Well that was one hell of a scare.  This blog went off air yesterday.  Following much communing with my Guru’s Fellow Guru and with my hosting provider (both of whom were very helpful), it is now back up and running touch wood and hope not to die.

However, I have shut down the comments (which it where the Gurus say the trouble may have started), which means that I will just have to take your kind wishes and commiserations for granted, and will make this posting the last here for a while, certainly until I thoroughly understand what happened.  Which will almost certainly be: never.

Now would be a good time for me to take that Summer Break that I would have had anyway around now.  I will definitely resume ego/kitten blogging somewhere, but almost certainly at somewhere new.  When I do, I may or may not risk one more posting here to say so.

Meanwhile, good bye for now, this was fun while it lasted, I hope that I and all of your have a good July, and I will be back.

On July 3rd, Cécile Philippe, who runs this enterprise, will be talking at the IEA Founders Day Party about “The Appeal of Capitalism to Young Europeans”.  So far so good, but she has also been emailing around asking for advice, me being one of the emailees.  What can I tell her about the appeal of capitalism to young Europeans?  As he would say, crikey, but here are some thoughts.

“Young Europeans” have been dosed for generations, way back to Hitler and before, with the claim that “capitalism” is bad, mad and dangerous to know, and a lot of them believe it, sort of.  Oui, jah, capitalism bad.  Amen.  But, the superficial products of capitalism, the freedom of movement and lifestyle choice and career choice that Cécile and I know to be the ground rules of capitalism, the abundance of what life has to offer that capitalism opens up to them, that they like, a lot.  Provided we don’t mention the C word.  That is the sense in which capitalism appeals to them.

Insofar as all the anti-capitalist propaganda is getting rather stale and feeble – the rulers of Europe seem determined both to denounce “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism and yet somehow also to contrive it on a Europe-wide scale – there may even be some Young Europeans who have made the connection between how nice life can be and how capitalist the nice life is.

There is another way in which capitalism may be both good and bad, depending.  Cécile’s question provokes thought about the perennial dilemma of whether “capitalism” is the right word to describe the beliefs that she and I share.  The word can mean two quite distinct things, and those of us trying to say one thing with the word are often heard, disastrously, to be saying the other.  It could mean what I have used the word to mean in this posting so far, a set of rules, good rules, rules which apply equally to everyone, which merely result in “capitalism”, that is, in some people getting mega-rich, and lots of others getting a bit rich, and almost everyone doing okay.  But it could also mean the privileging of the mega-rich, or “capital”, privileges for the owners of large amounts of capital at the expense of those who don’t own large amounts of capital.  If Young Europeans find that second idea very un-appealing, good for them.  (Actually, this is all too often a horribly good description of what European leaders do actually try to do.  It’s as if, having denounced capitalism, yet observed that capitalism is nevertheless doing quite well, they then, rather resignedly, do what they have been misguidedly telling themselves that capitalism has to mean.  Often there is no “as if” about it.)

“Feminism” is another word with the same kind of double meaning attached to it.  Does that mean equal rights for women, or special and superior rights for women?

I don’t know if any of that will be helpful to Cécile.  Even if of no use to her, maybe it will prod other people’s brain cells in helpful ways.  Yet another benefit of blogging: even emails that achieve nothing for the original recipient can still make themselves useful.  (If, on the other hand, the principle purpose of Cécile’s email to me was to prod me and my brain cells into doing a posting like this, well, mission accomplished.  Another benefit of blogging: it can flag up interesting events involving your friends, not just afterwards but beforehand.)

That picture of Cécile was taken by me in Brussels in 2004, when she was a salad reviewer.

Alan Little emails with the link to some outstanding Real Photographer and Billion Monkey pictures.  Not being conversant with Russian, I don’t know where they all come from (Tatyana?), but the “Turku Abo” signpost, just above the great lorryload of Real Photographers, says Finland.  (Road signs in Finland are in both Finnish and Swedish and Abo is the Swedish for Turku.  Or so I recall from when I was there in my teens.)

