liked to hear the Ligeti.  However, the Brahms is very fine.  He found some really weird and otherworldly sounds in the first movement, and the cadenza sounded as if it was by Ysaye.  (Zehetmair having recently having had a big CD hit with the Ysaye solo violin sonatas.) Not at all your average sweet toothed wallow.

They’ve now reached the last movement, and neither this nor the slow movement before it sound or sounded quite as interesting.  I think the tendency is for most performances of this piece to sound approximately the same in those last two movements.  The first is where the soloist is both most tested and has most opportunities to make you really sit up and notice.

Ah!  The whole concert is being repeated on Radio 3 on Monday afternoon.  And it’s available for the next week as an “audio phile” whatever that means.  I haven’t had much luck getting my computer to play audio files of late.

This has so far not been this blog’s most glorious week.  The Lords pictures are all recomposed and ready to go up, but I still have to recompose the patter in between them.  The effort to rescue the Word file today ended in failure, very quickly.  Tomorrow maybe.  Like I say, doing it is much easier than blogging it.  So, more stream of consciousness drivel.

Here is a quote from an otherwise extremely forgettable romantic comedy, called Failure to Launch, concerning which critical responses have veered between okay and vomit.  Sarah Jessica Parker to Matthew McConaughey:

Do you want to spend the rest of your life having fun?  Or do you want to spend it with me?

I watched that last night, while redoing those pictures.  I thought it was well-executed garbage.  Is this better than good stuff badly done?  Often.

On the right, a different picture, of my friend Michael taken by my friend Elena, with Michael’s mobile phone.

Next, cricket news.  Today, Justin Langer played his first and according to the BBC maybe his last game for Somerset, against Surrey, who took an uncharacteristic hammering in the field.  Somerset made 668-8. of which Langer made 342.  So, he shows up for one game, and not even one game in Somerset, scores a triple century, and immediately buggers off back to Australia.  How cool is that?

Very cool indeed, unlike the London weather.  However, my refrigeration by hot bath (see previous posting but one) is working amazingly well, even if no commenter has yet explained it.  The latest effort is hopeless.  You just stand something cold next to something hot, and the hotness is drained out of the hotness.  But the point is, refrigeration makes coldness out of nothing.  Obviously if you put very very cold stuff next to averagely cold stuff, the cold stuff gets even colder, but that’s only if you start with very very cold stuff.  With a lot of coldness you can obviously contrive some moderate coldness.  But that’s not refrigeration.  Refrigeration is when you don’t have any very cold coldness to start with, only some electicity, but that at the end of it, you have icecubes etc.  As the man said: How do make a small fortune in sport?  You start with a large fortune.

News re the Middle East.  President Bush today summed up his view with one of those calculated Presidential asides, along the lines of: If Hizbollah stop with all their shit, then it’s problem solved.  Google google, yes, here we go:

“See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.”

Hizbollah, Hizbullah, Hezbollah.  I vote Hizb Allah.

Michael Portillo, on BBC1’s late night TV poltical chitchat show thought this latest Bushism to be unpardonably “simplistic”.  Ah yes, two plus two equals four.  How primitive.  We sophisticates know better.

And that concludes today’s obligatory posting.  On this blog you get guaranteed quantity (one posting per day) but quality fluctuates wildly, between postings and, as today, within postings.

It is already midnight, and I am still slaving away with those Lords pictures, having been enticed away for a drink earlier in the evening.  Patience.  I really want to put them to bed tonight, before putting myself to bed.

UPDATE: Lords pictures not pending.  Concocted huge Word document, then Windows contrived not only to crash, but while doing that to bugger up the file and turn it into a uniform slab of gibberish.  Now seeking expert advice to recover earlier version of the same file, to save some of (about a day of) work I did.  Insert the most violent expletives you know to communicate to yourself how I now feel.

I should get out less.

Yesterday I went to Lords, just as I said I might.  It was really interesting and great fun, despite being a draw, and I have forty five photographs to show you of that.  So today, I prepared the photos for blogification, but I still haven’t finished.  Then this evening, when I could have been finishing that, I went to a book launch, and like a fool I promised I’d read the book and blog something about it.  And as if that wasn’t enough, tomorrow, I think I’ll be going to East London to photo London from the top of a tower.  All of these things take far longer to blog about than they do to do.  And the result of that is that I have to interrupt blogging about all the stuff that I have to blog about, if only because of all the wine I drank at the book launch, in order to blog something, but something that is about nothing and is therefore easier to write.  Life is a succession of self-imposed obligations that mean nothing and impress nobody, then you die.

So anyway, here’s a picture of me that someone else took, on their camera, which I then photographed, at that book launch.  Luckily, I had my own permission, but even if I hadn’t, I would have gone ahead and stuck this up here anyway, because in my opinion I wouldn’t have minded, and would in fact have been rather flattered.

Last weekend I went to supper at Michael Jennings’s, and the subject of refrigeration came up, by which I mean that I brought it up.  How the hell does it work?

Various futile attempts were made to explain the process to me.  However, I did get some advice.  When it’s hot, don’t take a cold bath.  That will only make you hot as soon as you step out of it.  Take a really hot bath.  This will refrigerate you as soon as you get out of it.  And you will sweat less.

Ridiculous.  So I tried it today.  And it worked.

It’s one thing for something to work that you don’t understand that you are not personally involved with, like a rocket that flies to the moon or a microchip that fits the whole of Wisden onto a thing the size of a centipede’s fingernail.  But when you do a piece of A level physics to your own body and it works but you don’t know why, that is peculiar.

Maybe the internet can tell me.  Quoth Wikipedia:

Refrigeration is defined as the process of removing heat from an enclosed space or from a substance and rejecting it elsewhere, for the primary purpose of lowering the temperature of the enclosed space or substance and then maintaining that lower temperature.

Refrigeration is, in short, refrigeration.  But how the hell do you do that?

The internet has failed.  It is telling me that light is produced by a luminiferous emanation, and that when I get a pain in my stomach this is caused by the fact that my stomach has a pain in it.

I know that refrigeration means things getting colder through energy being somehow squirted through them.  But how does that work?  Usually, when you stuff something with electricity or cover it with very, very hot water, the way I covered myself with very, very hot water this afternoon, it gets very, very hot.  So, why does it get cold instead?

If I don’t get any coherent answers here, I shall have to ask the Samizdata commentariat.  You have been warned.

England have finally declared against Pakistan, and are now trying, on the last day, with lunch approaching, to bowl Pakistan out and win.  England batted on this morning to make entirely sure that Pakistan couldn’t win, leaving Pakistan a notional 380 to get in two and half sessions.  The