My two favourites among these are this one, which brilliantly communicates the feral and aggressive nature of Real Photographers, and especially of course male Real Photographers:

When you see photos like that, you can see how seamlessly men switched with the flow of ecological fashion from guns to cameras when hunting big game.  The camera is a weapon, especially with those huge white Real Photographer zoom lenses, or when the Real Photographer cameras are arranged in mechanised clumps, making them look like anti-aircraft guns on a battleship.

The Billion Monkey shots are less brilliant, perhaps because the Real Photographer snaps are by Real Photographers, while the Billion Monkey snaps are by mere Billion Monkeys.

But, as Alan points out, this one is superb:

Naughty Billion Monkey!  Real Photographers would surely do things like that if they could, but they can’t!

(It’s only just hit me what a great name “Alpha Romeo” is.  Says it all, doesn’t it.  They are now advertising Alpha Romeos as being cars that people want not because of all their complicated features, but simply because they are, well, Alpha Romeos.  What red-blooded male who aspires to Alpha-Romeoness wouldn’t want a car to match his fantasies?  (Only problem I suppose: too obvious.) I wonder how that name came about.  Is it a regular Italian expression which pre-existed the car?)

I also like the fat Billion Monkey trying to be a Real Photographer, but only succeeding in knocking over with his big fat bottom another vase, no doubt priceless.  Plus, there’s an actual monkey, destroying some film.  Remember film?

Here at briammicklethwait.com it turns out that today is healthcare day, not a topic about which I have generally had much to say.

Helen Evans, friend and Nurse for Reform, has a piece in the Chicago Tribune about Michael Moore’s latest.

Michael Moore’s denunciation of America’s health-care system is about to hit the silver screen. In the film’s trailer, a desk attendant at a British hospital smiles while explaining that in Britain’s National Health Service, “everything is free.” But for free hospital care, Britons pay an awfully high price.

Indeed.  Says Nurse Helen of her piece:

This follows a series of speeches that I recently gave in Washington DC, about which I will tell you more in the next day or so.

For my take on all this, follow the second link in my previous posting here.  Oh all right then, here it is again.  This earlier posting by Nurse Helen suggests that she might agree with me rather more than I would otherwise have assumed.

I agree with this.  Sign of advancing years: going around yelling “I said that sixteen years ago!” But, I did.

So I’ve become interested in this wide but shallow photos thing, wide but shallow photos being suitable to decorate blog postings while nevertheless keeping them short.

One obvious candidate, I thought, would be that shot that you see everywhere of a long train, silhouetted against the sky, perhaps on a long viaduct.  I tried “long train” on Flickr, but the results were promising in a few cases, but never quite right.  And badly lit.  So then I tried “train silhouette”, if only to get better lighting.

And look what I found, and was able to crop into shallowness:

That snap was taken on a beach ("Cable Beach") in a place called Broome, on the north west coast of Australia.  Camels travel in trains too.

Sick of train spotting?  Well then why not explore the wonderful world of Japanese pencil carving?  (Linked to from here.) So this is what they do at the back of the class in Japan.  No wonder the Japanese economy failed to conquer the world.

I made this picture even more horizontal than the already almost horizontal original:

Any more suggestions for wide, shallow pictures?  Imagine a posting with a great pile of them all visible at once.  Could life get more exciting than that?  Yes, of course it could.  But fun anyway.

Via this guy, a big picture of all (known) bodies in the Solar System larger than 200 miles in diameter:

Shrunk down, it makes another fine short picture.

What I didn’t realise was that the quite big Jupiter moons (Io, Callisto, Titan, Ganymede) are actually bigger than The moon, i.e. ours.

I’ve been meaning to work out how you do video clips on a blog for some time now, and here is my first attempt to make this work.

I decided to do this some while ago, when I encountered some video of a wobbling skyscraper, but decided to wait for something more elevated.  And this from Christopher Hitchens certainly is that:

I found that at David Thompson’s blog.

To me the most interesting debate now raging in the West is not about whether we should or should not surrender to The Enemy.  The widespread if not universal opinion is: not.  But, who or what exactly is The Enemy?  Is it Islamists who have hijacked Islam and perverted Islam?  Or is it Islamists who are simply doing Islam with more than the usual Islamic degree of intensity, which would make Islam itself The Enemy?  Christopher Hitchens prefers the former position.

I incline to the latter, which is also, of course, what Osama Bin Laden and his followers say.  As David Thompson puts it:

Given jihadists pointedly cite Muhammad’s purported ‘revelations’ as their mandate and motive, how can the spread of Islamic terrorism be resisted if Muhammad and his teachings remain beyond criticism?  How does one respond when the Bali bombing ‘mastermind’ Mukhlas Imron asks his captors: “You who still have a shred of faith in your hearts, have you forgotten that to kill infidels and the enemies of Islam is a deed that has a reward above no other?” – and then quotes Muhammad’s own exhortations as his license for atrocity?

How indeed?  Once you start talking about Muhammad as someone who can be criticised, there goes Islam.

So how on earth do you persuade people to abandon Islam?  It would be a start to establish that they can, without being murdered.

Links to all this from recent posts by Mick Hartley.

Harry Hutton states a popular view concerning the canine nature of our current circumstances:

The country has been going to the dogs for as long as I can remember. But sometime between the Cliff Richard knighthood and Prescott’s promotion to Deputy Prime Minister, I think we can say that we finally arrived at the dogs. And here we all are, at the dogs.

If you seek the dogs, look around you.

One of the signs of a good country is constant complaining, and this country, according to reliable eye-witness accounts, has been going to or has been at the dogs ever since the arrival of the Romans.  The reason this is a sign of a good country is that in good countries, people are allowed to complain.

There is something that many people don’t get about progress, this being one of my complaints.  Each generation defines progress in its own way, and often, by that particular definition, dogness is indeed approaching, especially as each generation gets old and subsequent generations arrive with different definitions of what life is all about while they, the oldies, are still alive.  One reason why there is now more complaining is that people live longer.  They didn’t have nearly so many grumpy old men in the Middle Ages.

Suppose you define progress according to such things as how many people are having Latin lessons or by how well people can do handwriting with fountain pens.  Dogs!  By how good the output of the major classical CD labels is compared to former times.  Dogs!  By how much capitalism you and your friends have succeeded in destroying this year compared to how much is being created where it previously didn’t happen very much.  Dogs dogs dogs!!!  When Michelangelo was painting that ceiling, people who had actually witnessed him painting it nevertheless were in the habit of saying: the world is going to the dogs.  Why?  Who knows?  But they had their own definitions of progress or regression to dogdom, and Cistine Chapel ceilings didn’t register as a plus at all, when set beside whatever they considered important.

A good friend of mine defines regression to barbarism as literally a matter of how many dogs there are around the place.  Dogs equals barbarism, she reckons.  As you can imagine, she is not a happy bunny.  Well, if you were a bunny, you wouldn’t be, would you?

Optimism and pessimism are usually argued about according to which of them is right.  But this is like arguing about whether major keys or minor keys are better.  Both have their virtues, and in the end it is a matter of taste which you prefer.  I am an optimist.  What this means is that I am careful to choose methods of measuring progress that will actually measure progress until long after I am dead.  I choose measures like: how much hard disc space you can buy for £150, how many pretty bridges there are in the world, how cheap classical CDs are nowadays, how many people can now take nice photos (by the way, cats are involved in those pictures, which takes care of my feline duties today) and show them to one another, how long the footpaths are beside the River Thames, how many Poor People now have mobile phones, how many reasonably decent blog postings I have personally written.  That way, I stay cheerful.  Why do I do this?  Because I prefer to be cheerful.  I prefer not to think, or not too often, about the number of laws and regulations there now are (about which I feel the way my friend does about dogs), or about the hugeness of the number of people in the world who still think that more laws and regulations equals progress.  I try not to think about the number of bad blog postings I have written.

As for Harry Hutton, he chooses to be a grump.  That’s what he likes.  Plus, of course, that is funnier to read, which is far more important to him than accurately tracking the progress of civilisation.  But as for his quality-of-people-getting-knighthoods-these-days measurement, I have this to say, to quote my own words of wisdom here:

As you get older, more of the sleaze in the world becomes apparent to you, and you can sometimes mistake this learning process for a deterioration in the world itself.

For sleaze read everything bad.  I then proceed to contradict myself, but I’m going to let that pass here.

Were the people getting knighted a hundred years ago any less prattish or corrupt than those getting knighted now?  Or was it simply that all Harry Hutton knows about them now is that they got knighted, and accordingly they seem to him comparatively grand and worthy, when set beside Cliff Richard?  They weren’t and it was, just in case you have any doubts.

On the subject of being honoured, one of Hutton’s commenters links to this, which I think is rather good.

After yesterday’s excellent and very well received talk by Michael about China, some of us including him went to the pub nearby.  Just as I was leaving, Michael said that he had put up a picture of me on his blog.  Apparently Michael was demonstrating moblogging from his phone to the people at the other end of the table, which was okay.  Incoming email this morning:

I was demonstrating moblogging from my phone to the people at the other end of the table. I hope this is okay.

But I don’t know about this moblogging.  As in mobile blogging, I presume, rather than a mob of bloggers.  But I’m a traditionalist about blogging, and I tend to think it should be done at home in pyjamas, as nature intended.  Mind you, if I get one of these, I may soon be doing it myself.

I found this ...

... here.  I don’t know where he found it.  Maybe here.

This logo is certainly proving to be adaptable.  First Lisa Simpson, now this.  Soon we will have to adapt that old Soviet Empire joke, where the visitor says (now): “So, what do you think of the London Olympic logo?” and the guy says they must go somewhere very secret, this isn’t secret enough, etc. etc., shaggy dog shaggy dog, eventually finding somewhere secret enough, and then he says: “Well, I quite like it.”

The way to show off your photography skills on the internet, I am convinced, is to make collections in particular genres, like this guy does.  (Take your pick.)

And I particularly like it when several of my preferred genres get done with the one photo.  So, I particularly like this recent effort:

I like it when my Billion Monkey snaps feature what the Billion Monkey in question is snapping, and not just the Billion Monkey himself.  I like it when the Billion Monkey is reflected in something and there’s two of him.  I like it when familiar London landmarks are reflected in something, instead of just being regularly photoed.  I like it when the regular sky is blank white, but the reflected sky is vividly sky-coloured.  So: tick, tick, tick, tick.  Hope some of you like it too.

To my shame I had not clocked that Adriana, now back from Ethiopia, had put up some blog postings from there.  What are travelling blog postings for?  They’re for your friends to read.  What are friends for?  To read them!!!

There are also photographs, and I agree with Adriana that this photo is the best of the lot.  But I also like this one, of her brother Ivan:

Ivan is, to my certain knowledge (because I have several times watched him in action), a terrific teacher.  That’s how he earned the cash to go to Africa to study.

The bad news is that Adriana has been ill, and so has Ivan.  Africa.  Ivan intends to be an expert on Africa.  He’s learning fast.

Dave Gorman is a comedian who appears from time to time on British TV and radio.  And yes, I did check, and it is the same guy as the guy who took this collection of photos under the heading of I see faces.

This one is one of my favourites:

What these faces-that-aren’t-really pictures show is how we as a species will find faces, because we have a brain which actively looks for them.

Gorman is a Real Photographer, which I deduce from this set.  Real Photographers know their Photoshop, in my experience.  Billion Monkeys are too busy just snapping.

Indeed.

The U.S. long had plenty of cranes to get its big projects done. But many of the cranes today are migrating all over the world - shipped from the U.S. to the Mideast, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, where a global boom in commodities, oil and other sectors is spurring growth. Countries are investing the windfall in bridges, roads, power plants, oil pipelines and other infrastructure. Two big users are Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where residents joke the construction crane is now the national bird, and China, where an unprecedented building boom is under way in preparation for the Beijing Summer Olympics.

brianmicklethwait dot com has, it turns out, its finger on the pulse of the world economy.

Thanks to Michael Jennings for the link.  Michael is doing the 6/20 talk at Christian Michel’s in central London this coming Wednesday evening, which I will be trying not to miss, on the subject of China economic miracle or what?  Judging by the email about this, Michael inclines more towards the or what side of things:

China’s GDP is hardly above the UK’s. Half her exports come from subsidiaries of Western and Japanese firms. The country’s manufacturing capacity is limited to churning out low value-added, labour-intensive and polluting products the developed world no longer wishes to make. The toiling away was enough to lift 200 million people into something resembling a middle-class, but has done little for the country’s North-East rust-belt and its destitute rural inland. China faces in addition a demographic crisis unlike any other country, the implacable consequence of a fateful one-child policy.

Nevertheless, the cranes are moving there in huge flocks.  Find out more about Michael’s China talk by emailing Christian Michel: cmichel at cmichel dot com.

Following on from our earlier conversation about the recent Presidential election won by Nicolas Sarkozy, here is a further conversation between me and Antoine Clarke, on the subject of the subsequent elections for the French National Assembly.  Our chat lasted just over forty minutes.

Voting in the second round of these elections is today, and once again, it is widely assumed that Sarkozy will score a big win.  Antoine explains just how big, and how important that might be.  Key fact: with Sarkozy supporters making more than two thirds of the Assembly, which is probably what will happen, Sarkozy may well be able to change the French Constitution.

The other big thing that emerged from our conversation was that what Sarkozy and a lot of those who voted for him are on about is not so much different decisions about French government, as different kinds of people doing the governing, people who are less isolated from the concerns of regular people, more hands-on and less theoretical.  This attempt at a cultural alteration, rather than a mere economic turnaround, is highlighted by Sarkozy’s intention to change the way that France’s universities operate, towards something more along the lines of how things are done in the USA, with more business involvement, and less domination by the humanities.  The idea being to get a different kind of person into the French intellectual elite and to change how that elite thinks.

So, interesting stuff, I hope those of you who listen will agree.

Engadget is not for everyone, and most of it, frankly, is not for me.  Too many small objects the shape and size of chocalate bars which all look much the same and are usually called letters instead of names, either for mobile phoning or mobile music listening, or both of course.  (I have a bog standard mobile, which more than suffices, and when travelling, I read.) Plus, larger boxes for playing computer games, into which I am not.  But every so often engadget has something that pleases me greatly, so I keep going back there on the off chance that today will be another such day.

This for instance: Computer uses webcam to play Pong with itself.  I love the sublime, onanistic pointlessness of it.  Plus, I actually understand approximately what is happening.

Or this?  An oval bit of the outside of a brand X modern building has been cut out and made to rotate.  Only in Liverpool.  Well, actually, I wouldn’t have expected it anywhere.  It’s the kind of thing I enjoy, provided I had no part in paying for it.  Fat chance.

Or, how about this car?  Which, so far as I can make out, is some kind of TV series toy which has been brought to life.

And then there’s this, which I only saw while checking if there was any more engadgetry to feature here, to get it all over with:

That picture bigger, and further details (including a video), here.  The claim is that this thing, in which each floor can rotate independently, will actually generate enough power to run itself, from the wind.  Well, it does get windy up towards the top of towers, I suppose.  But the plan is to put one of these in Dubai.  But how windy is Dubai?  Maybe very, I wouldn’t know.  But wouldn’t Chicago, the Windy City itself, be the logical place for a wind-power tower?  Just asking.

Perhaps because some of the versions of this tower in the picture above look like the snap has been taken out of the structure, so to speak, it rather reminds me of this, which I got to the night before last night but didn’t at the time see any reason to mention here, from here.  Not that I need a particular reason for what I mention here.

ENGADGET LATEST: Blu-ray discs are rotting!!!!! Hurrah! because I back the other one.

The cricket is on the go again, after a day’s pause for rain, and one of the commentators yesterday pushed one of my grumpy-old-man buttons, which is the incorrect use of the word “inimitable” that you so often hear nowadays.  What the person who says this often means is “very unusual”, but what makes the item of behaviour in question very unusual is the very thing that actually makes it and the person who does it very easy to imitate.

So, as a typical for-instance, umpire Billy Bowden was described by Henry Blofeld as “inimitable”, in the way he signals a four.  Most umpires do this with their hands horizontal and straight out.  Bowden does it as if clearing some space on a table covered in junk, with a curved, cradling, vertical hand.  Anybody could imitate this.  I expect in due course to be told that the way Bowden signals a six, which is even more bizarre and different from the usual way (crooked forefingers and several upwards motions of ever increasing height instead of the usual one motion), is also “inimitable”, even though this would be even more completely untrue.

There.  I’ve said it.  One of the nice things about blogging is that whenever something trivial irritates you, you can say so at once - assuming you’re connected, as more and more of us are for more and more of the time.  Life is too short to be keeping grumbles in a notebook and then laboriously copying them out again when the opportunity finally arrives to say them to the world, but not too short to have the thought, blog it, and forget it.

As soon as I had put that linkfest below to bed, I found this, via this.  It’s a blog linking to claims that Y is the new X, and nothing else.  Just big fat orange lettering, underlined, all of it linkage.

Here’s a little effort from me in this genre, about how the internet has put a new weapon into the writing arsenal: Links are the new italics.  I thought of this myself.  I’m sure others have thought of it too, but none that I know of.  So I couldn’t link it to anything, and it had itself to be in italics.

You know how you accumulate lots of interesting links to interesting things, which you intend to blog about at length, Real Soon Now, but know you probably never will.  The answer is to do one of those lots-of-links postings, with links and nothing much else.  I am in that state now, and such lots-of-links postings are quite popular, so here goes, in no particular order.

Skimming machines on sale on eBay.  I love a good gadget, but is there any honest use for this one?

Jonathan Agnew says, as do many others, that there’s now too much Test Match Cricket:

Test cricket simply isn’t ‘special’ any more. It has been a weekly event so far this summer and I wonder what Test Match Special would have been called had it started now, rather than 50 years ago?

So presumably Agnew is happy today.

Jackie D emails to say that I might like this, this being a gadget for wireless gadget charging.  I hate to be a grump (lie), but: no.  It’s another thing to learn.  (Like Facebook.) I now know how to charge my gadgets.  For me the wires are a nuisance but no more.  One of many Micklethwait’s laws of technology and of life: do not unleash solutions upon circumstance which are not a problem.

Jackie D again:

I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about a celebrity haircut as I am about Katie Holmes’s bob.

Michael J emails noting that this Sony Ericsson gadget accepts SD cards (winner of the small(ish) storage card battle of the gauges), as well as the loser Sony Memory Sticks (which Sony still insists on using in all its digital cameras).  “They seem to be losing their religion,” says Michael.  About bloody time too.  Presumably Ericsson took Sony off to a quiet corner of the playground and beat the crap out of him until Sony agreed to have SD cards as well.  Instead presumably comes next.

Talking of battles of the gauges, how’s the great HD DVD versus Blu-ray battle going?  Somebody tell me who’s going to win, so that I can write it up here.  I support HD DVD, because Blu-ray is Sony, yah boo his.  His Gatesness says a plague on both your houses.  By plague he means a mega-hard-disc and getting it over the internet, instead of keeping lots of discs.  Can’t see that happening myself.

Patrick Crozier muses upon the Black Dad Phenomenon, if that’s what it is.  Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, the Williams sisters, and now Lewis Hamilton.

The Transport Blog surge continues.  May 21st to June 4th: no postings.  June 5th to now: too many to be exact but about fourteen.  Did you know that Alex Singleton is a communist?  Apparently so.

Bishop Hill recycles this Orwell quote, in among lots of other good recent stuff:

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

How times change.  Workers have no guns, and totalitarian states now do no great things.  The Chinese are bastards, yes, but they have prosperity because they have stopped trying to totalitarianise it.

I also like this Bishop Hill quote of the day, which he makes look a lot prettier:

The global temperature record is not a record in the true sense, but a theory of what the record would look like if it had been measured properly.

Norman Lebrecht reports on the Royal Festival Hall’s recent accoustic refurbishment.  Basically, it’s much better, if still not in the same class as the Vienna Musikvereinsaal or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, or for that matter Symphony Hall Birmingham.  Love the name of the acoustics expert who did it: Larry Kierkegaard.  Reminds me of a person invented by Peter Simple called Barry Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

This piece about physics (which I already mentioned here) continues to be noted and quoted.

The phrase “cargo-cult capitalism” definitely deserves a separate posting to itself, if only because of the alliteration, but just in case I never get around to doing that here or anywhere else, scroll down here, and you’ll encounter it.  Money quote:

Companies that were once part of nationalised industries but are now private tend to be run according to a set of principles that I call “cargo-cult capitalism”. Just like the cargo cults who build things that look like runways in the belief that these will bring planes bearing bounteous wonders, the managers of these organisations have seen private companies doing things and making profit, but have no conception of the underlying structure that informs their actions.

Lost of juicey stuff earlier about a train balls-up.  Not like it is in France.  (Julian Taylor is also a communist, it would seem.  Transport Bloggers?)

Recent and much overdue addition to my blogroll: The Freeway to Serfdom.  Jay Jardine here notes this delightful quote from an ancient news story on the subject of mobile phones in Africa, and how they use phone airtime as currency:

The big fear among Africa’s central banks is that internationally-recognized card brands would allow locals to bypass exchange controls.

That was written in 2003.  I wonder what happened with that.

Nearly finally, an extraordinary quote from way back in January, which is to be found in the blog written by Ken MacLeod, the noted SF author, The Early Days of a Better Nation, here.

On January 3, 1793, the first Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Short, the American ambassador to Paris, who had criticized the early excesses of the French Revolution. Praising the insurrection, he asked whether “ever such a prize” had been “won with so little innocent blood?” His “own affections,” Jefferson added, “have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”

Bloody hell. Give me liberty and give me death!

And finally finally, something feline, what with this being Friday.

Lost in France:

Jackie D again.

Cranes.  They’re huge.  You can’t avoid looking at them.  Yet almost nobody complains about them, because they’re either in an unavoidably craney part of town, or they’ll soon be gone.  Also, people like them, especially Billion Monkeys (you have to wade past the bird type cranes).  Cranes come over as friendly and helpful, even protective.  Pylons, on the other hand, are permanent and cause cancer.  If you don’t complain about them, they never go away, and very seldom if you do.

On the left, blue cranes in Salford, found in among random Flickr wandering.

On the right (click to get them bigger), lots of new cranes, snapped by me, resting in the blurry twilight after a day’s labour in the City of London.  About twenty five of them.  Cranes in among buildings mean more buildings.  What will the City of London skyline look like in two years time?

I love cranes.  As I keep saying here, they are (together with pylons) the last redoubt of pure functionalism, now that making snazzy-looking structures has become so easy even architects can be allowed to join in in without catastrophe.  But, the architects seem to have no designs on cranes.  Or pylons.  Long may it continue.  Modern style cranes is pointless.  They already are that.  But, imagine a crane tricked out like Tower Bridge.  (Or a pylon.)

So then, I went wandering through Flickr looking for cranes generally, and how about these?!?! In Rotterdam.  These are two of my favourite crane snaps ever, by Netream:

Here and here.  Says a Flickr commenter:

Deze is echt heel mooi!

Which I’m guessing is Rotterdamian for something very admiring.  If so, I almost certainly agree.

I believe in having short postings as well as long ones, and I believe in having pictures.  So here’s my version of a picture by someone else, thinned out and horizontalised a little more:

To the left: Earth.  To the right: The Moon.  To make you realise how far apart they really are.  Original picture and explication here.  I got to this from here.

Another natural photographic shape for blogging is very tall, and very thin across.  Maybe, a set of five of them, preferably much taller than anyone’s screen, and with something surprising in each of them right at the bottom, which you only see when you scroll down.  I’m keeping my eyes open, both on the internet, and when snapping photos myself.  But I seldom see anything that really qualifies.  Anyone else seen anything suitable?

The best picture in this genre I’ve ever seen was of someone serving at ping pong.  The ball was at the very top of the long thin picture, and the server was way, way down at the bottom.  The point being that some ping pong services involve throwing the ball up very, very high.

Indeed:

More Billion Monkeys here in among lots of Real Photographers:

Photography is sometimes the opposite of real life.  A bright light turns everything darker!

Here‘s what the launch is for.

During their 11-day space mission the seven Atlantis astronauts will install a new, 16-ton truss segment on the International Space Station (ISS) and will deliver another set of so